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

[Mark Williamson]

I, too, have noticed that articles on the Paiute people, their
language, etc. are very lacking, however I don't know a lot about
them.

If I were you, I would tell my brother "The GREAT thing about
Wikipedia is that YOU are allowed to fix that, and are invited to do
so. That's how the good articles became good articles - they started
out short and lacking, and then somebody like YOU found them and added
to them." ... sort of like Frankenstein's Monster...

Mark

On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 04:40:22 -0700, Ronald Chmara <ron at opus1.com> wrote:
> On Jan 5, 2005, at 2:28 AM, Andre Engels wrote:
> > This seems to be exactly the problem Larry Sanger talks about - We
> > don't care whether somebody is a renowned expert on a subject or has
> > just read a few lines related to a subject in the past. If they can
> > write it down, we consider them equal.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_%28bureaucratic%29
> 
> Certainly, a lack of expertise is a problem in managing fine details,
> but it does not require an expert in aviation to add to a wikipedia
> article that 'Air Force One is a plane'. The  problem I think, is not
> the insertion of facts by non-experts, but the use of (or omission of)
> facts by POV folks to drive a given agenda.
> 
> > A second fallacy I see in this message is that it equates factual
> > correctness with credibility. There's more than just factual
> > correctness to make a good article, there is also balance. Getting
> > experts is not what helps here (although it helps a bit, because they
> > are supposed to know about the subject, and thus notice missing
> > portions), but we should recognize the problem as being one.
> 
> 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
> 
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