[Foundation-l] WSJ on Wikipedia

[The Cunctator]

One essential problem is that once Wikipedia embraced the multipage
multimedia-heavy Encarta style as what makes for a "good" article -- without
a radical improvement in the editing technology -- the ease of editing has
fallen drastically.

Basically all of the policy trends -- agglomeration, deletionism, hierarchy,
protection, bureaucratization -- guarantee the decline of the Wikipedia
community, if not the website itself.

But so it goes.

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 3:28 PM, David Moran <fordmadoxfraud at gmail.com>wrote:

> Getting back to the content of the article: I get that inclusionism vs
> deletionism is a tired way to talk about divisions between camps of
> editors,
> and that everyone rolls their eyes when you start talking about it, but
> yeah, it's real.  Every single person I know who was once a producing
> contributor but who has now left the project (including me these days,
> functionally--my monthly edit numbers have gone from quadruple to single
> digits) did so because of having the same kind of arguments with the same
> people over and over again about what deserved to be in the encyclopedia.
> Which is anecdotal and statistically insignificant, I know.  But it is
> undeniable that Wikipedia, as a system, encourages (by its relative ease vs
> the alternatives) the removal of content, rather than the creation of good
> content, or the polishing of bad or mediocre content, the latter of which
> is
> a dreary chore.  To an extent, the destruction of content is as healthy and
> vitally necessary a part of the Wikipedia ecosystem as its reverse.
>
> I think a lot of attention is paid to the way the technical interface is
> hostile to newbies, and making that more user-friendly and democratic is
> certainly a concern that needs to be addressed.  But I think the tendency
> of
> older users, or certain editorially minded users, to squat on the project
> and bludgeon newer users with policy pages rolled up into sticks is just as
> much if not more responsible for driving away the new users we need to
> replenish our ranks.
>
> FMF
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Steven Walling <steven.walling at gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> > So the content of the WSJ article may be behind a paywall, but I just did
> a
> > cursory search of the researcher's 2009 Ph.D. thesis which was a
> > quantitative
> > analysis <http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/phd-thesis> of Wikipedia
> in
> > several languages.
> >
> > I didn't see any of the graphs from the piece or any conclusions in the
> > thesis which are equivalent to the statements made in the Journal, so
> this
> > must be new research.
> >
> > Steven
> >
> > On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net
> > >wrote:
> >
> > > Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> > > > books are available for years the copy of
> > > > the day may be available in a library, but how about last years copy
> of
> > > the
> > > > WSJ ? Do you really think the WSJ can be found in every USA library
> ??
> > > >
> > > I don't know about "every" library, but libraries are about more than
> > > just books, and librarians are not unaware of the wonders of databases
> > > in our modern digital age. For those of us that use libraries, I
> > > encourage you to familiarize yourselves with the collections your
> > > library may be able to provide access to online. I've certainly relied
> > > on my library privileges for such sources many times in the course of
> > > editing Wikipedia, particularly news archives (including the Wall
> Street
> > > Journal).
> > >
> > > --Michael Snow
> > >
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