[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Stan Shebs]

Philip Sandifer wrote:
> McCloud is somebody who knows comics. He quite literally wrote the  
> book on them. In the course of the conversation it became clear that  
> he was pretty well completely fed up with Wikipedia. And it should be  
> noted, this comes from someone who has been on the forefront of  
> digital technology debates several times. He makes clear his  
> admiration for the concept of Wikipedia. He makes clear his  
> admiration for how Wikipedia got started. His problem is with how it  
> works now.
>   
It's amazing how quickly people have gone from "it can't possibly work" 
to grumbling about how we haven't solved every problem with it.

What he think will happen if he visits EB? "Scott who? Our board of 
expert editors have already determined that webcomics aren't worth 
writing about." Encarta? Probably wouldn't get even that much of an 
answer. CZ? I think we can guess Larry Sanger's response, ha ha. As the 
world's largest encyclopedia, every day we deal with scaling problems 
that have *never* been solved before. Of course it's going to be messy - 
we can't just go offline while a bunch of eggheads ponders solutions. 
I've actually spent time in the university library learning what other 
people have done for large-scale knowledge organization, in the hopes of 
getting useful ideas for WP, and I tell you, the state of the art is 
just pathetic.

I think people like Scott McCloud, and other experts, just assume that 
there are fellow experts out there who have solved problems like how to 
assess notability, and we're just a bunch of stupids because we're not 
using their solutions. We need to get the word out - *there* *are* *no* 
*known* *solutions*. Every day we have to wing it, because we have no 
other choice.

I don't like to think about it too much, because it starts to p*ss me 
off a little - the expert is saying "I don't want to work on WP because 
you're all a bunch of amateurs who don't know how to do things right". 
Well gee, Mr. Expert, if no experts ever participate, what do you think 
you're going to end up with? And if you guys have all these amazing 
solutions to our problems, how come we can't ever seem to find where 
they are published?
> And it's a disaster that can be laid squarely at the feet of the  
> grotesque axis of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]] - two pages that are eating  
> Wikipedia alive from the inside out. (And I don't mean this in terms  
> of community. I mean that they are systematically being used to turn  
> good articles into crap, and have yet to demonstrate their actual use  
> in turning bad articles into good ones.)
>   
I can relate to this - just today I had an uninformed editor claim one 
of the world's famous postage stamps is "non-notable" because the 
article only has one reference - apparently the part where the reference 
is a page in the most authoritative works in philately doesn't matter, 
because he couldn't manage to find it mentioned more than once online. 
The mind boggles at the multiple incompetences, but since it's all done 
with templates, even the least capable of editors is enabled to cast 
aspersions on good content.

Even so, I understand why the guidelines were created, to close 
loopholes that have been discovered and exploited. Alternate ideas that 
don't rely on magical thinking are still welcome.

Stan