Garbled paragraph, my apologies.
Read:
Instead, Wikipedia articles today start the same way that the "Stupidity of the Reader" essay itself started: through the mass contribution of a single person (Federico Leva), tweaked and polished by several others. Failure to understand and acknowledge this basic fact leads to the dangerous idea that everyone who touches Wikipedia in any capacity is an equal "User," with those participating frequently a "Power User."
Tim Davenport
On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 7:23 AM, Tim Davenport shoehutch@gmail.com wrote:
Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
First, let's make one thing clear: the reader doesn't exist; it's just a rhetorical trick, and a very dangerous one. For more: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stupidity_of_the_reader
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While I think we may have broadly similar views of the WikiWorld, I sharply disagree with Mr. Leva's analysis of various Wikipedia participant categories.
The notion that today's Wikipedia writing process in any way resembles the idealized massively expanding 2 sentence [[Alan Alda]] article cited by the late Aaron Swartz in his 2006 essay "Who Writes Wikipedia" has very little to do with reality. Articles today do NOT start with two unsourced lines before being crowdsourced into finished pieces by a cast of hundreds.
Instead, Wikipedia articles today start the same way that the "Stupidity of the Reader" essay itself started: through the mass contribution of a single person (Federico Leva), tweaked and polished by several others leads to the dangerous idea that everyone who touches Wikipedia in any capacity is an equal "User," with those participating frequently a "Power User."
This is the conception of the paid bureaucracy, who would like nothing better than to declare the universal set to be hundreds of millions of equal "Users" who can thus be deferred as a "silent majority." In this way any and all decisions made by the 10,000 or so person volunteer community can be cast aside as statistically insignificant — thereby assuring that what the 200-or-so person professional bureaucracy says, goes.
In reality there are various levels of contributors, ranging from the IP who casually corrects one random spelling error, to the dedicated and devoted people who guard the gates at Recent Changes or who systemically put the work of others to style or who write new esoteric content. Certainly, turning casual contributors of a short article about something local or personal to them into regular contributors of editing work of various kinds is vitally important.
Mr. Leva's argument that "The user can (and should) turn from a reader to an editor, and vice versa, at any time." might sound good on paper, put it is actually provides the ideological basis for unfettered site rule by a professional caste.
We are not "power users." We are the volunteer community.
Tim Davenport "Carrite" on En-WP /// "Randy from Boise" at WPO Corvallis, OR (USA)
See:
Aaron Swartz article: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Frederico Leva essay: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stupidity_of_the_reader
A Dissident View of Crowdsourcing
"It must be said that Wikipedia does not make it easy to play nicely. Its basic set-up is a bit like having people try to draw a copy of the Mona Lisa in the sand, while herds of children and strangers walk through the emerging picture, leave their footprints, or try to blank or improve bits. And you're required to assume they are all doing so in good faith. It would drive anyone mad.
"Received wisdom is, too many cooks spoil the broth. Crowdsourcing wisdom is, the more cooks, the better. But in practice, every featured article in Wikipedia is the work of one writer...or a small team. Crowdsourcing does not result in excellent articles." —JN466, on Wikipediocracy, July 2012.