[Foundation-l] Verifiability: Constitution? Question for Jimbo!

[Daniel Arnold]

Am Montag, 18. September 2006 15:19 schrieb Christoph Seydl:
> I agree with Andre. The rules [[w:en:Verifiability]] are very strict.

Quite some people already have highlighted that Verifiability and "no original 
research" are two sides of the same medal.

This means in especially: "Look outside not inside if you write articles." 
[Jimbo said something like this somewhere TM]. This means an article about 
Wikipedia necessarily primarily needs to be based on external views. Raw data 
like size, transfer data and such are something different.

Interestingly the question of Verifiability and "no original research" is 
strictly correlated with the flame proof eternal debate on "relevance 
criterias". There's an easy answer to it:
* If an article with serious flaws is that much important for the authors that 
they need to write long complains defending its serious flaws they probably 
better invest the time improving the article.
* If they're unable improving it, the article is obviously not really 
important enough for its authors and thatfor lacks general relevance and thus 
does not fit into Wikipedia.

You will quickly notice that topics like "politics", "physics", "religion" are 
important enough that you can draw from a large body of publications and that 
there will be at any given time people that can and do improve such articles 
if there is a serious flaw with them. The more narrow the topic is the harder 
is it for the author writing something useful about it. For example an 
article about "Joshi" is way harder but there were people that managed it 
writing something really encylopedic about it.

Another metric is:
* If a discussion thread about an article is more than 10 times longer than 
the article itself then there is something wrong with the style of that 
particular debate.

> Who is deviant (better word than pathological)? The people who try to
> enforce the established rules or the people who ignore them? In a big
> community, it doesn't work to refer just to common sense because common
> sense is POV. Everyone defines common sense differently.

Well enforcing of policies in a bureaucracy way like: "There is something 
wrong but I don't say what" does help nobody. I suppose everyone can sign 
that. Constructive critics is the key but if someone does not listen to 
constructive critics, well then we don't need further patience like a buddha 
and should just execute what we consider necessary in that case without any 
further debate.

> If you are not satisfied with the rules, try to change them. If there
> are no rules how to deal with the daily conflicts, try to establish
> legitimate rules.

Well the best rules are rules nobody needs to write down. Do we need a 
detailed written down policy on separating article and discussion? No. Our 
interface inherits that policy already. Just look at other wikis and you see 
that this key policy is not for granted.

So please let us not write tons of detailed policies down; just the key 
principles and brainstorm what we want to achieve in detail (synonym to 
policy) and then how to make certain policies an obvious corollary of the 
user interface structure so that you don't need to remind people about it 
again and again.

Cheers, Arnomane