[Foundation-l] Fwd: Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

Mon Oct 4 08:33:42 UTC 2010

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Goodman" <dgoodmanny at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2010 12:07 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

> On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 5:26 AM, Peter Damian
> <peter.damian at btinternet.com> wrote:
>>
>
>>We were talking
>> about very aggressive editors who know absolutely nothing of the subject,
>> and drive away specialist editors.
>>
>
> I see an equal proportion of very aggressive editors among the expert
> as well as the non-expert editors.  Expertise does not necessarily
> mean a devotion to expressing all significant views and presenting
> them fairly. I have been involved a little with some   articles in
> Wikipedia written by fully-credentialed experts --in one case with an
> international reputation and distinguished academic awards-- devoted
> to expressing their own peculiarly one-sided view of the subject.  And
> there was a group of articles with several experts of established high
> reputation each taking the position that the other ones  were
> hopelessly wrong.

The irony is that this does not happen in Wikipedia in my experience, with 
philosophy.  I know all of the small group and they get on very well and 
support each other.  The problem is the aggressively belligerent non-trained 
editors who drive the specialists away. I think the best way to convince you 
of this is to get testimonials.  There is one here

http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/07/ohlocracy.html

I could get plenty more.

>>I am not qualified to judge articles on philosophy on my own
understanding of the material. I must ask whether you are so very sure
that academic consensus will endorse your views on the articles
mentioned that you would be able to write a replacement article, and
ask for an RfC on it, and convince outsiders  by reference to multiple
understandable authoritative sources?
>>

On the quality of the articles, even Wikipedia's own grading system shows a 
problem.

http://toolserver.org/~enwp10/bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&projecta=Philosophy&namespace=0&pagename=&quality=&importance=&score=&limit=100&offset=1&sorta=Importance&sortb=Quality

Any professional philosopher would support my view.