I think the people who want "actual experts" should go read encyclopedias built by actual experts. That user segment need not be targeted by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is what it is because of volunteer editors like me. It is not feasible to convert it to be majority "expert" so if it attempted to do so, the cost would be exorbitant and the users who prefer "expert-written work" will not be satisfied until it is complete since the presence of volunteer work will be considered by them a bad thing.
Those users will be concerned that they do not know which articles are "expert"-written and WP will lose volunteers who get upset that they can't correct "expert" works.
It's best that Wikipedia not attempt to be a thing it is not.
Encyclopedia Britannica does exist. There is no reason that Wikipedia needs to enter that space.
I see no reason why expert-written articles would have to be locked from further edits, or marked as expert-written. They could be subject to the same formal standards as the rest of Wikipedia, but with guarantee that those standards are applied.
There are already paid Wikipedia editors, they tend to be working for PR firms. A non-profit doing the same thing for altruistic purposes sounds feasible and good to me, it wouldn't even need to necessarily be part of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Because if they are not marked or restricted then I believe they won't appeal to users who want expert articles. Like in the reaction to LLMs we know that people who want high certainty in their articles also want to know when they're in their high certainty environment and when they're not. Mixing the two will cause many of them to be upset. Permitting volunteers to edit will cause many of them to be upset, especially if there is one with an error.
It's better this way with a clear separation of wiki and expert.
> Because if they are not marked or restricted then I believe they won't appeal to users who want expert articles.
I believe they will, because the quality will be higher. They shouldn't employ experts as a marketing campaign, they should employ experts as a way to keep interesting entries from devolving into trash heaps. I'd honestly prefer those experts to be research librarians and experts on parliamentary procedure or statistics, rather than subject matter. Instead all editorial decisions are made through trials adjudicated by a few people who happened to walk by, and other people paid to be there by private organizations and/or governments.
A higher-quality Wikipedia needs defenses against paid and deeply-invested mobs.
One way to bootstrap this approach is to mirror Wikipedia and add on expert articles. That would demonstrate the value of the expert articles. I suspect this value is low. If it were sufficiently high, this Expert Wikipedia would rapidly come to dominate.
I think the Expert Wikipedia would be a bad use of resources because most people do not desire this and because experts will not deliver better articles in general.
That’s an impossible experiment because a mirror would never get the same network effects, search engine treatment, and cultural integration Wikipedia has accumulated.
I suspect getting experts to write any significant fraction of articles is a multi-million dollar experiment. I don't think it's worth it, and I doubt anyone running WMF would think so either.
We have completely expert written media in Encyclopedia Brittanica, so that's probably the best place for people who don't want to use WP because it's insufficiently expert-written. It doesn't make sense to go join that market.
Wikipedia is what it is because of volunteer editors like me. It is not feasible to convert it to be majority "expert" so if it attempted to do so, the cost would be exorbitant and the users who prefer "expert-written work" will not be satisfied until it is complete since the presence of volunteer work will be considered by them a bad thing.
Those users will be concerned that they do not know which articles are "expert"-written and WP will lose volunteers who get upset that they can't correct "expert" works.
It's best that Wikipedia not attempt to be a thing it is not.
Encyclopedia Britannica does exist. There is no reason that Wikipedia needs to enter that space.