Philip Sandifer wrote:
McCloud is somebody who knows comics. He quite literally wrote the book on them. In the course of the conversation it became clear that he was pretty well completely fed up with Wikipedia. And it should be noted, this comes from someone who has been on the forefront of digital technology debates several times. He makes clear his admiration for the concept of Wikipedia. He makes clear his admiration for how Wikipedia got started. His problem is with how it works now.
It's amazing how quickly people have gone from "it can't possibly work" to grumbling about how we haven't solved every problem with it.
What he think will happen if he visits EB? "Scott who? Our board of expert editors have already determined that webcomics aren't worth writing about." Encarta? Probably wouldn't get even that much of an answer. CZ? I think we can guess Larry Sanger's response, ha ha. As the world's largest encyclopedia, every day we deal with scaling problems that have *never* been solved before. Of course it's going to be messy - we can't just go offline while a bunch of eggheads ponders solutions. I've actually spent time in the university library learning what other people have done for large-scale knowledge organization, in the hopes of getting useful ideas for WP, and I tell you, the state of the art is just pathetic.
I think people like Scott McCloud, and other experts, just assume that there are fellow experts out there who have solved problems like how to assess notability, and we're just a bunch of stupids because we're not using their solutions. We need to get the word out - *there* *are* *no* *known* *solutions*. Every day we have to wing it, because we have no other choice.
I don't like to think about it too much, because it starts to p*ss me off a little - the expert is saying "I don't want to work on WP because you're all a bunch of amateurs who don't know how to do things right". Well gee, Mr. Expert, if no experts ever participate, what do you think you're going to end up with? And if you guys have all these amazing solutions to our problems, how come we can't ever seem to find where they are published?
And it's a disaster that can be laid squarely at the feet of the grotesque axis of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]] - two pages that are eating Wikipedia alive from the inside out. (And I don't mean this in terms of community. I mean that they are systematically being used to turn good articles into crap, and have yet to demonstrate their actual use in turning bad articles into good ones.)
I can relate to this - just today I had an uninformed editor claim one of the world's famous postage stamps is "non-notable" because the article only has one reference - apparently the part where the reference is a page in the most authoritative works in philately doesn't matter, because he couldn't manage to find it mentioned more than once online. The mind boggles at the multiple incompetences, but since it's all done with templates, even the least capable of editors is enabled to cast aspersions on good content.
Even so, I understand why the guidelines were created, to close loopholes that have been discovered and exploited. Alternate ideas that don't rely on magical thinking are still welcome.
Stan