Well, one has to adopt a relative perspective. My experience has been that, although certainly there is room for expansion in scientific articles on specialty topics, Wikipedia already has much better coverage of science than any print encyclopedias, and most basic scientific subjects are treated fairly completely.
The Evolution article is here typical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution In contrast, Wikipedia's coverage of the humanities is often inferior to the better print encyclopedias, and even with very basic subjects. This is perhaps because the humanities lend themselves less to easy summary, as there is usually a great variety of scholarly opinion on basic subjects, unlike in science. The Tribe article is here typical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe So I think particularly for basic humanities subjects (which are very important to many of our readers), a pure review process by academic experts would be of great value, and help to indirectly guide the contributors to such articles along more productive paths. Thanks, Pharos On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 2:50 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <pute...@mccme.ru> wrote: >> But I do not believe that experts should have any special powers in >> the editing of articles. >> >> Rather, I think they should be encouraged to act in a pure review >> capacity, assessing the existing work of Wikipedians, and making >> recommendations for improvement. This might also be partially >> implemented through flagged revs, and I could also envision a type of >> button at the top of articles that says "see last version assessed by >> an expert". >> > > My point is actually that for majority of articles on science-ralated (and > possibly some article on humanity-related, here I understand the situation > less) there is nothing to review - they are either stubs or non-existent. > Somebody needs to write them. You can consider this as a kind of review if > you wish. > > Cheers > Yaroslav > > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
