[Wikipedia-l] Re: Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free software movement

Sun Sep 1 08:49:54 UTC 2002

Larry Sanger wrote:

>In particular, the Wikipedia project has been defined in such a way that
>we have few official standards and no virtually requirements for quality
>of the rigorous sort that Linux had when it set out to rewrite Unix from
>scratch (and later remain compliant with stringent technical standards
>like the POSIX standard).  Linus Torvalds' task had well-defined
>parameters that absolutely required a lot of genuine expertise.  Our task,
>by contrast, is to write a very large, unbiased encyclopedia.  What this
>task entails is far more nebulous (though I and others have worked very
>hard to settle on and explain what it does involve), and many reasonable
>people reasonably think that this doesn't strictly speaking require
>genuine expertise.
>
>But it does.  If you think otherwise, you're living in a fantasy world.
>The fact that there is no organization like the IEEE staffed by
>world-class experts defining a standard that we must follow doesn't mean
>that our work doesn't require expertise to finish credibly.  I think
>writing *and finishing* a credible draft of an encyclopedia requires more
>and a wider range of expertise than the free software movement has.  If
>our encyclopedia project doesn't get an infusion of that expertise, the
>quality of the result will suffer accordingly, which is a lot.
>
So maybe I am living in a fantasy world, but my opinion is different. 
First, I think many of the contributors to Wikipedia already have 
genuine expertise. They have good knowledge about a number of topics (be 
it because it's their hobby, work, study or interest) and - very 
important - gain a lot of experience about how to write encyclopedia 
articles from reading a lot of them, correcting them, talking about 
them. And if there are more people needed for an article: they're there.
Next, "normal" encyclopedias are not written by the most highly regarded 
experts either. There may be some, but in general these are not really 
better qualified than many Wikipedians, in some cases there are 
Wikipedians with better qualifications. In fact, the real experts will 
not even bother to write encyclopedias, they'll work on topics in their 
own field. Also, normal encyclopedias are usually written by a number of 
people, where each person has his expertise. While his articles are 
probably read by others, they're usually only written by one person.

So, while I think it would be great to draw some great minds to 
Wikipedia, I do not think we have a problem just because we don't have 
any (if that would be true). If these highly regarded experts think our 
encyclopedia is bogus because they've read a lot of articles that are 
bad, they are right and we can only hope these articles will be 
rewritten (hopefully by these experts themselves). But if they judge it 
to be a bad encyclopedia because there are no experts contributing 
(which there are), it is these experts that are wrong, and not the 
encyclopedia. Moreover, most people use an encyclopedia because they are 
NOT a highly regarded expert. I find it much more important if they 
think Wikipedia is useful. It is same as with the free software. If the 
program is crap, nobody will download/use it, not even if it were made 
by, say,  Linus Torvalds or some other famous guy. However, if my 
completely programming-ignorant neighbour would create a great program, 
it will be used. Most people judge by quality of the product, not of the 
producer. True, Torvalds may draw more people to download his crappy 
program at first than my neighbour, but when word gets out of the 
quality, that changes.

So my opinion is that attracting expert contributors because they're 
experts is wrong; we should attract any contributor because he's 
contributions are of (high) quality, no matter if he's a high school 
drop-out or a guy with seven master titles and three Ph.D's.

Jeronimo