On 8/11/06, maru dubshinki marudubshinki@gmail.com wrote:
"Article squatters are the feudal lords of Wikipedia and the only way to displace someone is to spend a great deal of time fighting with them, possibly escalating through the central authority. No doubt there exist article squatters who make it there mission to work with others to improve content but, in my samples, the trend is more towards censorship."
It'd be great to see his "samples." In most instances where people are simply unilaterally rejected they are usually trying to push a strong, un-sourced, un-neutral agenda. Even in cases where editors are very protective of articles, in *my* "samples" it is rare that the entire group is against genuine improvement, corrections, and additions. Even articles which are rather tightly controlled by editors ([[Evolution]] as an example), major changes happen every few weeks or so when someone new comes to the page and says "Hey, I don't think this section is correct or clear." They are, however, against things which contradict our content policies, or people with severe POV axes to grind show up and try and re-write the page into a Creationist screed.
The exact implementation of the policies is always open to some leeway, but the epistemic goals of the policies themselves (which ideally try to root Wikipedia in reliable knowledge and disallow its use as a place where quacks and spammers can run rampant) are surely commendable. Of course, one can call all quality control "censorship," but you'd have to have a pretty liberal sense of what it would mean to have a reliable encyclopedia if you don't believe in any checks on knowledge. And in fact that has been tried before.
And those that don't like them CAN start a fork. Wikipedia itself doesn't have to try and host multiple versions and all of that slog which makes places like everything2 so unreliable and unmanageable. It would be trivial for me to start a "World War II" encyclopedia licensed under the GDFL which used Wikipedia content as a base. The problem isn't that it couldn't be done, but that it would be hard to convince people to spend their time wrangling over my little fork rather than the big dog. But that's the case with all Open Source models. And in fact lots of crank groups are happy to fork -- the Neo-Nazis had a wiki for awhile, and the Creationists have a wiki too. Best of luck to them.
Strangely this fellow does not seem to interrogate WHY Wikipedia has been successful. It is NOT the first Wiki. It is not the only place on the internet where people can "edit this page" or contribute knowledge. Despite the many attacks often levied against Wikipedia's accuracy, it remains massively popular in comparison with any similar alternatives. Why? Perhaps it is because the model of de-facto-centralization-with-the-opportunity-to-fork-if-you-really-want-to actually works pretty well. The human resources issue puts a high price on forking, but since human resources are the breeder reactor which keeps this factory pumping, that's not a bad thing (if people could easily diffuse, then no one place would build up the critical mass needed to keep high enough production and maintenance for long term success). The option to fork is always there, and occasionally probably does serve as a pressure-release valve. And in the end, forcing people to come together and work out content issues under a reasonable epistemic model actually might end up producing better content than one would get under a "free for all" model.
Science is often criticized as conservative in its treatment of knowledge, and the rejection of controversial ideas is often decried as "censorship" by those so rejected. But philosophers of science have long argued that this conservatism actually is what results in its knowledge being generally reliable and, in the end, useful for practical ends. Sure, it makes mistakes sometimes. Sure, sometimes those controversial ideas end up being correct. But I think it is pretty self-evident that systems of knowledge generation which are concerned with quality-control, even to the point of epistemic conservatism, end up producing more reliable knowledge than those which are "anything goes." If we had unlimited resources and unlimited time, yes, we could all work tirelessly to flesh out every conceivable possibility for "truth." But it would be a wasteful endeavor. Methodology is that which cuts down on options so that we focus only on the most likely to produce results. As with science, with Wikipedia, if one does not take too much offense from the overwrought and pretentious analogy.
FF