Larry,
Thanks for clarifying your original posts and rebutting some responses. I didn't realize at first that you were talking about forking Wikipedia. That would be, as you say, a horse of a different color from changing the way in which Wikipedia currently runs.
First let me reiterate what I think you are saying, so if I am again missing the point, at least you will know what I am responding to. You want to have some articles taken out of the domain of the collectively editable, and put into a space (say ExpertWikipedia) where they are maintained exclusively by some expert or experts. This would break synchronization with Wikipedia, i.e. there would be no automatic transferral of information in either direction. If a Wikipedia article evolved in a way the expert disapproved of, s/he wouldn't incorporate the changes. Similarly, if the expert article didn't satisfy members of the Wikipedia community, they would modify it and evolve it into something different. In brief, the project would be forked.
Pursuing the free software analogy futher, there used to be much talk about inevitable forking, and the potential of forks to kill off the movement. In practice, however, forks have been very rare. The only serious infrastructure fork was over libc/glibc, and that remerged before long. It turns out that two versions of the same program can hardly ever survive. Either one draws all the developers and comes to dominate the field, or all the good ideas from one are merged into the other, which obviates the necessity of having two.
My question for you, Larry, is why the same immense pressure against forking wouldn't also apply in the free encyclopedia movement. If there is a Wikipedia/ExpertWikipedia split, why wouldn't whichever is dominant gain all the momentum and all the contributions?
Suppose that ExpertWikipedia becomes the site that everyone uses as a reference work. Suppose that my contributions to Wikipedia are not being incorporated into ExpertWikipedia. In that case, I will become frustrated and quit. If I contribute further the free encyclopedia movement, it will take the form of trying to influence the expert in charge of the "official" version of the article. I will submmit my patches (edits) to her/him at ExpertWikipedia instead of wasting my time at Wikipedia.
Conversely, suppose that Wikipedia becomes the site that everyone uses as a reference work. Why would experts want their work to languish in obscurity on ExpertWikipedia? They will either quit and go back to writing scholarly books and articles, or they will wade into Wikipedia and try to get there stuff to stick there.
You talk about experts in this way:
Someone, or a group of people, that the best minds of the world can look to and say, "This is fantastic. They want to do this? I want
to
be part of it."
There's the rub. How can ordinary people be a part of the expert project? I think you need to spell out in more detail how you evision a back-and-forth flow of information between the forked projects. What would make it different from the Wikipedia/Nupedia distinction that exists today? If an expert-led free encyclopedia is such a great idea, why isn't Nupedia taking off by itself?
(7) Fred Bauder was right to point out that a lot of the people who could help *Wikipedia* most just won't put up with arguing with
people
who they think should be sitting down and taking notes.
Very true. And many expert programmers do not suffer fools gladly, and do not enjoy the frequent heated discussions which open source software projects generate. Those experts work for Microsoft, found their own startup companies, or work in academic research where they can do their own thing.
On the other hand, many academic experts *want* commentary and contributions to whatever they write. Participation in conversation is as big a rush to established scholars as it is to schmoes like me. Of course nobody has much time for unsubstantiated fringe opinions and idiotic assertions, but I'm talking about perceptive questions and critiques. I can imagine many situations where a pool of informed, cooperative amateurs would not be a hassle for a leading expert, but rather a positive draw. And one thing I, an informed amateur, can do to make an expert's life pleasant at Wikipedia, is to spare her/him from the hassles of reverting vandalism, answering easy questions, etc.
It so happens, though, that as the movement has grown in stature, those people who make the decisions really *are* software experts. [...] This doesn't contradict anything I said, moreover.
Quite so, the leaders of the big free software projects really are experts. But it does contradict the spirit of what you said, because almost none of the free software projects are "experts only", and an insignificant few projects have experts-only forks. (e.g. Netscape is a fork of Mozilla, but Mozilla is carrying the flag and drawing all the volunteer participation. Netscape is technologically insignificant; it matters only as marketing.) In almost all cases literally everyone can submit incremental changes (i.e. patches) to every project. If there is a mechanism for ordinary schmoes to submit incremental changes to the ExpertWikipedia in your proposal, I missed it.
The robustness of open source projects is vastly enhanced by the fact that anyone can contribute to any extent they like. Some of the expert leaders have worked their way up through the ranks by submitting numerous small patches, then maintaining a subsystem, then taking over entirely when a leader steps down. All this happen with no recruiting and no official designation of who is expert. It is allowed to happen because there is no distinction such as you are proposing.
I can imagine Wikipedia evolving to the point that we semi-officially designate subsystem experts (e.g. Axel Boldt as math czar), and maybe give them power to protect a small number of pages. But somehow ordinary folks have to be able to get their oar in or the project will suffer. Even the main page, which we decided we had to protect, has a talk page for making suggestions which our 39 administrators respond to.
The disanalogy between software and encyclopedia article writing is simply that software has to work. It has to do what it is supposed
to
do. As software grows in sophistication, this requires huge amounts of expertise. But encyclopedia articles do not work or fail to work;
I agree that there is some disanalogy there. But how significant is it? Please note that open source projects often exclude submissions that work perfectly well. The grounds of exclusion can be that code is unmaintainable and/or difficult for peers to review. "How well does it work?" is in fact sometimes less significant than "How beautiful is the code?", as witnessed by incomplete patches with rough edges but beautiful underlying structure trumping crufty code that gets the job done with no errors. Deciding which code is worthy is far from black and white.
Anyway, the disanalogy only matters if the quality of encyclopedia articles is not generally recognizable. It will only harm Wikipedia if people routinely fail to recognize the scholarship of experts who know more and write better than they do. So far I see some of this failure to comprehend on Wikipedia, but not as much as I suspected, and not enough to put a systematic brake on the success of the project. In fact, I think it would be very instructive to visit the discussions of some open source projects, and see whether various proposed patches generate more or less disagreement than edits on Wikipedia. I suspect you would find as much heat in the open source movement as in the typical edit war on Wikipedia.
Peace, -Karl
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