User:William M. Connolley/Experts and wiki

Mess mess mess. Anyway I'll dump here:

Template:Expert_recovery and therefore User:Snowspinner, User:David_Gerard has it too, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#User:Snowspinner

Fun fun fun!

This page is pretty well moribund, and as far as I know the topic has somewhat died down. However, I've just noticed that Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Ed Poor 2 explicitly endorses me as an expert (its in FoF #4)... perhaps not what they intended :-)

Time to start building this page. My contribution to the well-worn topic: "what role should experts play in wikipedia".

Notes:

This is a work in progress. I know what I want to say but I don't guarantee I've said it properly. So if you disagree with me, you may well be right, but hopefully only because I've mis-spoken.
I'm mostly, of course, thinking about myself: which means experts within science, and climate change in particular.
Most of this gets qualified by "within the controversial bits of wiki". Because if you're an expert on Horsey windpump or indeed windpumps in general you can probably have fun making useful and productive edits.
I get a feeling that the experts-in-wiki case is somewhat prejudiced by people reacting against Larry Sangers presentation of it. There is discussion on the mailing lists... I must re-read it sometime.
[2005/06/07] There is some stuff over at Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/RFC and also discussion on the mailing list [1] which is in some respects eerily similar to some stuff here. Well, its all the obvious solutions of course. Here [2] is a hopeful comment from JW.

For the moment, I'll start with http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25, which is Larry Sangers op-ed on "Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism". There are things there I agree with... and things I don't.

The wiki signpost sez [3]:

Larry Sanger, formerly closely associated with the project, is quoted as saying there is a need for greater deference to expertise, and that a more traditional quality control mechanism should be sought. Jimmy Wales responded robustly, saying that "my basic response is that he is completely wrong about everything". Wales agreed that expertise should be acknowledged, but said the important thing was to find a way of doing this that was compatible with the basic principles of the project.

I agree with Wales' last sentence, certainly. Based on my experience so far, I doubt LS is right about "a more traditional quality control mechanism". What is needed is a better way of preventing destructive revert warring and fighting, which gets in the way, very badly, of improving articles. The arbcomm may be the answer, but its a heavyweight mechanism.

JW says Attracting and retaining academic specialists is one of our goals [4]. I'm not impressed: this is just puff.

Not-anti-expert vs pro-expert

JW recently said: I do not endorse the view, a view held as far as I know only by a very tiny minority, that Wikipedia is anti-elitist or anti-expert in any way [5]. Yeeeeesss, but, there is another point, which is: is wiki going to be pro-expert?

What is an expert anyway?

It takes more than a doctorate (although within broad-brush speaking people tend to swipe at "PhD's" [6]). Within science, requiring a doctorate might be an acceptable first hurdle. To be expanded.

Why wiki needs experts

Depth, accuracy, balance. To be expanded.

Most of this text, and most of the discussion, is about using experts to defuse conflicts and solve controversies. This is perhaps the most obvious use, but maybe not the main one, which should be adding content. The failure to make it possible for experts to add content is a rather more invisible problem, but as important. Or perhaps its incommensurable.

How to decide who is an expert?

If wiki were to adopt some model giving experts special powers (and I don't think wiki is close to trying this [7], so all of this is rather speculative stuff), then it would need a way to decide who experts are (and for the purposes of discussion, I'll assume that, and not qualify the rest by if-wiki-were...). Suppose we make some rough estimates: wiki (English) has 500k articles; they group into areas of about 100; and about 1% of article-groupings are controversial enough to need an expert(s). So that would need about 50 experts. If the process were no more than request-for-admin, then that would be workable. A factor of 10 increase could probably be accomodated.

I don't think you can get promoted to "expert" without being identifiable as having outside expertise. This is perhaps regrettable, as some people might prefer to be anonymous experts. But I don't think pure voting (a-la req-for-admin) will work for promoting experts in controversial areas, because you'll just get the obvious polarisation. Indeed, there is no reason why a group of POV pushers couldn't get together to promote their own pet anti-expert. So demonstrable outside expertise would probably be the best method to limit the field.

If you give the experts powers, then obviously those powers are limited to their field of expertise, and you expect them to tread more cautiously towards the fringes. There is no problem with multiple experts for a given area, or overlapping expertise.

Not all experts are useful

Some people are experts but biased. Fred Singer is an obvious example from within the cl ch debate (in fact he isn't really an expert, or if he is he usually choses to display a lack of knowledge for POV-pushing purposes: but thats not obvious unless you're familiar with the debate). Such people are not useful, obviously. This needs to be addressed at the expert promotion phase, and a review mechanism is also needed.

Why few experts will stay with wiki

Every now and then you see another expert leaving wiki, and people say, there goes another expert... but in fact I've no idea what the expert turnover rate is. I'm still here. But I'm persistent.

In controversial areas (global warming...) experts will rapidly run into resistance, if they try to edit according to the state of the science. Sometimes this resistance just results in the language being tightened up and ambiguities removed. But sometimes it results in tedious edit wars... little ice age being a current example. This is... just not interesting. Why bother? It takes an unusually persistent/dedicated expert to stay with it (and by definition these are rare). In many cases, it ends up with the pages being a messy compromise that underweights the science and over weights the non-science from the skeptics. More, its really hard to develope the pages within the general aura of combat that then emerges. Solutions to this (RFCs, RFAs) are long, slow, technical, messy. Most experts will simply back out, or never enter in the first place.

How could you fix this?

None of these are proposals. They are discussions (with myself?):

Don't fix it. Live without experts. Advantage: no changes needed. Disadvantage: many articles in controversial areas will become damaged, or will never become good.
Give experts superhuman powers: power to assert that certain text stays in/out of the article, and presumably power to ban people (or get sysops to) if they don't accept this. Advantage: avoids much tedious warring; would allow decent quality articles. Disadvantages: not-the-wiki-way; might tend to ossify/stultify articles and drive away useful contributors who would feel slighted.
Priviledged access to the arbcomm, and/or some specially appointed "expert helping" set of sysops/arbitrators? RFA is a heavyweight process. If an expert could say: "look, this user is messing up this article, fire a warning shot over her bows please" that might help. Advantages: fairly lightweight priviledge, doesn't disrupt wiki way much, might even work; the actual actions are in the hands of an admin. Disadvantages: suitable admins might get overwhelmed; since in many cases the admins would be required to trust the experts judgement then its not clear how the admin is using their judgement.
Allow a request-for-expert status; allow people to become experts; but give them nothing but moral authority. Advantges: minimal changes, is a wiki-way. Disadvantages: moral authority not much use against the immoral :-(
If we had some of the proposed versionning system, then for controversial articles we could require an "expert" to OK the promotion of a version from internal to external. Advantages: free editing. Disadvantages: would require the versionning system; would effectively allow an expert to veto changes; would allow an expert to revert to their version, promote it, then say "ha ha, have fun editing your version that no-one will see".

Random notes

In regard to wikibooks, Eric Moeller said Wikibooks could, in my opinion, be somewhat more expert-centric than pure NPOV would allow [8]. From context, this wouldn't help on wikipedia itself. Incidentally, there is a wikibook on climate change [9] but... whats the point? All it needs is to copy in the content from the wiki articles, instead it's the same fights all over again, so I decided not to bother.
172 said There are no signs of Wikipedia developing an authoritative public review process. The absence of one fosters a total disregard for expertise in this community; whether nor not you are taken seriously depends not on the merit of your work but rather how many friends you have made with the users who dominate the mailing list, IRC, and the administrative pages. [10]. nb: I found 172s interventions as admin on global warming distinctly unhelpful, so have little sympathy for him. "a total disregard for expertise" is wrong, but not as wrong as one would want it to be: when the edit wars hot up, then expertise is disregarded.