QUOTE(John Limey @ Thu 18th March 2010, 10:51am)
QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Thu 18th March 2010, 1:14pm)
QUOTE(WikiWatch @ Wed 17th March 2010, 8:47pm)
QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Thu 18th March 2010, 1:41pm)
People willing to spend countless amounts of time "building an encyclopedia" are in some sense aberrant and deformed.
I'm sure the people behind
Britannica,
World Book, and
Encarta might disagree.
Then again they got paid. Emphasis added aboveThere you go.
Then again, many projects have not paid their contributors. None of the contributors to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a resource of unsurpassed quality, were paid. Generally speaking, contributors to various specialized Encyclopedia of X variants are not paid either. They are experts who work as part of the general enterprise of academia or to spread knowledge or to advance their careers.
They do not make tens of thousands of edits, nor play MMORPG games. Nor are they participating in a mere
simulation of an encyclopedia. They write concise articles on a limited number of topics without undue interference, and reasonable editorial support. Whatever credit there is to had is achieved under their real names, using real credentials and not crowd shared. Even there writing an encyclopedia article is not going to generate much in the way academic creditability.
You are completely clueless of just how wack Wikipedians are and attempt to normalize their weirdness. This simple and basic fact (their weirdness) becomes a growing burden in interacting with Wikipedians, on there site and here as well. Be good and I'll assign you some extra homework.