The problem is that anyone can claim to be a math professor with expertise on graph theory. For this reason, everyone - even experts - need to cite sources in order to add content to Wikipedia.
In addition, I'm not aware of any way to be compensated, even by citation, for putting time and care into Wikipedia. As academics, we give a lot away for free (want to know some of our most-clever trade secrets? Just read our papers, where we detail everything we do so you can replicate it), but our compensation ultimately comes from what we can show others as our contribution to society. To anyone considering me for a job, promotion, or tenure, a well-written introductory article on precision tests of gravitation isn't worth a hundredth of one precision test of gravity published in Physical Review Letters.
For a single contributor, Wikipedia is ephemeral, but the academic literature is effectively permanent.
You mean, "hey, I wrote it, you go look it up if you don't believe me?" Down that path lies madness. And Fox News.
Academics aren't supposed to have "trade secrets" by definition, because that impedes the teacher and researcher's motivation. Historically, anyway, by my understanding.
I read it more as "by being an expert in this subject I know this is true; by being an expert in this subject I also probably don't have time to find the journal that has the article in question, cite it per Wikipedia's rules, and put it in the article."
Frankly that sounds like a great task for editors that aren't subject experts. Maybe the expert can say "this is missing knowledge, this is where I think a citation should be or what to look for" and the non-expert can do that.
[1] Widely-known result, probably in Jackson's Electrodynamics
as enough of a citation to placate the reversion police?
Really, a "P.S. I'm an expert" policy?
Maybe there's some sort of verification. Maybe experts get limited to their subject area. Maybe we just have to (gasp) assume good faith on the part of the editor and trust that they are experts in what they claim.
But I'd happily accept the edits of five "experts" if it means that someone that published with Erdos sticks around to edit.
I completely understand if that's not what Wikipedia wants. But I also think it's the wrong decision.
To allow "expert opinion" without opening the floodgates to everyone with an opinion would require some kind of validation, which is probably as much, or more, work as citing sources.
Anyone can make that claim; if not forced to cite sources, many will who aren't.
In any case, as an academic myself, I find it weird that we, of all people, would find ourselves "too busy to reference" or something. That's an attitude one finds among students asked to write papers, but academics do not have problems peppering supporting references all over the place; it's basically second nature. Some academics even get in arguments with book publishers because the publisher always want to remove the "clutter" of too many citations and footnotes that intimidate the general reader...
I disagree. Hunting citations doesn't take specialized knowledge, but it does take time. I doubt that the ratio of editors to article churn would sustain them being responsible for hunting citations.
I think that's really the core of most issues with wikipedia: neither side has the time. Individual contributors don't have the dedicated time to comply with all quality-control policies themselves, and editors are spread too thin to provide any feedback beyond quoting chapter and verse.
> want to know some of our most-clever trade secrets? Just read our papers, where we detail everything we do so you can replicate it
ISL was pointing out that many other professions have a lot of field specific knowledge with which they can charge people money to access. Academics print all of the information for basically free. So we already give it away for free, we don't have the time or patience to give it away free to somewhere that's not going to keep our work.
Probably the easiest way to do that: If someone makes a substantive edit that isn't obviously vandalism, but doesn't quite meet Wikipedia's standards, then don't just undo it wholesale. Instead, temporarily pull it off the main page and into a back-end discussion. And then immediately contact the author with an explanation of what's going on and what they can do to get the changes reinstated.
The barrier for entry to writing articles has to be way, way lower than it is; it shouldn't require a negotiation with a bunch of self-important petty bureaucrats.
What those self-important guys (they're mostly guys) miss is that the best is the enemy of the good. Their misguided approach to quality actively prevents improvement.
Outside the high-edit-count word-shufflers, I'd classify contributions to WP in four buckets: (a) substantial contributors who know a lot about a little and are able to significantly add or improve content; (b) trivial fixers, who fix grammar / spelling mistakes, or otherwise make tiny casual edits; (c) mindless vandals, who work some adolescent scrawl somewhere in the text, with varying degrees of visibility; and (d) the really sneaky stuff; well-written fakes, PR companies, reputation massaging, etc.
The guys in (a) need to be preserved at all costs. I think the editors are concerned about (d), but the trouble is that they're doing it in a rules-bound way, but because knowing the rules and right WP:INCANTATIONS is a source of power, the rules become a thing in themselves, rather than a last resort for eliminating (d).
I'd much rather have a more complete, comprehensive WP than one that's even 90% correct.
A number of historians have given up on Wikipedia because it's too easy for people to edit articles without discussion. An expert will spend a bunch of time working out a solid, cited article that integrates the best current understanding, often in discussion with other people, then come back 6 months later and find their work has basically bitrotted. In which case, why bother doing the hard work of hashing out a good article in the first place? Some academics therefore prefer a much more bureaucratic encyclopedia model, where all changes must first be proposed and then vetted by an expert in the subject who "owns" the article; Citizendium and Scholarpedia are two attempts to build that model of encyclopedia.
As a low-tech solution, you can actually put HTML comments in the source code, which people occasionally do, but it doesn't seem to be a very well-known option. <!-- Do NOT change birth date to XX/XX/XXXX, see talk page --> kind of things sometimes appear in the source. I haven't seen them used for longer discussions, though, just one-line "hey, watch out before you do X" things.
On contentious articles with a long history of debate people will sometimes write a summary on the talk page, so you don't have to read through the whole history of the discussion. On most articles, though, the talk page isn't huge, so I find it easy to glance at before making changes.
When that sort of stuff happens, I think you should make sure the incorrect information is referenced in the article as a misconception, or just have the correct information associated with citations. False information should only be erased if it is not "in the wild", so to speak.
Sure, Wikipedia isn't perfect. But I would question any method of evaluation that ends up preferring Citizendium to it.
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FUCK YOUWhat needs to happen is that there should be collaboration between Wikipedia insiders who know the Wikipedia system and subject matter experts who have valuable information to add.
Worse, the demand for citations is often just absurd. There's a big difference between "this is a controversial claim that might need citations" and "no one has yet bothered to look in a basic textbook for citations."
There are real reasons why experts can't just come in and say "do it my way" but the response has to be geared towards saying "how do we take advantage of your knowledge without forcing you to learn arcane policies?"
Update: As for identifying experts, that's not altogether obvious. But if an article is an absolute mess, there should be a low bar for cleanup. If the article is in decent shape, then presumably someone is running around with a bit of subject matter knowledge, and can coordinate. Think about any area you know something about: how quickly can you distinguish someone who generally is on target from someone who doesn't have a clue?
What I mean to say is that Wikipedia's system is one that does not/will not give article editors credit for original content; it treats them as just collectors and explainers of original content. When the explainers start writing stuff that has no source, they then disappear and leave Wikipedia holding the content which is now unverifiable. And that's just not how Jimmy wanted it to work I guess.
When I look at it that way, the policy doesn't seem that ridiculous. It may be inconvenient, but that's like saying a stack data structure is inconvenient because you can't remove things from the bottom. It's just the way it is; it has advantages and disadvantages.
My point is really about process: when someone comes to us with a bit of knowledge, but no citations and limited understanding of the Wikipedia process, how do we react?
The model whereanyone can edit and see their changes live has real benefits and costs. It makes it easy to make your first contribution, but it also means that if an editor doesn't like it, they just revert it. Sometimes, maybe changes should go in a queue or something.
I come to Wikipedia, and dump a ton of graph theory on some page. An editor says "look, this isn't quite how it works, but it looks like you're trying to improve the page. Is this stuff you have citations for? Do you know what textbooks would cover it?"
Maybe my edits don't go live immediately, but it's better than the current situation, where they just get reverted by some guy spouting WP:STQ!
(That's the grain of truth the comment down below that Wikipedia needs to be more like git).
Ideally, you'd go through the article. You'd remove anything that is "wrong"[1], and find citations for everything else. Then, when someone wants to add anything, you can find a cite for it, or ask them to find a cite for it, and remove it if there is no cite.
This demonstrates why WP can be horrible - anyone doing this to any article would soon find themselves skewered in horrible WP processes. Good cites are mocked as POV pushing, hopeless cites are forced in by people with more time than you.
> I come to Wikipedia, and dump a ton of graph theory on some page. An editor says "look, this isn't quite how it works, but it looks like you're trying to improve the page. Is this stuff you have citations for? Do you know what textbooks would cover it?
Sometimes that's how it works. There are people on WP who are great at helping that style of new editor; finding them mentors or whatnot to help them with the process. it's hit and miss, sometimes it fails badly.
> where they just get reverted by some guy spouting WP:STQ!
WP has made some effort to prevent the over active 14 year old using tools to auto-revert hundreds (thousands) of edits per day.
In my opinion, experts should be sincerely welcomed to kibbitz on talk pages - not directly in editing articles - with a strong invitation to cite sources other than themselves. This approach, optimistically, will keep bias on the Talk page, and out of articles, and give experts a substantial real and perceived voice, currently lacking.
The markup used for the linking in the edit comment is the same as the wikitext markup. For example, an edit comment like this:
... see talk page for discussion.
would be marked up:
... [[Talk:Article name#Section heading|see talk page]] for discussion.
This might help start discussions about low-traffic article topics that would otherwise languish at the bottom of the talk page for weeks if not months.
In my opinion it'd be better to risk a little inaccuracy if it meant attracting experts to edit articles. But as cldr notes above, it's possible that's not the goal of Wikipedia - which is completely fair, but makes me wish some hybrid of NuPedia and Wikipedia existed.