What we look like to a discouraged editor:
http://ploum.net/post/222-why-i-don-t-contribute-to-wikipedia-anymore
Note the blogs as reference issue.
Fred
I especially liked this part:
"It's a common story in the human species. First, we want to achieve a goal. Second, we discover that we are all different[2] and that we need some rules to organize our work. Third, we make the rules really complicated to fit every corner case. Fourth, we completely forget the goal of those rules and we apply them blindly for the sake of it. Fifth, we punish or kill those who don't follow the rules as strictly as we do."
On 04/02/2011, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
"It's a common story in the human species. First, we want to achieve a goal. Second, we discover that we are all different[2] and that we need some rules to organize our work. Third, we make the rules really complicated to fit every corner case. Fourth, we completely forget the goal of those rules and we apply them blindly for the sake of it. Fifth, we punish or kill those who don't follow the rules as strictly as we do."
To be perfectly honest, I've not really seen that happen; although people will often get their work reverted for not following rules. I cannot think of a single example of people getting banned for not following rules (other than copyvios and behavioral rules).
I've much more often seen people, or even worse, groups of people, tearing up rules and just doing something fairly random, often because they think it "reads better" or because they just don't like something or other(?)
One of the weaknesses of Wikipedia is actually that of accuracy. It's not that it doesn't happen, in fact it very frequently is accurate, but accuracy only occurs because individuals put it into articles, whereas there are often groups of people quite happy to systematically remove accurate information.
As the Wikipedia moves towards some arbitrary definition of notional 'completion', can anyone point to a board or mechanism in the Wikipedia which is specifically for maintaining and ensuring technical accuracy of articles?
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 1:48 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 04/02/2011, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
"It's a common story in the human species. First, we want to achieve a goal. Second, we discover that we are all different[2] and that we need some rules to organize our work. Third, we make the rules really complicated to fit every corner case. Fourth, we completely forget the goal of those rules and we apply them blindly for the sake of it. Fifth, we punish or kill those who don't follow the rules as strictly as we do."
To be perfectly honest, I've not really seen that happen; although people will often get their work reverted for not following rules. I cannot think of a single example of people getting banned for not following rules (other than copyvios and behavioral rules).
I think the comment by Nathan would be an accurate assessment of the history of the Verifiability and No Original Research policies, whose meaning has mutated so much that their initial, perfectly reasonable origins have been lost to myth and legend.
- Carl
"It's a common story in the human species. First, we want to achieve a goal. Second, we discover that we are all different[2] and that we need some rules to organize our work. Third, we make the rules really complicated to fit every corner case. Fourth, we completely forget the goal of those rules and we apply them blindly for the sake of it. Fifth, we punish or kill those who don't follow the rules as strictly as we do."
To be perfectly honest, I've not really seen that happen; although people will often get their work reverted for not following rules. I cannot think of a single example of people getting banned for not following rules (other than copyvios and behavioral rules).
Perhaps not banned, but driven away from frustration. To select just one from a myriad of examples, take the alt text cult at en.wiki's featured article process.
The basic idea of alt text is sensible: vision impaired people deserve a text substitute for images they cannot see. Surely Wikipedia's best articles would provide that.
So alt text became mandatory at featured article candidates. All images needed alt text, standards developed for alt text, alt text needed to be rewritten several times to meet the exacting standards.
Meanwhile, reviewers remained remarkably lax about the images themselves and resisted commonplace suggestions such as the idea that maps ought to be legible. The last time I checked several en:wiki featured articles I found multiple instances of misattributed public domain claims that ought to have been moved off Commons and reuploaded locally at en:wiki with nonfree use rationales.
Correct license and legibility are minimum expectations. The overall standard for media content is so low that the article about Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech reached featured status without any media component to see or hear that speech, which is public domain and readily available from several sources.
Yet text developed a cult status out of proportion to its actual importance. The problem is one of site culture where pointing out these imbalances risks a vindictive response from well connected people.