[WikiEN-l] Reflections on the end of the spoiler wars

[George Herbert]

On Nov 14, 2007 6:58 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Nov 14, 2007, at 7:41 PM, David Gerard wrote:
>
> > Yeah. This is a live working draft - although articles will *tend* to
> > get better with time, any given article may be in a HORRIBLE condition
> > at any moment. This is not a finished product. (Arguably, it's barely
> > started - [[WP:WIP]].)
> >
> > Don't forget to put at least one good red link in every article you
> > edit today, by the way ;-)
>
> Sure - and the possibility of utterly insane things is important -
> particularly in the article space. Which is why I'm less annoyed about
> the 2004 election controversy articles than, well, the spoiler wars.
> On the other hand, though, the utter amount of time-wasting in the
> policy space is a problem, and I think it's why so much of our policy
> reads like it was written for obsessively tenacious killbots - in too
> many cases, it was.
>
> -Phil
>

In politics, this is why the US joke about Congress being the opposite of
Progress is so popular.

Policy space is politics in Wikipedia.  We're dealing with maintaining a
community view of what it is that we're doing, and clearly not everyone
agrees on every point.

Any political process resembles making sausage.  It's why most government
separate out executive and judicial (policy enforcement) from legislative
(policymaking) functions to the degree practical.

People try to set themselves up as dictators-for-life on open content or
open source projects every now and then.  The only ones that work mostly let
communities run themselves and intervene a bit here and there with minimal
dictator-for-life powers, like Jimmy and Linus.


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