[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Phil Sandifer]

On Feb 24, 2007, at 9:25 PM, geni wrote:

>
> Scott McCloud appears to be an expert on comics. Not data sorting.
>

A+ for snippyness, D for actual content there. What makes you believe  
that our notability guidelines appear coherent and consistent to the  
outside? Particularly in light of, in the last week, three separate  
instances of people showing inconsistencies in three very different  
approaches (Straub, McCloud, and Noah).
> WP:RS is pretty solid
> There are a few conditions where it breaks down but is otherwise  
> pretty solid.
>

No. It's not. It never has been, it never will be, it never can be.  
Reliable sourcing is fundamentally a more complex issue than a black  
and white guideline could ever portray. This page is not flawed in  
any particular manifestation - it is flawed at the most fundamental  
level imaginable - it's a policy page trying to perform an impossible  
task.

> Wikipedia:Notability has a solid base in the:
> has been the subject of at least one substantial or multiple,
> non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and
> independent of the subject and of each other.
>

Yes. We took our notability guidelines, which used to be a vague  
sense of "if things like it survive VfD, it probably will too" and  
yoked them to our sourcing guidelines. This isn't so much throwing  
the baby out with the bathwater as drowning the baby in the bathwater.
>
> However working out if a certain article passes or fails this every
> time is hard. This in common cases people use shortcuts (just as
> chemists don't use MO theory to work out roughly what an organic
> chemical will look like) as long as people understand that these are
> approximations and what the underlying assumptions are that should be
> possible to deal with.
>

I don't think this describes the problem. It's not that we have rules  
that make sense but follow them badly. It's that we have rules that  
don't really make sense and that we follow them pretty well.
>

> Things change. Before we had them they tended to exist as de-facto
> standards in any case. And frankly once you take off the rose tinted
> specs the quality was not that high.
>
The quality still isn't that high. But I don't think it's gone up  
much since Siegenthaler. I think it's stuck in a situation where it  
can't actually improve. Which might explain why 1.0 has stalled.
> No amount of policy can ensure really good articles but they can
> reduce the amount of total dross.
>

No. Policy does not reduce dross. Good editors reduce dross. Policy  
reduces good editors.
>> No. I have to show that Wikipedia has a problem in the eyes of people
>> who are disposed to be sympathetic to it.
>
> Claim they are.
>

[[WP:AGF]]
>> This isn't a double blind
>> study to establish beyond a scientific doubt that Wikipedia has a
>> problem. Such studies don't exist, and if they're a prerequisite for
>> change then change is impossible. Which, admittedly, seems like the
>> situation you want most of the time.
>
> Pretty much. Nine times out of ten doing nothing is a surprisingly
> good solution.
>

And 10% of the time Rome burns. That's a high enough error rate to  
deserve more care than the pithy dismissals you've perfected.

> It's easy to find tales of woe and then say that this requires total
> change right now. Much harder to do a proper examination of the
> situation which would allow you to have some idea what the correct
> changes are.
>

Aside from an admittedly polemical call to nuke RS I've not demanded  
total change right now. In fact, total change right now is what got  
us into this mess. (Oh no, we got panned in USA Today. We'd better  
overhaul the system!) If anything, my position is more conservative  
than yours.
>

> We didn't have the 9/11 twoothers. We did rather badly with the aether
> people. In the early days of wikipedia we were rather tech heavy and
> other than certain audiophiles most tech people tend to be fairly
> sceptical. That isn't the case any more.

And I'm wearing rose-coloured glasses? I remember when I could be  
advancing two or three arbcom cases against POV pushing lunatics at  
once. And those were just the ones I knew about, which, we ought  
remember, was almost certainly a minority as I've only looked at  
around .5% of the articles on Wikipedia in my life. We've always had  
dreadful POV problems. And we've always dealt with them the same way  
- by going "OK, you're nuts" and blocking the person.

-Phil