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(a)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