[WikiEN-l] Citizendium

Sun Sep 17 04:49:57 UTC 2006

On 9/16/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/16/06, Kim van der Linde <kim at kimvdlinde.com> wrote:
> > What I do know is that experts have in
> > general a short life span at Wikipedia (if they join at all), and that
> > is not going to change.
>
> There are areas of Wikipedia where that generality is not true at all,
> and experts are quite actively involved and not being rejected or
> driven away at all.
>
> I keep wondering what's different about those, compared to the areas
> where they are being pushed out, and thinking if there's some way to
> change that.  I haven't figured it out yet.
>
> --
> -george william herbert

Short answer: the subject area should be obscure, or exceptionally ferocious.

Longer answer: there's an interesting *BSD phrase about "painting a
dog shed", which pithily expresses the idea that if the masses can
understand an idea/article/piece-of-software, they'll expect their
ideas on it to be heard seriously. Of course, on Wikipedia, to be
heard one must edit...
link: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAINTING

Clearly, what we need to do is set up a bot to run all Wikipedia
through a 1337 filter, or a pretentious Latinizing academic filter.
Ideally, the average reader will be able to read a lengthy 20 page
article on Britney Spears and have absolutely no idea what they just
read.

--Gwern