I wonder if anyone is tracking the rate of flow between the two… specifically, the rate of rewrite, transfer, and verification of existing wikipedia material into the new project.

1. I wouldn’t say he’s planning to “destroy” and rebuild; the original Wikipedia will still be there. Also, “steal” might be a bit inaccurate too; I don’t see why people can’t be signed up to work on both.

Having said that, though, I checked out what they have. Registration requires a real name (how exactly do they check that?) and a short essay. It sounds like too much work already. I like the lack of commitment involved in helping with Wikipedia – if I see something that needs fixing, I fix it. If I don’t feel like doing anything, I’m under no obligations.

2. Accountability and higher rate of responsibility/lower rate of pointless argumentation via “real name”: well, it didn’t cut down on flame wars during the pre-rampant-spam days of Usenet…

3. Expert contributors not liking the idea of being overwritten by cranks: Maybe so, but there’s a handy “revert” feature. You don’t lose your work if someone else comes in and destroys it later. Every single change ever made to an article is saved and can be restored. I think that once expert contributors come to understand that feature, it isn’t a problem.

The problem is more that expert contributors are more likely to be busy doing things in their fields of expertise, and less inclined to spend time doing it on Wikipedia.

4. “counterproductive viewpoints”: on Wikipedia that’s a feature, not a bug. I like that all of the viewpoints get a fair shot at being represented in the final article. Acknowledging the existences of alternate viewpoints is a good thing, as it’s yet another form of useful knowledge about whatever topic is at hand.

You can find out by perusing the Talk page and the History. Even a quick glance at the history can tell you a lot – for example if there have been lots of editting and reverting going on in the past few days, you know there’s probably an edit war going on. Sometimes there will be notices at the top of the article about it being locked, etc. On the flip side, if there are very few edits to the page, it’s probably going to have a bias toward the views of whoever did most of the editting.

Also, merely having certification papers does not guarantee credibility. Fraud things happen in academic and professional circles all the time too.

I meant something different with my “counterproductive viewpoint” interpretation though. Basically, I wonder what “counterproductive” really means – because it would be really easy to dismiss all views that disagree with your own as “counterproductive” even if, in a more objective sense, they actually aren’t.