[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

Sat Sep 18 17:05:57 UTC 2010

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 18, 2010 5:46 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

You say

> You haven't demonstrated there is enough of a problem even to induce
> people here to jump into action, let alone the Foundation doing so.

and then you say

> There are lots of people who complain about our humanities content,

This seems contradictory.  And in any case, the point you were replying to 
was that the main problem is recognising that there is a problem: your reply 
is symptomatic of that.

> You've had several examples of the sort of quality survey that would
> demonstrate clearly not merely that there was a problem, but what its
> nature was and to what degree.

The best suggestion is to take a list of what any humanities scholar would 
regard as the most significant or important humanities articles.  100 of 
these, for example (and NOT using the Wikipedia importance-assessment method 
which is grossly flawed).  We don't have to rely on subjective judgment. 
For philosophy, I could take the top 20 (by coverage) articles in a standard 
reference work (The Oxford Companion would be a start).

For assessment of quality there are various benchmarks that could be used, 
relying on standard reference works, for example, or other objective 
criteria.  Andreas suggested one earlier: if standard reference works say 
that there are 3 components to a particular writer's work, does Wikipedia 
mention these?  Does it assign due weight to these?  And so on.

> The usual way to fix such systemic bias is to get people actually
> involved in writing in the areas in question. This is hard, but it's
> also the method that will actually work.

How?  Are you going to do this?  How are you going to attract philosophers 
to Wikipedia?  After 10 years, why hasn't the natural process of 
crowdsourcing already achieved this?   In any case, the first step is to 
establish that there is a serious problem.

> There are various methods to bootstrap such a process. e.g. What's the
> financial model for the SEP? It's under an all rights reserved
> licence, but it doesn't generate an income in any way I can see. If it
> were placed under a CC by-sa licence, that would not take away from
> the prestige of the SEP and would help get its content somewhere it
> was read.

The SEP, as I have already pointed out, is not a good model for a mass 
publication like Wikipedia.  The style and approach required are quite 
different.

Peter 