On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 5:16 AM, Peter Damian <peter.dam...@btinternet.com> wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "John Vandenberg" <jay...@gmail.com> > To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 12:21 AM > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent > issues. > > >>Irony. David Gerard disparaging CZ using a rationalwiki page as evidence. > > Actually David wrote the page. I thought it was interesting ...
I agree it was interesting, and does include some valuable observations which highlight problems facing the CZ project. Credentialism is one of them, but David's assertion that it is a "pseudoscience haven" appears to be selective observation, or maybe selective writing in light of the CZ article about WP, which makes no mentions of the long history of pseudo-<x> problems on Wikipedia. >>Pseudo-science, pseudo-humanities, etc are no stranger to Wikipedia, >>and our processes have not always been victorious over it. Simply >>put, the rubbish on Wikipedia outweights the rubbish on CZ, and I >>suspect that an academically sound study would indicate that, >>proportionally speaking, Wikipedia pollutes the interweb more than CZ. >>Compare the rationalwiki page for CZ and WP. I wonder how large their >>WP page would be if a similar level of critical analysis was applied. > > ... but as you say, byte for byte, there may be a similar level of > 'pollution'. I wonder if it was 'credentialism' that was the problem, or > just the lack of editors. I joined CZ when it was formed, with one other > philosophy editor http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Peter_J._King who had > defected from Wikipedia. He was a good philosopher but had some kind of > stupid row with Larry and left. I found it difficult to edit in a vacuum so > I left also. And that was the end of "credentialled" philosophy on CZ. > Larry is not a bad philosopher himself and has credentials but he was in a > management role. He has this naive faith that academic philosophers would > come flocking to CZ and fill the gap but they didn't. So in the end he > lowered the entry barrier and the rest is history. > > In summary, the evidence as far as my discipline is concerned is that Sanger > wrongly expected the project to attract credentialled academics. It didn't. > He allowed a number of uncredentialled or 'less credentialled' editors in, > and the results are much as David Gerard describes them. An important distinction remains. CZ requires real names, and as I understand it, the credentials of the contributors are a known quantity, which adds a dimension in 'patrolling' process. This obviously reduces the quantity of willing contributors, and contributions. I'm surprised you found the quietness of CZ (the vacuum) to be a problem, as your content on MyWikiBiz is usually written solely by yourself, and many of your WP pages have mostly been written by yourself. -- John Vandenberg _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
