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> Because if they are not marked or restricted then I believe they won't appeal to users who want expert articles. I believe they will, because the quality wil
by pessimizer 3y ago
> Because if they are not marked or restricted then I believe they won't appeal to users who want expert articles.
I believe they will, because the quality will be higher. They shouldn't employ experts as a marketing campaign, they should employ experts as a way to keep interesting entries from devolving into trash heaps. I'd honestly prefer those experts to be research librarians and experts on parliamentary procedure or statistics, rather than subject matter. Instead all editorial decisions are made through trials adjudicated by a few people who happened to walk by, and other people paid to be there by private organizations and/or governments.
A higher-quality Wikipedia needs defenses against paid and deeply-invested mobs.
- renewiltord 3y agoOne way to bootstrap this approach is to mirror Wikipedia and add on expert articles. That would demonstrate the value of the expert articles. I suspect this value is low. If it were sufficiently high, this Expert Wikipedia would rapidly come to dominate. I think the Expert Wikipedia would be a bad use of resources because most people do not desire this and because experts will not deliver better articles in general.
- manmal 3y agoThat’s an impossible experiment because a mirror would never get the same network effects, search engine treatment, and cultural integration Wikipedia has accumulated.
- renewiltord 3y agoI suspect getting experts to write any significant fraction of articles is a multi-million dollar experiment. I don't think it's worth it, and I doubt anyone running WMF would think so either. We have completely expert written media in Encyclopedia Brittanica, so that's probably the best place for people who don't want to use WP because it's insufficiently expert-written. It doesn't make sense to go join that market.