to comment on one or two places where I have a different slant.
1/ formal academic credentials. I have them, and I know enough not
to trust them very far. There is no substitute for judging someone by the
work they do, and the relevant work is neither research nor teaching.
It's writing multi-level reviews, and this is a skill most of us will have
to acquire. It may be closest to writing a textbook. That's a skill that in
the real world depends very heavily on editors and copy-editors, and
specialists for illustrations, and test audiences.
That last one is our strength--
we will have the best possible reviewers, the entire body of our readers,
equipped both to find errors and to find ineffective writing.
Obviously, we can't start with this, though in some subjects we have
a core of people who have produced excellent groups of articles in WP.
We are self-selected based on interest, and the level of sophistication and
coordination required should sort out the initial participants as
effectively as any formal process.
2/ In all group activities a few of the people do the most, and
this can be seen from the history page of any WP article. The unique
feature of WP is its ability to obtain useful amounts of work from the
many who do only a little, or who work on an article and move on. We
have to stay open to this: the initial writing an editing of a certified article
will prove to be the easiest part.
3/ The quality of WP depends upon the knowledge , skill , and persistence of
the people working in that area. Its areas of great strength have been where
nonacademic people have the strongest knowledge, because that's who most of
the most active WP are.
4/The weakness of WP is the process, and the amount of skill and devotion the
quality control process requires in face of the anarchy. We'll have initial controls
of some sort in CZ to reduce the vandalism, but reverting them is not the hardest part.
The attempt to maintain a democratic process inherently
requires much overhead and inefficiency, regardless of the academic level. It
could even be said that professional academics are among the most difficult group
this way, because most of them expect to be the leaders. Those of us
with experience in faculty meetings should recognize what has been
at work here the weeks of the planning discussions.
I was not at all surprised to find that among the most effective participants
have been people too young to have this experience.
On 10/25/06, Giorgio F. Gilestro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
Hi Michael,
> David Gerard, who is on vacation, found that the bulk of WP was
> originated by occasional editors. While admins and wannabes had
> lots of edits, they were not the main source of useful content. This
> contradicts statements by Jimbo about who is contributing.
I am not sure I know what you mean by occasional editors but I have the
feeling this contradicts also the result of that experiment I have read
about elsewhere. (AaronSw on 'who writes wikipedia'). That was the only
collection of data I could find around - now my knowledge of the topic
is in fact very limited but I am sure I am not wrong when I say that a
systematic analysis of how wikipedia is working has never been done.
I don't know why this happened and the only hypothesis I could put
forward is that simply nobody was expecting such an explosion of WP and
so we weren't really prepared to handle the situation.
This is a great pity in my view and it would be even worse to repeat the
same mistake again. Ideally one should be able to know as much as
possible about the work of the authors and the editors: byte by byte.
When something goes wrong in an experiment first thing you do is run to
the data and trying to figure out what was wrong indeed. Here we cannot
do it. As a matter of fact we don't even know what the structure of
wikipedia is.
Anyway, if the data you mention are real, meaning that only a small part
of the crew does the big part of the job (I confess this is hard to
believe for me) than this issue should be taken in the deepest
consideration because it would change things. You don't need anymore,
for instance, to give too much power to the majority of users since
their contribution is minimal; that would lower the noise in the system
(reads: less vandals).
> You are calling for people who really understand to explain things.
Right, but it is not as easy as that. Before explaining something you
need to make your mind clear and have the problem well figured out. And
you need a method. A professional, for instance, would NEVER write
anything without introducing the proper references or by giving error
rates when talking about statistics. This is something the average
citizen never does because it is really matter of method; either you
learn to do that or you don't.
> When Feynman ran out of brain to figure things, he explained 'em:
I am not sure I follow this, sorry.
--
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