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

[Stirling Newberry]

On Jan 5, 2005, at 6:40 AM, Ronald Chmara wrote:
>
> My older brother despises some wikipedia sections that are written in 
> his field (cultural anthropology, with specific emphasis on the paiute 
> people), as he is an expert in that specific area, and finds the 
> articles "shallow", "without depth and nuance", and "lacking in a 
> deeper explanation". They are written by "non-experts", and thus make 
> "factual and comprehension errors".
>
> The articles are also written for *use* by non-experts.... So, I asked 
> my brother how many pages it would take to correct the errors, and he 
> pointed me towards his latest body of work, over 500 pages, and that's 
> just the historical *sites* of the paiute.
>
> So, what is wikipedia? Is it *meant* to be the equivalent of an 
> encyclopedia, with terse explanations? Is it meant to be a vast 
> repository of all that is known, without omissions of fact, or 
> omissions of a given POV?
>
> -Bop
>

The solution is to get your brother to contribute. And one of my 
activities is to encourage academics to contribute to wikipedia.

The emergent nature of wiki text is that it is very sensitive to 
initial conditions, a given article will converge on an acceptable 
form, very much based on the quality of the large inputs of expertise. 
This is what is wonderful about Wikipedia - it is an active audience 
for writing, constantly checking errors, pushing for readability, 
asking questions, making demands. The more experts we can get to 
contribute the large initial drafts of articles, the more that process 
can go to work to turn them into linked and smoothly written material. 
Given a good starting point the process produces higher and higher 
quality over time, in no small part because the bar is upped 
constantly, and the wiki community is there to make the changes needed.