[Wikipedia-l] Proposal: Introduce Editor Responsibilities?

[Andre Engels]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> The wiki model provides good checks and balances, and it seems
> unlikely that we'll ever want to modify it in any substantial way,
> although of course I do think we can tweak it, and that it'll be
> important for "Wikipedia 1.0" to be stable.

I'm not so sure about those 'checks and balances' of the wiki model. I
know one article where I strongly feel that it is not NPOV because it
presents the ideas of one historian as if they are established fact. But
I don't dare get into a discussion or edit war about it, because it also
seems clear that the person who put it there is more knowledgeable
about the subject than me - and probably more knowledgeable than any
other Wikipedian.

On the other hand, I have written a number of stubs on subjects that I
do not know that much about, which have not be corrected at all since
then. Now, it could be that what I wrote was just good - but I don't
see that as the most likely explanation. More likely there simply is
noone here who does have the knowledge to improve them. Or if there
are, they either have not seen the article, or had no lust to work on
it (I know at least one article where I as the 'more knowledgeable'
party had the latter reaction as well).

Now, I don't intend this to be arguments for an editorial model. It
would not solve these, at least not the first (as you write, either I
or the other side would be editor, and could just lock the article in
their preferred state), and probably not the second (although it might
have a good effect in specifying where the problems are). I do intend
it to say that the wiki model also is no panacea.

Improvements might come through various proposed voting systems,
especially if people are invited to specify their level of expertise
and vote especially on those subjects they think they know about. We
should certainly have something in for version 1.0 to deal with this
problem, but it would not at all hurt to do so earlier.

I guess I would like to see something like editors for an article,
but in a more Wiki-like manner - that is, make it easier to become
an editor, and also editors do not approve or disapprove edits, but
only judge their value and/or that of the resulting article. This
judgement could then be shown somewhere, either on the article page
itself or on its edit page. Pages with high scores could be shown
on some kind of "showcase" page, and would be more likely to get
into version 1 than would be the case based on the importance of
the subject alone, pages with low scores could be candidates for a
full rewrite instead of the normal piecewise editing.

Andre Engels