[WikiEN-l] Nuke [[WP:CITE]] and [[WP:RS]]

[George Herbert]

On 1/25/07, Michael Hopcroft <michael at mphpress.com> wrote:
> Phil Sandifer wrote:
> > On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:51 PM, Stan Shebs wrote:
> >
> >
> >> Phil Sandifer wrote:
> >>
> >>> If Susan can make the edit from memory, we're good. But if Susan has
> >>> to go Google the fact to find it somewhere else, we're already losing
> >>> precious seconds of Susan's time.
> >>>
> >> But how does that work out overall, when you save seconds of Susan's
> >> time, and cost me a half-hour of research to figure out why an article
> >> is inconsistent with all the ones it links with? Scholarship is tricky
> >> enough on its own, we don't need to make it harder by mixing in a
> >> bunch
> >> of random half-remembered bits.
> >>
> >
> > Simple. You're a different kind of editor than Susan. You're willing
> > to put long hours into Wikipedia. You care enough to join a mailing
> > list about Wikipedia. Accordingly, it's not the end of the world for
> > you to spend half an hour on a task like this. Because (and this is
> > important) most of the time it won't be wrong. Susan may not be 100%
> > reliable, but she's pretty good. How do we know this? Because she
> > wrote most of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is pretty good.
> >
> > The model is this: we have thousands of Susans. They do a lot of the
> > heavy lifting on Wikipedia. Then we have a few hundred hardcore users
> > who fix the problems left by the thousands of Susans - they check odd
> > facts that don't seem to jibe, they deal with malicious users, they
> > get involved with edit wars, they delete, they debate policy.
> >
> > Susan does 90% of the work. The hardcore do about 10% of the work, a
> > lot of which is cleaning up after Susan. But that's still a massive
> > net amount of work being done by Susan. Who does not show up on this
> > mailing list to offer her viewpoint, which is why we need to take
> > care to stop and think about Susan (and, of course, the other
> > thousands of casual editors.)
> >
> It is probably time we recognized that the very concept of Wikipedia --
> "An encyclopedia that anyone can edit, that will become the best
> encyclopedia in the world" is utterly self-contradictory and therefore
> impossible to achieve.
>
> To exclude "Susan" would defeat the purpose of Wikipedia. To NOT exclude
> "Susan" would ALSO defeat the purpose of Wikipedia.
>
> There is no way to use a rational means to achieve an irrational goal.

It's not an irrational goal; we have goals that, under some
circumstances, conflict.

Adding things like stable article versions and the like will help
de-conflict those goals.  I don't recall any serious objections to
doing them, just objections that Mediawiki is far from being able to
support them.

At some point, an encyclopedia project might fork off Wikipedia,
enforcing some stricter editing and editor standards, and move more
efficiently towards the ultimate goal.  But so far, nobody seems
interested in doing that, without going as far as Nupedia, who I
believe are too far out in that direction.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com