New subject: Wikipedia's destiny

27 Feb 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:

...
 An excellent argument for why AfD should never be
democracy-based (or
believed to be that way). In these situations, you almost need someone
to step up, say, "Look, I actually know something about entomology. I
believe this insect is notable", wipe all the existing votes, and say
"now, does anyone actually disagree?"
It also seems to me that "ignorance-based debates" are not in
themselves harmful, provided that there are mechanisms such that they
don't drown out the informed. Everyone's worst nightmare is the 10
pokemon fans drowning out the tenured professor in his own field. But
does it actually happen? 

It has already happened, on webcomics - a dedicated few editors worked
hard to alienate and drive off actual experts (while an actual
academic expert who's a Wikipedian tried to stop it happening), and
tried to force through that an expert could be outvoted by the proudly
ignorant. This led to Comixpedia forking the contributor base. Others
have seen this debacle and declared they want to have nothing to do
with Wikipedia while it perpetrates this sort of jawdropping idiocy,
and I'm having a very hard time convincing them otherwise. They don't
even want to use the GFDL because (2) it's complicated and unobvious
(1) it's too closely associated with Wikipedia. See past discussion on
this very list.

- d.

Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's destiny