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

[toddmallen]

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
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Your post seems to contradict itself. You say above that policy should
be set by "the dedicated few rather than the madding crowd." On that,
I agree.

I think you would find nontrivial numbers of readers interested in
reading video game guides, detailed plot summaries with no other
information, guides to where to find illegal copies of said works of
fiction, articles about their best friend's garage band or their
favorite uncle, and so on. That doesn't mean we should have that
stuff.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.