[Foundation-l] Privacy policy, statistics and rankings

[Michael Snow]

wiki-list at phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
>> 2. As an editor, you are participating in a collaborative process,
>> which has quite a lot of meritocracy, so your contribution to the
>> project matters. 
>>     
> Either an action/edit is good or it is not. Why would previous editing 
> history make any difference to the objective facts of the edits? Does 
> the input from someone new have less merit then someone with 'history'? 
> Because that isn't an example of a meritocracy its a clique.
>   
This argument is simplistic and seductive, but mistaken on many levels. 
It assumes that every last unit that matters can be isolated, and 
evaluated purely in that isolation. We learn otherwise from examples 
like the scientific understanding of actual matter, which shows the 
limits of such reductionist thinking.

An edit is an event or a change in state (maybe a physicist might like 
to call it a "phase"), but it is not an "objective fact" in the sense 
you are arguing, even if it hopefully deals in objective facts. We refer 
to "editorial judgment" in what we do because there are definite 
judgments involved, which can certainly be evaluated but cannot be 
reduced to purely mechanical independent processes. Otherwise, we would 
simply design a program to make all of the changes automatically for us. 
Instead, things must be evaluated in context, and quite often the 
context is much more enlightening to the evaluation than the thing in 
isolation. Imagine trying to deal with vandalism on a wiki with no means 
of connecting one inappropriate edit with another.

Human knowledge does not progress in this fashion; it does not begin at 
the subatomic level and move outward. Although this has been the cause 
of many fits and starts in its overall development, it is for very good 
reason that knowledge works from a rather larger picture.

--Michael Snow