by Alan Nelson
You may have noticed that Wikipedia recently reached the milestone of 3 million articles in English. It is a remarkable phenomenon, and although I know it causes much debate in academia about its reliability, for the rest of us ordinary mortals it is an invaluable, constantly available, desktop reference.
But amidst all the hype, there is a more interesting story. The rate of increase in the number of articles is, for the first time, slowing. Some commentators attribute this to a power struggle between what they call the “inclusionists” and the “deletionists”. As their names suggest, the former are more concerned with enabling as broad a base as possible to contribute, while the latter are more concerned to safeguard quality. The move towards the latter seems regrettable to me but it is entirely understandable as the project has matured, a stable group of high level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopaedia, while casual contributors feature less and less prominently.
All of this got me thinking about the emphasis we place on quality. Coming from a book publishing background, we have always believed that we understand the processes and controls necessary to ensure our finished courses are as good as they can be. For most of our work this is entirely appropriate. But in some cases, I wonder whether the inclusionist approach is worth considering.
For some projects, perhaps timeliness is the most important thing. Professionals need to learn about some new developments immediately – a properly crafted learning experience that arrives two months late is no good to them at all. That’s not to say that standards can be dispensed with entirely – the user should still expect the content to be accurate and free from typos. We have been experimenting with resources that focus on presenting brief pieces of content and then framing the right questions. Participants add their comments and get to read each other’s contributions. It is quite clear what is officially quality checked and what is the unmoderated observation of a peer - both seem to be valuable to the community.
So sometimes perhaps the challenge should be “What is the best thing we can do by 3.00pm tomorrow?”
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