Ray Saintonge wrote:

The sad part is that many who quote or apply the rules have absolutely no understanding of what went into producing those rules.

I think this is the real problem more than the rules themselves. I had an unpleasant experience about six months ago with someone who nominated the [[Drupal]] article for deletion. Drupal is a content management system that has had several books written about it; Wikipedia articles on it exist in at least a dozen languages; and the English-language article has existed for years with dozens if not hundreds of individual editors participating in it. The article met every test for notability, but it got nominated anyway.

Worse yet, the same individual also kept trying to delete specific pieces of information from the article, such as the link to Drupal's own website (which he called "linkspam"). The individual who kept doing this would frequently cite Wikipedia policies, but his usage of them was arbitrary, capricious and often contrary to the actual policies themselves.

I got sufficiently irritated with this person that I spent some time reviewing the history of his contributions to Wikipedia and found that he didn't have a pattern of similar behavior outside the [[Drupal]] article. Elsewhere, he generally seemed to be a competent, sincere contributor. By his own admission, however, he didn't know anything about Drupal and didn't care to learn anything about it. The result was that he was mechanically applying rules without sufficient knowledge of the topic at hand to grasp when and whether the rules applied. The problem, in other words, wasn't that he lacked understanding of *the rules themselves*. Rather, he lacked understanding of *how the rules should be applied in a specific context*.

I don't think there's any way to write rules so perfect that they eliminate this type of problem. It's a people problem, not a rule problem. Maybe we could add a new rule that says people should defer to others when editing articles about topics they don't understand, but (1) the most likely violators of this policy won't read the rule anyway, and (2) even if they do, they probably won't recognize their own ignorance.

I have a solution: a system whereby individual Wikipedians get rated by other users according to their competency as editors in specific topic areas. I estimate that developing the code necessary to make this work properly will take approximately the same number of person- hours as it has taken thus far to write all of Wikipedia. Add to that the number of hours needed to spend arguing about whether such a system is desireable or possible, and we effectively have a problem that will be solved at about the same time as the heat death of the universe. ;-)

-------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever -------------------------------- | Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting: | http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html | | Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting: | https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118 --------------------------------