On 6/12/2011 4:02 a.m., Fred Bauder wrote:
I can quite see why people do think Wikipedia "Byzantine", which is the basic message of what we are talking about. Probably trainee medics curse the immune system as unreasonably complicated. The metaphor doesn't seem to me either too defensive or too stretched. I think we should bear in mind that more and better written "manual pages" would only work better if people had the basic humility to read instructions, at least in the context of complex systems they don't understand.
Charles
On IRC last night I was trying to explain to someone how to put sources into their own words, quite impossible; we do things that are hard and that cannot be expressed in simple understandable rules. Tying to determine notability is one of those things.
In this particular case the person is notable within a small but highly significant community which makes determination difficult.
The complaint that Wikipedia is "closed and unfriendly" is false. Many people responded to the blog posting and we do have procedures to deal with the questions raised. Not that the blogger will get their way; nobody gets that consistently.
Fred
WP may on occasion be an unfriendly experience but it is far from closed. The ease of being able to make edits is well known, which is why we are continually getting rid of spam, vandalism, non-notable info, and trying to maintain balance within articles. But on the other hand, as Fred points out, it is hard editing WP since it has become a complex, bureaucratic behemoth. That is not a criticism - in order to develop and improve the project we need all manner of policy, guidelines, MOS, etc and we have to interact with other editors (of varying expertise about wikis and about the subject material).
Alan