[WikiEN-l] What is happening to the community

[David Gerard]

On 06/03/2008, Ron Ritzman <ritzman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Maybe this is the gist of the problem. AGF and all that good stuff are
> values developed on small wikis and it probably still works that way
> on other wikis like meatball. It may still work here too on the
> project and article level. The drawback with this is when other
> wikipedians who you don't know from Adam drop out of the sky and
> nominate your article for deletion, challenge the fair use rationales
> of your images, remove your spoiler tags, or otherwise challenge
> something in your article based on some policy discussion made
> "somewhere else" by people who you don't know.


The strength of "Assume Good Faith" is that it's a good heuristic for
life in general. Almost all people mean well and are sincere in their
actions - that's why they're so hard to sway from them.

And *shit happens*, but people are unwilling to accept that it's
possible - they ignore the ridiculous fucked-up complexity and
emergent behaviour of evolved systems and keep looking for someone to
blame. It's the same place conspiracy theories and witch-hunting come
from.

(I'm looking for a reference to an experiment I read of: birds being
fed or not at random when they pressed a lever. The chance of being
fed was determined only by chance, but the birds constructed all
manner of increasingly elaborate rituals before pressing the lever,
timing, etc. in an attempt to make the food come more reliably. Does
anyone know the one I mean?)


- d.