[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

Philip Sandifer wrote:

>On Feb 25, 2007, at 5:31 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
>
>  
>
>>We have a more practical reason to base WP on secondary sources, which
>>is that we don't have big-name experts writing the articles, so we  
>>fall
>>back on amateurs acting as the experts' proxies, via published  
>>works. By
>>their nature, primary sources are full of traps for the uninformed; in
>>areas where I'm expert, I can look at a primary source and instantly
>>know what its defects are likely to be, while a random person not only
>>doesn't know about them, but doesn't even know that there *are*  
>>defects.
>>(A falsified birth date in government records? How is that  
>>possible?! :-) )
>>    
>>
>
>Absolutely. Primary sources require skill. But the problem is that  
>writing an encyclopedia entry requires skill. Wikipedia was never  
>intended to be written by random people and idiots. It was intended  
>to be written by volunteers. It's not idiot-proof. In fact, it  
>depends on having experts on articles. The assumption is that someone  
>who knows something about a topic will go to edit it.
>Yes, the system is succeptible to the clueless and the crazy. 
>
When we begin to read a new article we need to begin with an assumption 
of good faith that this individual is neither clueless nor crazy.  
Usually we don't need to read very far before we find evidence that our 
assumption was in error.  That's where the application of judgement 
comes in.  The nutcases can generate citations just as easily as the 
sane; screwball publications can have very autoritative sounding 
titles.  Identical contents in "The Remote County Scamsheet" and "The 
Journal of Remote County Criminology" will get different receptions.  Is 
the latter really more reliable when you have seen neither.  If we need 
multiple sources, that too can be accomodated.  You don't know how 
reliable a source is until you have checked it out, and that's not 
always easy.  We do ourselves a disservice when we salve our self-esteem 
by adding a couple of references, and smugly go forward believing that 
the article is now accurate, and delude ourselves by believing that 
someone else's two references have brought the article to an apotheosis.

>And the  
>fix is to use the talk page, get reasonable people to come have a  
>look at it, etc, etc. In cases where the clueless/crazy are  
>particularly intractable we have a system whereby intelligent, sane  
>people are given bansticks. And in bad cases we have the arbcom.
>
I think that we have some people who feel that an early application of 
the banstick will cure the problem more quickly without having to bother 
with tedious discussion that could take days to resoplve. ;-)

>There is no good mechanism to have an encyclopedia written by idiots.  
>If we do not assume that our userbase is primarily comprised of  
>reasonably competent people who will follow the principles described  
>we are screwed.
>
That's right.  Those reasonably competent people also know how to listen 
to constructive criticism, and will easily adjust their thinking in the 
face of rational comments.  Just because they have repeated a common 
falacy on an article does not make them sockpuppets.  They deserve 
discussion with the same respect that the first poster of the falacy 
should have received.

Ec