On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Anthere wrote:
Ah, and who do you think would appoint a "site owner" ??? Jimbo ?
Yes, of course. He owns the system, the name, and the machines. He is very generous and liberal, but he is the owner.
Not that I speak for Jimbo of course, but this might be misleading, Lars. Jimmy has *always* been responsive to community concerns--he doesn't just do things without consulting anybody. (Except, of course, *starting* the project of an open content encyclopedia--and I trust we can all be glad that he did that without consulting anybody.) What you're saying here (in several places in your post) makes it sound as if Jimmy holds all the cards, and he makes all the decisions, and if you don't like it, you're going to have to go to the trouble of starting a competing open content project. But this is just completely false. In one very attenuated sense, sure, he's *ultimately* responsible for the decisions about the projects, but that's *only* insofar as the projects happen to reside on his servers. As we all know (you were writing as if this weren't the case), the Wikipedia and Nupedia projects and their policies (or lack thereof!) now take almost all of their cues from rank and file participants.
Some of us support it is also a dictionary... :-)
If the trademark Wikipedia has some meaning (NPOV, etc.), perhaps defined by some charter, that meaning should be the same for all languages. A year ago, Larry Sanger was very clear on the point that "Wikipedia is not a dictionary". So if the French Wikipedia is becoming a dictionary, somebody is breaking this rule. Either the French Wikipedia should straight up, or the rule should be revised. Since it is the trademark owner's (Jimmy's) interest to make sure the trademark keeps its meaning, he should appoint ambassadors who can help him maintain his policy in the various languages.
Again, this is misleading on a number of points. First of all, what Wikipedia stands for has **NOTHING** to do with the fact (if it is a fact--I honestly don't know) that "Wikipedia" is a commercial trademark. By suggesting that, Lars, you are suggesting that it is somehow quite important that Wikipedia policies, as promulgated so far, are bound up with "Wikipedia" being a trademark. But why think that? I'm sorry, but that just sounds silly.
Second, my declaring "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" one year ago obviously is not what would make that (still) Wikipedia policy, if indeed it is (still) Wikipedia policy. Your implication, that policy declarations from Larry are policy by fiat, is precisely the sort of nasty misleading implication I felt throughout my tenure, and it's something I should have thought we had gotten over long ago.
Third, you say that if someone on the French Wikipedia is breaking the "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" rule, they should be stopped or the rule changed; but this implies that *all* rules as formulated on the English Wikipedia are rules for all the rest. This isn't my understanding at all--at least, if nothing has changed since we last visited this issue, the non-English Wikipedias enjoy (and in my opinion *should* enjoy) an extreme amount of autonomy. Jimbo has declared that all wikipedias should share a few very basic policies in common. In fact, the only two that spring to mind immediately are the nonbias policy and the policy that we're working on an encyclopedia. The line between encyclopedia and dictionary is admittedly vague. I personally would insist that we risk producing something of poor quality and little use if we tolerate many stubs that are of dictionary definition length (not to say that we should just delete them outright--we *should* either expand or simply discourage them before they get written in the first place). This is my opinion, and I'll argue for it strenuously, but under no circumstances would I want to say that it should *necessarily* be the policy for the English Wikipedia, let alone all Wikipedias. *Whether* it is accepted as policy rests entirely with community consensus. Not fiat.
Fourth, we have a long and respectable tradition of letting articles go to hell on Wikipedia, as far as policy is concerned, and when people want to clean them up so that they're in accordance with policy, that's grand. So it hardly follows from the fact that one or two people are writing a bunch of dictionary definitions on the French Wikipedia that the policy-- even the French policy, is there is one--on this point should be changed.
Is it or will there be a problem to assert authority to weed out poor contributions in the small and slow-growing non-English Wikipedias?
I rather support keeping poor contributions, they might grow better in time.
This has not been the conclusion of previous discussions on this list regarding the English Wikipedia. People are now actively deleting "stub" articles.
Again, Lars, you misleadingly imply something that makes people look a lot worse than they really are. Please get it right. People are now actively deleting articles that are so completely useless that they don't deserve to be called "stub" articles. If I write an article called "Grant's Tomb" and the content is "The place where Grant is buried," there's nothing at all seriously or obviously wrong with removing that article, or its ilk.
small number, the effect of somebody speaking loudly to challenge these "ideals" gets a lot of power, far too much power on others. I don't think a central power "asserting authority" will solve that point : some contributors just don't want to hear anything about what an english might have said on that subject
This is why I think that an appointed ambassador or governor is needed, who knows the language and has the authority (from Jimmy) to tell people what the policy is, that they can join this list if they want to discuss the policy, and if they cannot accept this policy, then they must leave and start their own project. If you eat in a restaurant or stay in a hotel, you must behave as the owner tells you.
This is ridiculous, for reasons above stated. I'm certain that Jimbo would agree with that assessment, too. The authority for virtually all decisions comes from the community, Lars, and those of us in the community who like it that way would appreciate it if you would not imply otherwise.
Larry