[Wikipedia-l] Proposed fork of Wikipedia

[George Herbert]

There are a lot of good ideas here (a community with much stronger
civility expectations?  bravo!).

I do object to this characterization though -

(English) Wikipedia is not intolerant of experts or hating of quality.
 Both are in fact widely found in the project, in limited scope areas.

en.wp is intolerant of experts who won't play ball with Wikipedia
community.  Some of those expectations on both sides are unfair or
unreasonable.  But the community building a project has to both
survive as a community, and as individual contributors with your
talents and capabilities and expertise.  Your proposal to openly state
and strongly enforce better civility expectations would be one such
mechanism - and would be seen as hostility or intolerance by experts
who have reached a point in their career and personal life where they
are abusive to colleagues at times.  We are not deferential without
being intolerant.  You seem to want to draw a different line there
(good idea) but not escape the underlying tension between the
community and some individuals.

Good luck...


-george



On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 8:42 PM, Thomas Larsen
<thomashlarsen.wmf at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I am formally proposing that Wikipedia be forked and that a new
> compendium of human knowledge, Wikipendium, be created as an
> independent alternative with a more pleasant, respectful, productive,
> constructive community with simple, clear rules and an unbureaucratic
> and responsible governance structure.
>
> I believe, along with many others, that Wikipedia community members
> are frequently unjustifiably hostile towards viewpoints other than
> their own and towards the users who hold these viewpoints.  In
> addition, I feel that Wikipedia has become too bureaucratic,
> ineffective, and indecisive and has placed the values of quantity and
> openness, while important, over those of quality and reliability
> respectively.  I believe that Wikipedia's continued rejection of, and
> discrimination _against_, experts is outrageous and must be amended,
> but in a far less elitist and arrogant way than Citizendium has
> attempted.
>
> The official proposal may be found as a blog at
> http://wikipendium.blogspot.com/ .  All people who are interested are
> invited to participate in discussion there.
>
> Best and friendly regards,
>
> Thomas
>
> --
> Thomas H. Larsen
> thomashlarsen.wmf at gmail.com
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thomas_H._Larsen
>
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>



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com