Erik Moeller wrote:
On 9/1/07, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>
wrote:
This strikes me as somewhat reversed from our
typical practice---we have
goals, like creating a neutral, wide-coverage, multi-lingual
encyclopedia, or a repository of free media, etc., and then we choose
means to those goals based on what we find works and doesn't work. We
use wikis, for example, because they work better than Nupedia did, not
because we love wikis; and we use consensus-based decision making
because it seems to work better than the alternatives, not because we
have some attachment to consensus-based political systems ([[en:WP:NOT]]
has said as much for many years).
To some extent I agree with you. However:
- Quality (which encompasses many dimensions) may at first seem
blatantly obvious, but it's quite clear that many similar knowledge
collecting websites do _not_ emphasize quality, sometimes deliberately
so to focus on collecting large amounts of factoids or uploads (think
UrbanDictionary. YouTube). I'm not sure how much one can believe in
quality as a "value", though.
At first blush quality seems like an obvious value, but when you reflect
upon it it ends up looking like some kind of weaselly tautology.
Everyone except the vandals wants a better Wikipedia. Even the
neo-Nazis, when considered from their own warped perspective, want to
improve Wikipedia. As long as individuals insist on their own
interpretation of quality it becomes a convenient justification for all
manner of incivility, for pompous notions of notability and for removing
concepts before their full impact can be evaluated. An obsession with
quality destroys quality.
- I do not believe that we should ever sacrifice
friendliness "for the
greater good". At the most, we should downgrade it to politeness, but
we should never be impolite or unfriendly, and in fact build a
community which strongly emphasizes this throughout its projects.
(Mind you, I do not claim that I or anyone else can always live up to
that goal, but I consider it a failing when we do not do so.) Anyone
who has been on the Internet for a while knows that this idea is far
from self-evident.
Absolutely. Whether you call it friendliness or politeness doesn't
really matter. And too, we always need to be aware of our human
fallibilities, to the point where we recognize that we are all prone to
occasionally act out of frustration. Perhaps the implicit value here is
that Wikipedians are as important as Wikipedia, and that the process of
contributing is as important as he contribution itself. Persistent
bullying should be frowned upon as much as any other bad behaviour.
- "Participation" and "openness"
are perhaps a bit shallow, but it
seems clear that we are trying to empower the greatest number of
people possible to make a positive contribution to free knowledge &
free culture. We're not trying to empower idiots and trolls, of
course. How could this goal of empowering _good_ contributors be
phrased as a value?
The value is that anybody can edit. Some restrictions remain necessary
to deal with the worst offenders, but they must remain minimal. Some
forms of bad behaviour occur only rarely. For much of these it may be
simpler to just clean up the damage and go on with life instead of
implementing sophisticated prevention measures that make everybody's
life miserable.
I like the slogan "knowledge without
boundaries" because it
encompasses, in my view, this element of openness, while also
describing a few other beliefs (the value of knowledge, the idea that
everyone should have access to free education, and so forth).
Perhaps this could shorten to "knowledge unbounded". ;-)
Put out a few possibilities and see which get used.
- I liked the explanation of the word
"pioneering" that the group gave
which came up with it. We're not always the first to come up with a
great feature, but we sure as hell are quick to integrate it if it's
libre & useful.
We are well into uncharted paradigms. We ain't seen nothin' yet!
- I do not much like "diversity" as a value
and said as much during
our discussions; it sounds too much like corporate-speak to me without
really signifying much.
Yeah, it's like all those people who say that they have discussed a
variety of solutions to a problem, but are unable to specify a single
one. :-)
Ec