31–40 of 44 posts
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It is nothing short of astounding how small amounts of power corrupt otherwise intelligent people. Sometimes I despair at the state of democratic politics, but looking at the edit wars of Wikipedia, it could have been worse. So much pettiness for nothing.
I would definitely take wikipedia politics over american politics. Wikipedia has its problems, but nobody there is violently storming the whitehouse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is nothing short of astounding how small amounts of power corrupt otherwise intelligent people. Sometimes I despair at the state of democratic politics, but looking at the edit wars of Wikipedia, it could have been worse. So much pettiness for nothing.
I would definitely take wikipedia politics over american politics. Wikipedia has its problems, but nobody there is violently storming the whitehouse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is nothing short of astounding how small amounts of power corrupt otherwise intelligent people. Sometimes I despair at the state of democratic politics, but looking at the edit wars of Wikipedia, it could have been worse. So much pettiness for nothing.
I would definitely take wikipedia politics over american politics. Wikipedia has its problems, but nobody there is violently storming the whitehouse.
Part of the problem is that philosophically, Wikipedia wants to pretend that contributors are "thin" interfaces for pure knowledge. That there is a well-defined set of "reliable sources" and all contributors have to do is summarize and create hyperlinks to them. Not surprising given the ~Objectivist philosophies of its creators.
What's the alternative? Acknowledge that there is no Truth, and sit down and cry? That may be technically more correct, but i fail to see how one can build an encyclopedia under that view.
"Wrong" interpretations are perfectly useful data as long as I know who is making it.
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What's the alternative? Acknowledge that there is no Truth, and sit down and cry? That may be technically more correct, but i fail to see how one can build an encyclopedia under that view.
An alternative is to admit that knowledge is social, and include a lot more data on who claims and interpretations are coming from. It should be a first class feature of such an encyclopedia that I can hover over any sentence/paragraph and immediately learn who is behind it, rather than herding cats with diffs and reference links. "Wrong" interpretations are perfectly useful data as long as I know who is making it.
Unless you mean which user added it? I fail to see what a potentially ephemeral pseudonom really tells me. Its not like you need to present a drivers license to edit wikipedia. Anyone can be anybody.
But even ignoring that, i suppose i just don't agree. Seems like one big exercise in the genetic fallacy. I want people to show their work, and have their encyclopedic writing work be evaluated on its merits. I'm mistrustful of systems that put stock in people's reputations over what they actually do.
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Historically underrepresented groups have entered the chat.
Well true, that's often not low hanging fruit, especially if its about historical figures from historically underrepresented groups, as you have to dig deeper to find information on them
Not if you're a member of the historically underrepresented group. That's the point.
It was never and can never be sustainable to depend on a small number of super-contributors for a "crowd-sourced" knowledge store. Maybe the Wikimedia Foundation should focus more on attracting and keeping a broader range and number of contributors instead of curating few it considered "good".
Why not? That's how the rest of the world works. Almost every human endeavour forms a small world graph.
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Well true, that's often not low hanging fruit, especially if its about historical figures from historically underrepresented groups, as you have to dig deeper to find information on them
> as you have to dig deeper to find information on them Not if you're a member of the historically underrepresented group. That's the point.
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Why not? That's how the rest of the world works. Almost every human endeavour forms a small world graph.
How's that working out?
More to the point, i think your argument would be more compelling if you had some examples of non-"small world graph" endeavours that worked out well. I'd love for some experiments, but i think we need some succesful experiments before saying that its a better model.
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> the solution that Wikipedia themselves would advocate is that you should publish those explanations on some site of your own, and Wikipedia could then cite it The problem with "deletionism" is not lack of sources and citations. It's the fact some moderators don't want certain material there. Creating sources is not a guarantee you'll be able to add them back, quite the opposite. In the past I've seen purges of all…
Do the sources even matter? I don't know how many articles I've read in the past that have had some very questionable "facts" so I check the source link and it's a dead link. How does that work?
In practice dead links should be and are mostly converted to web.archive.org links. It's not a problem for them to be dead, they just have to exist somewhere and the original source should be classified as reputable. It's hard.