[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Sheldon Rampton]

Ray Saintonge wrote:

> The sad part is that many who quote or apply the rules have absolutely
> no understanding of what went into producing those rules.

I think this is the real problem more than the rules themselves. I  
had an unpleasant experience about six months ago with someone who  
nominated the [[Drupal]] article for deletion. Drupal is a content  
management system that has had several books written about it;  
Wikipedia articles on it exist in at least a dozen languages; and the  
English-language article has existed for years with dozens if not  
hundreds of individual editors participating in it. The article met  
every test for notability, but it got nominated anyway.

Worse yet, the same individual also kept trying to delete specific  
pieces of information from the article, such as the link to Drupal's  
own website (which he called "linkspam"). The individual who kept  
doing this would frequently cite Wikipedia policies, but his usage of  
them was arbitrary, capricious and often contrary to the actual  
policies themselves.

I got sufficiently irritated with this person that I spent some time  
reviewing the history of his contributions to Wikipedia and found  
that he didn't have a pattern of similar behavior outside the  
[[Drupal]] article. Elsewhere, he generally seemed to be a competent,  
sincere contributor. By his own admission, however, he didn't know  
anything about Drupal and didn't care to learn anything about it. The  
result was that he was mechanically applying rules without sufficient  
knowledge of the topic at hand to grasp when and whether the rules  
applied. The problem, in other words, wasn't that he lacked  
understanding of *the rules themselves*. Rather, he lacked  
understanding of *how the rules should be applied in a specific  
context*.

I don't think there's any way to write rules so perfect that they  
eliminate this type of problem. It's a people problem, not a rule  
problem. Maybe we could add a new rule that says people should defer  
to others when editing articles about topics they don't understand,  
but (1) the most likely violators of this policy won't read the rule  
anyway, and (2) even if they do, they probably won't recognize their  
own ignorance.

I have a solution: a system whereby individual Wikipedians get rated  
by other users according to their competency as editors in specific  
topic areas. I estimate that developing the code necessary to make  
this work properly will take approximately the same number of person- 
hours as it has taken thus far to write all of Wikipedia. Add to that  
the number of hours needed to spend arguing about whether such a  
system is desireable or possible, and we effectively have a problem  
that will be solved at about the same time as the heat death of the  
universe. ;-)

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
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