[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

Fri Oct 1 20:43:07 UTC 2010

On 28 September 2010 12:38, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> You can hardly move on Wikipedia without tripping over experts in
> whatever topic you're editing. Why are there any experts on Wikipedia?

I predict Wikipedia's biology articles will far outshine its
philosophy articles for the simple fact that the biologists bother:

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000941

They bothered paying author's fees for publication in a peer-reviewed
specialist journal in their field, just to increase the quality of
Wikipedia articles in their field. They're hardly going to rack up
citation credits for an article on how to teach biology to the general
public.

With some fields going to this effort and not others, ultimately it's
up to the specialists in the fields themselves to bother. So what do
the biologists have that the philosophers - or other fields that are
ill-represented in Wikipedia - lack?

(That article is great, by the way. It gives strong reasons for
experts to put in the effort to bother.)

- d.