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@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@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@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?
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