[Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 6/13/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Where is this potentially libelous material they are supposedly "loaded"
> with?  If you are making this claim: There have in the past existed a
> nonzero number of libelous claims in Wikipedia articles, that's
> certainly a reasonable claim.  But to claim they're "loaded" with such
> material requires some evidence.

Nine presses of random page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrisholme
Thirty six presses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scot_Alan_Bittinger

And it's not all libel .. there is a lot of crap... advertisements...
self promotion.. and people who are just confused (i.e
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subst:image_copyright).

The fact of the is that while we are catching a lot of things what
matters is what we aren't catching.  With no systematic review
process, no resources to build one, and a 'communitiy' which is
actively hostile to the mechanisms of such a process... we are pretty
much screwed.  We've invested very little in automated tools, and
built no strong processes for quality control. There has been a lot of
*TALK* but it's just that .. talk.

The fact is that we're simply allowing a huge amount of crap to slip
by while we busily congratulate ourselves for the fraction that we did
find.

> As for accuracy, in the first place the projects have relatively good
> accuracy, as confirmed for example by the _Nature_ review.  However, it
> is widely agreed that we can do a better job labelling which of our
> articles are in progress and which are "ready" to various degrees, and
> there are a number of proposals to do so.  Since this requires some
> coding it is indeed possible that the Foundation could help out here by,
> for example, hiring a coder to implement some features to help make this
> happen.  The fact that we haven't eliminated world hunger and cured
> cancer all at once doesn't mean that things are being "mismanaged",
> merely that there remains more to be done.

The nature review was focused on a small number of scientific
subjects. Our coverage on many top level things is great. It's the
stuff that people don't look for where the dragons lurk.  By demanding
that I provide evidence here you put me in the same silly situation
where we often put our critics, if I go find something it will be
fixed and you'll say "see no problem".  But the fact remains that we
still don't have any systematic way to reduce the chances that pages
we serve up are not malicious drivel.