Are there any known experts who write Wikipedia articles? Professors of history who write articles on history, for example. Medical doctors who write articles on disease?
Of course. Check out a partial list of Wikipedians with PhD degrees. Note the appearance there of one DYanega, a real live entomologist who contributes to several insect-related pages. He also happens to write Straight Dope Staff Reports.
Which leaves open the question of professors of history who write articles about diseases, or medical doctors who write articles on history. I wonder what percentage of articles written by professionals is actually in their professional field, as opposed to writing about their non-professional interests.
The article on “jazz” is written and supported by a member of the American Dialect Society Mailing List. He has access to the latest updates on the term Besides that, he’s brilliant and a great researcher in his own right.
I monitor about 20 articles, to make sure they keep up on the latest info on cites.
While imperfect, it’s a pretty useful tool, used in the proper way.
A good portion of the chemistry articles I’ve read are clear written by PhD’s in the particular field it’s about. If you look carefully at the references, it’s sometimes obvious which research group did it.
Many of the Wikipedia articles on physics are watched over by WikiProject Physics, which includes real physicists.
In some respects “experts” are very limited in what they can contribute. Wikipedia has a rule that prohibits “original research”. This article lays out the limitations.
A page that I started, on a technique from computer science, was edited by two people who happened to have done their PhD’s under the man who invented the technique. One of them works at NASA’s JPL, now.
Another example is the Wikipedia page on the Epigram programming language. It was started by Thorsten Altenkirch, a lecturer at the University of Nottingham (and one of the guys who worked on the language).
I don’t want to “out” myself, but I’m in the link in post #2, and I contribute modestly within my area of expertise. I agree with samclem:
I’ve written several pages on subjects I’ve written books about (I’m definitely an expert on those subjects), and I’ve done it under my real name so that people can check my credentials.
I’ve also written or contributed to a lot of articles about subjects I’m intimately familiar with, such as the breed of cattle I used to raise, but I’m not really a “true expert” on those.
In many articles, the “expert” status doesn’t really matter. If you write a Wikipedia article about episode 72 of the The Wombat of Baskerville series, the only thing that matters is that you watched it and you know the characters well enough to write the summaries and fit the episode correctly into the “Wombativerse,” carefully following the format of the articles about the other 223 episodes.
(I will note that I haven’t contributed anything since they screwed it up a year or two ago so that you can’t log in from a Mac.)
I don’t know if you’d call them “true experts”, per se, but the Wiki article on Oakley, Inc. (the sunglass people) is written and maintained by the members of the Oakley Review, a fansite so dedicated that Oakley staff up to and including founder and CEO Jim Jannard openly admit to using it for reference.
My article on Champion Base Ball speaks for itself.
My guess is that it would probably be pretty small. Most professionals are very busy people. I would think that if they took the time to contribute to Wiki, it would most likely be in their area of expertise rather than on a hobby.
I feel experts are discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia. If they write anything they’ll immediately be jumped by a bunch of termites insisting that they prove everything they’ve written. The termites hate it when a contributor says he knows more about something that they do.
You can’t log in from a Mac?
Unfortunately, there’s no way to know the credentials of the person(s) authoring a particular report on a scientific/medical subject.
In my experience, the reliability of a given report tends to be inversely proportional to the degree of controversy attached to the subject. When there are a substantial number of activists who disagree with the prevailing, evidence-based consensus on such subjects, they are often very energetic in making their views known through continual edits.
It varies. I’m in math so I know math/physics. Some mathematical physicists like John Baez revel in wikipedia and participate actively. Myself, I use it as a reference but I’ll be damned if I’m going to argue with some kid who just read The Dancing Wu-Li Masters about vector bundles in quantum field theory.
I just checked (for the first time in quite a few months) and it appears that they fixed it.
There was a problem for a long time where logging in from a Mac wouldn’t “stick” – you’d get the successful login notification and the very next page you went to you wouldn’t be logged in anymore. The solution was to use a HORRIBLY slow mirror site.
Unless the person edits under their real name, as I do. You can, of course, spoof your identity, but experts tend to find out about that pretty quickly and it gets fixed.
Exactly. Look up Wal*Mart, Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush for examples (unless those happen to be locked at the moment). They’re all a constant battle between apologists and critics, taking down perfectly valid information and putting up crap.
I think I qualify as an expert in my field, having edited the authoritative encyclopedia on the subject since the mid-1990s. I’ve written a handful of wikipedia entries, but mostly I’ve just spent time fixing glaring factual errors in existing articles that I happen across. On more than one occasion, I’ve gotten into flame wars with wiki editors who insist I’m wrong and their right, even when I cited a half-dozen references and asked them to cite something in opposition.
Most folks who are experts in their field publish, and writing for wikipedia is not only giving away their own work, but it’s creating a competing product.
And this is a factual answer to the OP…in what way exactly?