On 12/27/06, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
From: Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 17:46:56 -0800 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)
Marc Riddell wrote:
From: Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 13:54:50 -0800 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)
Marc Riddell wrote:
Back to some basics of my argument, or proposal, or whatever it has
become:
I am not talking about 'experts'. If I see an edit has been made to
an
Article in WP I would like to be able go to that Article's History
Page and
see the 'source' (person) of that edit, with a User Name in Blue.
Then, if
I choose, I can go to that corresponding User Page and learn something
about
that editor - it really is that simple!
Well, if you just want a "it would be nice if", we already encourage people to create accounts and to tell us a little about themselves. So now I don't know why you're even bringing this up.
Stan
Stan,
I didn't & don't use the phrase "it would be nice if". "Encourage"
should
become "insist" - that's why I brought it up.
OK then, you want to "insist" that they supply information about themselves - that means you're talking policy that we enforce, not just a guideline or a general recommendation. How much information? Can a person be banned because of a user page that doesn't list every degree earned? If not, then how do you enforce your insistence that they share their personal details? What if the information is not true? How is anybody going to tell anyway? There are a lot of "John Smith"s in the world - you'd need a government ID to reliably determine which ones actually graduated from MIT in 1982, and I don't think the Foundation really wants to be in the business of user authentication, not least because many countries have strict privacy laws that would require a major rewrite of the wiki software in order to meet the legal
requirements.
WP oldtimers really have thought all this through already.
Stan
Stan,
Every single thing you've said here is a reason not to act. Are you content with the way things are now as pertains to User Pages?
Marc
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I am not totally content, personally, but I see this as a question of the type of organization we want to be.
Sure, in an ideal world, everyone's real name, and verifyable credentials, are hanging out there for review and confirmation.
But it wouldn't be Wikipedia if we forced people to do that, and wouldn't have nearly as much content.
Nupedia and Citizendum are experiments with other tradeoff optimizations along these lines. Nupedia pretty much failed, in the sense of delivering enough content to be useful. Citizendum is an open question. Wikipedia has grown like mad because it chose to be very open; the question of where truly optimial "grown like mad" versus "somewhat better content" tradeoffs leave us is not answered yet.
All of these are volunteer organizations. Everyone brings to a volunteer organization who and what they are, and the time that they can contribute. How many people you will get to volunteer depends on the nature of the restrictions and percieved benefits.