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

Sun Sep 1 21:48:46 UTC 2002

LDC wrote;

>>>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.
>
Well, I don't know Larry either - and that shouldn't matter - but I 
think agree with Stephen Gilbert that the statement was slightly 
insulting. If I look at many Wikipedians' user pages, I see a lot of 
students, people with degrees, Ph.D's. If they're not highly educated, 
who are? Only professors?

>What bothers me even more is that we don't even seem to be
>attracting non-academic experts either.  Take a non-academic
>
I think everybody is an expert. Everybody lives in a country, a city 
worth writing about. Everybody likes some kind of music, movies (or 
films, whatever). Most people practise a sport or have other hobbies. 
OK, I may not be able to write about the social-economic effects of the 
Reformation in the Netherlands, but I sure can tell you something about 
the country that is required for encyclopedia. I know the main policital 
parties, know what's going on. As an apparently not high-educated 
person, I have had lessons at school about history, geography of my 
country. Apart from that, there are some areas where I consider my self 
to be an expert, or at least pretty close to it. And this holds for 
most, if not all people that regularly contribute here. We surely don't 
have experts yet on *all* areas - maybe we never will - but they can 
still come.

>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,
>
Yes, success is the only thing that will help us grow. And as I said, 
success is based on quality, which is not dependent on the number of 
people with a Ph. D. hanging round as a Wikipedian.

>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.
>
Yes, if we really want 5000 contributors, we need more infrastructure. 
The current one is already insufficient for our 200 editors. I also see 
that we may need SIGs or expert groups, who can take care of a specific 
subject or groups of subjects. Such groups already informally exist, be 
it small. If we could improve the infrastructure for such groups (making 
communication and decision making easier, for example), it would be 
easier to lift a certain subject to a high level.

Jeronimo