On 1/5/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)earthlink.net> wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 1/5/06, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com>
wrote:
While I'm generally in favor of broad latitude
for user behavior,
there are some people who are simply net negatives, and it is in our
interest to get them to go away. I've come to steer away from most
of that kind of debating, because the encyclopedia benefits more
from me applying myself in areas where I have specialized skills,
knowledge, and reference sources. But sooner or later we're going
to have to develop better ways to filter out the unhelpful.
Stan
You could always turn Wikipedia into an exclusive club that people can
only get into if they can prove themselves worthy.
Hardly what he's suggesting. Filtering out the unhelpful means removing
people from the "club" after they've proven themselves unworthy, not
requiring them to prove worthiness before getting in at all. We already
do the former, but optimizing the filtering process is a bit challenging.
Eh, I never said he was suggesting anything, I was the one suggesting
that the process be taken to it's logical conclusion. If you're gonna
do it, do it right.
If you're gonna filter out the unhelpful(*), you might as well
establish a process by which people gain membership. Sure, there has
to be a provisional membership too, but after someone has been around
for a while you can decide whether or not they're worthy of full
membership. The only reason I see *not* to do that is that Wikipedia
was supposed to be an encyclopedia that anyone could edit. But once
you've removed that, you might as well implement the same processes
that have been established by almost all the other exclusive clubs.
Frankly, I don't think it's such a bad idea, if you could somehow pull
the wool over the eyes of the editors who would strongly oppose it.
(*) And the implication was that this doesn't just mean people who are
*intentionally* unhelpful, as Stan was also talking about those "who
are simply not smart enough to be of
any help" in the previous paragraph.
For similar reasons, we constantly struggle with the
filtering process
currently known as "Articles for deletion". Since this one deals with
people even more directly, it should not be surprising that a happy
medium is difficult to find.
--Michael Snow
Keeping an article out of Wikipedia is completely different from
keeping a group of people out.
Anthony