<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />When scholarship meets [b]Wikipedia[/b]
Los Angeles Times (blog)
Maybe you have to be something of a fan of early jazz to know coronetist Bix Beiderbecke -- he's in the picture above, horn pointed at the camera. ...



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An interesting and all too typical story. I particularly enjoyed:


I've long believed that Wikipedia can't succeed until it involves experts more in its processes, but this, of course, is why that's so difficult to accomplish. Good old Randy from Boise hates experts.

Read to the end of the article. Yes at first he dealt with a reviewer who was incompetent and could barely speak English. Yet this reviewer was replaced with another one, and the article duly received GA status even if after too long a delay. It would be easy to say that this proves that Wikipedia gets things right eventually.

The point, of course, is that eventually isn't good enough. Sure, that article got GA. You'll notice that the author is gone now. So, sure the article got GA status, but the expert was scared off (to the point that he felt like talking to a reporter about it) and as the article says if you read to the end, "Equally likely, sadly, is that it will scare other scholars off from investing their time in creating well-rounded Wikipedia entries."

The "incompetent" reviewer was [[User:Philcha]]. Judging from their contributions to that review, it is difficult to tell how they managed to create such articles as [[Memory confusion protocol]], which is quite readable, even if it omits a crucial detail.