[Foundation-l] It is high time we decided upon global Wikimedian principles

[Birgitte SB]

--- On Mon, 8/4/08, Dror K <dror1975 at icqmail.com> wrote:


> 
> These are only a few questions that are not properly
> addressed, and the
> system doesn't work well anymore. This kind of problems
> rise more often
> as more people write in Wikipedia and as the communities
> grow, and we
> fail to supply answers and solutions.
> 

I don't know that there are any straightforward answers, but there are solutions.  However in this thread you have presented a solution without making very clear where there are questions not being addressed, which makes it hard to help direct to you existing solutions.  

It is much easier to show the defects in your proposed solution.  The underlying issue is that for anything to be accomplished on a wiki critical mass is required.  Not only to build it general, but for any particular task or enforcement.  Having the wikis work out the local guidelines on these issues themselves is necessary to build the critical mass to see the guidelines are followed in practice.  I am very hopeful the process could be helped along with targeted workshops, but it still must be done by local editors.  Until they grasp why NPOV or OR is dealt with in a certain way and more importantly what happens when they are neglected, they will not care about the issue no matter what the policy reads on the page. 

It is local admins caring about the issue enough to require others to change there behavior through social pressure which is the only way to fix the issues. en.WP for all that the policies and guidelines say about references has 140,000 articles *tagged* as completely lacking sources.  There has been no watershed event like the press received over BLP's to form a critical mass of people who really care about unreferenced articles. Someday if a hoax that has existed unchecked on Wikipedia for five years and is reported in the New York Times, that might create the critical mass. Or it might build in an internal fashion, it may be simply a matter of more urgent issues being solved first before.  I am certain every wiki has policies that are not practiced as you would imagine when reading them, so even if we could give everyone a perfected top 5 policies; the problem would still exist.   Besides likely being ineffective, handing such policies to admins to
 enforce would completely backfire (why would be another entire essay).  We need to admins to be invested in the particulars of the issue itself.  That comes from policy building on a local level.  The overall guidelines of Wikipedias are embodied in being an encyclopedia of free knowledge that anyone can edit.  If anyone can edit it, NPOV is the only practical method.  If it is to be an encyclopedia, OR will be avoided. As along "free" is understood a free content, the solution there are limited as well.  The sister projects overall guidelines are also embodied in their missions.

Birgitte SB