Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Mar 31, 2007, at 8:34 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
In en.wikipedia, we have a base of work for the future. And therefore it is natural and proper that we should over time get more and more and more serious about quality.
Then what the hell was the point in writing all the stuff in the first place?
I mean, I've made a good number of contributions based on personal knowledge and on primary sources of philosophical and theoretical texts in the humanities. Stuff that doesn't fit the current "independent secondary sources or bust" model at all. I'm appalled at the idea that these contributions - contributions I made admin on the basis of, and contributions that my ability to make was part of why I fell in love with the project - are now part of a steaming pile of shit that needs to be cleared out.
If we want to get serious about quality, there are ways to do it without starting to destroy what we've already built. But this idea that we should feel guilty because you got slammed in a television interview is ridiculous. Of course Wikipedia has inaccuracies. It always has. You know full well we haven't fixed them all. And we've had a defense in line for that for years too - "it's a work in progress. We don't recommend using Wikipedia as the only source for serious research. We recommend using it as a starting point, with care, and looking at the sources and other resources provided." I know being slammed in a TV interview isn't fun. But, well, if you want to be able to go on TV praising a project that's done and accurate and wonderful, Wikipedia probably isn't the project to go on TV about. It doesn't lend itself to that. It lends itself to having to be defended, over and over again, against the same objections. It lends itself to waiting for two or three years at which point we'll be better. It lends itself to recognizing that we hit the big time well before we were ready to. You of all people should know that. So stop trying to guilt the community because the job of evangelizing Wikipedia isn't as easy as you'd like.
Hear, hear!
It should come as no surprise that those most concerned about Doc's proposals and similar trends are people who have participated on the projects for a considerable time. These are not the people who are about to wilfully add libellous or other illegal content. When they do so by inadvertance they are the ones who will review the situation fairly once it is brought to their attention. Their commitment to the project is too great to support either the kind of National-Enquirer silliness that some would add to the project or the equally silly framework of broad-stroke rules that ravages the ecology in a by-catch of useful efforts. An ecology can withstand trolls much better than drift nets.
The long-term participants have always been serious about quality, just as much as those who are now proposing rules. They also incorporate a vision that goes far beyond what may be found in any individual article, good or bad. Vision does not come from looking at a limited problem, and setting out to find a specific solution that will easily solve the problem without regard to other effects that the solution may have.
The vision of a compendium of human knowledge that anybody can edit remains valid even if it does get messy around the edges. The desire for accuracy has always been a part of the vision despite the antics of those whose understanding of accuracy and neutrality is particularly limited. The vision is what made Wikipedia what it is to-day. The openness that told the prospective contributor that he had to say was important, that he was important, that his ideas were just as important as those of the professional, that lifted his spirit- this is what made Wikipedia. The fact that it is now the world's single biggest reference source remains an afterthought. It was inevitable that Wikipedia would include material that is mind-numbingly trivial, that it would include articles about people whose claim to notability is dubious at best, that ideas of perpetual motion machines would be in perpetual motion, but all this is perfectly harmless. Most of it will go completely unnoticed, and the amount of space that it takes up in the databse is inconsequential for as long as there is no debate about its value.
As a collector of old books I encounter a surfeit of material that has fallen into a well deserved oblivion, but I'm glad it's there. Like much of our "non-notable" material nobody notices it's there, and I wonder whether the editors of that day had the same arguments as we now have.
Try this experiment at Wikimania: Set up two meetings where people are asked to comment broadly to identical questions about their views of Wikipedia. The difference between the two would be that the participants in the first would have joined during the first half of Wikipedia's existence, and the participants in the other in the second half. Compare the results.
I think it's important to trust the instincts of those who have endured for a long time. Picking up on Phil's theme that Wikipedia is a work in progress, once it is out of progress it will be something else.
Ec