Pablo De Nápoli wrote:
Hi!
I'm new to wikipedia, and I think that it is a great project that can help to
extend the ideas of free software to other areas, and to non technical
people.
Welcome to Wikipedia Pablo. I don't mean to be nasty, but I feel obliged
to mention Most Common Wikipedia Faux Pas #9 "judging and trying to
change what Wikipedia is before you understand it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AMost_common_Wikipedia_faux_pas
I don't want to start a flame war but I want to
express my point of view on
the way that articles are edited in wikipedia.
I've contributed with some articles. I'm rather disapointed, though. For
example, I've rewriten the article on Lebesgue integration in the English
wikipedia, since I find that the article explained the tenichal difficulties
of Riemman integral, but it does not define the notion of Lebesgue integral
(perhaps I had to tell you that I'm a mathematician, I work at the mathematics
department of Buenos Aires University, Argentina).
After that, looking at the history of the page, I find that some rather old
previous versions where much better, but they had been deleted since a
user consider them "too advanced". Needless to say, Lebesgue integration is
indeed an advanced topic in mathematics, so that any article on this subject
is necesarilly advanced (or does not covered the topic).
So fix it. Revert it to the previous version, and argue your case on the
talk page.
It seems to me that the model of wikipedia is too
much open, so that open
that anyone can annonymously edit any page. That I think is to much.that at
least one should have to register and log in in order to modify a page, one
has to take a responsability for what is saying (specially for deleting some
one else work). In the current model, we don't know who write what
(even though, most civilizated wiikipedians do log in, but I think this should
be mandatory)
You'll be pleased to know that there is a faction you can join, and
plenty of people to argue against. This has been dicussed many times
before. Suffice to say that restrictions of this nature are against Wiki
culture and are generally unpopular. The essential reason for this is
that low barriers to entry encourage contribution and hence growth, and
it is generally thought that this benefit outweighs the associated cost.
Another idea that comes to my mind is that there could
be some teams for
especific topics, that manage the pages in some section (say mathematics,
geogrpahy,
economics or whatever). This does not mean that any user from outside the team
could not submit modifications. But without a team of core developers or
a project leader for each section how can you assure a minimum of
quality of wikipedia?
(this is more or less the model in all free software projects, no project
grants write access to cvs to everyone anonymously, say)
The concept related to this is the WikiProject, although it is
traditionally associated with content generation, not protection. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AWikiProject
Feel free to organise groups and review content, however you can't
expect such groups to carry more weight in a dispute than a new user.
Wikipedia is based around low barriers to entry, and the opinion of an
anonymous reader should be treated with as much respect as that of a
trusted user.
-- Tim Starling.