5 ms·

I am curious on your opinion on something: do you perceive the current shortcomings as something that stems from the tool (the wiki platform itself), the organi

I am curious on your opinion on something: do you perceive the current shortcomings as something that stems from the tool (the wiki platform itself), the organizational structure (the people), or a combination of both? Thanks for your question. To keep down the total number of replies in this thread, I'll also refer to other questions posted in replies to my comment. I think that Wikipedia currently has a hostile editing culture that especially discourages participation in editing by subject-matter experts, who cannot count working on Wikipedia as "publishing" in the usual way that publishing is rewarded for academics, and who will find the willful ignorance of many Wikipedians more than a little tedious. I don't have any problems with the Wikipedia software. A wiki (a broadly editable collaboratively edited document) does seem to be the way to go to build a good, free, online encyclopedia--Wikipedia is proof of concept for that. I think Wikipedia's human culture around editing started out pathological and stayed pathological because there was too much domination of the culture by amateurs (in editing) at the beginning of the project. I think a philanthropist would do well to fund a Free Online Encyclopedia X Prize because there are many forms of editorial culture in online wikis that have not yet been tried, and it may be that Wikipedia itself will reform its culture if it is exposed to more competition. (The very small number of people who so far participate actively in editing Wikipedia are easily replaceable if a new project comes along with a culture more welcoming of subject matter experts and of editors with professional editorial experience.) I care not at all which organization wins if there is an X Prize competition, but I would like to see the experiment tried, because plainly people all over the world will continue to use online encyclopedias, and there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick for improving the existing online encyclopedias. I agree with the comment (a subcomment of another reply to my earlier comment) that says that what Wikipedia (or some other project) needs more of is more professional writers who are used to explaining technical concepts to the general public. Yes, Wikipedia needs much more of that, and more sound editorial judgment in general. Let's think a bit broader: if you did truly solve that problem it's quite likely that the solution would have broad applications across a wide range of domains. That's an important point. There are many projects besides building a free, online encyclopedia that would need to bring about very similar forms of collaboration, and you are correct that working on the online encyclopedia improvement project will probably turn up knowledge that will be applicable to other projects. AFTER EDIT: Some other comments mention Simple English Wikipedia. But Simple English is a controlled vocabulary, and it's not even clear as a matter of linguistics that Simple English is more understandable to second-language learners for general purposes than everyday English carefully written by a sensitive editor. I happened to look at some of the Simple English articles on the topics I research in the last year, after extensive editorial work on the main Wikipedia articles on the English language, and the whole Simple English Wikipedia has an even bigger problem than most versions of Wikipedia with thinly sourced, incomplete articles.

TrevorJ 11y ago
Thank you for the reply, these are some really interesting insights. To the problem of laymen understanding any given article, I almost question if this is truly a bad thing? To me, it seems that the 'web' itself was meant in the beginning to help solve this problem in the sense that you could traverse up and down a network of related hyperlinks to gain the context/knowledge needed to understand the page at hand. This kind of leads me to the thought that maybe it's not the individual articles that are really at issue when it comes to the widest audience being able to read with understanding: maybe what is missing is the 'meta' structure which would allow a user to quickly understand what prerequisite knowledge they need, and where to find it. In teaching, the analogue is the scope and sequence. We introduce each subject and topic so that it builds on previous understanding. I wonder if some meta structure or learning 'tracks' that are curated on top of the article structure might solve part of the problem?
- detaro 11y ago
  I feel like following hyperlinks to related pages gets unwieldy quickly, because you then have to follow the links from there, ... It might be helpful if you could expand links maybe in an extra column to the right, similar to how you might find notes on the margins of a book, to get definitions and info while also seeing the "source" article. But that's really hard to get right, both in UI and content.

TrevorJ 11y ago

Thank you for the reply, these are some really interesting insights. To the problem of laymen understanding any given article, I almost question if this is truly a bad thing? To me, it seems that the 'web' itself was meant in the beginning to help solve this problem in the sense that you could traverse up and down a network of related hyperlinks to gain the context/knowledge needed to understand the page at hand. This kind of leads me to the thought that maybe it's not the individual articles that are really at issue when it comes to the widest audience being able to read with understanding: maybe what is missing is the 'meta' structure which would allow a user to quickly understand what prerequisite knowledge they need, and where to find it. In teaching, the analogue is the scope and sequence. We introduce each subject and topic so that it builds on previous understanding. I wonder if some meta structure or learning 'tracks' that are curated on top of the article structure might solve part of the problem?

detaro 11y ago
I feel like following hyperlinks to related pages gets unwieldy quickly, because you then have to follow the links from there, ... It might be helpful if you could expand links maybe in an extra column to the right, similar to how you might find notes on the margins of a book, to get definitions and info while also seeing the "source" article. But that's really hard to get right, both in UI and content.