User:Matt Crypto/Witterings/Expertise

This is a draft wittering.

Wikipedia and expertise in 2006

By User:Matt Crypto, 25 April 2006

Larry Sanger, former editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, famously criticised the project for its lack of respect for expertise in December 2004. Since then, Sanger has joined up with another free (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike), wiki-based encyclopedia, part of the Digital Universe project, the first instantiation of which will be known as the Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE). The EoE, a specialist encyclopedia on the environment and related topics, will be written by acknowledged experts. A more general encyclopedia may follow on from this.

Deference to expertise on Wikipedia

Wikipedia has continued to develop since Larry Sanger's comments at the end of 2004. In particular, there is a new emphasis on citing reliable sources. The Verifiability policy, in a nutshell, states that:

"Information on Wikipedia must be reliable. Facts, viewpoints, theories, and arguments may only be included in articles if they have already been published by reliable and reputable sources. Articles should cite these sources whenever possible. Any unsourced material may be challenged and removed."

The ideal Wikipedia article, to which those graduating from the Featured Articles process will be close approximations, should allow a reader to locate a reliable source for every assertion in the article. "Reliable source" means that the author is deemed trustworthy, with respect to his field (whether it's astrophysics or Pokémon). In other words, Wikipedia aims to cite an expert for everything that an article says. No fact can stand merely on the authority of a Wikipedia editor. The job of a Wikipedian is to survey and then summarise the expert literature on a topic, and in a majority of cases this can be done adequately by non-specialists.

So, Wikipedia does make use of experts, but primarily indirectly, as opposed to directly, in the case of EoE. There is deference to experts: not in the sense that an expert gets to dictate how an article is written, but that all facts in an article must be derived from an expert.

Potential advantages of real experts

So, the question is, what difference does this make? What advantages could a "direct expert" model have over Wikipedia's "indirect expert" model? This is largely an open question, and it will be interesting to see how the Encyclopedia of Earth fares. Here are some areas where expertise could count:

• An expert is very familiar with the literature of his subject. A non-expert might omit important aspects of a topic, or accidentally rely on discredited or superceded sources.
• An non-expert may be at risk of unintentionally distorting or misrepresenting an expert source.
• Some topics do require a level of technical expertise. For example, research mathematics cannot be written about adequately by someone who lacks sufficient mathematical training.

Best wishes to EoE

The downside, of course, to limiting your editors to experts is that you miss out on a lot of manpower. The challenge of Wikipedia is to safely channel the efforts of masses of people to correctly summarise what experts are telling us. The challenge of the Encyclopedia of Earth, or its more general counterpart, will be to find enough suitable people to write for it, and to keep it up to date.

But the Encyclopedia of Earth is not Britannica. It will be licensed under a free license, and, just like Wikipedia, if you don't like how things work, you can take the content and do what you will with it (as long as you attribute it, and share alike). In my book, that makes it a worthy project, and I hope it has success. One can't help but wonder, though, if it would be more workable to start with Wikipedia articles, and have experts review and revise them as a "downstream" project, rather than write the entire thing from scratch.

Comments

Comments and discussion are very welcome on the talk page. — Matt Crypto 13:58, 25 April 2006 (UTC)