Thank you Ivan for a voice of reason. Your statements seem perfectly
accurate.
The gains made by editable comments are minor: The community can
collaboratively prevent flamewars and edit spelling.
The losses are major: The community could prevent speech that they deem
offensive, which is an violation of free speech in general, (especially
since people often consider differing viewpoints "offensive" and would
edit them out) and people would not have their comments represented as
written, which makes the discussion difficult to follow at best and
pointless at worst.
To say exactly why it IS wrong that I edit other people's comments:
This has as much to do with free speech as the concept of wikis in
general. (Go read "Free Software, Free Society" for a good chunk of
Stallman on the issue of opinion writing.) The purpose of an
encyclopedia is to be informative about specific topics, hopefully in a
NPOV manner as far as this is possible. Because of this goal, the wiki
structure is amazing--the wiki structure fulfills the goal through
collaboration.
A message board, comment thread, or whatever you want to call it, does
NOT have this purpose. The purpose is to discuss something. More
fundamentally, the purpose of *my comment* is to represent *my opinion*,
which is not subject to the bounds of an encyclopedia article.
Therefore, my comment as posted fulfills this goal in a way directly
proportional to my ability to express myself. Assuming I can express
myself sufficiently to reflect my thoughts, then my comment *as posted*
fulfills the purpose of a comment 100%. Editing of any fashion only
harms the effectiveness of my comment--it makes it fulfill less of its
purpose, whereas editing an encyclopedia article improves the
effectiveness thereof.
That is why comments DO "belong" to their authors, not in a sense of
ownership per se, (they belong to the community for reading and to
inform the community about the poster's opinion) but because any changes
to those comments by others defeat the philosophical purpose of a
comment/threaded discussion.
Thanks for reading. No invective responses, please.
Take care,
--
Christian Sieber
Brigham Young University
Ivan Krstic wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
>>Secondarily I want to be able to fix spellings, in the faint hope that
>>it will help some people learn better spelling. Again, the only people
>>who would object to this would be people who can't spell and are
>>therefore unsuitable for writing an encyclopedia anyway.
>
>
> Totally broken reasoning.
>
>
>>I've heard many reasons for maliciously changing an article. Yet
>>articles on Wikipedia tend to get better. Interesting, innit?
>
>
> That's an irrelevant non-answer to Ryan's question.
>
>
>>No, the purpose of this was to test your reaction. You fell right for it
>>exactly the way I expected: you picked up only on the emotional side of
>>the paragraph (taking it as an insult)
>
>
> Do you understand how conceited this makes you sound?
>
>
>>And this highlights what I mean: you (and many other people) only object
>>to being able to edit comments because it somehow "feels" wrong. You
>>can't really say why it *is* wrong.
>
>
> You need to relax, and start spending less time writing
> borderline-offensive e-mail to people who are trying to reason
> constructively, and more time thinking about what they're saying. I can
> tell you exactly why it *is* wrong: comments are not Wikipedia articles,
> even if you seem to be constantly confounding the two.
>
> A Wikipedia article isn't signed by a single person's name. It doesn't
> represent the views of an individual, but tries to become an objective
> reflection of its topic. As Brion puts it, a wiki is a place where you
> let wackos edit your site, and with luck, the good wackos outnumber the
> bad. The iterative editing process is a good way to ensure eventual NPOV
> conformance.
>
> Comments are absolutely different. They are written and signed by a
> single person, represent only that person's views, have no requirement
> of adherence to a NPOV, and that means that essentially none of the
> reasons that Wikipedia articles are editable by everyone apply to them.
> If allowing comment cross-editing was in any way beneficial, the popular
> web-based discussion forums with tens of millions of posts would have,
> without a doubt, adopted such a model quite a while ago. There's a
> reason they haven't done it.
>
> I am not interested in continuing this discussion further, so please
> refrain from writing a snide reply that questions my intelligence so as
> to "test my reaction".
>