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The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia

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41–44 of 44 posts

Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia

#41
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My opinion is that it should be inclusionism and not deletionism. Include many thing as needing. > Actually, I've seen "the content is already available in another website, why do we need it here?" being be used as an argument against reinstating some very uncontroversial articles. Having it on Wikipedia is helpful. This way, you can find it in Wikipedia, can have a free license, mirrors (if there are any), can use M…

> My opinion is that it should be inclusionism and not deletionism. Include many thing as needing.

I agree with you, unfortunately we're losing the battle here.

There are already plenty of rules defining what fits or not in Wikipedia: not only it needs sources, but also notability and it can't be original research.

The issue is not that those rules aren't being followed: is that deletionist mods are deleting articles, metadata, lists, and everything else, even when those rules are followed. And they're also making it harder to create new articles.

Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia

#43
post #35
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think i have ever had a problem figuring out which citation corresponds to which sentence. 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 t…

Yes, it requires contributors to have more skin in the game. Zero-cost contribution is the main reason why some topics on Wikipedia are outright disinformation "contributed" by special interest groups. And don't get me started on the "regulatory capture" of power users...

Re: The loss of prolific contributors in Wikipedia

#44
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's that working out?

Decently well? Society has its problems, but its had some pretty cool accomplishments along the way. 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.

> Decently well?

There are millions of oppressed, desperately poor, and disadvantage people who would scoff at that assessment.

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