Vito
This rather tends to support my point. One (and not the most important)
pieces of evidence for Wikipedia being in a failed state is precisely that
it does not , by the community's own admission, constitute a reliable
source:whereas "Reputable tertiary sources
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TERTIARY>, such as
introductory-level university textbooks, almanacs, and encyclopedias, may
be cited". So Wikipedia fails in its aim of being an encyclopaedia on one
of the most important tests one could imagine, namely reliability. And a
reason for that is its lack of effective content management policies and
mechanisms to put them into effect (in the old days we called that being an
editor, but that word on Wikipedia now is more or less a redundant synonym
for contributor).
Now suppose that Wikipedia had effective editorial policies and processes
that allowed it to assume the status of a reliable source, just like the
encyclopaedia it aims to be. You say that even in that situation, it would
be easy to manipulate. On that assumption, how much easier it must be to
"trick" it today when it has no such effective policies and processes in
place!
Thrapostibongles
On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 6:46 PM Vi to <vituzzu.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Honestly I cannot imagine a functional Wikipedia
citing itself.
Such Wikipedia would be so easy to trick.
Vito
Il giorno dom 16 giu 2019 alle ore 16:54 Martijn Hoekstra <
martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com> ha scritto:
I disagree that Wikipedia not considering
Wikipedia as an admissible
source
is indicative of Wikipedia being a failure.
On Sun, Jun 16, 2019, 14:18 Mister Thrapostibongles <
thrapostibongles(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
> The discussion triggered by recent WMF T&S actions has tended to focus
on
the
merits or otherwise of that specific action (even though as I have
pointed out elsewhere this is very much a case of those who know don;t
talk
and those who talk don't know). So I though
it might be helpful to try
and
abstract some more general points for
discussion.
The long-term future of the Community, and the relationship between the
Foundation and its volunteers is under discussion in an elaborately
structured consultation announced already here in September 2017. It
would
not be particularly helpful to try to run a
parallel discussion here.
But
in the short to medium term, it seems that it
will be necessary for the
Foundation to take a different stance with respect to the management of
the
various projects, and the English Wikipedia in
particular.
It is often said that "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works
in
practice. In theory, it can never work."
Well, that's half true. What
the
> experiment has proved is that the theory was indeed correct --
Wikipedia,
> as currently constituted, does not work.
There are two inter-related
> aspects to its failure: content and conduct, inextricably related in a
> project founded on crowd-sourcing.
>
> Let's look at the content first. Even on Wikipedia's own terms, it has
> failed. It is a principle that Wikipedia is founded on reliable
sources,
and by
its own admission, Wikipedia itself is not such a source. That
bears repetition -- a project aiming to be an encyclopaedia, that
compares
> itself with Britannica, explicitly is not reliable. Foundation
research
> has shown that about one fifth of Wikipedia
articles are supported by
> references that are inadequate to support the text or simply are not
> there. That's about a million articles each on of the larger
Wikpedias.
Some
thousands of those are biographies of living people and in view of
the
risk of defamation, no such articles should exist
on Wikipedia at all.
There are several thousand articles that are possible copyright
violations:
> again such articles should not be there. And when I say "should not",
I
> mean according to the rules adopted by the
Wikipedia volunteer
community
itself.
This links to the conduct aspects. The self-organising policies of the
"encyclopaedia that anyone can edit" have flattened out the formal
hierarchy to the extent that it has been replaced, necessarily, by an
informal but strong hierarchy based on a reputation econiomy. This
creates
> an unpleasant and hence ineffective working environment, and makes it
all
but
impossible to organise a volunteer workforce into coping with the
major
violations of content policy alreay mentioned.
Indeed, the conduct
policy
> makes it all but impossible to effectively handle cases of major abuse,
> witting ot uwitting. For example, one reason for the failure to manage
> copyright violations is that some thousand of articles were written by
a
> volunteer who was unable or unwilling to
comply with the copyright
> requirements applicable to their contributions There is simply no
> mechanism that allows for contributions to be effectively checked
either
> when contributed or subsequently, bcause
there is no mechanism that
makes
it
possible to manage or organise the work of the volunteers, and
existing
> community norms will not accept such a degree of organisation.
>
> These mutually reinforcing failures make to necessary for some degree
of
> organisation and management of content and
conduct to be imposed from
> outside the volunteer community. The Foundation has the resources and
is
> the only entity that can acquire and deploy
the expertise required to
do
> so. No doubt this is unpalatable to some of
the more vociferous
members
of
the community -- those who stand highest in the
reputation economy and
have
> most to lose by it being replaced by an effective management policy.
But
the fact
remains -- Wikipedia is failing, and in its present form will
inevitably continue to do so.
Foundation or failure -- which is it to be?
Thrapostibongles
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>