On 9/19/2010 8:21 PM, Robert S. Horning wrote:
On 09/19/2010 06:52 PM, wiki-list(a)phizz.demon.co.uk
wrote:
On 20/09/2010 00:26, Robert S. Horning wrote:
I'm not entirely sure how accurate this is,
so I'm just making a raw
conjecture here that is completely unsupported by facts other than
perhaps by general observations:
Is it possible that the problem with the humanities-related articles on
Wikipedia has more to do with the lack of an existing culture of
"copyleft" or public domain collaboration? It has taken literally
decades of effort that go back even a couple of decades earlier of
similar efforts to put together what is today the "open source movement"
that has produced things like Linux, the GNU tools, and software like
Apache. Wikipedia is a product of this environment too, where many of
those who have participated in developing open source software don't
hesitate to at least add a couple of paragraphs to Wikipedia.
Linux, Apache, and
the GNU Tools were the work of a handful of people.
Others have come along and added a bit here or there or fixed something
or other but I bet that if I were to look at the core source code for
Emacs to day it wouldn't be that much different from when I worked on it
20 years ago.
Software changes either work or they don't and any change ought to be
testable to demonstrate that it adds some new feature or fixes something
broken. But there is a problem with software changes in that most
changes tend to degrade the overall quality of the product in some way.
Overtime, unless someone steps in and does a rewrite the code becomes a
mess, and it happened one change at a time.
The same is true of wikipedia articles, edit by edit, they tend to
degrade. There comes a point when they are 'done' and they knob
polishers need to be told to bugger off and leave them alone.
While I appreciate
extending the analogy, you are missing my point
here. Geeks have been used to the philosophy of collaboratively written
documents (including software) for quite some time and this was
ingrained into at least a significant sub-set of technologically minded
people for quite some time. It is this culture of sharing with one
another and having no stigma of sharing your work and letting
potentially millions of others poke at your work, tweak it or even trash it.
It isn't just this software but the tens of thousands of other
applications that have been built and shared with the world. Wikipedia
was formed from this community where sharing this kind of information
was even a second nature. Indeed it has been encouraged for people of a
technical nature to share the information they know with one another.
What I'm trying to point out is that a similar sub-culture within the
community that works on arts and literature is such a minority that you
might as well not really pay attention to it. Certainly academia isn't
embracing Wikipedia for multiple reasons. That may be part of it as
those in an academic situation tend to be a minority in technical fields
but tend to dominate those with studies in the humanities. They are
also hesitant to work collaboratively and even when that happens it
tends to be very small groups... not groups of dozens or hundreds
involved. A paper on physics may have hundreds of co-authors, but a
similar academic paper on Greek Mythology may only have a couple authors
or a single author. This is a cultural difference that can't be
understated.
I think you two may be talking about issues that overlap as much as
they
are distinct. Perhaps technically-minded people are more connected to
the culture of sharing the way we do it. But I think the "it either
works or it doesn't, and figuring out which is straightforward" notion
of coders could also factor into the equation, as illustrated by your
hypothetical physics and mythology papers. I would expect the more
technical paper to be oriented more towards facts and scientific
hypotheses, things that can be evaluated and proven to "work". Even
though it may require highly specific expertise which not that many
people beyond the paper authors possess, it can be approached in a
similar fashion.
With mythology or other humanities subjects, the academic paper may rely
on some facts or things that are very nearly facts, assumptions that
have universal acceptance though they may not be provable in the usual
scientific sense. But I would expect the paper to contain a great deal
of analysis that consists primarily of opinion, conjecture, and
speculation. Highly informed opinion, conjecture, and speculation, mind
you, and worthy of respect according to the thoughtfulness and expertise
of the authors. Yet it may have difficulty establishing much in the way
of new facts, or even ideas that may eventually come to be assumed as facts.
There are some related consequences that have relevance for Wikipedia as
well. One is that it may be harder to collaborate on works that appear
to involve endorsing views of which you are unsure, hence fewer authors
signing on to a paper and a greater tendency toward a "lone wolf"
approach. I know that personally I feel some slight hesitation when I
edit just a section of an article that I might be seen as responsible
for endorsing the whole (not just that there's no undetected vandalism
or errors, but that the article is well-informed and balanced overall).
Another issue is that the humanities approach to analytical writing is
harder to adapt to a neutral point of view, because that's not really
what you're encouraged to strive for. When writing student papers, I
recall on so many occasions hearing exhortations to make an argument,
take a stand, reach a definite conclusion. With more and more expertise
behind it, that may be great for stimulating academic debate or
advancing particular ideas, but Wikipedia wants that only at a
considerable distance.
These dynamics play out in concerns about article "ownership" manifested
in one direction, or in what David Gerard likes to call Wikipedia's
house style in the other direction. Another manifestation is that it's
probably a bigger challenge for experts in the humanities, broadly
speaking, to persuasively overcome objections from the uninformed. It's
easier for someone to be obtuse and stubbornly fight ideas that are
generally accepted, something that for scientific questions shows up
primarily in the biggest-picture contexts where no one expert can
demonstrate or defend every last conclusion, topics like evolution or
global warming.
--Michael Snow