On 11/13/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
What we are fighting here is the perception -- rightly or wrongly held, but by nontrivial numbers of people -- that Wikipedia has a tendency to engage in suppressive and outright repressive ways towards some of its critics and towards some viewpoints that it doesn't like to hear.
Right!
And for the record, I personally think Wikipedia does a pretty wonderful job of dealing with the situation, in the long term.
When I look over all the BADSITESesque disputes, for example, everyone one got worked out correctly in the end. When you look over all the pages where these disputes have come up-- Michael Moore, we link to Making Lights and Don Murphy and Prof Black and WP:BADSITES and WP:NPA and the Attack Sites Arbcom and everywhere-- it's always worked out in the end. The Wikipedia system DOES work, in the end.
And even if there is a group of people who would prefer to change Wikipedia into were something a little more community-oriented and a little less enyclopedic-- the fact is, it hasn't worked, and the encyclopeidia has always won out in the end. So while we defintely have brushes with bieng a tad suppressive in the short term, in the long term we get an A+.
And indeed, when I look around, there's only two "active" problems in which the situation hasn't resolved itself in a way that fights this perception of Wikipedia as suppressive.
Persistent Issue One: We still don't have an article on Encyclopedia Dramatica.
It's not that this is a "wrong" decision, but it will be better when we can have such an article. It's jsut that not having an entry on ED does make a look bad.
I live here, so I understand that deletion decisions are complex, and at Wikipedia, coverage is often idiosyncyratic, but is instead a combination of the available sources and interest. This often leads to some bizarre conclusions when you compare coverage across articles-- as Colbert commented-- "any site that's got a longer entry on 'Truthiness' than on Lutherans has its priorities straight".
So I won't actually criticize the deletion of the ED article, I'll just say generally-- Wikipedia will be a better place when we are able to write a NPOV, NOR, Verifiable article on Encyclopedia Dramatica. That should be true of absolutely any subject.
If we can't have such an article-- if ED just isn't notable enough for us to have any sources to work with-- then that's the way it is, and it can't be helped. But I hope that won't be the case as soon as possible, because it doesn't "look good" not to have an article on it, and people who doesn't understand Wikipedia are probably inclined to suspect we don't cover it out of malice.
Outsiders have never heard of WP:OTHERSTUFF, and when they see we have a lengthy featured article on Spoo, a fictional food product from a cancelled sci-fi tv show, but lack even a stub on ED, it will contribute to the perception that we deleted the ED article out of bias.
Persist Issue Two: Rampant incivility The second problem that we're still dealing with is this persistent bug of falsely accusing people of being in support of, in favor of, or in league with banned users. I've discussed it extensively here, and in two different essays, so I reiterate it here.
Other than that-- we're actually doing great in the long term. Everywhere else, things have worked out completely non-suppressively in the end.
Of course, we should still work to make sure these outbreaks of embarassing transitory supressivess are as infrequent as possible. Making Lights and Michael Moore, for example, really showed us as our worst, but of course, they were "ancient history" in wikipedia time, so hopefully we won't have to go down those roads again the future.
Alec