On 15/10/2007, William Pietri <william(a)scissor.com> wrote:
In that case, the right thing would not have been to
say, "Oh, well,
that's what the community wants. Let's call it 'the gossip rag anybody
can edit'." In extreme circumstances, the right thing would have been
for the Foundation to destroy the community and start fresh. This is
know as "hot tubbing" a community:
http://www.plocktau.com/writing/hottub.html
Note that the Foundation has done this before, e.g. French Wikiquote,
which was so riddled with copyright violations they deleted it and
started again blank.
And when a Wikimedia wiki fails at NPOV, the Foundation will indeed
close it or whack it upside the head, e.g. Moldovan Wikipedia (closed)
or Belarusian Wikipedia (moved to a special name for the "classical"
variant enforced on the wiki by its community).
i.e. the community can't vote against NPOV, no matter how they twist
and turn to try to do so.
This nuclear option is closely related to the right to
fork, which is a
fundamental part of open-source efforts:
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RightToFork
And getting good backups is becoming more of a priority, making it
easier to fork if a given community goes bad. This should also take
the pressure off: those who want a Wikipedia that doesn't include
material on people they don't like can have one.
Although these sorts of things are dreadful and
painful and to be
vigorously avoided, it's important to remember that if it really comes
down to it, things will be ok. Unix has had more than 30 years of drama
and forking, and it's doing just fine:
http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html
Mostly because Linux came along and whacked the rest upside the head.
So in the end, that's why we have "absolute
and non-negotiable" things
like NPOV. The community is really important, and we should treasure and
nurture it. But ultimately, if we have to choose, we pick the encyclopedia.
Precisely.
- d.