[Wikipedia-l] Certification

[Larry Sanger]

erik_moeller at gmx.de wrote:

>> I understand your point, and I agree with it to some extent: People who
write articles aren't typically the best judges of their own work. But I
think you're making a mistake by assuming that someone who would take part
in a certification project that is a subset of Wikipedia would necessarily
also be a) a contributor to the specific article/subject he certified, or
even b) a contributor to Wikipedia at all. The experts you want could well
use the system, see below.

I re-read my post and I do see how you might think that my main objection
was that people who write articles aren't typically the best judges of
their own work.  That wasn't exactly my point, though (while I agree with
that point, too).  My point was that (to oversimplify) the results of
certification-by-general-vote would not be trustworthy from the point of
view of your school librarian.  This is not because people would have
judged their own work but because the certification process were not
staffed and led by the sort of experts that your school librarian has been
taught to trust.

(And perforce I wasn't assuming those other things you said I was
assuming.)

>> Elian suggested a scheme where we would simply get aggregated ratings
from everyone. I am familiar with such schemes (Kuro5hin uses it), and I
have considered that option and decided to submit a different proposal,
the team system. The idea here is that teams can make their own rules, and
by selecting a team to trust, I select a whole ruleset according to which
I want to view articles.

This, like my proposal and Elian's, is not new, and in the past I was
lukewarmly in favor of it.  I'm now lukewarmly against it.  One thing
would have to go: names like "Team Nupedia," as if we were engaged in
sports.  :-)

My fundamental objection to the team proposal is that it would make
Wikipedia smack of the amateurism and, worse, the insularity and
in-crowdishness that I detect on Kuro5hin, Slashdot, and other self-rated
websites.  There's already too much of that on Wikipedia.  That's all
right for K5 and /. but not for the world's largest *encyclopedia*
project.  We might let everyone *work* on articles, but I don't see how
that entails that we should therefore set up a system whereby everyone
*rates* the articles.

If the rating website were completely separate from Wikipedia, I think I'd
have little to complain about.  There are separate reasons, which someone
rightly pointed out, not to do it on Wikipedia itself: it complicates
things far more than they are already.

>> I think the modus operandi here would not necessarily be different from
what you envision for a separate project, but have the advantage to be
directly and visibly integrated into WP, thereby attracting more people
(even if you want an expert-centric team, you will probably get more
experts by addressing a larger sample of users).

Repeated experience with Nupedia confirmed what I knew already, that
experts are very careful about who they associate with.  I predict that
most experts *wouldn't* be interested in participating in a certification
project where they are on "just another team."  I'd much prefer that the
"expert-centric" team have its own website and own project.

>> Other teams might adopt more liberal approaches, trying to separate
obvious low quality articles from possibly high quality articles (i.e.
detecting egregious NPOV violations, spam, bad writing etc.). These teams
might produce more output and be valuable to do basic filtering (which
might go both ways -- I think it might be valuable to have negative
certification, too, to detect bad articles; I believe it was Ed who
suggested something similar). This is useful, but a separate goal from
creating a truly trustworthy encyclopaedia -- in the team system, it can
be accomplished within the same framework.

I see absolutely nothing to object to there!

Larry
-- 
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell