On 6/4/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/3/06, Sam Spade
<samspade.thomasjefferson(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
People could fax their diploma or some such. It
doesn't seem like a
huge deal to me. Personally I'd just like to see some
'''informed'''
party with the final say (i.e. not a random, non-expert admin or
arbiter).
And if there's a technical area where the experts have a disagreement, and
the one who shows up first happens to be strongly biased in one direction or
the other?
What about fields where the number of experts are either tiny, or they are
for various reasons grossly unlikely to ever contribute to Wikipedia?
What does it say to people who are jacks-of-many-trades if you institute a
policy which says that only a degree is valid qualification, and that it
doesn't matter how many fields you may publish in, work professionally in,
have patents in, only the ones on your degree matter for WP?
This suggestion seems likely to seriously curb a lot of otherwise qualified
involvement.
--
-george william herbert
gherbert(a)retro.com / george.herbert(a)gmail.com
There is also the other suggestion, that anyone who is contributing to
the article counts as a peer. Also there are possibilities for reader
involvement, if someone was willing to code a small feature to allow a
reader to rate an article, and/or which of 2 competing versions they
prefer.
The point is that there needs to be some sort of organic, small scale
decision making mechanism, to allow resolution for edit conflict. It
would be awesome if we could find one that was any good at judging
article quality as well.
The way the system is now, it exaggerates conflict. For example, I
tend to get along with everyone IRL. People tend to like me, generally
agree with me, and its easy to make friends.
The wikipedia is acompletely different story. Because people get to
know me based on conflict (nobody notices when you make a good edit),
and because cliques are encouraged (RfA, etc...), it took practically
no time for me to have a gang of enemies on the wikipedia. The system
is sick, and punishing those who are willing to accept your
punishments (i.e. good users) is not an answer. The abusers can
continue to abuse the system, the stressed contributors leave, and the
cliques focus on chatting with one another about their cats and
gossiping about outgroup members, not creating quality encyclopedia
articles.
We need more productive, rewarding processes (FA / collaborative
editing), and less punishing processes (ARBCOM / RfC). Getting rid of
the clique building mechanisms (RfA/AfD) would help alot too.
Wikipedia has more ugly little cliques than my middle school had, and
sadly their are no impartial teachers to step in and break up fights,
because their all in cliques too.
SS