On Feb 5, 2005, at 7:24 AM, David Gerard wrote:
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) [050205 09:24]:
I think there is a good deal of substance in Larry Sanger's and Robert McHenry's criticism. They are correct as long as they describe the problem they see. However, the outsider's perceived anti-elitism doesn't necessarily originate from an intentional anti-elitism in the community. And since it isn't intentional, it is quite impossible to "abandon" this anti-elitism, so Larry fails provide a solution. He suggests a fork of the project. Yes, maybe he should try this.
He specifically didn't suggest a fork, as far as I can see - he wanted to change *this* project's working methods.
Given how wikipedia is structured, anyone with the server power can fork anytime they are willing to sponge down the material. And as for anti-elitism, it is has POVs too, often notable and documentable, and which should be present.
A great deal of the thrash on this issue is because in Wikipedia one can "look inside the sausage factory" and see the infighting and arguing that goes on. One can't see this in academia. Imagine if every academic journal had a section after each article of all of the drama processing that went into the paper - academia wouldn't quite look as shiny. Or do we need to bring up Charles Van Doren's role in the 21 scandal back in the 20th century?
The truth of much of Larry's criticism is that it is annoying for someone who knows the material to have to fight with people who don't, and wikipedia's rules are not currently structured for the impatient academic, who views the world as he glides into class, dumps his POV, and obliterates poor dissenting undergraduates with withering objections and a few points off on class participation. In fact, even fairly patient people have levels of "wikistress" which are probably higher than is sustainable.
Improvements do need to be made, many of our mechanisms are not well implemented and are frustrating to deal with. We still need to integrate citations into our text in a more thoroughly wiki manner (and here I will insert a crass plug for getting more people involved with wikicite which would do just that), we do need to improve how we handle disputes, and we do need to improve a host of other details.
Sanger's points do have merit, however, before taking measures of the kind he proposes, we should continue to place faith in the mechanism of participatory dialectic that has produced more than most people would have thought possible in a very short time.