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

Sun Sep 1 10:55:32 UTC 2002

At 05:29 PM 8/31/02 -0700, 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... 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.
>If our encyclopedia project doesn't get an infusion of that expertise, the
>quality of the result will suffer accordingly, which is a lot.
>
>The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated
>people aren't drawn to Wikipedia. 
>
>The bar to contribution is very low, and if
>there is any elite in charge, then with all due respect to everyone (and
>that's a lot--there are a lot of *extremely* smart and knowledgeable
>people here), our elite would seem rather less than impressive compared to
>the leading members of the intelligentsia that contribute to the likes of
>Britannica.
>
The free encyclopedia movement is doesn't seem to be travelling in the
>direction of being led by world-class thinkers, scholars, and scientists,
>as a close analogy would seem to require. [T]he right thing [to do is to]
>ask Jacques Barzun (before he dies), or some other distinguished
>intellectual, to head up the project properly...how can we arrange for our
free encyclopedia movement to be led by representatives of the creme de la
creme among the world's scholars and scientists?
>
>But no expert will want to [contribute] until the whole project is led by
>similar experts and therefore, to their mind, there is some guarantee that
>the project will not wind up being an enormous waste of time.  Without
>that sort of leadership, I fear that my articles, and the many other
>fair-to-middling (but basically correct and perfectly contentful)
>Wikipedia articles, will never receive the vetting from qualified people
>that they really need.

Yes, is there traction where the rubber meets the road? The community I
live in has a number of retired and semi-retired people living in it and
from time to time I talk up Wikipedia to them. I wonder what they think
when they log on. I spoke to a man who edits books that are published by
university presses yesterday. He had been following a cricket match on the
internet back in his home town in England. I suggested he might write an
article on cricket. (He brought cricket up since the word wikipedia made
him think it had something to do with cricket).

I doubt he will contribute, might not even log on. The question I had as I
talked to him and later was how would wikipedia fit into his life, perhaps
as an occasional pastime, perhaps as an avocation. As a professional
editor, he would be a fine catch, but to him that's work and work that he's
paid for. But he is just one of millions of highly qualified people who
might potentially contribute.

One key is respect. We don't know when a former editor of the New York
Times logs on and edits a bit on an article, but if he comes back and his
contribution is trashed and he has to argue about nonsense, it's doubtful
he'll return.

It's true that bad software won't run, sometimes won't even boot, but an
encyclopedia also has it everyday threshold of success and failure: is it
useful to its range of users, providing accurate basic information and
leading the user on to useful external and hardcopy resources? If it is, it
will be used and relied on.  Range of users, that's a good topic.

Fred