subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be
 more like thefree software movement

body:
Larry Sanger wrote:
>
"There aren't many bona fide experts, leaders in their fields,
> involved in Wikipedia right now."  For example, I am not a bona fide
> expert about much of anything or leader in any of my "fields."

What precise criteria would you assert demonstrates a bona fide expert?

>
> (3) My contention is that, for Wikipedia to succeed, we need experts
> *guiding* the *free encyclopedia movement* (notice the key words).

I notice *guiding*.  It has been my experience that bona fide experts
are best employed in what they excel at.   Are you proposing we find
some expert project managers, executives, project team leaders,
negotiaters, technical writers, etc.?  If so, then they could apparently
apply some expertise proposing *guidance* for the community's
ratification.

> What I *am* saying is that, in the long run, unless a lot of experts are
> involved and unless there is a process that holds *some* portion of the
> free encyclopedia movement (not Wikipedia) up to extremely high standards,

The existing standards are as high as any individual chooses to apply.

I found the standards at infanticide extremely rigorous.  In fact, I
have not yet found an independent credible source to support strong
claims that some of us wish to make there.

> the overall project won't succeed in producing a credible encyclopedia.

Credible to who?  Specific criteria can be useful in discussion.

> In some cases this might be because no one but an expert would be able to
> write (or rewrite) an article on a topic properly.  In many more cases, it
> will be because no one but an expert will be able to edit, supervise, and
> otherwise whip into shape articles on subjects that many nonexperts think,
> but mistakenly, they can write adequately about.  There are many such
> subjects, at least if we want to compare ourselves to actual reliable
> encyclopedias.

O.K.  Name a few subjects that defy writings by anyone except
the leading world authority on the subject.

I contend that by the time someone is acknowledged a leading world
authority on anything specific; there is sufficient written material
available for the subject to be understood by most who choose to
study it.

Some of the leading authorities is even more certain.  Multiple
authorities acknowledged implies more writings and communications
and more people exposed to them in order to certify more people
as leading experts.

It is insufficient to assert the Einstein (or the equivalent) is the
best physicist of his generation and that only he can guide an
effort to write about general relativity.  By the time he has convinced
enough other physicists that his theories are correct there are quite
a few people around who have reviewed and written about them in various
forums.   These "mediocre" people are presumably good enough to
contribute to quality articles at Wikipedia if they can get published
in Scientific American, National Geographic, etc. or reproduce
empirical results confirming the theory, or recalibrate clocks in
orbital spacecraft, or read any of the above and understand it.

>
> (4) I should have known better than not to spend at least a couple more
> paragraphs explaining that I do not have a fetish for formal
> qualifications.  I agree absolutely completely 100% that it is totally
> possible for people who lack any sort of formal qualifications to write
> (and edit and code) wonderful creative works of all sorts.  I also agree
> that this is at the heart of the success of the open source movement.

Apparently I was confused.  I thought you said that the secret of
their success was the prevalence of highly qualified and credentialed
people *guiding* their important successful projects.

> But that mere possibility doesn't mean that we don't need a lot of experts
> *guiding* a quality control process that Wikipedia benefits from.

Likewise, the mere possibility that leading authorities can be
invited to come be in charge does not mean that we need *guidance*
to achieve a high quality product.

What specific benefits to Wikipedia from a *guided* quality
control process at Nupedia do you project as possibilities?

The current Wikipedia community process appears to me to implement
a process that could be modeled by control theory and shown to be
tending to converge towards excellence ... apparently without any
pre-emptive guidance by acknowledged experts.   The process seems
well evolved to accept participatory input as it is available at
whatever level whenever it is provided.

If the above is sustained, then as long as some experts show up
interested in contributing to specific topics, and the pool of
contributors continues to diversify (or rotate) then the local
article quality will continue to rise as will the aggregate.  Indeed,
one could argue that with the evolutionary approach that has evolved
the process can be *unguided* as long as the community does not
fall below regenerative thresholds.  It must be able to collaborate
with (train) newcomers, accomplish maintenance exceeding damage
accrued by casual contributors and vandals, interact a bit within
the long standing ranks, and do a little original fact checking
or editing.  There may exist size thresholds where the overall
quality of Wikipedia would drop until the reliable community of
contributors grew back to previous levels and where the community
would collapse rather than regenerate.

 Part of
> the irony in my title was precisely this point: the open source movement
> is full of all sorts of people with relatively few formal qualifications,
> and no one cares.  But, IN FACT, the movement in general is guided by
> people who are a lot more expert in coding than the average Wikipedian is
> about what he or she writes about (and that couldn't be otherwise, given
> its success).  There's nothing paradoxical about this--and it doesn't make
> the free software movement into a cathedral rather than a bazaar.  It's a
> bazaar *guided* by expert coders.  Kind of (but not entirely) like the
> stock market, a more or less free market, being guided by Wall Street
> gurus.

The free software movement is shaped by evolutionary pressures, not
*guided*.  Successful Wall Street gurus do not manipulate or guide the
market as a whole (this activity is extremely localized in space time,
successful "experts" get out before getting caught) they stay out of its
way.

The local community has managed to develop a culture that embraces
some rules and procedures which tend to evolve better material
from good faith participation in the community commons, the Wikipedia.
Additional participation, not *leadership* or *guidance*, will emulate
and enhance past success.

Are you aware that many free/open projects start as a means of
studying a language or computer science concept of interest to
the initiator?   Much of the expertise is developed on an as
needed basis.  I find it hard to believe, given this fact, that on
average the expertise at project initiation that is applicable
to the problem at hand is higher that the expertise available at
twikification for a typical contributor at Wikipedia.  Contributors
at Wikipedia can apply their entire applicable expertise to
small twikification opportunities and the content is immediately
and visibly improved.  A similar level of effort in a complex
software component is likely to introduce bugs or break it
entirely.  Several iterations may be required before actual
visible improvement occurs.   Combine this with the fact that
Wikipedia contributors can simply pass when uncertainty occurs
regarding the potential improvement, the article does not require
"fixing" before it can be compiled and evaluated by the next
potential contributor.  Clearly Wikipedia's articles should
improve faster with fewer iterations than free software components.

>
> (5) I am not heralding the doom of Wikipedia, Daniel M., nor did I say (or
> mean to imply) that what Wikipedia does is futile, and I'm sorry if I
> wasn't clear about that.  In fact, I think that, eventually, Wikipedia
> *will* get the loose direction (by example) it needs, by becoming an
> independent part of an open encyclopedia movement that includes an (also
> independent) expert-staffed review board.  Part of the purpose of my post
> was to help move the movement in that direction.

We need to establish groundwork so that academia or Nupedia can take
full credit for Wikipedia's success?

You have not established to my satisfaction that your proposed
leaders are intended to provide guidance in how to improve our
existing successful processes.  Currently anyone can (and does) read
or review any article.  There is substantial expertise being applied
to constructive criticism on talk pages and in editing improvements.
This is improving both content and editorial collaborative skills.

It appears to me that you are saying we absolutely must have old
style endorsement by those at the top of the academic pyramid.
This makes the material magically acceptable to readers too lazy
to critically assess and establish for themselves the credibility
of the material presented.

Wikipedia is being assembled by a process that deletes mistakes
as it finds them.   Readers are encouraged to learn scholastic
research, review, and critiquing methods suitable for civilized
interaction with other contributing editors and readers.  One of
the Wikipedia products is already critical readers.  Do I believe
this? Is the reliability adequate for my purpose
or should I check on it?  Is is consistent
with my prior beliefs or sources?  If it is not verifiable or
consistent with other sources how much do I trust it?

There are two major methods of quality management and control
used in the modern industrialized world:

1.  One hundred percent inspection.  Defects are corrected
or thrown away.    This method is preferred when dealing with
potentially expensive endeavers.   Nuclear reactors, space
shuttles, ballistic missiles, traffic lights, etc.

2.  Improve the production process and use statistic sampling
to drive process improvements.   This is used where productivity
and quantity manufactured makes it cost prohibitive to use
100% inspection.  ICs, machine bolts, automobiles, etc.

3.  The two are effectively combined by the economy on an ad
hoc basis to suit local economic requirements.
i.e.  Land Rovers or Snow Cats are extensively overhauled and
inspected before setting out in redundant convoys across the
Sahara or the Antarctic.  Individual high quality components
and initial integration were probably manufactured subject to
method 2 above.

Apparently rather than challenging the reader to think critically
and assess the material for themselves (as Wikipedia currently
does) you propose an easy immediate jump in credibility
(percieved reliability?) by being able to cite leading
authorities directing or guiding the assembly of the material,
rather than self improving contributing readers.

You contend that only the advertised guidance of these
authorities will lend the process or the product any
credibility with specialists and leading experts.

You propose that we need an "expert-staffed review board".
Yet it is clear that we already have this, the review board
consists of the entire community of reading contributors and
the experts we have already attracted to the project.

Authorizing a "the review board says" or "As a representative
of the review board I say, therefore the issue is settled"
is a substantial deviation of the current project procedures
which are:  "If you cannot work productively without extended
edit wars with the other contributors then you should come to
the mailing list and discuss it or stay away from these subjects
or face banning."

The latter shuts down persistent problems damaging to the
community.  The former shuts down effective participation.

Wikipedia is clear evidence that participation can drive
a successful project.  Nupedia (and possibly others) apparently
has yet to demonstrate that authority or *guidance* or
*leadership* can deliver a quality project without the funds to
pay for participation.

>
> (6) It is possible, as a few people seem to think, that by attracting many
> experts *to Wikipedia* (and continuing to forget that Nupedia ever
> happened) will result in the sort of excellent quality I hope we'll
> achieve.  If that were to happen, I'd be delighted.  (I don't expect it to
> happen; see (9) below.

Perhaps we should formulate some quantitative criteria for
success and begin measuring our processes.  This has been
done to a certain extent, but if it is perceived as important
to the community for effective self management, there is a bit
more that could be done fairly easily.

But it wasn't my suggestion. My suggestion was for
> Wikipedians to get behind a new or newly revitalized project (such as
> Nupedia), officially independent of Wikipedia, that would be managed by
> experts.

Managed by expert managers or leading authorities in a variety
of arcane specialties?   I have worked with many specialists,
since they have been extremely focused on specific topics many
of them lack management skills typically developed via on the job
experience which professional managers accumulate.

Why expect a leading metallurgist, acknowledged top in his field,
to be good at assembling a presentation of metallurgy suitable for
kindergartners through P'hds as a comprehensible, reliable reference
source?  Why expect him/her to be good at recruiting, motivating,
training, and/or managing the diverse team of specialists in education,
presentation, tech writing, web design, etc. needed to tackle such
a demanding multi-media multi medium project?

>
> Roll out the red carpet.  Create a structure that will make the elite feel
> welcome to be involved in a *leadership* role.  Get universities involved,
> and major research institutions, and even businesses--just as is the case
> with the open source movement.

The elite in the open/free source movement earn their recognition
by coding and giving away useful software products and source code.
We have created a structure here where the elite participators are
recognized and welcome.  Now if we can identify ways to avoid
overloading
the elite, while the rest of us improve a bit, and newcomer's are
assimilated without undue aggravation, then we shall really
have something.

Universities are involved.  Unless I am mistaken some of our
better credentialed contributing regulars worked for universities.
Bomis is involved by at least Mr. Wales philanthropy and unless
I am miskaken there are still some paid Bomis employees actively
contributing, whether on their own time or paid by Bomis or both
I am uncertain.

I do not know if any influence is present yet from research
institutions.  I used to work at Edwards AFB, which did some
leading edge telemetry processing and flight test in support
of experimental aircraft from time to time.   Indeed, much of
what I learned there regarding TQM and project management is
available to the community.

>
> (This, by the way, doesn't mean that they would set the standards for
> *Wikipedia*.  I would strongly oppose that; Wikipedia should be
> self-managing as it always has been.  But Wikipedia articles are open
> content.  They might manage a different project that uses Wikipedia
> content, as is their right.  Wikipedia would hugely benefit if this
> happened.)

I am not certain I would quantify the benefit as huge.  Certainly
the credit for the work would be good PR.  It would seem about the
equivalent of a fork in terms of drawing off productive contributors.
Of course, if the effort drawn was concentrated with people valuing
credentials over actual content and sources for the "target" audience
to read, evaluate, and contribute back to; then it might be very
beneficial in reducing the scorn to which newcomer's are
occasionally subjected.

>
> (7) Fred Bauder was right to point out that a lot of the people who could
> help *Wikipedia* most just won't put up with arguing with people who they
> think should be sitting down and taking notes.  A college professor who
> has spent his life studying X would, at least in many cases, find it
> absurd and ludicrous that he should have to argue with someone about X who
> has maybe had a college course on the subject and read a few books.
> There are exceptions, but they are *really* exceptions, and be grateful
> for them.  You might hate this attitude, but it's a fact of life.  The
> free stuff movement (how's that for a name) might be fantastic and
> wonderful, but that doesn't mean it'll magically change this fact.

Progress!  We are really delineating some of the fundamental issues
involved in this revolutionary and innovative community project now.

I agree.   Modern academics are completely out of touch with the old
style log, student and instructor approach to self educational
opportunities that produced ancient scholars and prodigies.  A doctrine
of indoctrination has permeated U.S. institutions to the extent that
many professionally compensated scholars, educators, and specialists
feel comfortable with this resort to authority.   The problem, of
course, is that many people find it difficult to recover a more active
role in study, research, work, innovation, etc. after spending 20
or 30 years keeping quiet and being indoctrinated.

Wikipedia breaks this mold and proposes to develop contributing
readers and reading contributors who verify the facts or the
reasoning for themselves.   Unfortunately this potentially places
a large strain on busy, knowledgeable people; some of our best and
brightest.   We need better processes to alleviate this, not a
return to gullibility or religious embrace of opinions backed by
worshipped credentials.   Newton gets a lot of credit for revolutionary
scientific work.   There are also some allegations that he single
handedly slowed down science in the British empire by routinely
blocking any idea that he did not agree with or for which he
could not take personal credit.  Good old Not Invented Here
Syndrome.

I think we should encourage our best and brightest (such as Jules)
to pace themselves a bit and develop better processes for keeping
inaccurate, unreliable material off the current pages served to
casual readers than overworking our dedicated and best collaborative
scholars.   6 Billion - 37 - 200 - 2000 - 4000 leaves aproximately
6 billion people to expose to this return to the old ways.
A student, a scholar, and a log ...  Actually billions of students,
millions (billions, assuming that no universal scholars exist)
of emulation worthy examples, and an internet connection on demand
between any two self chosen people, or people and forum,
addressing the subject of choice.

Perhaps MIT's announcement a year or two ago to commit to open
courseware freely available online should be reevaluated in the
context of our conversation to see if it provides any insight.
They do not propose to argue with the readers, merely to present
their easily convertible course materials online for easy, free,
access to any who wish to read them.   They do not invite the
internet accessible public to become critical thinkers and
contributors, merely a reader.  Last time I checked they were
still largely vaporware, but some course materials are available
online.

Personally, I think Wikipedia is on to something bigger.  The original
goal still specificially articulated is to develop a deep, broad,
reliable encyclopedia.  The chosen method embraced a new technology,
wiki, that was in itself a revolutionary idea.   What is the simplest
computer technology possible to implement to allow distributed
large scale collaboration via the internet?  The answer turned out
to be some scripts, a server, a database engine, and a simple text
user interface, Wiki.  The convolution of two goals threatens to provide
a miniature World Wide Web which is easily modifiable peer to peer.

Adding SVG to the capabilities really has possibilities.  Since
engineers are indoctrinated by society to love getting paid for
building things, instead of loving to design and build things.
It should be possible to continue to attract sporadic participation
here even if immediate forks spring up from the green space faction's
desire to save representative fragments of the Amazon rain forests
via distributed R&D on technologies applciable to space settlements.
Most engineers will not rush to participate until success is
obvious and assured.

What will 6 billion people decide to do next when they get
affluent enough to ignore their leaders' *guidance* when
freely developing and sharing knowledge bases via installed
sunk capital infrastructure?

>
> The free encyclopedia project--not Wikipedia, necessarily--needs these
> people.

Substantiating evidence?
logical proof?

Needs which ones that we do not already have?

It's frankly a little silly to expect them to help us as long as
> we continue to be wide open to everyone (except "24" and Helga,
> perhaps...) and to follow the editing policies and practices that we all
> know and love.

Actually I do not find partime participation a silly expectation.
I expect they will pace themselves and contribute effectively as
they choose, when they choose, and in ways they choose.

For example:  Jules/April have twice in the last month notified the
mailing list that a couple contributors were refusing substantiate
their material in credible ways.   This resulted in some augmented
efforts by multiple people in verifying or deleting inaccurate
information.  Also resulted in some further modification and
articulation of community policy.

It's much *less* silly to expect a number of them to join
> a free encyclopedia project advisory board of some sort, made up of
> leaders in all fields, that would set standards and procedures for the
> selection of *some free articles* (not to lead Wikipedia).  It's also
> quite possible many of them will want to get on board as active parts of
> the writing and vetting process--but on their own terms, not on Wikipedia.
> We've already seen some potential for this with Nupedia.  But I think we
> can do better, by getting behind the notion of a project led by, well,
> *real* experts.  Not me, but Jacques Barzun, or someone of his stature.
> Someone, or a group of people, that the best minds of the world can look
> to and say, "This is fantastic.  They want to do this?  I want to be part
> of it."

Perhaps.  I remain unconvinced because I have not identified
any clear arguments beyond *this is the status quo*.   The people
you wish to attract have it pretty good with the current status quo.
Why should there be wide attraction to revolutionary concepts within
their ranks?

I also fail to understand what weight you feel the consensus of the
Wikipedia community will carry with these people when you feel our
product, processes, and credentials are inferior to what they will
allegedly require for participation.

Again, the existing participation here at Wikipedia seems to contradict
this assertion.  24/200 is over ten percent.   24/2000 is over 1
percent.
What percent of the general internet population have credentials
documenting the expertise you desire?

Wikipedia is already sorting the "creme".  Regular repeat
contributors are learning to collaborate respectfully and
effectively.   Methods and means of reducing workload and
harassment of our best contributers also seem to be evolving.

>
> That's how academics and scientists think, hate it or not.  But it *is*
> how they think.  Hard-headed problem-solvers will devise ways to work with
> it, as a constraint.

Innovative problem solvers will modify the constraints.

I think this has already occurred.  I have been proposing
perceived incremental improvements, not contending that the
existing process is broke.

>
> (8) A few people think I misunderstand the source of open source's
> success.

>
> Similarly, Karl J., I am sure the final decisions about what to officially
> release are made as you say they are (by whatever experts are at hand, not
> by the world's greatest expert about the thing).  It so happens, though,
> that as the movement has growed in stature, those people who make the
> decisions really *are* software experts.  If I'm wrong, please supply me
> with an example.

Browse sourceforge.   The free software movements source of
success is its evolutionary approach.   Release early and often.
Reuse, innovate, whatever.   If you cannot get along, fork.
The best fork wins.  There are a lot of losers at sourceforge.
So what?  It is the stuff that gets kept and used that matters.

You are attempting to argue that we must start with experts.

I am arguing that if Wikipedia is alive in ten or twenty
years it will have helped develop many of its own experts.

How could the leaders of kernel releases, GNOME, etc.,
> fail to be experts in what they do?  The success of their projects is
> sufficient evidence.  This doesn't contradict anything I said, moreover.
>

This circular argument provides no support for your assertion
that we simply must start with experts to attract expertise.

Many or most of the experts you cite developed much of their
expertise within their projects as they successfully evolved them.

> The disanalogy between software and encyclopedia article writing is simply
> that software has to work.  It has to do what it is supposed to do.  As
> software grows in sophistication, this requires huge amounts of expertise.
> But encyclopedia articles do not work or fail to work; still, very many of
> them *do* require the attention, at *some* point, of an expert, in order
> for anyone to be able to trust them reasonably.

The free software creedo is release early and often.  This means
that it arguably does not work!  The users help fix it.

Demonstration is easy.  Go to sourceforge and search any
category of interest.   Download it and attempt to get it
to work.  Much of it will not even compile.   Much of it is
extremely buggy.   There is a pretty clear correlation that
the better it works at doing something useful the more developers
and users the project tends to have.  This begins a positive
feedback loop until its quality delivered is good enough to
satisfy most of its users, at which point participation
stabilizes or falls off.

Encyclopedia articles clearly do fail or not fail.  Each failure
is an invitation to an existing contributor or a new reader to
make a minor adjustment.  The human brain is the best computer
design on our planet (by our standards) and each of our readers
in the near term has one applied to assessment of our material.

Perhaps we should test an advertising campaign on the front
page similar to the "Edit any page, boldly" focus earlier in
the project.  "Please make a comment on a talk page, your feedback
is appreciated and critical for continued content improvement."

>
> (9) Now to address a point that at least three people made.  If Wikipedia
> develops by itself, without any association with any sort of expert-
> controlled approval mechanism, to the point where it is used regularly by
> librarians and referred to as a good research source by college
> professors, I would take that as prima facie proof that a *lot* of experts
> are involved in Wikipedia.

A tautology.  If experts are reading or referring then clearly
they are involved with the project, even if they are not the
intended target market.

But this is precisely what I predict will not
> happen.

However, the only evidence that I have detected so far
is based upon Academia's irrational dependence on certification
and credentials rather than evaluation (and improvement or
constructive comment if possible) of the actual content.

The argument seems to be:

P1  The status quo is that credentials
are respected, confer respect and attract respected colleagues.

P2  Wikipedia can not be expected to change this by itself.

P3  Many experts (but not all) have credentials and are respected.

Conclusion:  The Wikipedia community should take immediate
and dramatic action to recruit credentialed and respected
experts to *guide* *the free encyclopedia movement*.

Personally I do not see how this follows.  Particularly
given the fact that we have some local experts in some
subjects and participation seems to be on the rise.

<snip>

> Axel and Lee both opined that Wikipedia might be able attract experts to
> lead it (hopefully not in an official capacity but due to proper respect
> to their expertise in their areas of expertise)

Hopefully their expertise will allow them to demonstrate the
correctness of their position to open minded skeptics.  This
should indeed build local respect for their abilities.

This would seem to imply first participation, then emergent
leadership.

Your argument seems to be that without a priori respect no
expertise can be attracted.  The existing community would
seem to be adequate proof that this is not the case locally.

all on its own, due to the
> (eventual) strength of its material.  Bootstrapping, as many people have
> observed.
>
> I'm willing to admit that I could be wrong; I don't have a crystal ball.
> But, looking at Wikipedia's contents now and comparing it to what I recall
> from times past, I do have to say that I'm worried.  I don't think that in
> terms of quality, overall, it's getting that much better.

Any quantitative or objective evidence?

But I also
> admit the project is still very young and no trends can be reliably
> predicted.

I disagree.  Sufficient data is available or could be collected
to reliably project some trends.  What reliability do you
require?  Within ten percent over the next 6 months?  Confident
of the sign of linear or exponential growth terms?  Identification
of gain or loss factors?

Notice that I do not claim I could collect the data or
create the projections in isolation.  Merely that the
community could reliably predict some trends if it wished.

That doesn't stop me from being worried, and I think you
> should be too.  There's nothing utterly magical about the Wikipedia
> formula that *necessitates* that articles *on the whole* will not reach a
> level of mediocrity they never excel *on the whole*.

Control engineering is a fairly developed reliable
field.  Fundamental approaches have been shown to work
well both analytically and empirically with predictable
results and reliable design methods.

Human systems are much more chaotic than industrial
processes.  With that caveat noted I would say that we
seem to have effective community processes, procedures,
and culture that tend to establish two critical
feedback processes in a massively random parallel
fashion.

1.  Friendly dialogue between contributors tends to
improve the future contributions.

2.  Random, purposeful, and chaotic editing seems
predominantly to incrementally improve the local edited
content.

Further, with rare exceptions, when and where diminishing
returns set in, people seem to branch out or find additional
interests or other people to collaborate with to the limit
of their willingness to participate.

Your statement above seems to rely on the assumption that
new random contributors do not learn to apply editorial
judgement and that therefore future improvements beyond
the *mediocre* *must* come from recruiting from a different
pool of contributors with a higher credential level.

Currently new contributors are self selected, presumably
because they see some potential in the project.  Surely
these self selected enthusiasts are more likely to apply
the effort to learn new methods required by the new medium,
than stodgy established authorities unwilling to interact
on a peer to peer basis with the other community members?

>
> Moreover, there's a reason to think far too many experts won't ever give
> Wikipedia the attention it needs: it's just not a "form of life" that
> they're interested in and used to.  It's important that we properly come
> to grips with this fact.

Evolution does not have to be harsh.   We do not need to
assassinate or convert inattentive experts, merely ignore them.
As  the Wikipedia improves it is likely to attract sufficient
attention to keep improving.  As it improves it will eventually
attract the notice of even well isolated academic giants.

It is important that we do not modify a working process,
project, or community into something which does not work.
That way lies "The Fact Factory" or oblivion.

>
> My experience with Nupedia makes me strongly suspect that the ablest
> possible contributors to the open encyclopedia project need their own
> project with their own rules, and that it's unwise to expect most
> academics and professionals anyway (I dealt with many dozens on Nupedia)
> to be interested in joining a wiki and contributing in that fashion.

So the few we expect to attract should be placed in
authority or leadership positions?

Axel, Jules, April, Daniel, and others locally seem to be
successfully influencing the community due to their track
record of effective participation.   Interestingly enough
even "24" seems to have exercised some influence, despite
anonymity and an abrasive tendency when on the defensive.

>
> If Wikipedia gets behind the notion, it'll happen!
>

What exactly are you proposing that the Wikipedia community
or mailing list do to "get behind the notion"?

Let me take another stab at expressing my current mis-understanding.

Nupedia has a paid professional staff that has atttempted to
setup procedures and policy, develop software, and recruit leading
academics to the vision of creating the best encyclopedia ever.
Presumably ideas from the participating academics/experts regarding
how to organize the project, create the material, review it, modify
it, publish, etc. have been discussed (ad nauseum?) and some
overall consensus or decision implemented, at least partially.

Meanwhile, sometime during this process an idea occurred
(between you and an acquaintenance) and Mr. Wales {perhaps
advised by other professional staff} agreed to fund the
experiment with an open wiki, Wikipedia ... the afterthought.

Now the randomly attracted community of volunteers (seeded
by some experts and paid professional effort from Bomis) has
managed to self organize, is successfully creating content,
and appears to be growing and/or improving slightly.
Multiple views and success criteria exist but everybody still
contributing seems to agree that progress of some sort is
occurring.

You contend that to achieve maximum success, Wikipedia needs
*guidance* or *leadership* from the same pool of potential
participants from which Nupedia's initial recruiting efforts
were aimed at.  Otherwise we (the entire free encyclopedia
effort) are doomed to mediocrity.

I think this is a premature conclusion.

More specifically, there has been little formal analysis,
specification, or agreement regarding actual Wikipedia processes
to date. The ensemble is clearly working but it is made of many
different approaches and peoples preferences.  It is not
precisely clear what percentage of the community is using
which policies or customs.  It is not precisely clear even
what rough percentage of the newcomer's, passive readers,
or infrequent tweakers even bother to read the orientation
material prior to browsing the site.  It is clear that google
is delivering hits and that some newcomer's will occasionally
become contributors.  The community and product utility for
initial audiences appears to be growing.

To state conclusively that the existing process is infeasible
(or has specific limits to specific quality or success criteria
which are attainable) would seem to require a decent understanding
of the existing system characteristics.

Mike Irwin


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Average Size of Articles and Article Size Evolution

body:
On Monday 02 September 2002 07:15 am, David Levinson wrote:
> Each article, as it ages, presumably tends to get longer as
> people add content. ?New articles start small. People add facts, they
> get larger. ?They spawn incomplete links[?] and new articles are
> created, but start small.

You just gave me a great idea -- How about we have a population pyramid on
the statistics page? See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Box characters and question marks

body:
I didn't change anything to question marks on purpose, though my browser may have changed them when I edited whatever page it was--and what page /was/ it we're talking about, anyway?

If *standard, correctly coded* characters were changed to question marks, I need to know about it.  If it's the result of some paste from MS Word it's everyone else's problem too.  :-)

kq

>They were changed by Koyaanis Qatsi at 14:57 Aug 31, 2002. What program did
>he use that changed them into question marks?
>
>phma


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Potential forking of Wikipedia

body:
If that's the proposal, I'm all for it. I've had
similiar thought myself.

Stephen G.

--- Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> wrote:
> Let me try to summarize:
> 1. Articles are written by experts, or are copied
> from "free
> encyclopedia sources"
> 2. They get checked and maybe expanded by experts
> 3. They are stored in a "safe" place where every
> change, if any, is
> controlled
> 4. These modified articles are a "free encyclopedia
> source" again
> 5. As a result, these articles (or parts of them)
> can be integrated into
> the "free encyclopedia sources" from #1
>
> So, Wikipedia could be the basis for Nupedia (which
> is no problem in
> itself; I could open up "Magnuspedia" today, based
> on Wikipedia, and
> declare it expert-edits only, and noone could stop
> me). But, whatever
> the experts at Nupedia will come up with, it will
> probably be better
> than the corresponding Wikipedia article it is based
> on. Wikipedia can
> only profit from such edits, as they can be used in
> turn.
> There's one thing Wikipedia will always beat Nupedia
> in: Growth. At the
> moment, that is growth in the number of articles.
> Bu, at some point, it
> will be growth of individual articles. Many articles
> I originally
> submitted to Nupedia have been growing enormously on
> the fertile soil of
> Wikipedia. Articles can grow on Wikipedia, be
> proof-read in Nupedia, and
> gan then grow further on Wikipedia again.
> What I'm trying to say is Wikipedia and Nupedia
> won't be a fork, because
> they're not really competition; they could both
> benefit from a symbiosis.
>
> Magnus

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] peer review

body:
Even though I understand the need to find a way to "prove" some readers the reliability of the article, I feel very much troubled by the notion of peer review.

First because I fail to see how we would decide who is a peer and who is not in some fields, such as games, cooking, opera or cars. What criteria would be used ?

Second, more specifically in science (where peers indeed hold a very important role) because I also failed to see how would somebody "earn" the right to be considered more an expert than all of us together. Most science fields have controversial issues somehow.

We should expect, in science articles for example, a lot of factual information and proofs ('till they are proved false :-)). But we should also expect a whole lot of theories, hypothesis and interpretations of facts. Whatever science subject, one may find two types of information sources, the "school book" type (carefully trying to avoid any in-debt content on questionnable issues) and the "biaised-source" (trying to push its author agenda).

For fact checking, there's no need of a highly considered old professor, just need of a dedicated knowledgeable person.

For non-factual information, I can't see why a knowledgeable old professor (well-known for writing good biaised books or articles ?) would do any better than us together. I don't think any of us can alone achieve neutrality (ie to express all view points on a subject), for however hard we try to get it, we are necessary biaised by our history, culture, origin (and we can't know everything). What makes a good article is not only reliable info, it's also the making up of several people with different inputs.

In my field I know of very very few experts that I would trust for knowing and having an open mind on all the issues, and even less that would resist twisting the article a little bit, to suit their own beliefs/needs. If only because they would also be judged by their own collegues, and probably made fun of for having accepted to let a very crazy and little accepted hypothesis in the way. That would mean for a given field, we would need quite a bunch of experts, not only a bunch of experts from overlapping fields, but also several experts from the very same field, with different angles of views (not only academics but also professionals). That would be quite a lot of people in the end! Well, if these people could be there, for regular work on regular articles, that would not be bad already !

And again, on which criteria would these people be chosen? One criteria I would see, would be that they both reveal themselves known and recognised by their own professional/academic, AND by wikipedians. Meaning they are wikipedians themselves. I see not why our work would have to be stamped "correct and acceptable" by an outsider who would take part of the credentials deserved by a dozen of writers. In my language, we would call that "?tre un n?gre" (no offense meant for black people among you, you don't know, maybe I'm black ;-)).

(Very unfortunately, only choosing reviewers from academics will also weaken principle of value of self education)

For wikipedia reviewing would NOT be similar to a scientific peer work, where people looking at your article do not get their name on the paper, (just participate in the reputation of accuracy and quality of a publication revue:-)). In this case, it's not only fact/accuracy checking, it's also advertising, saying high to the world "this *very famous* guy said Wikipedia made good work here". Yup, isnot that the way Asimov did ? Putting his name in big letters on a book written by others whose names where in small letters ?

Maybe necessary.

But why not publishing some of the best articles on portals or sites recognised for the very high quality of their content rather ? It would have impact. It would remain community work. It wouldnot get a name attached to it. It would be as a limb going away to live a good life on its own, teaching others. It would not be a bunch of dusty pages we would put away, under a glass for protection, with a nice golden ribbon with the stamp on it. Or alternatively, it would not be a bunch of pages only experts could edit, as if any further work from us could sullied it. Yes, *that* is insulting.

BTW, when looking around in wikipedia, I see so many articles that are good ones, but that obviously reflect a very northern view point (not to say north american/british view point :-)). Some definitly lack other cultures perspective to be "honest", such as african and north-african people for exemple. My guess is that to make it a 3 billion users encyclopedia, it is not only for english-mother language people, but for any english-reading potential user. Obviously, it is not easy to involve international-english people to edit articles, otherwise participants will die under loads of articles that would need heavy copy-editing. But...at least...if wikipedia is to be widely used, there are quite a lot of articles that will require review from people from all-over the world to be *certain* they reflect the world diversity of opinions.

---------------------------------
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from_name: Pierre Abbat

body:
On Monday 02 September 2002 07:55, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Pierre Abbat wrote:
> > 3. What changed the boxes to question marks?
>
> There is no "box" charachter in ISO 8859-1.  The boxes is your
> browser's way to display an unknown or invalid character.  Another
> browser might display a question mark there instead.  Do not use "box"
> characters.

They were changed by Koyaanis Qatsi at 14:57 Aug 31, 2002. What program did
he use that changed them into question marks?

phma


from_name: David Levinson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Average Size of Articles and Article Size Evolution

body:
People have been tracking the average size of articles as a measure of
content quality.  The problem has been that the average size has been
dropping (or leveling off).  I think there is a missing element to this
debate.  Each article, as it ages, presumably tends to get longer as
people add content.  New articles start small. People add facts, they
get larger.  They spawn incomplete links[?] and new articles are
created, but start small.

They are like people in this respect, people are born small and grow
up.  Unlike people (hopefully) they don't die.  So while the average
article size may drop, that just indicates more young articles.  Each
article is likely larger than before (unless it is split into multiple
articles, or slightly tightened by editing - going on a diet so to
speak).

If we could have a graph/table (from the people who have access to run
queries)

Something Like
Creation Month /Average Size/Number of Articles Created
  Jan 2001   N2  150
Feb 2001 ....
....
Sep 2002

I suspect (hypothesize) that the older articles would be longer, the
younger articles would be shorter. Maybe this would resolve some of the
fears about quality.

Second, looking at some of the smaller articles (e.g. Wallace
Harrison), I suspect he warrants the size of stub he gets given the age
of the project, it is a longer article than Encarta (which is 0).  The
EB article is of course longer, but they have over 200 years on us.

David Levinson
levin031 at tc.umn.edu


from_name: Larry Sanger

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Proposals

body:
I didn't make any specific proposal other than that we (or someone
associated with Wikipedia and Nupedia) get back into the business of
making the process of creating an free encyclopedia palatable to "the
experts."  The exact form of the proposal is best left to the concerned
parties, I guess.  The one Magnus makes is rather old (as I'm sure he
knows) and I vaguely recall making it myself once or twice on Nupedia-L.

I do think we could go farther, though.  I think we need to be creative
thinking up ways we can attract, say, a major university to become
involved in managing Nupedia (or perhaps some new organization).  But,
again, I don't want to make any *specific* proposals, just because I'd
rather leave that up to concerned parties.

Who's that?  Jimbo, those of you on Wikipedia who are interested in
breathing life into Wikipedia, and those on Nupedia who still care.

Larry

On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Stephen Gilbert wrote:

> If that's the proposal, I'm all for it. I've had
> similiar thought myself.
>
> Stephen G.
>
> --- Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> wrote:
> > Let me try to summarize:
> > 1. Articles are written by experts, or are copied
> > from "free
> > encyclopedia sources"
> > 2. They get checked and maybe expanded by experts
> > 3. They are stored in a "safe" place where every
> > change, if any, is
> > controlled
> > 4. These modified articles are a "free encyclopedia
> > source" again
> > 5. As a result, these articles (or parts of them)
> > can be integrated into
> > the "free encyclopedia sources" from #1
[...]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Top 10 Google hits

body:
hello, I've started a new page for obsessive editors, wikipediholics, and the frequently bored and diligent.  It's an incomplete listing of articles which land in the top 10 google results by searching for title alone (in the case of slashes, parentheses etc. it's nice if they turn up in the top 10 without special punctuation.).    Anyway, take a look at it if you're interested:  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ATop_10_Google_hits

Automation in this regard would be nice, but oh well.  And, BTW, I'm not presenting this as a way to shame anyone, by any means--three of the articles written almost exclusively by me are on the list ([[canna lily]], [[Joel and Ethan Coen]], and [[Dziga Vertov]]), and I've already added 2 paragraphs to canna lily.  Needless to say, it's moved Dziga up on my priority list also, since I don't cover the last 15 years of his life at all.

Best,

kq


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Why the free encyclopedia movement needs to be more like the free software movement

body:
On 01-09-2002, Axel Boldt wrote thusly :
> I agree with the assessment that the average level of expertise among
> Wikipedia contributors is lower than that among Linux contributors or
> Encyclopedia Britannica contributors.
> However, I also think that an intelligent person with good writing
> skills and no specific expertise can write an average quality (call it
> "mediocre" if you want) encyclopedia article about pretty much
> anything. So by following the current path, we have a good chance of
> producing an average quality encyclopedia.
> (In a certain sense, that "mediocre" encyclopedia will already be
> "great", since it will be the only one you can burn on CD for free and
> mail to a highschool in Tanzania.)
> Now, producing the greatest encyclopedia in the world is a different
> story. Maybe experts will show up in greater numbers as the project
> approaches "mediocrity". Or maybe many of them will be put off by
> constantly having to defend their writings against incoming idiots,
> and we will need some sort of quality assurance process. Maybe we will
> need a charismatic expert leader, or one will emerge.
> But I think those are questions for the distant future. Right now, we
> should focus on moving Wikipedia from crappyness to mediocrity.

Hi all,

I think that we need open-minded, willing to learn people with some
background. Getting involved in Wikipedia means doing some additional
research, rethinking some ideas, reading, surfing the net for information
or references, discussing.
We have some experts in the making here on Wikipedia.

Let's invite 100 outstanding experts to join Wikipedia. How many will
respond ?

I believe in Wikipedia. I think it needs a great deal of improvements,
but more in software and infrastructure than policies.
Individual people and the community are the most important treasures
we have. Don't lose them !

Regards,
kpjas.


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Let me try to summarize:
1. Articles are written by experts, or are copied from "free
encyclopedia sources"
2. They get checked and maybe expanded by experts
3. They are stored in a "safe" place where every change, if any, is
controlled
4. These modified articles are a "free encyclopedia source" again
5. As a result, these articles (or parts of them) can be integrated into
the "free encyclopedia sources" from #1

So, Wikipedia could be the basis for Nupedia (which is no problem in
itself; I could open up "Magnuspedia" today, based on Wikipedia, and
declare it expert-edits only, and noone could stop me). But, whatever
the experts at Nupedia will come up with, it will probably be better
than the corresponding Wikipedia article it is based on. Wikipedia can
only profit from such edits, as they can be used in turn.
There's one thing Wikipedia will always beat Nupedia in: Growth. At the
moment, that is growth in the number of articles. Bu, at some point, it
will be growth of individual articles. Many articles I originally
submitted to Nupedia have been growing enormously on the fertile soil of
Wikipedia. Articles can grow on Wikipedia, be proof-read in Nupedia, and
gan then grow further on Wikipedia again.
What I'm trying to say is Wikipedia and Nupedia won't be a fork, because
they're not really competition; they could both benefit from a symbiosis.

Magnus


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Expert quality

body:
an aside on the subject of expert quality:

There are certain topic areas where amateurs *know* they are out of
their depth,and only the likes of Mr "relativity is wrong" Jones dare to
tread.

In other areas, *everybody* thinks they know something. Take Music: I
have found most of the articles on music theory to be of sloppy quality;
they appeared to be written by people who half-remembered stuff from
chilhood piano lessons. I and several others (Camembert, JFQuackenbush)
have lately been rewriting them. Stuff like Note Pitch, the various
scales, etc -- all much improved, but still, I hope, comprehensible to
the lay person.
contrast with Nupedia: there's just an article on "atonality", which is
largely incomprehensible.

The problem with "experts" is that they don't want to write about the
basics. I doubt I would have wanted to bother with writing about "major
scale", or "key signature" but finding the page in such a state
compelled me to do something about it.

Another point on stubs: my 1100 page Oxford Companion to Music has about
12 lines on the Glockenspiel -- about the same as Wikipedia. Some
subjects will probably always be stubs.


body:
If some articles are moved to a "safe haven" -- whether that be
"ExpertWikipedia", "Nupedia" or just some [[protected: namepsace of
wikipedia -- they should not be editable there.
That's only going to lead to two concurrent versions of an article,
which someone is going to have to muck around merging in the future.

The multi-tiered system with voting sounds horribly complicated.

The basic idea, as I see it, is for one particular revision of a page to
be protected & marked out as being "good", in the event that vandalism
or general rubbish occurs.
It wouldn't be hard for a page to have a "view last approved revision"
link on it.


from_name: Hannes Hirzel

body:
On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Magnus Manske wrote:

> Let me try to summarize:
> 1. Articles are written by experts, or are copied from "free
> encyclopedia sources"
> 2. They get checked and maybe expanded by experts
> 3. They are stored in a "safe" place where every change, if any, is
> controlled
> 4. These modified articles are a "free encyclopedia source" again
> 5. As a result, these articles (or parts of them) can be integrated into
> the "free encyclopedia sources" from #1
>
> So, Wikipedia could be the basis for Nupedia (which is no problem in
> itself; I could open up "Magnuspedia" today, based on Wikipedia, and
> declare it expert-edits only, and noone could stop me). But, whatever
> the experts at Nupedia will come up with, it will probably be better
> than the corresponding Wikipedia article it is based on. Wikipedia can
> only profit from such edits, as they can be used in turn.
> There's one thing Wikipedia will always beat Nupedia in: Growth. At the
> moment, that is growth in the number of articles. Bu, at some point, it
> will be growth of individual articles. Many articles I originally
> submitted to Nupedia have been growing enormously on the fertile soil of
> Wikipedia. Articles can grow on Wikipedia, be proof-read in Nupedia, and
> gan then grow further on Wikipedia again.
> What I'm trying to say is Wikipedia and Nupedia won't be a fork, because
> they're not really competition; they could both benefit from a symbiosis

Magnus

I consider this to be a very good proposition. So the Nupedia articles
will acutally be edited snapshots of wikipedia articles done by experts in
the field from time to time. I think this is a good thing to save results
of successful wikipedia articles. It would be something like a quality
label and would perhaps attract one or the other expert.

At the moment nupeida is actually a dead project, perhpas this might lead
to its ressurection.

Another idea would be that universities just do edited snapshotsf of
certain wp articles with link back to wp, edit them an put them on their
website.

Hannes


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] what was the eventual decision on citynames?

in_reply_to:
<3D72BE7B.2BD906A3@labyrinth.net.au> from Karen AKA Kajikit at "Sep
 2, 2002 11:27:23 am"

body:
> I'm not trying to restart the debate - it went on quite long enough as
> it was! But what was the consensus on naming wikipedia entries for
> cities? Did it come out to [[city, country]] or was that shouted down by
> the masses? The reason I ask is because I'm looking at a couple of
> entries that might be moved and I don't know whether they should...

As far as I can judge it, the following rules seem to have gotten majorities:

* Normal rules on disambiguation apply: When there is no need to disambiguate
  (that is, if there is no other subject with the same name, nor likely to
   come into existence soon, or when the city is clearly the most important
   subject under its title), we use simply [[City]].
* When there is a need to disambiguate, [[City, Country]] is used, unless
  there is a special case or there is a need to disambiguate within a country.
* Special case are at the moment the USA and Canada, using [[City, State]] and
  [[City, Province]], respectively.

What, as far as I can see, has NOT been decided on yet, is whether American
and Canadian cities get their State/Province addition even in absence of any
necessity for disambiguation.

Andre Engels


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Failure of Nerve

body:
My thought is we need to be patient, let see what things look like with,
500 active contributors, with 1000, with 10,000. I don't think Wikipedia
has actually reached its takeoff point yet.

Experts will come, retired folks, occassional passersby, students. Frankly,
I don't want to see any expert (in some field) playing any important role
unless they are also expert in the give and take of wikipedia article
writing and editing.

It is in that give and take that peer review happens.

If you quit now or greatly modify the system you'll never know how what we
do now would have developed.

Fred


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Proposals

body:
On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, tarquin wrote:

> The risk of having only experts write a set of articles is that only the
> experts will want to (or be able) to read them.

Who has suggested that having only experts write them?

> Outsiders to a subject
> give the layperson's perspective.

No part of anyone's proposal militates against this.

> I'm all for a "safe haven" for good articles, something that will
> attract experts to Wikipedia. We DO need more people who are
> knowledgeable, in many subject areas, but not at the expense of shutting
> out the hoi polloi.

Little danger of shutting out hoi polloi (literally, "the many") on
Wikipedia.  My whole point is that you're shutting out the *experts* right
now!

> I suggest that such a safe haven be non-editable: a presentation of the
> best of Wikipedia, not a forking.

It is disingenuous to call the proposal of expert guidance of a revived
Nupedia a "fork."  But, if due to your hostility to the idea you want to
call it one, that's your prerogative.

--Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Failure of Nerve

body:
On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Fred Bauder wrote:

> Experts will come, retired folks, occassional passersby, students.
> Frankly, I don't want to see any expert (in some field) playing any
> important role unless they are also expert in the give and take of
> wikipedia article writing and editing.

But since I'm not proposing that experts play any important role (other
than one that they can already play right now) in *Wikipedia*.

> If you quit now or greatly modify the system you'll never know how what we
> do now would have developed.

"Quit now"?  Who is proposing that anyone quit anything?  Besides, the
systems running the free encyclopedia project been constantly modified
from its very beginning.  Why stop doing that?  Do you really think that
Wikipedia has found the magic formula?  I don't think so, and (if you'll
forgive me) I played a larger part than anyone in developing the formula.

--Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Back to work...

body:
Sorry, all, I've said my piece, but I've got unsubscribe and to get back
to work.  I'll have to hope that I've clarified my position adequately,
although I suspect from recent posts I still haven't--people continue to
make objections based on incorrect interpretations of my views.  Oh well.

As I have always said, I still expect Wikipedia to go on to be a hugely
interesting and useful reference, or at least, I expect that *I* will find
it to be such.

Good luck, all the best in whatever you decide to do and support!

Larry


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

body:
I'm not trying to restart the debate - it went on quite long enough as
it was! But what was the consensus on naming wikipedia entries for
cities? Did it come out to [[city, country]] or was that shouted down by
the masses? The reason I ask is because I'm looking at a couple of
entries that might be moved and I don't know whether they should...

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature
that will truly appreciate it in all its facets' -
and so He made the kitten.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/

Love and huggles to all!


body:
>It's Quercusrobur's talk page. The characters changed to question marks are
>neither standard nor pasted from MS Word. They are the output of the
>following Forth code:
>
>: box 160 128 do i emit loop ;  ok
>cr box
>???????????????????????????????? ok
>
>phma

Now I'm completely lost.  If I did it, I'm sorry.  I don't know what to change to avoid doing it again though.

kq


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Tesla Coil wrote:

>Which, if any, is the ideal form among these examples?
>
>1). [[Madrid]] redirects to [[Madrid, Spain]].  For other uses,
>    see [[Madrid (disambiguation)]]
>
>2). [[Paris, France]] redirects to [[Paris]].  For other uses,
>    see [[Paris (disambiguation)]]
>
>3). [[Athens, Greece]] redirects to [[Athens]]; disambiguation at
>    the bottom of the page.  (A note of irony here: Athens, Greece
>    has received a less substantial article than [[Athens, Ohio]]).
>
Number 2 appears to be the standard, although many would still argue for
Number 1.

Number 3 appears to have been set up before the recent debate, and
should be upgraded.  With that article still being quite short it's not
a big problem for now.  The argument for a disambiguation block at the
"top" of the article is that it lets people know right away that they
could or should be somewhere else.
Eclecticology


from_name: Karl Juhnke

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Proposals

body:
It's too bad Larry ran out of time and had to go back to work.  I hope
he didn't leave the debate prematurely because of numbskulls like me
who couldn't understand his ideas.  I am sorry, too, that I apparently
offended him by using the word fork.  I was gearing up to write this
letter, eschewing the word fork as a sign of respect.  If Larry has
unsubscribed before this gets posted, that's too bad, but I want to
write this way anyway as a discipline.

> > --- Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at epost.de> wrote:
> > > Let me try to summarize:
> > > 1. Articles are written by experts, or are copied
> > > from "free encyclopedia sources"
> > > 2. They get checked and maybe expanded by experts
> > > 3. They are stored in a "safe" place where every
> > > change, if any, is controlled
> > > 4. These modified articles are a "free encyclopedia
> > > source" again
> > > 5. As a result, these articles (or parts of them)
> > > can be integrated into
> > > the "free encyclopedia sources" from #1

--- Larry Sanger <lsanger at nupedia.com> wrote:
> The [proposal] Magnus makes is rather old (as I'm sure he
> knows) and I vaguely recall making it myself once or twice on
> Nupedia-L.

OK, I think I finally get it.  Two free encyclopedias coexisting side
by side.  Each has its own version of each article, and each has its
own process for adding and improving.  Each is free to take content
from the other.  Because each generates prose that is useful to the
other, they support each other symbiotically.

The beauty of the system is that we attract more total contributors.
Nupedia attracts experts.  Wikipedia attracts everyone.  We get quality
AND quantity instead of having to choose between them.

It sounds great.  It won't work.  The devil is in the details.  Once
two articles have diverged to any significant extent, re-merging them
is an enormous hassle.  You have to remember which differences exist
for a legitimate reason, and which differences are changes that you
would like to incorporate across the boundary.  If a Wikipedia article
has been refactored in its Nupedia incarnation, tweaks to the
un-refactored Wikipedia article may be non-trivial to incorporate on
Nupedia.  Or, moving in the other direction, the refactored Nupedia
article would break all the Wiki links and have to be re-Wikified to be
re-imported to Wikipedia.

> I didn't make any specific proposal other than that we (or someone
> associated with Wikipedia and Nupedia) get back into the business of
> making the process of creating an free encyclopedia palatable to "the
> experts."  The exact form of the proposal is best left to the
> concerned parties, I guess.
>
> I do think we could go farther, though.  I think we need to be
> creative thinking up ways we can attract, say, a major university to
> become involved in managing Nupedia (or perhaps some new
> organization).  But, again, I don't want to make any *specific*
> proposals, just because I'd rather leave that up to concerned
> parties.

I always hate it when people tell me "That sounds good in theory, but
it won't work in practice."  I think the burden of proof should be on
the person doing the debunking to say why such a good-sounding theory
won't actually work.  What is it about practice that the theory doesn't
account for?

Sadly, I want to tell Larry that having a free encyclopedia separate
from Wikipedia and structed so as to attract experts "sounds good in
theory but won't work in practice".  Moreover, the debunking task that
falls to me *requires* that I know the specific details that he doesn't
feel it is his place to give.  I'm in the awkward position of making a
pragmatic argument in vague, theoretical terms.  But I'll take one more
stab at it.

One of the lessons of free software is that not many similar projects
survive in the same space.  One or two projects usually come to
dominate mind share, and the dominant project then draws all the
participation and use.  It has already happened with the OS, where
Linux has come to dominate the various flavors of BSD.  It has happened
with the browser, where Mozilla rules, and with graphic design where
the GIMP dominates.

To say nothing of forking, projects that start and evolve independently
in the same space are culled by a brutal natural selection: some
utility will be most used, or have the most developers, or have the
best developers.  If those three don't coincide at first, they
eventually come to coincide, as developers are drawn to the best and
most active and most widely used project, which improves the project,
which draws more use, etc., etc.

Where there are two projects, in the same space, for example with the
KDE and GNOME desktops, there is substantial pressure to make them
merge or interoperate.  Witness, for example, Red Hat's latest
distribution where they try to make it so that a user can be ignorant
of whether they are using GNOME or KDE at any given moment, and switch
transparently between them.  Or in the case of OpenOffice, AbiWord, and
the KOffice suite, there are calls to make the OpenOffice file format
standard so that all the free word processors can interchange documents
seamlessly.  (Whether it is OpenOffice's format that rules or not,
there *will* be a merged standard.)

The reason why every project except one tends to die off or merge
should be familiar to Larry.  People simply don't have time to
contribute to two projects.  It isn't fun to reinvent the wheel here
and then there.  Therefore almost all people pick one project to
contribute to, and stick with that.  Porting changes back and forth
between two projects is immensely inefficient.  Indeed, it is often
more efficient to make the same change twice as opposed to copying
anything.

Yes, there would be a benefit from attracting more people, specifically
more experts, to the open encyclopedia project.  But that benefit would
be dwarfed by the ineffeciency of having two divergent information
repositories, i.e. by having to do every edit twice.

Peace,
-Karl

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


body:
--- David Levinson <dlevinson at mn.rr.com> wrote:
> People have been tracking the average size of articles as a measure
> of content quality.  The problem has been that the average size has
> been dropping (or leveling off).  I think there is a missing element
> to this debate.  Each article, as it ages, presumably tends to get
> longer as people add content.  New articles start small. People add
> facts, they get larger.  They spawn incomplete links[?] and new
> articles are created, but start small.

Right, I think that is precisely the point.  When I say that median
article size is holding steady, I don't imagine that half of the new
articles created are above the median size and half are below.  Instead
I imagine that for every two new small articles which are created, one
article which used to be small has been expanded to be above the median
size.

Of course the reality is more complex, because there are useless
articles being deleted, mature articles being split, etc.  But the
basic question I am trying to get at is whether Wikipedia is becoming
more and more stubby.  Are we creating dinky articles faster than they
are being fleshed out?  Have we gotten so focused on the headline
article count that we care about quantity more than quality?

If the median article size is stable, I draw the tentative conclusion
that the quality is holding steady.  It is evidence that the balance
hasn't tipped away from deep, polished content too far in the direction
of broad, shallow content.

By the way, I'm stunned at the current rate of addition of articles.
We crossed 40,000 less than 72 hours ago, and now have over 40,600.
That's more than 200 articles a day!  And it hasn't been a stub-fest
either: over those three days the median article size actually climbed
from 990 bytes to 993 bytes.  Some of this comes from splitting huge
articles (e.g . The Alps) into several articles that are each above the
median, but I think most of it comes from the natural evolutionary
process by which new short articles get older and longer.

I don't want to be ridiculously optimistic about our pace, given that
this is a long weekend and people have to get back to work and school,
but just dreaming for a second... 200 articles a day times 120 more
days in the year puts us at 64000 articles by year end!

Peace,
-Karl

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


from_name: Tesla Coil

body:
On 2 Sept 2002, Andre Engels wrote:
> As far as I can judge it, the following rules seem to have gotten majorities:
>
> * Normal rules on disambiguation apply: When there is no need to disambiguate
>  (that is, if there is no other subject with the same name, nor likely to
>   come into existence soon, or when the city is clearly the most important
>   subject under its title), we use simply [[City]].

Which, if any, is the ideal form among these examples?

1). [[Madrid]] redirects to [[Madrid, Spain]].  For other uses,
    see [[Madrid (disambiguation)]]

2). [[Paris, France]] redirects to [[Paris]].  For other uses,
    see [[Paris (disambiguation)]]

3). [[Athens, Greece]] redirects to [[Athens]]; disambiguation at
    the bottom of the page.  (A note of irony here: Athens, Greece
    has received a less substantial article than [[Athens, Ohio]]).


from_name: Sean Barrett

body:
Taking up the gauntlet that KQ has hurled down ;->, I have thrown
together a Perl script (undoubtedly hideously inefficient; I am not a
native speaker of Perl) that has automated this process -- it repeatedly
calls Wikipedia's random page link, grabs the title, drops all dates,
turns all punctuation (including subpage slashes) into spaces, googles
for the result, and looks for links to "wikipedia."

Sample output, with comments added:

	269		# date, not googled
	Truth drug	# googled, but not found
	Aconitine	# a hit!
	Aconitine
	Famous Canadians
	1 E 1 m	# probably shouldn't be googled, but currently is

Would anyone be interested in seeing this cleaned up and turned into a
regular report?

--~~~ the Epopt, aka...

--
 Sean Barrett     | Hey! Chuft-Captain!
 sean at epoptic.com | What sthondhat was your mother?

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-admin at nupedia.com
[mailto:wikipedia-l-admin at nupedia.com]On Behalf Of
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com
Sent: Monday, September 02, 2002 09:41
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia:Top 10 Google hits

hello, I've started a new page for obsessive editors, wikipediholics,
and the frequently bored and diligent.  It's an incomplete listing of
articles which land in the top 10 google results by searching for title
alone (in the case of slashes, parentheses etc. it's nice if they turn
up in the top 10 without special punctuation.).    Anyway, take a look
at it if you're interested:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ATop_10_Google_hits

Automation in this regard would be nice, but oh well.  And, BTW, I'm not
presenting this as a way to shame anyone, by any means--three of the
articles written almost exclusively by me are on the list ([[canna
lily]], [[Joel and Ethan Coen]], and [[Dziga Vertov]]), and I've already
added 2 paragraphs to canna lily.  Needless to say, it's moved Dziga up
on my priority list also, since I don't cover the last 15 years of his
life at all.

Best,

kq

[Wikipedia-l]
To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikitech-l] Japanese Wikipedia

body:
Hello everybody,
I'm living in Japan and I know some japanese people very intrested to
contribute to japanese Wikipedia.
But with the actual software installed on japanese Wikipedia, there many
problems using japanese caracters in links names and the interface is all
english.
I can ask to translate the Language.php file, but I'm afraid that when they
will finish the translation, this file been up to date.
The japanese Wikipedia is practically empty, so I think it will be easy to
put the new software on japanese site. Then we will translate it in japanese
while running.
No convertion is need, I think it will take less than a hour to recreate the
few pages actualy on http://ja.wikipedia.com.
The new software using UTF8, isn't it ?
If you would change the damain name, please choose www.wikipedia.co.jp (for
commercial) or www.wikipedia.or.jp (for organisation).
It would be a great idear to also create the Korean Wikipedia.
Cheers,

Guillaume (Aoineko)


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Pierre Abbat wrote:
> 3. What changed the boxes to question marks?

There is no "box" charachter in ISO 8859-1.  The boxes is your
browser's way to display an unknown or invalid character.  Another
browser might display a question mark there instead.  Do not use "box"
characters.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


body:
On Monday 02 September 2002 09:31, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> I didn't change anything to question marks on purpose, though my browser
> may have changed them when I edited whatever page it was--and what page
> /was/ it we're talking about, anyway?
>
> If *standard, correctly coded* characters were changed to question marks, I
> need to know about it.  If it's the result of some paste from MS Word it's
> everyone else's problem too.  :-)

It's Quercusrobur's talk page. The characters changed to question marks are
neither standard nor pasted from MS Word. They are the output of the
following Forth code:

: box 160 128 do i emit loop ;  ok
cr box
?????
?????????????????????????? ok

phma


body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> You just gave me a great idea -- How about we have a population
> pyramid on
> the statistics page? See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands

Demographics by age?  How will you determine the age of an article,
particularly for articles that have been renamed, and given that the
history only goes back to the automatic conversion script?  Or
demographics by size?  Either would be extremely cool.

Peace,
-Karl

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


from_name: Brion VIBBER

body:
Karl Juhnke wrote:
> --- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>You just gave me a great idea -- How about we have a population
>>pyramid on
>>the statistics page? See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands
>
> Demographics by age?  How will you determine the age of an article,
> particularly for articles that have been renamed, and given that the
> history only goes back to the automatic conversion script?

It would be incomplete data, but at least partial stats on raw age or
number of edits might be interesting.

 >  Or
> demographics by size?  Either would be extremely cool.

Scroll down to the bottom of Wikipedia:Statistics.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Failure of Nerve

body:
Larry Sanger wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Fred Bauder wrote:
>
> > Experts will come, retired folks, occassional passersby, students.
> > Frankly, I don't want to see any expert (in some field) playing any
> > important role unless they are also expert in the give and take of
> > wikipedia article writing and editing.
>
> But since I'm not proposing that experts play any important role (other
> than one that they can already play right now) in *Wikipedia*.

What precisely was the new proposal?

Nupedia already has panels and the FDL allows easy use of
the Wikipedia articles.  They can be frozen or modified at
whim as long as the attribution requirements of the license
are met.

>
> > If you quit now or greatly modify the system you'll never know how what we
> > do now would have developed.
>
> "Quit now"?  Who is proposing that anyone quit anything?  Besides, the
> systems running the free encyclopedia project been constantly modified
> from its very beginning.

The procedures and the community have been incremented only
slowly due to the consensus driven process.  The substrate
is necessary but not sufficient.  It is much easier to change
a technical feature back after a mistake than regrow a community
or repair a community member's reputation or attitude.

Even today; as we argue about whether we are: successful,
on the verge of success, on track for huge success, or
something else suitably vague; the policies and guidelines
are voluntary and not uniformly applied by members.

The ensemble currently works.  Is it improving or
degrading?  Can you prove it?  Can you measure the
change when a contributor endorses, comments or takes
exception to one of the policy guidelines?  Is any
persuasive yet inconclusive evidence available for
presentation to the next contributor judgement?

> Why stop doing that?

Nobody has proposed to freeze the community or project.
What you proposed sounded like some potentially large
changes and you were very vague about the proposal.

It appeared you were seeking approval and support before
articulating the proposal.   A blank check.

> Do you really think that
> Wikipedia has found the magic formula?

Yes!  Until it can be articulated; quantified; modified
by design (instead of prayer); incremental damage detected
and incorrect changes backed out swiftly and reliably;
AND explained to the satisfaction of the newest readers or
contributors via self reference such that they embrace its
working culture, customs, or "community";  it
is "magic" ... not science or engineering design.  The
mana could fade tomorrow and be difficult to reproduce.

I don't think so, and (if you'll
> forgive me) I played a larger part than anyone in developing the formula.

An interesting perspective.   If you will forgive me, you
were compensated for your efforts.

I only arrived in Feb 02 but
from review of the list archives, policies, participation
in the community, etc. I have reached the tentative conclusion
that the chaotic collaboration of the volunteer community was
the critical element in the emergent success that would be
required to fork or establish a derivative project.

The inability to dictate terms to stubborn volunteers seemed
to play a very large part in the evolution of mostly working
customs and procedures that currently define a robust community
which jots or essays much material and iteratively keeps the
best and modifies (sometimes deletes) the rest.

The volunteers donate spare time or contribute portions of
their professional work which is compatible with the project
goals at no impact to their employers.  A crude estimate I
ran last Feb resulted in the relative stakes of Bomis vs
volunteer effort being roughly the same at 500K value each
using conservative guesses.  With increasing volunteer
participation the balance can only shift towards the volunteer
community.

The paid professionals were necessary investment to get the
systems infrastructure established, the software working well
enough to attract adequate free developer participation, and
the community collaboration started but insufficient to
guarantee success.  The near instant large participation from
the existing Nupedia community or dedicated enthusiasts and
professional was probably also critical in launching an experimental
project with experimental technology in a short reasonable
period of time.   Now that the prototyping has been completed
successfully to demonstrate the large potential in the approach,
subsequent projects should have less trouble convincing random
internet volunteers that a project is feasible.   The question
becomes is it desirable to adequate volunteers?

A derivative project could be launched on the cheap with a
server and a high speed domestic internet link or a detailed
plan could be assembled and grant funding sought or a combined
approach could team wiki a project.  Any approach is more
viable now that a successful community (philanthropist, paid
professionals, and volunteer philanthropists) has d3eveloped
and published several critical components and concepts under
the GDL and FDL.

To summarize:  If you cannot articulate the details and
valid reasons in some valid form that I and our peers can
recognize, then I am unlikely to be swayed by appeals to
past glory.

Sorry, but my life is valuable and I only have so many
hours to invest in humanity's future glory.  I too require
food, shelter, consumers goods, and respect from my peers
must be bought or earned the old fashioned way:  Recent
cash or accomplishment.

Hmmm! Not bad.  Modified, that might do for some proposed
non-policy on the oft alleged impending green space derivative
open engineering site ... I could be a founder any day now.

With warm slightly trollish yet highly respectful
regard for past service to humanity,

Sincerely,
Mike Irwin


body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>>2). [[Paris, France]] redirects to [[Paris]].  For other uses,
>>    see [[Paris (disambiguation)]]
>>
>>3). [[Athens, Greece]] redirects to [[Athens]]; disambiguation at
>>    the bottom of the page.  (A note of irony here: Athens, Greece
>>    has received a less substantial article than [[Athens, Ohio]]).
>>
>
>The difference between #2 and #3 has to be decided from case to case.
>If disambiguation takes little space, #3 is preferred, if it takes much
>space (because there are many alternatives, or because they take more than
>a few words to explain), #2 does.
>
My approach when dealing with these would be to show all the
alternatives if there are at most three.  If there are more than three I
would use a single entry in the form [[city (disambiguation)]] and sort
out the rest of the list there.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Proposals

body:
An expert-only fork will lose something very valuable, I fear.
For example, I know very little about the English Civil War, or the
Battle of Trafalgar (I had "trendy" history teachers at school who
steadfastly refused to teach us dates...)
Yet today I've been looking around these pages and those that link,
fixing links, correcting typos, and occasionally rewriting for clarity.
The risk of having only experts write a set of articles is that only the
experts will want to (or be able) to read them. Outsiders to a subject
give the layperson's perspective.

I'm all for a "safe haven" for good articles, something that will
attract experts to Wikipedia. We DO need more people who are
knowledgeable, in many subject areas, but not at the expense of shutting
out the hoi polloi.

I suggest that such a safe haven be non-editable: a presentation of the
best of Wikipedia, not a forking. It can attract experts, who will
marvel at the quality -- but to make a contribution, they have to go
into the fray of the main Wikipedia.

-- tarquin


from_name: Marian Steinbach

subject: [Wikipedia-l] OffTopic: Looking for lots of XML (docbook) documents

body:
Hi!

What the subject line probably can't tell: In order to create a demo for
a tool that processes and visualises the content of an xml document
repository, I am looking for documents to experiment with.

The ideal material would be in one single format, e.g. DocBook, and
would come from a scientific area, ideally from one discipline. As I
need the stuff for a demonstration, content is not as important as form.

Do you guys know any source where I can freely download a number of
let's say 50 - 5000 articles / papers matching the above requirements?

I bet if things like that exist, there are people on this list who knoe
about it. Thats why I dare to bother you with that stuff.

Thanks in advance for any hints!

Marian


from_name: Julie Hofmann Kemp

subject: [Wikipedia-l] What Larry (and everybody else) said

body:
Just to put my oar in the water:

1) Why Nupedia isn't as "successful" as Wikipedia:

I can only tell you what I think (since I'm in arrears on a Nupedia
article).  First, I think Nupedia is in some ways the ideal -- partially
because my understanding is that expertise can be demonstrated in ways
other than credentials.  Second, because there's peer review that means
something -- review by other people who might know something about the
subject.  Finally, there's a copyediting standard.  Why isn't it more
successful?  For me, it's two things -- the process is a bit unwieldy
(I'd actually have to draft a complete article to submit it, which takes
time -- probably a lot less than I spend here, but wikipedia nickels and
dimes your time to death) and second.actually, it's really just what I
said -- the process is a bit unwieldy -- it's not set up for people who
have a few minutes here and there to do a quick edit or addition.  Oh --
and frankly, online resources of any kind aren't really accepted yet by
moat of academia (at least not the people in charge of hiring and
granting tenure).

2) Re: Attracting experts:  The estimable Mr. Gilbert said, "if you
build it."  I agree, but add (a la Mr F. Bauder)  they will also leave
when they get tired of the aggro.  I think expert retention is more the
problem -- there has been attrition, though, since I've been here.  Let
me first say that yes, ego is involved.  Credentials do usually
represent a huge amount of work and emotional investment, as does
teaching a subject.  So too with interested amateurs who have their own
areas of expertise -- meaning they've done a lot of work and really
learned their subjects.   It doesn't mean we can't be wrong (Lord knows,
I have my moments!), but it generally means we are, well, experts.  That
means that we do get irritated when we get into edit wars with people
who know less and often express it even less well.

3)  Retaining good people in general.  I think it's part of getting
bigger and having no staff -- it's like working in a successful start-up
-- the initial employees are really tight and get so used to working
together that they cooperate and play to each other's strengths without
thinking.  As the start-up grows, it starts to get a hierarchy, New
people don't have the luxury of knowing who among their fellows is the
go-to person for what, and there is sometimes friction.  The difference
here for me is, I don't think newbies have any excuse for not learning a
bit about the old hands -- and I think they also have some
responsibility to help make themselves known.   I try to encourage
people to tell us something about themselves when I say hi, but it might
be nice to have a template for user pages with a space for "expertise"
and "interests."

3 continued )  It might also be  good to have links to Wikipedia
etiquette on the user page -- or as part of the login process.  DW, the
person with shades of French Helganess, is contributing huge amounts,
but refuses to respond to queries on whether his/her pictures and
sources are PD, or to acknowledge my requests to look at how we've been
formatting historical stuff.   This is after accusing me of pushing
everybody else around (not that I don't make cases for how I think
things should  be, but I generally have good reasons, and when I
haven't, I hope I've given in gracefully.

Still -- the two things that have driven me off on "breaks" in the past
(and most likely the future) are the lack of respect for my hard-earned
knowledge and a general lack of communal cooperation from a very few
(but for some reason, interested in history) people who make me thing
"My time is too valuable for this -- I spend way more time fighting to
make other people's articles *passable* than writing new stuff."

Anyway, that's my take.  It would be really nice to have a few people
with some official *moderator* position, but I can see how that could be
a problem unless there are volunteers.  In the meantime, I just thank
goodness for the Vickis and Aprils and Mavs and Stephen Gilberts (etc --
I'm not leaving people out on purpose.) there are lots of good reasons
to hang around!

Jules
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from_name: Stephen Gilbert

body:
You might try the Linux Documentation Project
(http://www.tldp.org/). I believe they use a
simplified  version of Docbook called LinuxDoc.

Stephen G.

--- Marian Steinbach <marian at ds.fh-koeln.de> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> What the subject line probably can't tell: In order
> to create a demo for
> a tool that processes and visualises the content of
> an xml document
> repository, I am looking for documents to experiment
> with.
>
> The ideal material would be in one single format,
> e.g. DocBook, and
> would come from a scientific area, ideally from one
> discipline. As I
> need the stuff for a demonstration, content is not
> as important as form.
>
> Do you guys know any source where I can freely
> download a number of
> let's say 50 - 5000 articles / papers matching the
> above requirements?
>
> I bet if things like that exist, there are people on
> this list who knoe
> about it. Thats why I dare to bother you with that
> stuff.
>
> Thanks in advance for any hints!
>
> Marian
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go
> here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


body:
Oh God, [[Barbara and Jenna Bush]] is on the list. As
soon as I have a few minutes...

Good idea, k.

Stephen G.

--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> hello, I've started a new page for obsessive
> editors, wikipediholics, and the frequently bored
> and diligent.  It's an incomplete listing of
> articles which land in the top 10 google results by
> searching for title alone (in the case of slashes,
> parentheses etc. it's nice if they turn up in the
> top 10 without special punctuation.).    Anyway,
> take a look at it if you're interested:
>
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ATop_10_Google_hits
>
> Automation in this regard would be nice, but oh
> well.  And, BTW, I'm not presenting this as a way to
> shame anyone, by any means--three of the articles
> written almost exclusively by me are on the list
> ([[canna lily]], [[Joel and Ethan Coen]], and
> [[Dziga Vertov]]), and I've already added 2
> paragraphs to canna lily.  Needless to say, it's
> moved Dziga up on my priority list also, since I
> don't cover the last 15 years of his life at all.
>
> Best,
>
> kq
>
>
>
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go
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body:
Julie Hofmann Kemp wrote:
> 1) Why Nupedia isn't as "successful" as Wikipedia:
>
> I can only tell you what I think (since I'm in arrears on a Nupedia
> article).  First, I think Nupedia is in some ways the ideal -- partially
> because my understanding is that expertise can be demonstrated in ways
> other than credentials.

Nupedia may well be wonderful, but I have zero interest in it. I first
heard of it a few months before I got involved in Wikipedia; I went to
the site, browsed through the FAQs, and got the distinct impression that
I wasn't welcome unless I had a PhD.

Perhaps that's an exagerration; after all, this excerpt explains
carefully that you don't _need_ a PhD:

   If a man who had received a Master's degree in French
   literature focusing exclusively on Victor Hugo had written five
   peer-reviewed articles about Hugo, the fact that he lacks a Ph.D.
   should not stop us from assigning him topics related directly to Hugo.

;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Proposals

body:
Larry Sanger wrote:

>On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, tarquin wrote:
>
>
>
>>I suggest that such a safe haven be non-editable: a presentation of the
>>best of Wikipedia, not a forking.
>>
>>
>
>It is disingenuous to call the proposal of expert guidance of a revived
>Nupedia a "fork."  But, if due to your hostility to the idea you want to
>call it one, that's your prerogative.
>
>
Having two versions of one article, both editable, is a fork by
definition -- just as Karl Juhnge says.

Will this whole "Cream of Wikipedia" idea actually attract the experts
we feel we need?


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Mutualistic symbiosis vs simple symbiosis (Nupedia/Wikipedia
 relationship)

body:
Hooray!
Mav and I actually AGREE on something for once!
calloo, callay, O frabjous day and all such things!

BTW, Mav, did you know you are time-travelling?
Your emails arrive AFTER I receive what other people have replied to
them. This one says 08:52 and has arrived at 21:05. very strange....

-- tarquin


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Commas, parentheses etc. at the end of URLs

body:
Phase III changed the handling of free-standing URLs: if the last
letter of the URL is a period, comma, semicolon or parenthesis, it is
taken to be part of the URL. I think this should be changed back to
the Phase II behavior.

I entered this before as a feature request, and I just learned that
Brion also favors the change. Lee argues that the current behavior is
correct.

I say that the goal is not formal correctness, but user satisfaction.
URLs almost never end in one of these special symbols, but when used
as part of Enlish sentences, they are often followed by one of them.
Numerous links all over Wikipedia have been broken by this change.
Just one example: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/BryceHarrington.

Axel


body:
> Which, if any, is the ideal form among these examples?
>
> 1). [[Madrid]] redirects to [[Madrid, Spain]].  For other uses,
>     see [[Madrid (disambiguation)]]
>
> 2). [[Paris, France]] redirects to [[Paris]].  For other uses,
>     see [[Paris (disambiguation)]]
>
> 3). [[Athens, Greece]] redirects to [[Athens]]; disambiguation at
>     the bottom of the page.  (A note of irony here: Athens, Greece
>     has received a less substantial article than [[Athens, Ohio]]).

#1 is outdated, this was how it was done before the policy change. When I see
a case like this, I will change it to #2, but such changes have very low
priority.

The difference between #2 and #3 has to be decided from case to case.
If disambiguation takes little space, #3 is preferred, if it takes much
space (because there are many alternatives, or because they take more than
a few words to explain), #2 does.

Andre Engels