On 11/13/07, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
What we are fighting here is the perception -- rightly or wrongly
held, but by nontrivial numbers of people -- that Wikipedia has a
tendency to engage in suppressive and outright repressive ways
towards some of its critics and towards some viewpoints that it
doesn't like to hear.
Right!
And for the record, I personally think Wikipedia does a pretty
wonderful job of dealing with the situation, in the long term.
When I look over all the BADSITESesque disputes, for example, everyone
one got worked out correctly in the end. When you look over all the
pages where these disputes have come up-- Michael Moore, we link to
Making Lights and Don Murphy and Prof Black and WP:BADSITES and WP:NPA
and the Attack Sites Arbcom and everywhere-- it's always worked out in
the end. The Wikipedia system DOES work, in the end.
And even if there is a group of people who would prefer to change
Wikipedia into were something a little more community-oriented and a
little less enyclopedic-- the fact is, it hasn't worked, and the
encyclopeidia has always won out in the end. So while we defintely
have brushes with bieng a tad suppressive in the short term, in the
long term we get an A+.
And indeed, when I look around, there's only two "active" problems in
which the situation hasn't resolved itself in a way that fights this
perception of Wikipedia as suppressive.
Persistent Issue One: We still don't have an article on Encyclopedia
Dramatica.
It's not that this is a "wrong" decision, but it will be better when
we can have such an article. It's jsut that not having an entry on ED
does make a look bad.
I live here, so I understand that deletion decisions are complex, and
at Wikipedia, coverage is often idiosyncyratic, but is instead a
combination of the available sources and interest. This often leads
to some bizarre conclusions when you compare coverage across
articles-- as Colbert commented-- "any site that's got a longer entry
on 'Truthiness' than on Lutherans has its priorities straight".
So I won't actually criticize the deletion of the ED article, I'll
just say generally-- Wikipedia will be a better place when we are
able to write a NPOV, NOR, Verifiable article on Encyclopedia
Dramatica. That should be true of absolutely any subject.
If we can't have such an article-- if ED just isn't notable enough for
us to have any sources to work with-- then that's the way it is, and
it can't be helped. But I hope that won't be the case as soon as
possible, because it doesn't "look good" not to have an article on it,
and people who doesn't understand Wikipedia are probably inclined to
suspect we don't cover it out of malice.
Outsiders have never heard of WP:OTHERSTUFF, and when they see we have
a lengthy featured article on Spoo, a fictional food product from a
cancelled sci-fi tv show, but lack even a stub on ED, it will
contribute to the perception that we deleted the ED article out of
bias.
Persist Issue Two: Rampant incivility
The second problem that we're still dealing with is this persistent
bug of falsely accusing people of being in support of, in favor of, or
in league with banned users. I've discussed it extensively here, and
in two different essays, so I reiterate it here.
Other than that-- we're actually doing great in the long term.
Everywhere else, things have worked out completely non-suppressively
in the end.
Of course, we should still work to make sure these outbreaks of
embarassing transitory supressivess are as infrequent as possible.
Making Lights and Michael Moore, for example, really showed us as our
worst, but of course, they were "ancient history" in wikipedia time,
so hopefully we won't have to go down those roads again the future.
Alec