[Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has Been Around For A While

[Lars Aronsson]

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> There's something interesting about all of this discussion: no serious
> person in the wikipedia community, no matter where they may fall on
> the spectrum of "respect/deference to professors" holds the
> anti-elitist view that Sanger ascribed to us.
> 
> If anything, I think we're more elitist than that: we look at academia
> and say "Yes, pretty good, but we should do better."

I think there is a good deal of substance in Larry Sanger's and Robert
McHenry's criticism.  They are correct as long as they describe the
problem they see.  However, the outsider's perceived anti-elitism
doesn't necessarily originate from an intentional anti-elitism in the
community.  And since it isn't intentional, it is quite impossible to
"abandon" this anti-elitism, so Larry fails provide a solution.  He
suggests a fork of the project.  Yes, maybe he should try this.

I personally think (does anybody know?) that the core of Wikipedia
users (and contributors) still consists of people who look for
information on the web only.  If you write a blog entry, it is far
more convenient to link to a Wikipedia article that explains a
concept, than to link to or reference an article in Encarta or
Britannica, to which the reader might not have access.  (If the
Wikipedia article doesn't exist, you might even take the time to write
it.)  This is the typical situation where Wikipedia wins over
traditional encyclopedias.  But there are many other situations where
it does not, at least not yet, maybe next year.  If a student wants a
good overview of the history of Czech literature, she might be lucky
and this topic happens to be well covered in Wikipeda, but more likely
it is better presented in Britannica or even Encarta.  The number of
topics or areas that are well covered in Wikipedia is increasing for
every year, but we are still far from the coverage of traditional
encyclopedias.

A search on en.wikipedia for "history of Czech literature" gives very
odd results.  Maybe it's not just the contents, but also the search
function that needs improvement.  Go to encarta.msn.com and the same
search yields the articles "Czech Literature" and "Book", or on 
britannica.com it yields "Czech literature", "Literature", "Czech 
Republic, history of", "Hus, Jan", and "Mathesius, Vilem".

So the student might try Wikipedia and be lucky or maybe not.  But if
the student asks a librarian, that librarian isn't going to risk his
professional appearance on a source that depends on his being lucky.  
He is going to tell the student to use Britannica, nothing less.  The
library reference desk is a situation where traditional encyclopedias
win and where Wikipedia loses big time.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

At least in theory, the sales force of a commercial business has the
double task of selling products (or services) and collecting
information from prospective customers.  If Britannica sales people
discover that customers prefer the World Book Encyclopedia because of
its illustrations, they will return and tell their editors that more
and better illustrations are needed.  Focus is then put on improving
those aspects that make a difference in the competition. Free software
developers don't get this kind input, which explains why Linux has
been so slow in replacing Microsoft Windows on the desktop.  And the
Wikipedia community faces the same lack of input from outsiders.  I
don't know how to solve this.  Maybe we need a sales force.



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se