[WikiEN-l] "Who The Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway?"

[Steve Summit]

Phil wrote:
> This should be required reading...  The sense that our inclusion and
> notability policies put us at odds with readers who are not major
> parts of the community has always been there, but this troublingly
> nails it: the population of people who write articles and people who
> delete them are nearly exclusive.

You're right, but it's a bit more complicated than that.

For one thing, there's nothing *necessarily* wrong with having
policy set by a relatively small number of insiders -- a
consistent policy, like a consistent look and feel or editorial
tone or categorization scheme, is something better realized by
the dedicated few than the madding crowd.

The problem, of course, is that we confront the second of
Wikipedia's great contradictions, the first being that anyone
can edit, including people (namely vandals) we don't like.
Vandals we can deal with pretty well, but the the second
contradiction, which I'm not at all sure we've figured out a way
to cope with, is that anyone can set policy, including people
(like narrow-visioned tiny-minded wonks) who do it spectacularly
badly.

(And this is not at all a new observation, of course; it's at
the core of Clay Shirky's classic essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst
Enemy", which should also be required reading.)

Another complication is that it's not just "people who write
articles" versus "people who delete them".  What really matters
-- or ought to -- is the people who *read* them.  Like the Lorax
who speaks for the trees, Wikipedia desperately needs some
verifiable, NPOV channel through which we could learn the wants
and needs of our readers.  Inclusion and notability policies
ought to be based neither on what an anonymous contributor is
interesting in writing, nor what a self-appointed policy wonk
deems "notable" or "encyclopedic", but rather, on what some
nontrivial numbers of our readers are interested in reading.