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

Sun Sep 1 17:21:10 UTC 2002

>> The problem is that, with several notable exceptions,
>> highly-educated people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.

> I don't know about everyone else but I think that statement
> was a bit insulting. 

If you think so, then you don't know Larry very well.  I also
think he's entirely correct, and I can't imagine how anyone
can disagree.  We don't attract very many highly educated
people; I can think of maybe one or two dozen that would qualify.

What bothers me even more is that we don't even seem to be
attracting non-academic experts either.  Take a non-academic
subject like Poker, for example.  There is no formal field of
study in it, and almost no academic research (a little bit at
U of Alberta, but that's about it).  But there are certainly
dozens, if not hundreds, of professional and semi-professional
players who would qualify as experts at a level more or less
equivalent to a Ph.D. in some academic field.  We happen to have
one of them--me--and so we have at least the beginnings of some
good poker articles.  But where's our Bridge expert?  Where's our
cat breeder?  Where's our expert woodworker?  Our chef?  Our
basketball player?  Hell, we don't even have expert coverage of
most computer programming languages despite the number of serious
geeks around here.

But unlike Larry, I don't think there's any systemic reason for
our dearth of experts; I think it's just that the project is
still young and small compared to what it needs to be to achieve
our goals.  Yes, we need an approval/review mechanism, and that's
one of my goals for software development, but that in itself won't
attract the experts.  I think the only thing that will attract
them is a proven record of success.  And that will come with time,
and with the work of the experts we do have.  When the software
gets closer to completion, and I can finish adding all of my poker
stuff, and Magnus can add his wonderful biology stuff, and Axel
his great Math stuff, etc., then we'll have some things to point
to to say "look, this is what we've accomplished, and you can
help us do more".  That will draw the experts.

We may already be the largest Wiki in the world, but we simply
aren't big enough yet to do what needs to be done.  We need 5000
regular contributors, not 200.  And we need to make sure the system
can support them all, and do the things they need done to make
good articles.  For example, I really like the idea of having
"staff" specialists in things like image processing, copyediting,
and other tasks that we shouldn't necessarily expect subject
experts to be good at.  And we need to make it easy for authors
to contact and work with those other people (that's why I wanted
the e-mail and user talk page features, for example--I think
they're critical to the collaborative process).  If we build it,
they will come.