[WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

Sun Sep 12 05:29:46 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
>
>>We don't have to give them "that bit of comfort". They will get around 
>>to reading and trusting our content anyway.
>>
>
>And yet they are not and are in fact warning others to stay away from it. My
>best friend, whose opinion I regard very highly, is a grade school teacher. She
>is very intelligent, liberal minded, and has listened to me describe Wikipedia
>and how it works. It pains me greatly to concede that she will not allow any of
>her students to use our content as a reference due to the fact that it is not
>approved by people with relevant degrees. She went so far as insinuate that the
>mere existence of Wikipedia is harmful due to the fact that children *will*
>innocently use it, thinking it is an authoritative source. The librarian at her
>school is similarly convinced as well as the two other librarians I've talked
>to about this. 
>
Bear in mind that your sample is very small; don't freak out because
not everybody understands the concept (and if they're gating on
experts' blessings, whatever that's suppoed to mean, they don't
understand it yet).

To trot out yet another GNU comparison, most components of GNU and
Linux have been disparaged by computer scientists and leading
technologists ("just a hobby system", "no one would ever use it
for anything important", etc). The interesting thing that happened
is that over time, some experts (like me) got pulled into the
projects, and in other cases, the less-expert simply tried
imitating what experts did, sometimes several times before
settling on something that worked in practice. The cumulative
result has shut up a lot of skeptics (and I've had the distinct
pleasure of some of them saying "Stan, you were right" - aaah...).
But it did take a long time - GNU is almost 20 years old, and Linux
is 13, at 3 1/2 years only the true believers worked on them.

Getting back to WP, one of the things I don't think people appreciate
is the number of bonafide experts already reviewing WP articles on a
daily basis. It would be very hard for someone to get something by me
in the GCC or GDB articles for instance; I know articles in other
areas also have experts' eyes watching intently. It would be a
pretty low impact simply to have a place to document the existing
experts (real names with CVs, no hiding behind pseudonyms). The
recognition alone, even without any special privileges, would attract
some experts, and the power structure works right - editors will
tend to defer to the known experts (that happens already) but
still be able to challenge those who get out of line.

Going a little further, I could imagine pages having a link going
to a list of real-name editors who have publicly declared themselves
to be watching the article. Those seeking reassurance can then
peruse the list to see if they're sufficiently impressed. Conversely,
it's an incentive to the watchers, whose reputation will suffer if
the articles they're publicly watching are poor in some way.

Stan