[WikiEN-l] The London Review of Books on Wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

Charles Matthews wrote:
> Cormac Lawler wrote:
>   
>> I think what's interesting here is asking: how does Wikipedia harness 
>> the energy of the public (for want of a better word) in a way that can 
>> be more productive, useful (or at least less brain-sporkingly 
>> nonsensical) than a newspaper open comment section does?
>>     
> Of course just about any model is superior to encouraging low-level 
> ranting.  The "open comments" are generally less interesting than a 
> letters page because there may be no filter. Or, as in the case of the 
> Sunday Times it seems, there is moderation but only to save 
> embarrassment to the paper. WP's basic idea of "merciless editing" is 
> one way, and it gets to one major issue at the root: touchtyping skills 
> don't make you a great writer, while basic copyediting skills can 
> transform rubbish prose.
>   

The difference between merciless editing and open comments is as much 
the difference between mainspace and talk pages.  There needs to be a 
place of "low-level ranting", which often verges on the incoherent. 
Hopefully there are enough pigs to smell out the truffles in the pile of 
vegemite. I feel very concerned when some individuals determine that 
certain material should be removed from a talk page because it does not 
serve to improve the corresponding article.

>> But I was struck by how in the LRB review of Andrew's book, the 
>> reviewer singled out the collaboratively-written afterword as better 
>> written than Andrew's book, which he found "full of interest but 
>> rather indulgent, containing too much incidental detail about people 
>> Lih wants to please." I can't imagine Andrew is fully happy about that 
>> (!) - but it's an interesting take.
>>     
> Time for one of my current pet theories: the "triangle of takes" on 
> upgrading WP. Andrew Lih represents one vertex, as you can see in his 
> recent NYT interview, where he cites popular culture and politics as the 
> drivers in WP. Basically this is about being very current in our 
> coverage. Another vertex is the FA people: in theory they don't care 
> about the topic, do care about optimising the writing to the point where 
> there is no obvious way to improve quality. The third vertex is 
> comprehensiveness. Lih's book - well, I haven't read it yet (sorry, 
> Andrew), but you can see it fitting roughly in with where I locate him 
> on the triangle. The "incidental detail" is often how popular culture or 
> political journalism is (deliberately) written, rather than trying for 
> in-depth or serious. 
>
> Anyway, I commend the triangle: currency, comprehensiveness, quality. 
> Most people around the wiki can probably plot themselves somewhere in 
> the interior, and this gives a kind of map of prorities.
>   
I wouldn't see it as a triangle, but as a bi-polarity with currency 
being a variation of comprehensiveness in the time dimension.  Looking 
at the recent Iranian election, where but on Wikipedia could one get a 
breakdown of the official vote-count by province.  (Whether or not that 
count is fraudulent is quite a different matter, because such a 
break-down could be sought just as much in non-controversial 
circumstances.)  Traditional electronic journalism would only bore 
people by droning on with such statistics; patterns of information are 
not obvious in such a linear presentation.  Print journalism could 
present the information more comprehensively, but if it appears in 
to-day's newspaper you may not want the information until next week ... 
by which time you will have already used that newspaper to wrap the 
kitchen garbage. Wikipedia is in a position to negate both of these 
limitations.  Iran specialists may be able to find that information on 
familiar sites, but for generalists it would take considerable effort to 
find those sites.

FA people are like teachers who teach for the sake of passing exams; it 
is easy for them to perceive quality as exemplified in a manuscript that 
is immutably ready for the printer. To do this they must ignore the 
dynamic quality of NPOV.

Ec