On 2/27/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 2/25/07 10:29 PM, John Lee at johnleemk@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