On 4 December 2011 16:58, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
On 4 December 2011 03:56, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about the unfriendliness of the environment.
Well covered in The Signpost, in fact.
Thanks, I hadn't seen that. That's very good coverage.
But I came away thinking that there is a misconception behind the "complaint". Put it this way: who is the customer? That turns out to be a rhetorical question: the customer is the reader. If the customer was the writer, or the person who feels he/she should have a Wikipedia page about them, the tone of the complaint would be more justified.
The wiki model of content production makes no distinction between reader and editor.
It isn't so much that we've gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the purpose.
Considering that Wikipedia is the "killer app" for wikis, the comment seems a bit off-beam. What we have done is to stress-test the wiki concept by making a wiki at least two orders of magnitude larger than would have been been thought reasonable in the year 2000.
I think you're missing my point that the processes we're running on the wiki--not the content--are what the tool is unsuitable for.