Hoi, I do not know if uniformity is good. Actually I doubt very much it is good; one of the pillars of Wikipedia is "ignore all rules" and uniformity assumes that people have to comply with a format. Uniformity means that everybody shares the same values, works in a same way. Uniformity means that there can be no change as it would destroy the uniformity.
We should have communities of people working together on topics and when, as a result of a good collaboration, there may be some uniformity and this will be welcome as a by product. It should not be an aim in and of itself.
It is like having the people who only do patrolling content determine what content should look like. It is not their game. They are reactive, they are not active. They do not assume good faith because it is too easy to find what is wrong. Often they are correct, but having them determine rules is absolutely dangerous. They go for the blanket rules. They only look at the current patterns and do not have the vision to see how much opportunity is lost.
I was told that the English Wikipedia was proposing a blanket ban for paid for content. It was as expected a person who is proud to be only patrolling who wrote the piece I was referred to. It is unlikely that this person has any notion of other projects/languages it is just reactive and imho sad. It is sad because the text of this proposal was done in such a way that you cannot be against such a proposal.. It is a hopeless proposal if there is also this need for the WMF to reach out. It is hopeless because this type of determinism does not allow for some common sense policies. It is hopeless because it shows there is no faith that some good can come out of collaboration with other organisations. It is myopic.
Uniformity is not necessarily good. No paid for contributions is not necessarily good. Blanket policies are almost always not necessarily good. It takes consensus coming from some polite conversations to determine instances where conventional wisdom is in need for renewal with some alternate approaches.
Thanks, GerardM
Marco Chiesa schreef:
On 3/7/07, Frederick Noronha fred@bytesforall.org wrote:
Could someone hazard a guess on which areas the Wikipedia is strong in, and which areas it is still lacking? FN
I think Wikipedia is really strong in some pop culture niches (yes,
Pokemon may be one of that) and is weaker in some more scholarly subjects. But this varies from project to project and from topic to topic. There are articles which are the most complete essay ever written on the topic, there are articles that simply suck. Uniformity is something we're weak (basically people write about what they know and/or care about). We are strong in correcting factual mistakes, we are weak because we cannot guarantee if what we say is correct. We are strong because we give access to basic information of very many things to a huge lot of people, and for most of them we offer enough. We're far from being perfect, there's a lot to improve, but we're good at it.
Marco/Cruccone