Quality of Articles and Quality of Sources

I agree completely with FT2 here. But I have to add, I am uncomfortable with and resist a "customer satisfaction" approach. I like the basic model, Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit at any time - this means our consumers are also our producers. The issue here is not so simple as our providing a service to consumers. The problem is this: those people who come to Wikipedia because they do not know anything about Hegel simply cannot assess the quality of the Hegel article. They CAN assess how readable it is, and a comment on the talk page "I do not understand the third paragraph because ...." shoud always be welcomed and valued. So I hav eno peoblem with saying any reader can give us feadback on how readable an article is. But the only way to know whether the article on Hegel is really good or not is for an expert on Hegel to say it is.

I am not calling for some boad of experts to rate articles.

This is my main point: One index of Wikipedia's poor standing is the number of university professors who discourage students from using Wikipedia as a source. I think one reason why Wikipedia has quality problems is because too few of our editors are experts (e.g. university professors) on the relevant topics. When more professors are editors, more professors will judge article content highly and encourage their students to use it.

So I see the real problem as in the recruitment of experts as editors. University professors are used to writing things without getting paid; some will not edit Wikipedia because they hate the fact that their work will be edited by others - I wouldn't even want such people contributing to Wikipedia. Many more simply are not used to writing something collectively. But I think most academics do not contribute to Wikipedia because they are too busy and receive no recognition by their employer for contributing to Wikipedia. I do not see any solution to this.

But the fact is, more and more university professors are contributing to Wikipedia. As Wikipidia has grown, so has grown the number of academics contributing. But I bet that users have epanded exponentially but the number of expert editors has expanded arithmeticaly.

I think we need to find ways to recruit more.

By the way I use academics as the example but I mean of course any kind of expert. Slrubenstein 14:26, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

The poor state of the verifiability principle is probably the main reason why Wikipedia isn't seen as a trustworthy source. The problem is not the quantity of sources, but the quality of sources and the balance between them. Woodwalker 12:33, 9 December 2009 (UTC)