User:Pete.Hurd/Wikirant

<!-- =Broken Windows, a Wikipedia rant=

Articles on wikipedia seem to fall into two categories.

The first are are about traditionally encyclopedic topics, the arts and sciences, and are written by editors with something like a graduate student level of expertise. Articles on these topics exist in many reference texts, and the editors of these articles were probably first drawn to wikipedia while searching for standard reference material, and found that it was to access online than to look it up in a book. These articles were written by people who are used to looking things up, their idea of an encyclopedic article is based on first hand experience.

The second seem to be written largely by adolescent boys, and are.

Wikipedia at it's best
I first started paying attention to Wikipedia in 2003, when looking for material to use in behavioural genetics lectures. The quality of wikipedia's genetics material was good, with some gaps in it and consistently improving. I'm most familiar with Wikipedia's coverage of game theory, the material on that topic is very good (and continues to improve). Other areas in which Wikipedia is remarkably good (but terse) include statistics, mathematics etc. These topics show Wikipedia at it's best, and are marked by contributions of editors contributing to a (fairly geeky) topic with which they are well informed. These are all areas in which the editors are informed to something equivalent to a graduate student level, and are clearly experienced consumers of knowledge before becoming producers of knowledge.

Broken Windows
The example articles for Wikipedia at it's worst (recent debate about the quality of wikipedia articles), Bill Gates and Jane Fonda, are all subjects in which editors don't require any grasp of subject matter, beyond that provided by popular culture, to contribute to Wikipedia. Such articles may easily be fixed by motivated editors. The real problem with wikipedia isn't in such pop culture topics, but the topics that lie between the arcane and pop culture, those that products of intellectual histories yet protrude outside of the geeky realms into mass culture. Editors blissfully or willfully ignorant of highly relevant research on the topic. These articles may grow in length, and gradually become better written, but they will not move beyond the quality of high-school essays until editors feel obliged to do their homework before contributing. Perhaps the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention applies here. If Wikipedia contains a bunch of articles that anyone can "improve" after reading an issue of People magazine, then this leads contributors to the view that having read a newpaper article, Wikipedia article, or broached the topic in a high school class, is sufficient education to "improve" the Wikipedia article on that topic.

Be Bold: Why do homework when I can edit Wikipedia?
If Wikipedia is to compete as an encyclopedia, then it's editors must consider it to be intellectual dishonesty to contribute without due dilligence. Here the be bold wikipedia tradition may be rephrased be ignorant. The attitude that editors ought to be really knowledgeable in the topic area has been caricatured as Academic Standards Disease. This says a lot about what's wrong with Wikipedia. Educated editors have no time to engage in editorial reversion debates with successive highschoolers determined to voice their own opinions. In a perfect world editors would educate themselves before launching into pedantic mode. Wikipedia should do more to encourage such behaviour.

Wikipedia *is* a collection of trivia
Arguments to include an article because it may be of interest to someone someday, (recent example: a biography on the grounds that the subject played on the college basketball team, and college basketball is a topic of note) merely demonstrate that debating notability on AfD is a chump's game. No insight into any topic of relevance can come from reading an article listing all the verifyable facts relating to a typical elementary school, any more than from articles promoting non-notable bands. While explaining why a historically notable instance of a phenomenon adds to knowedge, phrenetically documenting trivia does not.

The fundamental problem is that many editors are attempting to produce a product for which they have no experience as a consumer. It's my impression that article quality is directly related to the number of times the article is referred to by people looking for enlightenment on a topic. If they don't find it meets their needs, they seem motivated to return and fix it once they have found what they are looking for elsewhere. This process just will not happen with non-notable cruft topics. This is because, unlike topics of a more technical nature, there is no enlightenment to be gained anywhere.

Pete.Hurd 23:18, 29 November 2005 (UTC) -->