[Wikipedia-l] Proposed fork of Wikipedia

[Maury Markowitz]

Well color me sceptical. Many of the problems you mention on the web page seem inherant to any large group of humans. I don't see how changing the rules can, of itself, address the fact that we all have opinions and we all consider them to be important. As this appears to be a major concern of the proposal, let me address this directly...
 
"Pleasantness and respectfulness will be effectively enforced on Wikipendium"
 
The concepts of "pleasantness" and "respectfulness" are very much open to interpretation - and thus opinion. How are we to decide if a comment is simply a poke-in-the-ribs for fun, or a seriously nasty note? This is often difficult in "real life", let alone the limited bandwidth of a text based media.
 
Perhaps it's just me, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that there can be a set of rules that can address this. Instead, it seems that a flexible case-by-case basis with many viewpoints is the only way to ensure that one person's view, the "constables" as you call them, doesn't become overarching. I believe the system on the Wikipedia had demonstrated itself to be workable beyond my own belief.
 
A word of advice: I had a friend who ran a very successful MUD about a decade ago. It was created out of the ashes of another MUD with rules very much like what you are proposing. This first attempt died a hasty death. Their second attempt was a free-for-all with self-policing by the members. It ran for years.
 
I don't want to sound like a downer, but in my limited experience, more rules generally makes things worse, not better. Generally the rules themselves become the points of argument. You can certainly see this on the Wikipedia, and I have argued on several occasions for re-writing some of them to be based more on common sense and less on the letter of the law.
Maury
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