George Herbert wrote:
On 9/16/06, Kim van der Linde
<kim(a)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.
Well, maybe you are active in area's were this is less of a problem.
What causes it? In general, the impossibility to keep things at a high
level quality due to edit wars, POV-pushers, drive-by-editing, good
intended insertion of non-obvious nonsense, and the basic idea of
consensus, which often leads to the most watered down version that is
acceptable to all involved but does not necessarily reflect the current
state of the knowledge in for example science. Finally, Wikipedia
articles often reflect what is available at the internet (aka that what
is easily verifiable), but fails to incorporate important work that is
not directly available to editors, while experts would have access to
those sources.
As long as Wikipedia has no way to protect the quality of the content in
a better way, content will deteriorate asymptotically to the level of
understanding of the the average vandalism fighter unless excperts
themselves babysit those articles. The higher the quality, especially
articles about complex subjects written by experts, the more problematic
it will be to maintain the quality as most vandalism fighters don't have
the insight to actually judge whether a this-is-obviously-not-vandalism
change is actually an improvement or not, or worse, whether the
insertion of nonsense or just plain incorrect information.
But this is inherently Wikipedia, and it will not change.
Kim
--
http://www.kimvdlinde.com