On 6/4/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/3/06, Sam Spade samspade.thomasjefferson@googlemail.com wrote:
People could fax their diploma or some such. It doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. Personally I'd just like to see some '''informed''' party with the final say (i.e. not a random, non-expert admin or arbiter).
And if there's a technical area where the experts have a disagreement, and the one who shows up first happens to be strongly biased in one direction or the other?
What about fields where the number of experts are either tiny, or they are for various reasons grossly unlikely to ever contribute to Wikipedia?
What does it say to people who are jacks-of-many-trades if you institute a policy which says that only a degree is valid qualification, and that it doesn't matter how many fields you may publish in, work professionally in, have patents in, only the ones on your degree matter for WP?
This suggestion seems likely to seriously curb a lot of otherwise qualified involvement.
-- -george william herbert gherbert@retro.com / george.herbert@gmail.com
There is also the other suggestion, that anyone who is contributing to the article counts as a peer. Also there are possibilities for reader involvement, if someone was willing to code a small feature to allow a reader to rate an article, and/or which of 2 competing versions they prefer.
The point is that there needs to be some sort of organic, small scale decision making mechanism, to allow resolution for edit conflict. It would be awesome if we could find one that was any good at judging article quality as well.
The way the system is now, it exaggerates conflict. For example, I tend to get along with everyone IRL. People tend to like me, generally agree with me, and its easy to make friends.
The wikipedia is acompletely different story. Because people get to know me based on conflict (nobody notices when you make a good edit), and because cliques are encouraged (RfA, etc...), it took practically no time for me to have a gang of enemies on the wikipedia. The system is sick, and punishing those who are willing to accept your punishments (i.e. good users) is not an answer. The abusers can continue to abuse the system, the stressed contributors leave, and the cliques focus on chatting with one another about their cats and gossiping about outgroup members, not creating quality encyclopedia articles.
We need more productive, rewarding processes (FA / collaborative editing), and less punishing processes (ARBCOM / RfC). Getting rid of the clique building mechanisms (RfA/AfD) would help alot too. Wikipedia has more ugly little cliques than my middle school had, and sadly their are no impartial teachers to step in and break up fights, because their all in cliques too.
SS