[Wikipedia-l] wikipedia is too much open

[Evan Prodromou]

>>>>> "PDN" == Pablo De N?poli <Pablo> writes:

    PDN> I don't want to start a flame war but I want to express my
    PDN> point of view on the way that articles are edited in
    PDN> wikipedia.

There are a lot of places to do this: on the village pump, on the
meta-wikipedia, and on the talk pages for individual articles.

One advantage of using the wiki itself for commenting on how the wiki
works is that you'll see what others have said before.

    PDN> Needless to say, Lebesgue integration is indeed an advanced
    PDN> topic in mathematics, so that any article on this subject is
    PDN> necesarilly advanced (or does not covered the topic).

That's an important trade-off to note: extent of coverage versus
generality. It's probably a good idea to start articles with general
introductory text, and then if one needs to get into the nitty-gritty,
do it later on. Give the layman a chance to bail out.

It's also worth noting that Wikipedia is not a textbook. There's
another project for that: www.wikibooks.org. Knowing how much
information to include in a Wikipedia article is a black art.

    PDN> It seems to me that the model of wikipedia is too much open,
    PDN> so that open that anyone can annonymously edit any page. That
    PDN> I think is to much.

There's an article about this on the meta wikipedia:

        http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_users_should_not_be_allowed_to_edit_articles

Good pros-and-cons discussion here:

        http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Anonymous_users_should_not_be_allowed_to_edit_articles

    PDN> But without a team of core developers or a project leader for
    PDN> each section how can you assure a minimum of quality of
    PDN> wikipedia?

One reason that Wikipedia works so well is that it's structured to
support a low level of commitment from a high number of people. Other
encyclopedias are built with a high level of commitment from a low
number of people.

There is a project to make an Open Content encyclopedia like
that. It's called Nupedia, and the main page is here:

        http://www.nupedia.org/

You should check it out.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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