David Gerard wrote:
On 18/11/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Sat, 18 Nov 2006 00:00:29 +0000, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The Community(tm) is far too often collectively an idiot
And yet we trust it to edit the world's biggest encyclopaedia...
Not in any way a contradiction. The wisdom of crowds happens when it happens. The Community has shown it can write an encyclopedia. The Community has shown it's really bad at dealing with many of the indirect processes involved. Just as with people, ability in one area does not confer ability in another, and I'm surprised you seem to think it does.
I find some value in the concept of the wisdom of crowds, but the crowd here is the Wikimedia community as a whole, and not some self-appointed committee of the self-righteous that thinks it's a crowd because of the noise it makes.
Sam's first words in addressing this issue were "I've just come across". This was on Nov. 17, but the actual page was started Sept. 20. That's almost two months. It was probably a stroke of luck that Sam found it at all, and one wonders what other occult rules have snuck through waiting to strike at the unwary.
It is next to impossible for active encyclopedia writers to grasp the implications of such proposals. At first glance it would seem that rules like the one proposed would deal only with the people who have consistently bad behaviour to start with. In the short run that could be very true. What concerns me as that the next generation of literalists will take this in directions that were so simplistically ignored by those impatient to have their own pet inconveniences addressed.
Is it any wonder that we need to get our rule-making processes under control?
(re-sent) Ec