POV forked articles are a perennial proposal. They have in fact been implemented on other wikis, such as WikInfo. However, it seems in practice that readers want one place to go, not several.
It has been proposed before, certainly. The most important feature though is the use of the web of trust between peer reviewers/users/authors to rate each article, the decentralization and thus democratization of the peer reviewing system, ie the creation of a personalized attack resistant trust metric.
The fact that there is only one article per topic that is obtained through consencus is the reason why wikipedia cannot guarantee the credibility of the created information. Content created through collaboration should be able to be referenced by academic papers, should contain new research topics and should be able to be a medium for the creation of new ideas and not simply the writing down of previous ideas.
@Stirling
I think we can avoid the arrows impossibility theorem by not striving for consensus at all.
When someone likes an idea from a different article, he will simply "merge" it with his.
@all
I know that this is very different from what wikipedia has been known to be and it is understandable that this huge change can only happen from outside of wikipedia.
2012/10/27 Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net
There is no general solution to this problem, by way of background:
http://tech.mit.edu/V123/N8/8voting.8n.html http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/arrows-impossibility-theorem.asp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/~gean/art/p1116.pdf
There is no general solution that allows all preferences in all orders, selects all group preferences in order, and forbids dictators – that is individuals that break ties. Wikipedia as with anywhere else. What can happen is that layers can be put in place, and a priori choices made. Wikipedia picked non-dictatorship very highly. The structure of wikipedia is meant to reduce the roll of dictators, and particularly ones that have a stake in the matter. It is imperfect at this, and two common problems are paid editors, and people who want to violate transitivity. On wikipedia, dictatorship is delayed as much as possible, and it is unlinked to some extent from preference.
While wikipedia is very direct democracy most of the time. Academia has chosen feudalism. PIs (Primary Investigators) are dictators in their own area, and owe fealty to some larger institution. They accept a system of mediation, which includes peer review, as part of the grant of power. This system is wildly imperfect, and going through convulsions, convulsions brought on by the same realities that created Wikipedia: the high cost of gatekeepers and the reduction in the value they add. In Wikipedia's case, standard encyclopedias don't spend enough on writing, and a great deal on maintaining their position, the case of academia, the high cost of academic journals, who spend all of their money on staying important – articles are written for free, and peer reviewers work for free.
There are forums for gather pre-consensus, including talks, conferences, starting ones own journal, open source journals, and ArchiveX. Wikipedia is not one of these. It is not a community for the vetting of utterly new ideas. It can alter consensus, because often the public discourse is dominated by money and network effects, which involve themselves in suppression of other ideas, that is violating transitivity and admissibility. By balanced and neutral coverage, it gives general intelligent readers access to a source of information, which is directed as explanation. Read the links. One is a short bastardized example, for investopedia, one is a kind of coffee hour discourse, from hit, one a moderately technical exercise without enough context. I will submit that the best introduction to the theorem, and its context, is wikipedia, because it is not meant to advance a specific career or to be narrowly tailored to a small audience. The system as it is can be painful, but it does work better that various forms of dictatorship or limited admissibility. The purpose of Wikipedia is to move information from early adopters to the early majority and from there to the late majority. It is not for creating early adopters, and is, in fact, intended to be moderately hostile to people trying to do this.
Experts can, and should upgrade articles to include accepted though not preferred ideas in their field, move from basic to advanced content, and clarify explanations. But to expect that editing article A in the standard form gives you the permission to insert original research in B is to violate transitivity.
On Oct 27, 2012, at 4:41 AM, David Gerard wrote:
On 26 October 2012 23:49, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis xekoukou@gmail.com
wrote:
Progress only occurs when there are different views that can coexist.
When
you force the less popular views to disapear into a talk page, ie into obscurity, then the stronger view becomes the only view. So wikipedia is not solving the filter buble problem as it is now. It simply has one filter buble created by the most enduring, by the
strongest.
In my proposal, all different opinions could and should be easiliy accessible.
POV forked articles are a perennial proposal. They have in fact been implemented on other wikis, such as WikInfo. However, it seems in practice that readers want one place to go, not several.
- d.
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