On 8/11/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
"Article squatters are the feudal lords of
Wikipedia and the only way
to displace someone is to spend a great deal of time fighting with
them, possibly escalating through the central authority. No doubt
there exist article squatters who make it there mission to work with
others to improve content but, in my samples, the trend is more
towards censorship."
It'd be great to see his "samples." In most instances where people are
simply unilaterally rejected they are usually trying to push a strong,
un-sourced, un-neutral agenda. Even in cases where editors are very
protective of articles, in *my* "samples" it is rare that the entire
group is against genuine improvement, corrections, and additions. Even
articles which are rather tightly controlled by editors ([[Evolution]]
as an example), major changes happen every few weeks or so when
someone new comes to the page and says "Hey, I don't think this
section is correct or clear." They are, however, against things which
contradict our content policies, or people with severe POV axes to
grind show up and try and re-write the page into a Creationist screed.
The exact implementation of the policies is always open to some
leeway, but the epistemic goals of the policies themselves (which
ideally try to root Wikipedia in reliable knowledge and disallow its
use as a place where quacks and spammers can run rampant) are surely
commendable. Of course, one can call all quality control "censorship,"
but you'd have to have a pretty liberal sense of what it would mean to
have a reliable encyclopedia if you don't believe in any checks on
knowledge. And in fact that has been tried before.
And those that don't like them CAN start a fork. Wikipedia itself
doesn't have to try and host multiple versions and all of that slog
which makes places like everything2 so unreliable and unmanageable. It
would be trivial for me to start a "World War II" encyclopedia
licensed under the GDFL which used Wikipedia content as a base. The
problem isn't that it couldn't be done, but that it would be hard to
convince people to spend their time wrangling over my little fork
rather than the big dog. But that's the case with all Open Source
models. And in fact lots of crank groups are happy to fork -- the
Neo-Nazis had a wiki for awhile, and the Creationists have a wiki too.
Best of luck to them.
Strangely this fellow does not seem to interrogate WHY Wikipedia has
been successful. It is NOT the first Wiki. It is not the only place on
the internet where people can "edit this page" or contribute
knowledge. Despite the many attacks often levied against Wikipedia's
accuracy, it remains massively popular in comparison with any similar
alternatives. Why? Perhaps it is because the model of
de-facto-centralization-with-the-opportunity-to-fork-if-you-really-want-to
actually works pretty well. The human resources issue puts a high
price on forking, but since human resources are the breeder reactor
which keeps this factory pumping, that's not a bad thing (if people
could easily diffuse, then no one place would build up the critical
mass needed to keep high enough production and maintenance for long
term success). The option to fork is always there, and occasionally
probably does serve as a pressure-release valve. And in the end,
forcing people to come together and work out content issues under a
reasonable epistemic model actually might end up producing better
content than one would get under a "free for all" model.
Science is often criticized as conservative in its treatment of
knowledge, and the rejection of controversial ideas is often decried
as "censorship" by those so rejected. But philosophers of science have
long argued that this conservatism actually is what results in its
knowledge being generally reliable and, in the end, useful for
practical ends. Sure, it makes mistakes sometimes. Sure, sometimes
those controversial ideas end up being correct. But I think it is
pretty self-evident that systems of knowledge generation which are
concerned with quality-control, even to the point of epistemic
conservatism, end up producing more reliable knowledge than those
which are "anything goes." If we had unlimited resources and unlimited
time, yes, we could all work tirelessly to flesh out every conceivable
possibility for "truth." But it would be a wasteful endeavor.
Methodology is that which cuts down on options so that we focus only
on the most likely to produce results. As with science, with
Wikipedia, if one does not take too much offense from the overwrought
and pretentious analogy.
FF