[WikiEN-l] avoiding rule-boundedness

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 10:16 PM 5/25/2008, Steve Summit wrote:
>I wrote:
> > Our rule-boundedness is relevant in another way, as well:
> > though it's loved by pedants and petty bureaucrat wannabees,
> > it's absolute death to the truly intelligent and creative...
> > So while there are good reasons for our tendency towards
> > firmer and firmer policy... it's a trend which has to be
> > intelligently resisted[.]
>
>One huge thing to watch out for is when our policies end up
>hurting our responsible contributors more than the vandals
>and trolls they're supposed to protect us from.  If every new
>contributor is guilty until proven innocent of being a vandal,
>POV warrior, linkspammer, copyright violator, or non-notable
>vanity article pusher, we're going to turn off and drive away a
>lot of new contributors.

More accurately, we've been driving such away for a few years now. I 
was not active enough to really see what was going on back in 05 and 
06, and I only started up serious editing, getting involved in WP 
process, etc., in Sept. 07, and it had gotten pretty bad by then. My 
friend, now blocked, started up 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia_Reform 
to look at what has been happening. That needs more attention. There 
are plenty of long-time editors who have left, often with bitter 
goodbye messages. But we also need to look at what happens in a more 
invisible way, to experts and writers who simply take the promise at 
face value: the sum of all human knowledge, the encyclopedia that 
anyone can edit. They assume, as we normally do in the marketplace, 
that the fine print won't take away what the headline promises. And 
we could make that promise come true. Easily. No cost. And end up 
with a better encyclopedia, better organized, more reliable, all of 
that. There were already ways in existence that only take different 
approaches, not different software, but flagged revisions is a 
powerful new tool that would help. The true encyclopedic question, 
classically, was never "delete" or "keep," but, "where do we file 
this?" "Delete or keep" wasn't a knowledge question (knowledge never 
deletes, though it may categorize in a file of such low notability 
that it might get forgotten), it was a publication space question, 
made by editors, and writers weren't asked to write articles to be excluded.

The public, with wikipedia, is asked to contribute from their 
knowledge. Presumably they are human, and what they know is thus part 
of "all human knowledge." "Sum" has two meanings, arguably, 
"totality" and "summary," but, as used in our slogan, any court in a 
Consumer Fraud action (at least in Arizona, where I had to deal with 
the state on an issue once) would decide, I'm sure, that it meant, in 
this context, totality.

So we are deceiving people when we allow good-faith contributions to 
be simply deleted. But this isn't limited to AfD process. Our article 
process grew like Topsy, and, particularly where there is some 
controversy, the bulk of contributions, even if accurate and sourced, 
get overwritten with other contributions, instead of a full 
exploration of the topic being built. (This would *not* be on the top 
layer, it's not what you'd see when simply looking up a topic, but, 
when you want more detail, and especially when you want to edit an 
article, you'd have it at your fingertips.)

Real knowledge is built through accumulation and categorization. The 
category "notable" doesn't exist in real knowledge, as a practical 
matter, because in order to categorize something as non-notable, you 
have to notice it! "Notable" is a relationship between a person or 
process and topics of knowledge, it is not intrinsic to the topics; 
hence notability debates become a matter of whose opinion is better. 
Sure, we can set "objective" standards, but they are arbitrary 
underneath. (They can be very specific, so many peer-reviewed 
articles, so many Google hits, appearance in some specific reference, 
etc., so they can be "objectively applied," but I'm referring to the 
original standard. It is, helplessly, elitist in some form or other. 
What is important to "us" is more notable than what is important to 
"you." What is important to people with college degrees is more 
important than what is important to people without them. What is 
important to the de-facto dominant culture on Wikipedia is more 
important than what is important to someone from a different culture 
(that happens to speak English, and such people are all over the 
world now, plus fans are humans too, and "fancruft" is an aspect of 
human knowledge.)

Now, notability decisions still need to be made, because importance 
to a topic, and importance of the topic itself, is part of the 
categorization process. We don't put trivia in the top layer of a 
categorized encyclopedia, unless some decision is made that a piece 
of trivia is really so interesting that it belongs at the top for 
reasons of making articles attractive and fascinating as well as accurate.

Underneath all this is a basic problem that Wikipedia never faced and 
resolved. And I'll make that a topic of its own mail. This is already 
too long for this list (and *that* is, again, part of the problem!)