[Wikipedia-l] Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has Been Around For A While

[Stirling Newberry]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism

For those that need an example of why documentation and citation, in 
themselves, do zero for getting rid of entrenched pove problems, I 
present to you this page and its history. The two main editors on it 
before are Bretonists - that is Breton and only Breton is surrealism. 
Never mind that if you do a google search on surrealism, the most 
common use is for the artistic movement. That's "misrepresentation" of 
the "truth". Note the explicitly cited and well formed list of holy 
texts. The pove is well armed with "proof".

The cost of having an open information source is that these wars are 
going to be endless. There is no way to both get the contributions from 
poves - who are going to often be exceedingly well informed on their 
holy writ - without placing the ability to deal with problems in the 
hands of a different process. Citations merely say that someone's POV 
has lots of people who agree with it.

"Cite your sources" is a form of rent, it gives an advantage to an 
entrenched group, whether they are right, realistic, or even sane is 
utterly beside the point. Sometimes it will work to the advantage of 
generating high quality POV material. Very often, however, it will not.

To fight this means we have to lower the search cost of 
counter-references by other editors - even other POV editors because 
more points of view balance each other out over time. So far there has 
been a great deal of "lets force people to generate citation lists". 
However, the examples on the ground indicates that this will merely 
shift power in favor of fanatics, who will come well armed with their 
website(s) list of holy texts.

Derrida called it logocentrism - I believe a bad coinage, what it 
really is is primo-centrism - but the point is there, books do not make 
truth, and grind out POV material, since it is profitable, is not a 
filter for bad points of view. More over, citation without citation 
tools enforces another one of the pove's weapons - time. He doesn't 
need to defeat your arguments, he just needs to waste enough of your 
time. He takes a few minutes to cut and paste a list, you have to spend 
an hour searching and compiling a bibliography - result, pove wins 
hands down, his work is already done for him.

Ultimately one of the most important differences between wikipedia and 
other sources is that we do not represent the commercial bias of a 
single entity. There are commercial biases, but they are not 
systematic. Citation lists give commercial entities - who have time to 
mechanically compile such lists as part of their business - a distinct 
advantage. Wiki needs to give its editors the firepower to match this, 
at the very least.