> I have to say that Gareth and I have had our differences
> in the past but I am with him 100% on this; historical
> revisionism in any shape or form is not to be countenanced.
> Ever.
Reportage is not approval. If some group of folks makes
enough noise to get attention, and has published a book with
silly ideas, it is every bit as much of a moral obligation
for us to honestly report that fact as it is for us to to
express disapproval (or to report that most people disapprove).
Just to put my oar in the water:
1) Why Nupedia isn't as "successful" as Wikipedia:
I can only tell you what I think (since I'm in arrears on a Nupedia
article). First, I think Nupedia is in some ways the ideal -- partially
because my understanding is that expertise can be demonstrated in ways
other than credentials. Second, because there's peer review that means
something -- review by other people who might know something about the
subject. Finally, there's a copyediting standard. Why isn't it more
successful? For me, it's two things -- the process is a bit unwieldy
(I'd actually have to draft a complete article to submit it, which takes
time -- probably a lot less than I spend here, but wikipedia nickels and
dimes your time to death) and second.actually, it's really just what I
said -- the process is a bit unwieldy -- it's not set up for people who
have a few minutes here and there to do a quick edit or addition. Oh --
and frankly, online resources of any kind aren't really accepted yet by
moat of academia (at least not the people in charge of hiring and
granting tenure).
2) Re: Attracting experts: The estimable Mr. Gilbert said, "if you
build it." I agree, but add (a la Mr F. Bauder) they will also leave
when they get tired of the aggro. I think expert retention is more the
problem -- there has been attrition, though, since I've been here. Let
me first say that yes, ego is involved. Credentials do usually
represent a huge amount of work and emotional investment, as does
teaching a subject. So too with interested amateurs who have their own
areas of expertise -- meaning they've done a lot of work and really
learned their subjects. It doesn't mean we can't be wrong (Lord knows,
I have my moments!), but it generally means we are, well, experts. That
means that we do get irritated when we get into edit wars with people
who know less and often express it even less well.
3) Retaining good people in general. I think it's part of getting
bigger and having no staff -- it's like working in a successful start-up
-- the initial employees are really tight and get so used to working
together that they cooperate and play to each other's strengths without
thinking. As the start-up grows, it starts to get a hierarchy, New
people don't have the luxury of knowing who among their fellows is the
go-to person for what, and there is sometimes friction. The difference
here for me is, I don't think newbies have any excuse for not learning a
bit about the old hands -- and I think they also have some
responsibility to help make themselves known. I try to encourage
people to tell us something about themselves when I say hi, but it might
be nice to have a template for user pages with a space for "expertise"
and "interests."
3 continued ) It might also be good to have links to Wikipedia
etiquette on the user page -- or as part of the login process. DW, the
person with shades of French Helganess, is contributing huge amounts,
but refuses to respond to queries on whether his/her pictures and
sources are PD, or to acknowledge my requests to look at how we've been
formatting historical stuff. This is after accusing me of pushing
everybody else around (not that I don't make cases for how I think
things should be, but I generally have good reasons, and when I
haven't, I hope I've given in gracefully.
Still -- the two things that have driven me off on "breaks" in the past
(and most likely the future) are the lack of respect for my hard-earned
knowledge and a general lack of communal cooperation from a very few
(but for some reason, interested in history) people who make me thing
"My time is too valuable for this -- I spend way more time fighting to
make other people's articles *passable* than writing new stuff."
Anyway, that's my take. It would be really nice to have a few people
with some official *moderator* position, but I can see how that could be
a problem unless there are volunteers. In the meantime, I just thank
goodness for the Vickis and Aprils and Mavs and Stephen Gilberts (etc --
I'm not leaving people out on purpose.) there are lots of good reasons
to hang around!
Jules
I checked this out, and it's appalling. I looked at other articles, as
well as the one you suggested. Helga, if you want people to support
you, please take my advice and direct them to sites that are not
revisionist. I know that the site claims that it doesn't deny the
Holocaust, and that's somewhat truthful. What is DOES do is blame the
Jews for the Holocaust, which is almost as bad. Basically, it's
inflammatory and chooses to publish (or link to, because it's trying to
avoid prosecution under German law) the most obscure and not necessarily
factual articles. There is often a kernel of truth, but it is so hidden
in warped opinion that we can't trust it. AS I have said again and
again -- Consider your sources and ask if they are credible. This
source isn't -- unless we write an article on propaganda and hate groups
and how effective they are at convincing people.
One of the things about history is that our picture is always expanding.
You are correct that many people are only now learning about the
Heimatvertriebene -- just as 30 years ago, people (especially
non-scholars) in English-speaking countries were really beginning to
learn about Stalin's purges -- mostly through reading "The Gulag
Archipelago", which topped the NY Times bestseller list. Documents are
hidden. Governments cover things up. Historians constantly rewrite
history to include more knowledge -- and sometimes that revises the big
picture.
What I'm trying to impress upon you is that most of the postwar picture
you want included is real -- that is, ethnic Germans, counted perhaps
into the millions, were either exterminated or expelled from their homes
in areas that fell under Communist control. But we don't play
comparative victims here, and we also have to include facts that
unfortunately don't fit your picture. I think I can speak for everybody
when I say we want the truth -- but we want it to be told responsibly,
and not by revising history in ways that at present seem entirely
unwarranted.
Julie
An edit war seems to have broken out on the 'East Timor' page earlier
today. 209.226.107.51 has twice added a line about the US selling weapons
to Indonesia during the conflict in East Timor, which Zoe has deleted
twice. Maybe someone could look into this case before it leads to a real
edit war or someone is leaving the project in disgust.
Andre Engels
Dear all,
I've been away from active involvement with Wikipedia for many months now,
though I occasionally still lurk on Wikipedia-L and make a casual edit on
the website when I feel so moved.
My distance from the project, and some recent reading about Linux and open
source software, has made something clear to me in the past few days:
there is a profound disanalogy between the development of our free
encyclopedias and the development of free operating systems and software.
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.
The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated
people aren't drawn to Wikipedia. It's not surprising why not: I would
like to suggest that this is similar to asking veteran programmers working
on Linux and its applications to work with, supervise, and put up with
rank beginners and script kiddies. If they had had to do that, I doubt
very much that the free software movement would have come a fraction of
the distance it has.
Please don't misunderstand. My concern with expertise and knowledgeable
participants does not reflect an overvaluation of formal qualifications,
or academic elitism, by the way. (If you think I have enormous respect
for someone just on the basis of their academic credentials, you *really*
don't know me.) If someone without a degree (I can think of a few) can
write and think well and convey what they know in a way that reflects
expert knowledge on the subject, that's great. May their kind be fruitful
and multiply (among our ranks). There's no reason for me to suggest
otherwise, just as there's no reason to ask free software developers to
have degrees in computer science before they get their hands dirty working
on open source software.
Consider this. Eric Raymond might be correct that free software
development is represented as a bazaar. What is perhaps less often
acknowledged is that it is a bazaar full of extremely highly-qualified,
knowledgeable people. In this bazaar, the bar to *productive* and
*original* development is set very high. (Conveniently, it's not people
that set the bar high but instead the facts of reality about how hard it
is to develop software.) It is also less often acknowledged that there
are necessarily elite groups--elites based on merit, but elites
nonetheless--who are in charge of releasing new versions of important
packages. That's as it should be.
Wikipedia is quite different. 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.
Along these lines I suggest there's another disanalogy between the free
software movement and our free encyclopedia movement. The free software
movement is organized and led by world-class computer scientists
associated with industry and academia. The free encyclopedia movement is
much newer, but (forgive me) it 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. To be quite honest, it was good
to lay me off when economic necessity required; now do the right thing and
ask Jacques Barzun (before he dies), or some other distinguished
intellectual, to head up the project properly.
If we really want to make the best encyclopedia in the world (the original
stated goal of Nupedia, by the way), we must discuss a pressing question
that I suspect very few people on this list are disposed to take very
seriously: 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?
Now, I would not dream of suggesting that *Wikipedia* change its policies
of openness. Basically, I don't think Wikipedia should change. It is
what it is and it has produced a huge number of *great* articles. It's
amazing that it works as well as it does, and I continue to expect that it
will result in a useful, interesting, huge body of work if we continue on
in the same way we have been.
That said, all of my previous predictions of huge success for the free
encyclopedia movement were based on the assumption that a Nupedia, or some
other quality control mechanism, would eventually mature into something to
inspire confidence among the leaders of different fields, so that
contributions and editing would be of the highest quality. But if no such
mechanism materializes, I would be much less apt to predict success, in
terms of quality of articles, for Wikipedia. Wikipedia by itself will
continue to go on to useful things, interesting things--but not great
things.
So I don't propose we touch Wikipedia--but we have Nupedia. What I hope
is that Nupedia can be changed and rearranged, somehow, to create an elite
board of bona fide experts that is ultimately in charge of "releases" of
free encyclopedia content.
Whatever the specific Nupedia article creation and/or vetting process
might turn out to be--see the Nupedia-L archives for discussion ad
nauseum--one thing is increasingly clear to me. Namely, unless there is a
dramatic change in how the free encyclopedia movement is organized,
Wikipedia will be stuck with, on balance, mediocrity.
Lest you think yourself insulted, let me offer an example of mediocrity:
my many philosophy articles. They are full of content, they are basically
correct, many of them (those that have been re-edited from lecture form)
are reasonably well-written--but they are woefully inadequate and
basically mediocre. I would be ashamed to bill them as anything other
than what they are--very rough first drafts based on lectures to OSU
undergrads, which sit there waiting for some experts to, probably,
completely rework them, or even replace them.
But no expert will want to do that 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.
(I acknowledge that an appropriate response to this is: "I agree, but what
are you bothering Wikipedia-L about it for? Go post to Nupedia-L."
Basically, Wikipedia is the only game left in town as far as the free
encyclopedia movement is concerned. If enough of you get behind this,
something might happen. To my mind, Wikipedia shouldn't change but
Nupedia can and should, and Wikipedia might benefit directly.)
Larry
Jimmy Wales said:
I think we could say: "Tensions between Jews and non-Jews in Germany had
been growing for several years, as evidenced by thus and such actual
facts that actually happened."
-- Jimmy, even that kind of implies a some kind of mutual antagonism --
Helga is here now.
----- Forwarded message from Helga Hecht <helgah(a)email.com> -----
From: "Helga Hecht" <helgah(a)email.com>
Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2002 01:03:43 +0800
To: jwales(a)bomis.com
Subject: Re: Subscribe to wikipedia-l
Hi Jimbo,
I subscribed to the wikipedia-l.
I also want to make you aware of what Rabbi Schwarz wrote:
http://globalfire.tv/nj/nyt.htm (posted on the same google results).
Have a good holiday weekend
HelgaH(a)email.com
>I don't want to pick on Ed Poor, because I'm sure there are other
>examples I could use. But I think Ed Poor believes a lot of false
>things. I'm sure he thinks that I believe a lot of false things.
>Maybe I think he's a nut. Maybe he thinks I'm a nut.
>
>Fair enough, but he and I are both polite and reasonable, and I find
>it hard to envision a situation where we couldn't agree on what an
>encyclopedia article should say.
What higher praise could one get? "Polite, reasonable nut". I like that :-)
But seriously, isn't there any way to configure the software so that Helga could contribute only when logged in? That is, ban her IP address, but not her user ID (if you know what I mean)?
Mav and others have told me that Helga's been a thorn in the project's side for a year. But I think the way you've responded has been inflammatory. No offense meant.
Instead of hitting her over the head verbally with phrases like "she's at it again" and "removed NPOV text" -- why not take a more low-key approach? It's working for me in the Arab-Israeli conflict articles:
"Removed to talk" -- concise, unemotional: clearly the text hasn't disappeared but will be found on the talk page in a moment.
"According to ..."
"Some advocates claim ..."
"Although most scholars believe X ..."
The above 3 phrases deftly inserted into the article text work wonders. *sigh* if only Larry were still here.
Ed Poor
On Tuesday 03 September 2002 04:34 pm, LDC wrote:
> They certainly could, but only in their capacity as vetted,
> recognized, and fully identified experts. Nupedia's function,
> then, is precisely the selection of appropriate experts to review
> articles in certain areas. This could be by reviewing academic
> credentials in some areas, professional credentials in others, or
> by whatever means are felt appropriate for things like games and
> hobbies. Such reviews would be themselves fully credited and not
> editable, and attached to the article they describe, but the
> subject article itself would remain fully editable.
I like this idea - it just may work. What would be needed of course would be
a good deal of integration between Wikipedia and Nupedia. A link in in the
non-editable part of a Wikipedia page in the article namespace might say;
"View the last review of this article". Clicking on that link will bring you
to Nupedia's review of the Wikipedia article with maybe the exact text of the
version of the Wikipedia article reviewed on the left and the review on the
right (with maybe reviewer made highlights, numbering, underlining and other
markup in the copied Wikipedia article).
Another important thing to have would be the exact revision number, date and
time of the Wikipedia article along with a cur link (that way somebody could
easily see what, if any, edits have been made to the Wikipedia article since
it was reviewed).
Just some thoughts - take them or leave them (remember I really only care
about results not any particular process -- please do think of something even
better).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
I'm not trying to restart the debate - it went on quite long enough as
it was! But what was the consensus on naming wikipedia entries for
cities? Did it come out to [[city, country]] or was that shouted down by
the masses? The reason I ask is because I'm looking at a couple of
entries that might be moved and I don't know whether they should...
--
Karen AKA Kajikit
And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature
that will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.
Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/
Love and huggles to all!