[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Phil Sandifer]

On Feb 24, 2007, at 10:26 PM, geni wrote:


>
> Given that the outsiders is unlikely to have taken time to study them
> I have no reason to think they do appear so. But then many things in
> this world are incoherent to outsiders.
>

Yes, but the project is written for outsiders. If our logic doesn't  
make sense to them, we did it wrong.

> Noah didn't, we don't know what McCloud said and Straub identified a
> weakness in our system that has little to do with policy.
>
Noah showed that our sense of notability is absurd. I've given a  
pretty good account of what McCloud said, and so I'm not sure why you  
say you don't know. Straub identified more than a weakness - he  
identified a complete failure of policy to meaningfully prevent  
spurious deletions. Which has been clear to anyone who follows DRV  
for a while.

>
>> No. It's not. It never has been, it never will be, it never can be.
>> Reliable sourcing is fundamentally a more complex issue than a black
>> and white guideline could ever portray.
>
> This is going to come as a serious shock to all those lecturers
> teaching the subject
>

I doubt it. Nobody in a rhetcomp position I have ever talked to has  
said that reliable sourcing is black and white. None of them ever  
would. We teach whole courses on this subject. It's not something  
that can be condensed into a usable single policy page. Otherwise  
we'd be throwing out our textbooks and just assigning [[WP:RS]].  
We're not.

> For an  impossible task it appears to have been done an awful lot of
> times. Anyone writing a review article will establish what is and is
> not a reliable source.
>

Yes. But they don't do it in an absolute, black and white sense that  
is proscriptive for all other review articles.

> It generally fairly well known which journals can be trusted and which
> ones need to be used with caution that the reactions they describe may
> only work one time in 10.
>
But [[WP:RS]] lacks a list of those. And no such list readily  
presents itself in the humanities.
>

> You were the one objecting to stuff being done "inconsistently,
> arbitrarily, and in a manner that is not meaningfully predictable"
>
> Now you object to an attempt to create a single unified rule set.
>
The previous system was more consistend and predictable than the  
current one. Hell, it solved the schools debate. It was an ugly,  
torturous debate, but it eventually shook out to "Look, stop  
nominating schools, because they clearly get kept." That's a heck of  
a better system than the current one.

> Just because you don't agree with the rules and don't agree with
> people's actions it does not mean that one flows from the other.
>
Huh?
>
> Depends on the area you are looking at. I'm seeing a lot more  
> citations.
>
Citations != quality. And are, in fact, at times antithetical to it.  
The more citations to secondary sources [[Jacques Derrida]] has, the  
worse of an article it will be. Guarantee it.

>> No. Policy does not reduce dross.
>
> G11
>
Strange. I remember deleting such articles on sight before that  
policy came into being. Nobody ever complained, so I have trouble  
imagining that the policy is what caused that to be OK.

>> [[WP:AGF]]
>
> We are talking about stuff off wikipedia here. AGF does not apply.
> Thus there is no reason to make assumptions of any type.
>
We're talking about well-intentioned critiques of how Wikipedia is  
working. The prerequisite for assuming good faith is not an account -  
it's a contribution to the conversation. Noah, McCloud, and Straub  
have all contributed to the conversation and deserve at least an  
assumption of good faith.

> However after it has burned you know what the real problem is and can
> fix it. As a bonus you haven't spent time fixing it against attacks
> from giant geese.
>
Geni, I'm sorry, but this is stupid and a blatant straw man that,  
frankly, strains the limits of good faith. I am pointing to a  
problem. I am pointing to evidence that the problem is causing  
concrete, describable negative effects. This is not [[WP:BEANS]].  
This is "Uh-oh, it smells like smoke."

I am not advocating going and implementing solutions randomly. I'm  
advocating actually looking and seeing that we have a problem. You're  
opposing with insulting pithiness even bringing the problem up. You  
imply that I misrepresent what people said, you refuse to assume good  
faith on the part of external critics of Wikipedia, you reject prima  
faciae the idea that someone has looked at our deletion and  
notability debates and gone "WTF."

I'm not calling for radical solutions to every problem that arises.  
Anything but - I think that's how we broke the system. I'm calling  
for actually thinking through whether we have a problem. I would  
think this practice would be uncontroversial enough to be allowed to  
go by without the unhelpful pithiness.

>
>> Aside from an admittedly polemical call to nuke RS I've not demanded
>> total change right now.
>
> Aside from that Mr Lincoln how was the play?
>
The post began "Consider this another entry in that time-tested genre  
of "obviously
futile suggestions to nuke things that nobody is ever going to nuke,
but probably should anyway" posts." If that doesn't flag this as "not  
an entirely serious suggestion" I don't know what to tell you.

>> In fact, total change right now is what got
>> us into this mess. (Oh no, we got panned in USA Today. We'd better
>> overhaul the system!) If anything, my position is more conservative
>> than yours.
>
> I never claimed to be conservative.
>

No, just to be opposed to changing things.
>>
>
> No because that only works with the more incompetent POV pushers.

Strange - the block system has always seemed to me to work pretty  
well no matter who you block. [[WP:AN]] sometimes doesn't work as  
well, but that seems intimately related to the "fix it with policy"  
approach.

-Phil