Much of the fire, as opposed to the light, that eminates from Wik concerns
editing disputes which do not affect the content of an article, being over
such questions as whether Vietnam is in Southeast Asia or in East Asia, or
whether Mongolia is in Central Asia or in East Asia, etc. So no matter
whether Wik "wins" or not, and he does usually win as he never gives up or
wastes time talking with other users about disputes, the article itself is
basically unaffected.
He does affect Wikipedia as he serves for others as a model of how to impose
your will and get your way. He will also (eventually) serve as an example of
what happens if you continually buck the minimum requests Wikipedia makes of
users in the way of etiquette.
Fred
From: Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 19:47:58 -0700
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)Wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] the wik user
The structural change is something that occasionally gets proposed but
hasn't been detailed to anyone's satisfaction yet. The main issue is
how we can make things less "fragile" without also losing the
characteristic "anyone can edit any page" nature of Wikipedia.
Personally, I wouldn't be against losing some of that for
more-established pages---once an article has been hashed out over a
period of a year or two by hundreds of people, the ability for anyone to
change anything seems to do more harm than good. In fact, most major
edits to something like, say, [[Israel]] will be reverted anyway unless
there is plenty of talk-page discussion about each point first, so maybe
it wouldn't hurt to make this restriction more technically-based.