On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Ian Woollard <[email protected]> wrote: > On 12 October 2010 18:08, MuZemike <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Perhaps it's more of a misunderstanding that this is still a wiki above >> anything else - in particular, those understandings that literally >> anyone else you write, and you can edit anything anybody else writes. >> >> I believe those who have a good understanding of those two fundamental >> wiki concepts tend to do better in a wiki environment (not just >> Wikipedia) than most others who do not. >> > > The problem comes when an expert (in the broadest sense) understands > something that most people don't get, or get exactly wrong, and where most > people can't or don't or even refuse to understand the literature on it. > > In that case, much of the population of the wiki will be repeatedly editing > the material back to what they believe, rather than what is actually true. > > The expert can try to explain the problem, they can revert it back to the > objective truth of the literature, but in the end they will be the ones seen > as problematic, rather than the majority of people that are repeatedly > putting the wrong information into the wiki. > > The more careful experts are, the more likely that they are to get banned or > otherwise censured for 'causing trouble'. > > The classic example of this is William Connolley. > > He stuck around, but other experts have evaporated. > > Long term I see issues though. The expertise needed to improve the Wikipedia > is ratcheting ever upwards, but I doubt that the admins are; if they see a > person 'causing trouble' they tend to attack the minority as being 'not > consensus', but people with genuine expertise are always in the minority. > > The Wikipedia should be and needs to be becoming more expert friendly, not > as a matter of policy, but due to some of the subject matter being more > fine-grained and precise. > > I suppose at the moment, the admins are acting as a plaza, whereas > specialist admins may be more and more desirable.
We have a danger here though; peoples bona fides are hard to verify online in general, and on Wikipedia with its culture of pseudonymity particularly. An "expert" may not be who they say they are, and we may have no way to tell either way even if they are. A large part of the system we have is designed to mitigate not knowing the quality of the people we have editing. Various other online communities have tried to work around that with different concepts (which is probably good) but failed for unrelated reasons (rendering their approaches a no-test, as it were). We have many experts using Wikipedia. Some really haven't gotten the community part, some have. Some who haven't gotten it are working OK in their areas anyways, for various reasons including good luck. We also have a significant number of - for want of a better word - kooks who feel they're experts and are attempting to meld Wikipedia in their image. Every one of these does immense damage. We also also have a very large number of editors who aren't kooky but overestimate their skills and knowledge. These are usually not that bad, as they usually can be reasoned with and pointed to better sources. We can't "just trust the experts" - for the reasons above - and managing them is already part of the community and process. That this drives some away is a problem - but letting them run wild without sufficient gatekeeping and QA checks would be worse. If this was an easy problem, we'd all be basking in our easy retirements now... -- -george william herbert [email protected] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
