[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[John Lee]

On 2/25/07, Philip Sandifer <sandifer at english.ufl.edu> wrote:
>
> I just had dinner with [[Scott McCloud]], and, unsurprisingly, the
> conversation turned to webcomics, and, eventually, to Wikipedia's
> treatment of them. (This was partially spurred by the Kristopher
> Straub debacle, about which I will say only that it demonstrates the
> degree to which the bias is overwhelmingly towards deletion across
> many areas of Wikipedia right now)
>
> McCloud is somebody who knows comics. He quite literally wrote the
> book on them. In the course of the conversation it became clear that
> he was pretty well completely fed up with Wikipedia. And it should be
> noted, this comes from someone who has been on the forefront of
> digital technology debates several times. He makes clear his
> admiration for the concept of Wikipedia. He makes clear his
> admiration for how Wikipedia got started. His problem is with how it
> works now.
>
> The problem he has? Notability. Specifically the arbitrary and
> capricious way in which AfD targets things, questions their
> notability, and uses guidelines that make no sense from the outside.
>
> See also Timothy Noah's recent article on Slate for this - it gives a
> good view of how notability guidelines look to the outside. In this
> case, it's how they look to the subject of the article, but I assure
> you - they look similar to people who are familiar with the subject.
> In short, they appear a Kafka-esque absurdity.
>
> This is a new problem - these are major figures who are sympathetic
> to Wikipedia but fed up with its operation. And I can tell you, the
> tone among people I talk to in that real life thing I maintain is
> pretty similar - great respect for Wikipedia as a concept, reasonable
> respect for Wikipedia as a resource, no respect for Wikipedia as
> something anyone would ever want to edit. The actual editorial
> process of Wikipedia is rightly viewed as a nightmare. Hell, I view
> it as a nightmare at this point - I've given up editing it because
> the rules seem to have been written, at this point, with the
> intention of writing a very bad encyclopedia.
>
> Our efforts to ensure reliability have come at the cost of a great
> deal of respect - and respect from people we should have respect
> from. We are losing smart, well-educated people who are sympathetic
> to Wikipedia's basic principles. That is a disaster.
>
> And it's a disaster that can be laid squarely at the feet of the
> grotesque axis of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]] - two pages that are eating
> Wikipedia alive from the inside out. (And I don't mean this in terms
> of community. I mean that they are systematically being used to turn
> good articles into crap, and have yet to demonstrate their actual use
> in turning bad articles into good ones.)
>
> Best,
> Phil Sandifer
> sandifer at english.ufl.edu


Okay, instead of bickering over whether there is a problem with the status
quo, let's assume there is a problem. What should we do to solve this
problem? I haven't seen many ideas about what ought to be done to resolve
the ostensible issues.

I'm not saying there isn't a problem, nor am I saying it's impossible to
solve it. However, I think it's important to recognise that you can't expect
perfection from an innately imperfect project. When you have something on
the scale of Wikipedia, involving so many mortals, the errors multiply by
each other pretty quickly, and add up to some massive problems. We need to
solve them, and the status quo is what we came up with. It's clunky, it
sucks, but it's better than nothing.

The problem, as I see it, is that there's just far too little common sense.
Defining common sense is of course an ordeal I am not about to delve into,
but the point of our policies and guidelines is to enforce a semblance of
common sense on people lacking it. Why do we have a guideline for reliable
sources even though it's impossible to establish in black and white what
constitutes a reliable source? Because a lot of editors don't have the sense
necessary to discern what is a reliable source and what is not. Why do we
have notability guidelines? Because otherwise deletionists and inclusionists
without common sense would simply do whatever they like on AfD, and never be
able to reach agreement by arguing from the same premises.

In short, policy is a substitute for common sense. Phil seems to suggest
that we ought to block people who exhibit a deficit of common sense. The
problem is that an editor who is insane in one area may turn out to be a
very reasonable and sensible chap in other fields. Since selective blocking
is impossible, it's an all-or-nothing proposition.

Another problem you run into is the obvious controversy that would result if
admins had discretion to block people without common sense. The problem is
that one or two admins themselves would lack the sense to identify who has
common sense, and thus block the wrong people. We'd have a huge debate about
whether this discretion is warranted, and thus further distract us from the
point of WP - to write an encyclopaedia.

The clunky status quo sucks, but it tries to strike a balance to minimise
timewasting controversy. It's erratic, it's inconsistent, and it's far from
ideal - but the idea is to have something that works. Just like WP, I
suppose.

Now, if we want to move beyond the status quo, how are we to resolve the
problem of people lacking the sense to know their limits? If people had some
common sense about their limits on things like webcomics or postage stamps
or content management systems, we wouldn't need policy - we probably
wouldn't even need AFD.

Phil's solution is to liberally apply the banstick. I don't know if this is
the right way to go about things, but I would like to see a way to make the
banstick selective. Other ideas, like article and editor ratings, would also
be very good. In the end, this may come down to the software rather than
writing/destroying policy.

Johnleemk