[WikiEN-l] User Pages & Editing in Wikipedia

Thu Dec 28 22:39:53 UTC 2006

David Gerard wrote:
> On 28/12/06, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
>> OK - I'm learning. There is very much of the technical aspects of Wikipedia
>> I know nothing about. It may seem like grasping, but it's really trying to
>> wrestle with, what I see is a large problem.
> 
> 
> When you started this thread, I assumed you were an old Wikipedia hand
> who knew his stuff. That's probably a compliment ;-)
> 
> 
>> But, I believe, with all of the
>> human, intelligent resources within the Wikipedia community, a solution can
>> be found. I'm just not willing at this point to leave it at "there's nothing
>> that can be done".
> 
> 
> Mmm. I think that you may be asking the wrong question: that is,
> you're making the implicit assumption that a user page can be trusted
> to ascertain whether a contributor to a page knows their stuff.
> 
> In practice, I don't think that's the case. On Wikipedia, the
> contributors are listed in the history, and someone I don't know other
> than a two-page detailed userpage is not necessarily a better writer
> than an anonymous IP that puts in well-written statements of fact with
> good checkable references.
> 
> When a reader views a Wikipedia page, they need to apply critical
> thought to it, like they do to any web page. We can't take that
> requirement away from the reader (and become a "trusted" source). But
> with references, we can *enable* them to apply critical thought to
> Wikipedia.
> 
> So it's all about the contributions themselves and the source material
> that backs the contributions up. The contributors themselves are not a
> focus at all. That's "no ownership of pages."
> 
> 
> - d.

David raises a good point. Don't judge Wikipedia articles by the quality 
of their contributors, but by the quality of the article - and the 
sources in particular. Never trust an unreferenced article. An article 
that provides a good number reliable, verifiable sources and is 
well-written should be considered in the same light whether it's written 
by anonymous users or long-time contributors. (Virtually all our 
articles are a mixture of both).

-Gurch