[WikiEN-l] Nobel prizewinning chemist: "in my field, Wikipedia is more reliable than textbooks"

[Ray Saintonge]

On 11/04/11 11:24 PM, Carcharoth wrote:
> Thanks for that. And for looking into the history of that. The fact
> that the tag stayed there for so long doesn't surprise me at all. Most
> casual editors, if they don't know how the system works, will assume
> that someone else will deal with the tag and eventually remove it.
> This is one reason backlogs got so big, because only a small
> proportion of editors actually use the tags and their workflows in a
> systematic manner, and this doesn't include the vast majority of
> casual editors.

I suppose this also has some relationship to the bystander phenomenon, 
where a victim will more likely be helped if there is only one witness 
to an accident than many.

> One other thing has struck me about the reliability of tagging, and
> that is the fact that most of the articles I use to look up stuff most
> days (from high-traffic articles to relatively obscure stuff) tends
> not to have tags (though some do). I think this is an indication in
> same way that stuff that people look at and care about gets edited and
> improved enough that they don't get tagged (or the tags are removed),
> but that stuff that is tagged but not fixed may tend to be the stuff
> that readers and editors don't really care about enough (again, stats
> of article traffic for the backlogs would help immensely here). The
> few times I've dipped into the backlog, I've recoiled at the stuff
> being written about and then tagged as they are mostly borderline
> notable and I just can't bring myself to help out with stuff that
> frankly arouses no interest in me and I'm never likely to need to
> refer to as a reader.

When I look at an article as an ordinary reader looking for information 
I mostly don't notice if it has been referenced, and I've learned to 
ignore the tags that are there.  I sometimes wish that they were at the 
bottom of the page where they are less visible.  The information already 
there will usually satisfy me. Unless I want to look more deeply into 
the matter, or something sounds suspicious I have no need to look at the 
references.

> The backlog I dipped into was:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_sections

Sectioning is a kind of fix that can be done without seeking outside 
information. Those people who add this tag could just as easily fix it 
themselves.

> Selecting:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_needing_sections_from_October_2009
>
> And the articles I looked at were:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Pace
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Palackal
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palamaneri
>
> In all three cases, I struggled to convince myself that editing these
> articles would be a good use of my time.

One possible test for notability is to ask whether they are more or less 
notable than our many articles on second string sports figures and 
entertainers.

Ray