Everyone reading this list is probably pretty smart - Wikipedia is a nerd magnet, after all.
So I liked this blog post explaining how people fail to share:
http://www.lifebeyondcode.com/2009/12/26/why-some-smart-people-are-reluctant...
Can you explain the obvious to people it isn't obvious to? With references?
- d.
On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 12:30 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Can you explain the obvious to people it isn't obvious to? With references?
Your comment there reminds me of a mini-battle I had on Wikipedia.
I started articles on various forms of published 'criticism'. We already had 'music journalism' but I started ones on, for example, 'dance criticism'; you can see the template that arose at the bottom of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_criticism
So I just started off several articles stating, as blandly as I could, what criticism of those things meant. But I couldn't provide any references and my stubs were tagged for deletion as being original research. Find *examples* of such writings, sure, not a problem at all.
I was merely trying to state the obvious existence of these forms of writing, but because it was so obvious nobody on the web had written *about the writing* itself. There wasn't any meta-level discussion of these things.
User:Bodnotbod
On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 11:30 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Everyone reading this list is probably pretty smart - Wikipedia is a nerd magnet, after all.
So I liked this blog post explaining how people fail to share:
http://www.lifebeyondcode.com/2009/12/26/why-some-smart-people-are-reluctant...
Nice. Most of my wikipedia writing is "current" - stuff I don't actually know much about, but am in the process of sharing. Because "anything is better than nothing", I have no qualms about sharing it.
Can you explain the obvious to people it isn't obvious to? With references?
Yes, I can, but it can be tedious. I'd also comment that some of the most horrible text on Wikipedia is the "obvious" or even "background thinking" level stuff, where people try and write about stuff that is totally obvious to them.
Steve
Can you explain the obvious to people it isn't obvious to? With references?
- d.
Ah, well, that's the advantage of a wiki. If you know what to do and can't explain it, you can {{sofixit}} yourself with others to review and figure things out on their own.
Instruction creep: The dumbing down of the world.
~Keegan
Keegan Paul wrote:
Can you explain the obvious to people it isn't obvious to? With references?
- d.
Ah, well, that's the advantage of a wiki. If you know what to do and can't explain it, you can {{sofixit}} yourself with others to review and figure things out on their own.
Instruction creep: The dumbing down of the world.
It's dumbing down, but that too derives from the premise that everything has an origin. Computer geeks tend to be fanatically logical, and that does not leave much room for alternative explanations or sources. In many subjects we can fill in the blanks later when someone has the time to spend tracing things, but that approach is not shared with those who believe in the immediacy of a deletion debate. The older ones among us, and seniors in general, have an enormous amount of background thinking built up. Nevertheless, we may no longer have access to the references that we used to build this up 40 years ago. A mathematician working through an explanation of a complex theorem should not need to reference why a + b = b +a unless the contrary would be meaningful in that context.
When sourcing and original research rules start to exemplify a phobia about being wrong the system has come around to bite us in the ass. The trickster/raven has come home to roost.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
When sourcing and original research rules start to exemplify a phobia about being wrong the system has come around to bite us in the ass. The trickster/raven has come home to roost.
My personal bugbear is cite tags on facts that are attributed in plaintext rather than within ref tags. In my opinion when the work or the expert voicing her opinion is independently notable in itself/herself, attributing in plain text is not an unreasonable burden on the readability of the text.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
It's dumbing down, but that too derives from the premise that everything has an origin. Computer geeks tend to be fanatically logical, and that does not leave much room for alternative explanations or sources. In many subjects we can fill in the blanks later when someone has the time to spend tracing things, but that approach is not shared with those who believe in the immediacy of a deletion debate.
Ec
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Great thought.
The advantage of the wiki model, and {{sofixit}}, is that it doesn't matter the profession.
I'm not a computer geek, I'm an encyclopedia geek. While my personal work doesn't involve my degree, I did major in history, which leads to this:
http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42
So what we have is an amalgamation of left brain and right brain thinkers working together while building Wikimedia projects, which gets back to my idea of instruction creep interferes with the process of building. It's not an architectural project, we don't have blueprints. Thinking that we do will discourage the "experts/smart people" from contributing. Well, it has as well as will. There's no mitigating factor other than accepting that users will "get" the model of having no deadline and consensus building and work within it, or choose not to no matter the talent or skill/knowledge level.
~Keegan