Hi folks, I am formally proposing that Wikipedia be forked and that a new compendium of human knowledge, Wikipendium, be created as an independent alternative with a more pleasant, respectful, productive, constructive community with simple, clear rules and an unbureaucratic and responsible governance structure.

Maury Markowitz wrote: > Well color me sceptical. Many of the problems you mention on the web page > seem inherant to any large group of humans. I don't see how changing the > rules can, of itself, address the fact that we all have opinions and we all > consider them to be important. As this appears to be a major concern of the > proposal, let me address this directly... > > "Pleasantness and respectfulness will be effectively enforced on Wikipendium" > > The concepts of "pleasantness" and "respectfulness" are very much open to > interpretation - and thus opinion. How are we to decide if a comment is > simply a poke-in-the-ribs for fun, or a seriously nasty note? This is often > difficult in "real life", let alone the limited bandwidth of a text based > media. > > Perhaps it's just me, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that there > can be a set of rules that can address this. Instead, it seems that a > flexible case-by-case basis with many viewpoints is the only way to ensure > that one person's view, the "constables" as you call them, doesn't become > overarching. I believe the system on the Wikipedia had demonstrated itself to > be workable beyond my own belief. > > A word of advice: I had a friend who ran a very successful MUD about a decade > ago. It was created out of the ashes of another MUD with rules very much like > what you are proposing. This first attempt died a hasty death. Their second > attempt was a free-for-all with self-policing by the members. It ran for > years. > > I don't want to sound like a downer, but in my limited experience, more rules > generally makes things worse, not better. Generally the rules themselves > become the points of argument. You can certainly see this on the Wikipedia, > and I have argued on several occasions for re-writing some of them to be > based more on common sense and less on the letter of the law.

I very much agree with this analysis. It is hard to conceive that a saviour will come along and lead the true-believers to the promised land. They will be lucky to find that peace in the promised land lasts as long as five minutes. The underlying ideals are a common thread in many such religious or political movements. Most of these devolve into either tyranny or ineffectuality. Rule-making too often dwells on the relatively rare extreme cases. Devoting our efforts constructively to what kind of a project we want is a lot more fruitful than wasting a lot of time arguing about what to do with the occasional saboteur. It's easy for the builder to see these detailed rules as a threat to fundamental freedoms. It is too easy for these rules to be trotted out in situations that were not imagined when they were written. Ec

Thomas, I looked over your Contribs and found that you have made only 21 mainspace edits since the start of the year, and 10 of those were marked "minor". In that same time you made 46 edits to user talk pages, 121 edits on the Wikipedia namespace, and 45 to Wikipedia talk pages. That's a ratio of 10 to 1. To me this suggests your primary interest in the Wikipedia is to use it as a social networking tool. There's nothing wrong with this, but I think you'll agree that that's not the primary purpose of the system.

Hi folks, I am formally proposing that Wikipedia be forked and that a new compendium of human knowledge, Wikipendium, be created as an independent alternative with a more pleasant, respectful, productive, constructive community with simple, clear rules and an unbureaucratic and responsible governance structure. I believe, along with many others, that Wikipedia community members are frequently unjustifiably hostile towards viewpoints other than their own and towards the users who hold these viewpoints. In addition, I feel that Wikipedia has become too bureaucratic, ineffective, and indecisive and has placed the values of quantity and openness, while important, over those of quality and reliability respectively. I believe that Wikipedia's continued rejection of, and discrimination _against_, experts is outrageous and must be amended, but in a far less elitist and arrogant way than Citizendium has attempted. The official proposal may be found as a blog at http://wikipendium.blogspot.com/ . All people who are interested are invited to participate in discussion there.