[WikiEN-l] Re: How did this happen (comixpedia??)

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

David Gerard wrote:
> Darin Brown wrote:
> 
> 
>>Here we do run into an issue which esp. tricky in this particular case. By
>>its very nature, webcomics and the webcomics community are going to eschew
>>the more traditional verification mechanisms, most esp. those found in
>>print. Of course -- the entire phenomenon itself is based around the
>>internet. The entire *community* itself, its own internal verification
>>procedures, its own internal conditions upon which it deems verification
>>necessary, are non-traditional. It is disingenuous to hold it accountable to
>>similar verification procedures as say, mathematics or physics. You are not
>>going to find thousands of references to webcomix in the academic
>>literature. And it will be very difficult to find many in print. The fact
>>is, the phenomenon of webcomix itself is highly radical and raises serious
>>issues about the nature of verification itself
> 
> 
> 
> Oh, it's much better than that. There is in fact a real genuine actual
> peer-reviewed academic journal on comics called ImageTexT
> (http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/). One of the managing editors
> is Phil Sandifer, who you will know better as Snowspinner. In a
> jawdropping assumption of bad faith (which is, of course, the reason
> why AFD is so poisonous to the Wikipedia community in its present
> form), the AFD regulars did their damnedest to get coverage in it
> excluded from the webcomics guidelines *because* Snowspinner was the
> editor. The excuse was that he was too involved or too close or knew
> too much or something.
> 
> This was after they'd driven off a previous comics expert for knowing
> more than them on the topic, leading him to say "you people are
> clearly idiots" and form Comixpedia.
> 
> geni will, if he reads back, agree that this is closer to the
> chronology of what actually happened in the formation of the comics
> inclusion guidelines: (1) provably bad AFD, (2) deliberate attempt to
> exclude academic expert for being an expert, (3) guidelines then
> formed such that the bad AFD would have led to a deletion.
> 
> (Don't take my word for it - read the talk page, it's amazing. Note in
> particular the direct assertion that editors who confess to knowing
> *NOTHING* on a topic should have their opinions count just as much as
> an actual provable expert, for the purposes of achieving "consensus" -
> remembering that the AFD jargon meaning of "consensus" is a two-thirds
> vote. Therefore, that a two-thirds majority of editors who
> *admittedly* know nothing at all about a topic can get the topic
> excluded from Wikipedia altogether over the objections of experts on
> said topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Webcomics/Notability_and_inclusion_guidelines
> )
> 
> 

Larry Sanger was right. Wikipedia is too anti-elitist. Maybe we should
bring Nupedia back.

-- 
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