On 15/10/2007, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
In that case, the right thing would not have been to say, "Oh, well, that's what the community wants. Let's call it 'the gossip rag anybody can edit'." In extreme circumstances, the right thing would have been for the Foundation to destroy the community and start fresh. This is know as "hot tubbing" a community: http://www.plocktau.com/writing/hottub.html
Note that the Foundation has done this before, e.g. French Wikiquote, which was so riddled with copyright violations they deleted it and started again blank.
And when a Wikimedia wiki fails at NPOV, the Foundation will indeed close it or whack it upside the head, e.g. Moldovan Wikipedia (closed) or Belarusian Wikipedia (moved to a special name for the "classical" variant enforced on the wiki by its community).
i.e. the community can't vote against NPOV, no matter how they twist and turn to try to do so.
This nuclear option is closely related to the right to fork, which is a fundamental part of open-source efforts: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RightToFork
And getting good backups is becoming more of a priority, making it easier to fork if a given community goes bad. This should also take the pressure off: those who want a Wikipedia that doesn't include material on people they don't like can have one.
Although these sorts of things are dreadful and painful and to be vigorously avoided, it's important to remember that if it really comes down to it, things will be ok. Unix has had more than 30 years of drama and forking, and it's doing just fine: http://www.levenez.com/unix/history.html
Mostly because Linux came along and whacked the rest upside the head.
So in the end, that's why we have "absolute and non-negotiable" things like NPOV. The community is really important, and we should treasure and nurture it. But ultimately, if we have to choose, we pick the encyclopedia.
Precisely.
- d.