[WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

Wed Sep 8 17:36:49 UTC 2004

--- "KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk> wrote: 
> 
> From: Delirium [mailto:delirium at hackish.org] 
> 
> >I don't think academic credentials are very good ones. 
> > Perhaps some measure of involvement in Wikipedia would 
> >be a reasonable start, as most of our longtime 
> >contributors are reasonably reliable.
> >
> 
> Perhaps articles should be reviewed by at least a couple of people. One
> 'expert' plus one long term wikipedian, in whom we trust.

I think this is spot on; for any Nupedia/Wikipedia 1.0-style project, articles
need to be reviewed from at least two angles. First, a "general" review, which
can be performed by a compentent layperson -- clarity, grammar, spelling,
structure, layout, and basic checks on accuracy, balance and completeness.
Second, we need to have articles reviewed by specialists to ensure that the
articles are entirely correct, balanced and comprehensive; there's no getting
around this, in my opinion.

As an example, I'd point to our current way of marking quality articles: the
Featured Articles system. My guess is that 90% of the review there is of the
"general" variety, and we shouldn't be surprised if a specialist could find
significant flaws in the factual accuracy of a number of Featured Articles. One
such case: after ordering and reading half-a-dozen books on the [[Enigma
machine]] (recently promoted to a Featured Article), I found a number of
errors, and I'm certainly not an expert.

The problem remains to identify experts who can perform specialist review. For
some topics, academic credentials would be reasonable evidence of expertise,
but I certainly don't think this is the only way to find experts. For, say, a
soap opera, perhaps the best way to locate an expert would be to look for a
prominent fan site on the Web. I believe a majority of experts would be willing
to (at least) read through a Wikipedia article and point out problems if asked.
Whether they would be willing to commit to putting down their name (and hence
their reputation) as approving a version of an article is another matter,
though.

--Matt (User:Matt Crypto)

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