[Foundation-l] content ownership in different projects

Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis xekoukou at gmail.com
Sat Jun 18 22:28:40 UTC 2011


The fact that the truth is determined by consensus between experts and
unknowledgeable or between people with contrary ideas is a problem.

It is not a process that derives the truth since the truth is defined by the
many,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_research#Wikipedia.27s_Problem

or the more powerful. That leads to power struggles which many just dont
want to fight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Wikipedia#Editorial_process

If wikipedia allowed articles to be forked and defined a trust metric that
showed which article is more trustworthy, that would solve both previous
problems and would also have contradictory ideas together, thus allowing
people to have their own opinion about those different opinions and
wikipedia wouldnt need to hide the strugle behind curtains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_research#Web_Researching_Methods:_From_Google_to_Wikipedia

Of course, this trust metric would have to be personalized, ie give
different values depending on who the user trusts.

Why do we need trust?

Let me just make a simple example. There is an architect , a doctor and an
economist each writing an article on their fields. Each one of them wants to
read the others article. They are unable to verify it is correct information
because they are only experts on their field. How do they solve this
problem? Well they use different skills, they don't judge the article, they
try to check the person's credibility. My metric tries to use social
relations so as to help people that have no knowledge about a specific
subject judge the experts.

The absence of knowledge in all fields makes trust a necessity.
Controversial topics also necessitate the existence of different articles.

I do agree though that knowledge is not a property of anyone other than
humanity.


2011/6/18 Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>

> On 06/17/11 5:01 PM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
> > I am a bit biased since I have a project to add a trust metric on
> mediawiki
> > but I think that content ownership is important. It lets us evaluate the
> > content without reading it which is important to most of us who are only
> > experts on one subject.
>
> Somebody should still have to read the article to apply the trust
> metric.  What are the criteria for the trust metric. Ultimately they are
> statistical determinations with stated deviations.
>
>
> > In any case, if someone doesnt want other to change their
> > articles, the best thing that could be done is forking the article. That
> of
> > course is against the way Wikimedia works.
> Yes, I would encourage more forks, but how is it anti-wiki for them to
> start their own site?
>
> Ec
>
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