[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[geni]

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

It is written to be read by them. If you think it goes much beyond
that look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Isle_of_Wight&action=edit

>Noah showed that our sense of notability is absurd.

I beg to differ. He showed he disagreed with it.

>I've given a
>pretty good account of what McCloud said, and so I'm not sure why you
>say you don't know.

You've given a couple of very condensed versions padded by your POV.
Given what we know of confirmation bias it don't feel that that is a
very reliable source.


>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.

Policy assumes people play fair.

>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.

WP:RS isn't completely black and white either. You admit is it
possible to judge the validity of a source. WP:RS is just a very very
condensed set of instructions on how to do that.

> 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.


>
>But [[WP:RS]] lacks a list of those.

Issue doesn't come up often enough to put one together. Chemicalcruft
doesn't appear to have entered the lexicon yet.

>And no such list readily presents itself in the humanities.

WOK has an index of Social science papers going back the 50s. It would
be fairly trivial to compile an outline of such a list based on
citation rates (although you then have to adjust for publication type
which is always a pain).


>The previous system was more consistend and predictable than the
>current one.

Not if you threw something new at it.


>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.

I understand people are following aprox that approach with webcomics (
"Look, stop
creating article's on webcomics, because they clearly get deleted.").
I suspect you would object if they ever looked like succeeding (and
the schools issue isn't over).


>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.

How do the one's there lower the quality of the article

>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.

Strangely copyvio most of the time but the OTRS people are getting a
bit fed up with people doing that.

It also helps the deletion rates are so high that no one checks the logs.

I the meantime people used to tag suck articles with cleanup rather
than CSD and their they rotted.


>We're talking about well-intentioned critiques of how Wikipedia is
>working.

Or well-intentioned critiques that wikipedia isn't what they want it
to be. Although to be fair since it appears no one really worked that
hard on defining encyclopedia before wikipedia came along that is
hardly a position that is impossible to support.

>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.

I'm assuming they are not out to destroy wikipedia.


>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.

No. You are claiming there is a problem

>I am pointing to evidence that the problem is causing
>concrete, describable negative effects.

Given that you are yet to properly describe the problem it is quite
hard to establish a case of cause and effect.


>I am not advocating going and implementing solutions randomly. I'm
>advocating actually looking and seeing that we have a problem.

I've looked. I see people unhappy that wikipedia isn't what they want it to be.

>You're
>opposing with insulting pithiness even bringing the problem up. You
>imply that I misrepresent what people said,

I imply that you are a human. I've spent too long dealing with reports
of psychics and the like to trust reported conversation. Especially
when the person reporting it has a stake in the outcome.

>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 sure they have done. Certainly it would be in keeping with a
popular response to our copyright policy. Quite a few preditions of
ruin there. Is that some I should be worried about?

>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.

You assetion is that we have a problem. I'm throwing the normal
battery of tests at it.

>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.

That you have forgetten Ed Poor.

>No, just to be opposed to changing things.

I tend to oppose changeing things that would involve going over old
ground into the middle of a long running fire fight. There are better
ways of changeing things.

-- 
geni