G'day Michelle,
Steven Ericsson Zenith wrote:
A brief contrarian point of view. If Wikipedia
is to succeed in any
measure to move beyond its tabloid status then transparency is essential.
That is, every admin must necessarily have their identity exposed and
it surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here - and I find it
hard to justify.
Ah, but admins don't control the content, do they? In just a quick
glance at several of the encyclopedias I have lying around, none of them
mention who wrote each article, most don't source their facts and many
don't have editors listed by name anywhere in the set. What makes
Wikipedia so special?
While I agree with you *in general*, on the specific point of named
contributors ... uh ... not in my experience.
I've got two encyclopaedia-like thingies sitting about; /The World Book
Encyclopedia/ (1966) and /A Woman's Body/ (199X).
The World Book includes a list of its contributors, and where an article
was contributed by someone not on the list (for instance, their entry
for association football) it includes direct credit over the article
("this was contributed by Mr $NAME, president of the USSSF" or whatever
it was at the time).
/A Woman's Body/ lists its contributors, with qualifications and area of
interest. So, that exceedingly interesting article about the workings
of the nervous system, while not *directly* credited, can easily be
traced to Dr Josephine Bloggs, PhD and author of numerous textbooks on
brain surgery. Meanwhile, that piece of new-age claptrap about the
aquatic ape causing women to stick their pinkies out while drinking tea
and subverting the dominant paradigm of male superiority as a gesture of
independence --- or whatever it was --- is presumably the fault of Ms
Karma Roe, astrology expert extraordinaire.
Of course, real names don't necessarily confer authority (/A Woman's
Body/ is a remarkable combination of excellent information and utter
tosh), but as I read somewhere, "Britannica have Oxford's greatest
expert on Shakespeare to write their article. Wikipedia has
User:ShakespeareFan00", or words to that effect.
--
Mark Gallagher
"What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse
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