[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[John Lee]

On 2/27/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> on 2/25/07 10:29 PM, John Lee at johnleemk at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > 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. ŠŠŠŠŠŠ
> >
> > Johnleemk
>
> Common sense or common purpose? What common sense needs to be applied to
> accomplish this common purpose?
>
> I see a great deal of the problem being many persons with many different
> agendas and purposes for being in WP itself. If a degree of common sense
> is
> needed to accomplish the common goal of ³A² then all persons must be
> trying
> to accomplish ³A². If others are there to accomplish ³B², their ³common
> sense² will be applied and measured differently.
>
> Solutions? That is going to take some creative, collaborative thinking
> with
> all participants working toward the same common goal. But first, there
> must
> be an agreement about what the problem - and its cause - really is.
>
> There seems to be a great deal of resistance to the idea that many of the
> problems within WP involve the very culture itself. This speaks to me of a
> great deal of denial on the part of the Community Members.
>
> Denial is saying ³anything but that². To admit that the ³that² is the
> problem, might mean having to confront, and possibly get rid of, the
> ³that².
> If a chemical dependent admits that the chemical is the ³that² that is
> killing them, they might have to give up that ³that².  ³Anything but
> that!²
>
>
> Marc Riddell


It's a question of whether we want a "big tent" of people with different but
similar purposes working together to achieve a result that approximates what
all of them desire, or whether we want a smaller but more dedicated group to
achieving a particular common purpose. I have always been torn between the
two, but I am of the opinion that it wouldn't hurt to turn Wikipedia more to
the latter direction. At times, there's been a great deal of
misunderstanding about what exactly Wikipedia is. It's not an attempt to use
a democracy or anarchy to organise information. It's not an attempt to prove
that a decentralised approach to organising information works. It's not an
attempt to make information egalitarian by being anti-expert. It's not a
social networking site. It's an encyclopaedia, and everything about
Wikipedia, directly or indirectly, should be related to the purpose of
writing an encyclopaedia.

Regarding the issue of culture, I'm not sure if that was meant to directly
rebutt anything I said, because I implied that the problem is one of
culture. We've turned to more red tape and more policy in order to
approximate the common sensibility that was shared in earlier days. The
inclusionist and deletionist debates were in full swing around 2004, but you
didn't see complaints about "rouge admins" or things like that, because
people had the common sense to respect each other, to accept different
viewpoints, to understand their limitations. That culture is gone.

The reason I mentioned that we may have to resort to a software fix is
because I am very skeptical about the possibility of changing our culture.
It's not possible to do this without alienating a lot of longtime editors.
In the end, it's possible that we could massively purge WP of people who
don't share the common purpose of building an encyclopaedia, but it's highly
implausible. I believe we can survive without these people, because a lot of
edits are made by anonymous editors, but we will never drive them off,
because it's politically unacceptable to most Wikipedians, even those who do
share the common purpose of building an encyclopaedia.

Therefore, what has to be done is to find ways to limit the damage our
corroded culture can do. We've tried the policy route, and it's failed
abysmally. It's time to see if article and editor ratings, together with a
more refined approach to blocking, can ameliorate the problem.

Johnleemk