I do agree that experts do have their place in the content creation process, but I’m not sure that the place in question is down in the trenches. Wikipedia is the furnace that produces raw content, what we need is a forge where that raw content can be molded and polished.

You might ask yourself why, therefore, in spite (or because?) of the fact that we are starting over, we have had over 500 edits in the last six hours…

Spamming every inbox probably isn’t the answer but we should restir the ideas on how to advertise to professors more.

What about retired professors? How can we target them?

You can find more information at “Murder, Madness, and Mayhem”, and an essay I wrote about the process is “Madness”.

“I understand that there are certain topics, especially more technical and mathematical topics, where Wikipedians behave themselves rather better and where expert knowledge is accorded an appropriate (not fawning, of course) respect.”

I’m a retired associate professor of theoretical chemistry and spurred on by a retired professor of psychology (who is a contributor to the Dutch WP) I started to contribute fairly technical physics/mathematics stuff — at the senior, first-year grad level — to the English WP. I kept my patience at WP for quite some time(for those who want to check, my WP name is P.wormer), but after nine months explaining high-school material over and over again to an infinite supply of nutcases, I gave up on WP. So, I disagree with your (positive) statement.

Dr. Paul Wormer

At Wikipedia I’ve been astonished (and very impressed) at the close attention that an article can receive, and the way in which this forces my students to re-examine their work line by line, word by word. See the process here, for instance.

Now, again, as I wrote in my little essay, the paradox of Wikipedia is that is has such lofty standards, and yet it fails so much to meet them: less then half of one per cent of its articles are what it itself considers “good articles” or “featured articles.”

But still, this doesn’t mean that those standards are there, and that they are (as far as I can see) higher than Ezendium.

Meanwhile, regarding the rather different topic of the type of people who are on Wikipedia (and I’m not sure why you repeatedly confuse these two topics): I’ve no doubt that there are plenty of what you term “nutcases” on Wikipedia, and I’ve run into them in my time. Indeed, as I suggest in my essay, this was my major fear in going into this project: that students would be put off by endless edit wars. But really, this has not been a problem in the slightest.

This is, of course, my personal assessment and there is room for disagreement. But the highest standards on each project (Approval and Featured Article) are significantly a function of the number of smart, sensible people who vet the candidates. So in practice, educational projects like Jon’s will get both more useful criticism and more assistance reaching the codified standards on Wikipedia than on Citizendium.

But for those who do not want to clink that link, here is a snippet of what I say about Wikipedia’s standards:

“[I]ts standards are, in fact, impressively high. Indeed, it is a central paradox of wikipedia that its standards are impeccable, even as its actual performance so often lags far behind these standards. To give some indication: fewer than 0.1% of wikipedia’s articles are featured articles.”

But then I also said this in a comment above.

Still, whatever the educational destiny of Mr Kohs’s daughter, I recommend that her father think first and expostulate later.

As for Chris D’s comment. In fact, in this class, I have allowed students grades to be determined in part by whether or not their articles make FA or GA status. I don’t find anything necessarily problematic with that. Indeed, I see significant advantages in allowing students to see that grading schemes are not a professor’s personal whim, but have some correlation with what goes on in the public sphere.

In a follow-up essay, I hope to have more to say about this. In brief, however, I’ve found that in lots of ways Wikipedia’s standards have been much stricter than mine–and undoubtedly much higher than those set in almost any college course that I could conceive. Above all, for the sheer number of revisions that it forces upon them. There are other ways, however, in which Wikipedia’s standards are very different from those customary in academia. (Again I talk about that in my essay, too.) Plus there have been some pragmatic issues in terms of the ways in which groupwork is done, but I’m not sure those are particularly related to Wikipedia.

Anyhow, I will certainly be reflecting further on the process when the course is finally over, and the questions of grading and groupwork are among the issues I may well reconsider.

But once more, this is not for lack of standards on Wikipedia!

And I am far from saying that Wikipedia’s articles generally (or even in the vast majority of cases) meet those standards. But again, for fuller discussion of this, you can just click and read.

NB all this seems rather separate from the question of “expertise” and its valorization (or otherwise) on Wikipedia. Though the two topics do mutually impinge in certain interesting ways. But we can discuss that anon…

1) I’m aware that there are ways of gaming the system and cheating in one manner or another. I mention this is my essay. Running a sockpuppet would be one of them. I actually think it would be fairly hard to do this successfully: certainly no easier than the multitude of ways of cheating that are (and always have been) available to students in other forms of assessment.

2) No, I don’t know the qualifications of the people that “deal out” FA status. And I suspect that they know little to nothing about Latin American literature (translated or otherwise). But given the genre of the encyclopedia article, and the fact that the Featured Article assessment system relies on the fact that articles are copiously sourced, on the whole I don’t see that as a problem. The issue is not ”expertise”, but whether or not editors have followed the stipulated (and as I say, quite demanding) ”research protocols”.

Obviously, in this particular case (and no doubt in others similar), it helps that I am there as a (credentialled) source of expertise in the subject. And for what it’s worth, in my experience that expertise has very much been respected by everyone involved. For instance, a question arose as to whether or not there was insufficient emphasis on the political career of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, as compared to his literary and journalistic activities, and I was able to advise.

But in fact, expertise has been hardly at issue. I’ll repeat that I think that’s a bit of a canard, at least in my experience. At the very least, it’s a rather separate matter.

And I should say (again) that I am not celebrating Wikipedia or endorsing it in all cases. Even after this experience, I will continue to tell students that they should not cite it in term papers etc. But a) Wikipedia itself recommends against such citation; and b) I hope that the students in this class will now know, much better than previously, the perils as well as the potential of using a site such as this.

My students might even have learned another paradox of wikipedia: that if an article is good, then they will not ”have” to cite it, because it will provide references to the sources that they should be citing; and if it does not have those references, then it is not good enough to cite in the first place.

Again, I think all this should be clear enough from the essay I wrote. I hope (in fact, I am certain) that the students are coming out of the process with a much better knowledge of how wikipedia works, and also how it doesn’t. As far as I can see, that’s good for everyone concerned.

Of course in the normal course of things, it would be more likely that such a problem would be caught only much later, as an article is put up for reassessment; we didn’t have the time to wait for the normal course of things. Wikipedia’s oversight mechanisms can work slowly, and there’s a particular backlog when it comes to Good Articles.

So, yes, this could be a problem. But I don’t think it is unmanageable.

But obviously, others are welcome to do things differently. I’m not trying to be prescriptive here!

If anything, Jon’s class is a good reason to attend UBC.

I don’t care how rigorous the “Featured Article” standards are on Wikipedia. The leadership of the project is corrupt, and to participate willingly while that corruption festers is like praising how efficiently the autobahns ran in 1938. A fish rots from the head down. Some of us recognize that. Others of you don’t.

How does the academic community react to the recent proposal by the Wikimedia Foundation’s lawyer to “swap” the GFDL distribution license that has governed the millions of editors and billions of edits, where it has no legal right to do so? Does the academic community even understand the ramifications of a licensing “bait and switch”?