[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia struggles, Mozilla set for life?

[Gwern Branwen]

On 2007.10.27 10:34:30 +1000, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> scribbled 0 lines:
> On 10/26/07, joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu <joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Keep in mind who this is talking about:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Radin
> > (and now pardon me while I NPOV that article a bit)
> >
> > The quote itself was from David Hill.
>
> This part of his quote is more troubling:
> "The greatest problem with Wikipedia that we now find is that they are
> highly selective in who should place information and where therefore they
> will never really have a web-based encyclopaedia that is unbiased and
> totally factual. It is ultimately at the whims of the few enlightened ones
> who control what should be a great reference. Unfortunately we now see that
> it is not."
>
> The perception that Wikipedia is controlled by "the few" is painful, and
> relatively common. In my experience, individual articles or sometimes
> subject areas are indeed sometimes controlled by a "few", but certainly not
> the whole thing. The vast majority of my edits never run into any kind of
> problem editors. So why does this perception linger so long?
>
> Steve

I think it's a fair perception. For articles that people really care about, they often are controlled by a few. An example: would there really have been any outcry about the perceived unfairness and elitism of the mass webcomic deletions if non-editors didn't care about them? It's an uncomfortable fact for a lot of deletionists, but the reason people keep writing 'Poke-cruft' or 'Star Wars fanon' (incidentally, to whoever recently smeared Wookieepedia as 15000 pages of fanon - they delete that sort of thing and always have), is because, well, people care about that sort of thing. You rarely get edit wars over Encyclopedic-with-the-capital-E because people just don't care as much about them.

And obviously there are issues of confirmation bias and that sort of thing - if you agree with "the few" who are editing articles you care about, they merely look like conscientious energetic contributors. But I think it's more the former. However, things like disabling page creation, oversighting stuff, and other things certainly don't help the perception that many of the people at the top are being capricious.

--
gwern
SACS IW 5.53 Sayeret NRO Tower cybercash delay Rome bet
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