User:AdamRetchless
Role of experts in Wikipedia
- Experts should rarely write/edit articles.
- Experts should guide the laymen experts in writing the article
- Citing in-depth, publicly available resources that can be understood by laymen experts but not novices
- Experts should start articles
- Experts should validate articles, thereby contributing their authority to Wikipedia.
Premise:
- Encyclopedias exist to inform novices, and are written by (relative) experts
- Experts are often busy expanding their expertise, and don't have a lot of time to contribute to projects like Wikipedia. This is compounded by edit conflicts and slow servers that make Wikipedia writing and editing less productive than other uses of expert time.
- Laymen experts (hobbiests and evangelists) dominate the content of wikipedia
Validation
I haven't been following the validation discussions, but I think that the socially most effective means of validation would be an individualized validation system, where each user can validate particular verions of articles, much in the same way that we place articles on watch-lists. Each user would then be able to share his own validation list with others (including real-world contacts, such as students, etc.), and thereby lend his authority to the Wikipedia project. I have no idea of how hard this would be to implement on the software side, but I think that socially it makes more sense than devising a centralized, "official" version of Wikipedia (and it is more in line with the spirit of the open, inclusive wiki community). I am excited about the Trust extension.
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