[Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent issues.

Sun Aug 29 17:25:48 UTC 2010

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Moran" <fordmadoxfraud at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2010 5:19 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent 
issues.

>>I don't really see this as a problem with Wikipedia anyway.

Do you mean the problem of experts being generally discouraged?  I was 
talking about the problem of there being serious errors in articles, 
particularly in the humanities.  I agree with David that when it comes to 
facts and figures, Wikipedia is pretty good. For many of the hard sciences, 
also good.  But it's a disaster zone in the humanities. That's the problem I 
am referring to.

On credentials, I agree, but I wasn't talking about credentials.  I was 
talking about people with a reasonably good knowledge of their subject.  In 
philosophy, all the editors who have made good contributions have some 
background in the subject.  I was emailed by one today, complaining how it 
was descending into complete chaos.  I told her not to bother and just to 
step back from the whole thing.  Then the problems would become more obvious 
and perhaps people would be motivated to improve the way the system works.

>>I've mentioned before that this was wrong for almost 2 years, and it
went through various edits and reformatting over that time:

yes I documented a similar problem here

http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/08/argumentum-ad-baculum.html

which still haven't been fixed.

>>all three said something to the effect of "I'm going
to pretend I've never read that because otherwise I'll have to correct
it and I'm not prepared to spend the evening argue the toss with a
teenager.

Quite. How does Wikipedia improve its rules, or governance, or software to 
resolve the current problems with the *articles*? 