-----Original Message----- From: David Gerard [mailto:dgerard@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 03:03 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Harassment sites
On 15/10/2007, fredbaud@waterwiki.info fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
The encyclopedia is the work of the community, its creation. Thus the encyclopedia is dependent on the viability and integrity of the community.
Yes, but if it comes down to one or the other ... then what?
- d.
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It cannot do so. Maintenance of the community is necessary for the maintenance of the encyclopedia. To fail to maintain and support the the community is to fail to provide the prerequisites necessary for continuance of the encyclopedia in its current dynamic form.
Although, one may overdo it. But overdoing it is to fail to maintain and support the community in an optimum way.
Fred
fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
On 15/10/2007, fredbaud@waterwiki.info fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
The encyclopedia is the work of the community, its creation. Thus the encyclopedia is dependent on the viability and integrity of the community.
Yes, but if it comes down to one or the other ... then what?
It cannot do so. Maintenance of the community is necessary for the maintenance of the encyclopedia. To fail to maintain and support the the community is to fail to provide the prerequisites necessary for continuance of the encyclopedia in its current dynamic form.
Not only can it do so, but I believe it does all the time in small ways. Communities are made out of people, and we eternally have people leaving because they don't like the way it's going. And that's ok.
But what if comes down to the community or the project on a large scale? As you know, Fred, communities are prone to capture by special interest groups. If Wikipedia had gone differently, it could have ended up running out of control as, say, a tabloid journalism site or nothing more than Geocities-style fan tribute pages.
In that case, the right thing would not have been to say, "Oh, well, that's what the community wants. Let's call it 'the gossip rag anybody can edit'." In extreme circumstances, the right thing would have been for the Foundation to destroy the community and start fresh. This is know as "hot tubbing" a community:
http://www.plocktau.com/writing/hottub.html
This nuclear option is closely related to the right to fork, which is a fundamental part of open-source efforts:
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RightToFork
Although these sorts of things are dreadful and painful and to be vigorously avoided, it's important to remember that if it really comes down to it, things will be ok. Unix has had more than 30 years of drama and forking, and it's doing just fine:
http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html
So in the end, that's why we have "absolute and non-negotiable" things like NPOV. The community is really important, and we should treasure and nurture it. But ultimately, if we have to choose, we pick the encyclopedia.
William
On 15/10/2007, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
In that case, the right thing would not have been to say, "Oh, well, that's what the community wants. Let's call it 'the gossip rag anybody can edit'." In extreme circumstances, the right thing would have been for the Foundation to destroy the community and start fresh. This is know as "hot tubbing" a community: http://www.plocktau.com/writing/hottub.html
Note that the Foundation has done this before, e.g. French Wikiquote, which was so riddled with copyright violations they deleted it and started again blank.
And when a Wikimedia wiki fails at NPOV, the Foundation will indeed close it or whack it upside the head, e.g. Moldovan Wikipedia (closed) or Belarusian Wikipedia (moved to a special name for the "classical" variant enforced on the wiki by its community).
i.e. the community can't vote against NPOV, no matter how they twist and turn to try to do so.
This nuclear option is closely related to the right to fork, which is a fundamental part of open-source efforts: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RightToFork
And getting good backups is becoming more of a priority, making it easier to fork if a given community goes bad. This should also take the pressure off: those who want a Wikipedia that doesn't include material on people they don't like can have one.
Although these sorts of things are dreadful and painful and to be vigorously avoided, it's important to remember that if it really comes down to it, things will be ok. Unix has had more than 30 years of drama and forking, and it's doing just fine: http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html
Mostly because Linux came along and whacked the rest upside the head.
So in the end, that's why we have "absolute and non-negotiable" things like NPOV. The community is really important, and we should treasure and nurture it. But ultimately, if we have to choose, we pick the encyclopedia.
Precisely.
- d.
On 10/15/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/10/2007, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Although these sorts of things are dreadful and painful and to be vigorously avoided, it's important to remember that if it really comes down to it, things will be ok. Unix has had more than 30 years of drama and forking, and it's doing just fine: http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html
Mostly because Linux came along and whacked the rest upside the head.
Actually, we had the University of California, Berkeley release the essentially AT&T-Free 4.3 Net 2 BSD, followed by several spinoff projects from the Net2 release in the same timeframe as Linux (386BSD, which spun out FreeBSD, NetBSD, and BSDI). Had Linus been hit by a bus (perish the thought) in 1991 we'd have had a very similar open source movement, just with a different free flavor of Unix.
It's true that open source Unix kicked the industry upside the head to some degree, but the particular flavor wasn't important.
On 10/15/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Actually, we had the University of California, Berkeley release the essentially AT&T-Free 4.3 Net 2 BSD, followed by several spinoff projects from the Net2 release in the same timeframe as Linux (386BSD, which spun out FreeBSD, NetBSD, and BSDI). Had Linus been hit by a bus (perish the thought) in 1991 we'd have had a very similar open source movement, just with a different free flavor of Unix.
And if USL hadn't sued BSDI and UCB, and thus cast a shadow across free BSD, it's quite possible that Linux would have remained an interesting reimplementation of Minix for the 386, used by a few hobbyists.
-Matt