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GlassBeadGame |
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#1
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Dharma Bum ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Contributors Posts: 7,919 Joined: From: My name it means nothing. My age it means less. The country I come from is called the Mid-West. Member No.: 981 ![]() |
I have been struck lately by the growing smugness of "article writers." Those who avoid wonkery and administraton for the creaton or "improvement" of articles on Wikpedia. To hear them say you would thing they were creating some great works of literature. I got to tell you I don't see it. Even among our FA artistes. They use this activity much in the same way "vandal patrols" or policy wonks use the stuff they do for playing the game that is Wikipedia.
At best I'd say is "Well pretty good for a sand painting made in a sandbox surrounded by pre-schoolers flinging rocks and spraying down the place with pressure hoses...but come back tomorrow." Wikipedia articles, even FAs, are no great shakes. Certainly they don't justify the sense of self-entitlement these prima donnas pretend. Nor do they make up for the many levels or irresponsibilty directed at people outside the project that results from their work. The only thing of any value in Wikipedia is it partially functions in the the same task Wikia Search fails at, collecting a list of manually generated sources (very imperfectly vetted) and indirectly returning them on the top of search request. You don't need article writers for this task at all. |
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Skinny87 |
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#2
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Neophyte Group: Contributors Posts: 12 Joined: Member No.: 8,963 ![]() |
As an article writer, and an FA contributor, I don't think I'm particularly vain; I like my articles and think they're quite good, but I'm not going to say they're brilliant. Far from it; my prose is probably average, for example.
I'd agree that wikipedia isn't the font of all human knowledge it's sometimes portrayed as being, but I'd also agree that it's better than nothing at all, and probably the best organized on the internet. My articles aren't comprehensive, even when they're at FA level, they're often lacking (non-vital) sources that I can't access or afford. But I'd like to think that they're as comprehensive as they can be, and that they give the reader a fairly detailed and neutral view of what occurred. Ultimately, they're a starting point - no one should be citing them in an essay or thinking they're the best source of knowledge for that particular topic. A good wiki article should be well-sourced to allow the reader to find those sources for themselves whilst they get at least a general understanding of the topic. |
UseOnceAndDestroy |
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#3
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Ãœber Member ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Moderators Posts: 568 Joined: Member No.: 4,073 ![]() |
I'd agree that wikipedia isn't the font of all human knowledge it's sometimes portrayed as being, but I'd also agree that it's better than nothing at all It's a recurring wikipedian myth to position wikipedia and "nothing" as the only possibilities. Wikipedia is decidedly not better than a rich and diverse internet of independent sites and documents, created by people who actually understand the topics they're involved in. The wikipedian project is to appropriate and re-mediate, losing definition and wedging content into its own shape on the way - for the benefit of someone other than the readers. Most "article writers" are doing grunt work that MFA sites can do with scripts. |
Sarcasticidealist |
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#4
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Head exploded. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Regulars Posts: 1,662 Joined: From: Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada Member No.: 4,536 ![]() |
It's a recurring wikipedian myth to position wikipedia and "nothing" as the only possibilities. Wikipedia is decidedly not better than a rich and diverse internet of independent sites and documents, created by people who actually understand the topics they're involved in. So why doesn't that network exist? Surely the people who actually understand what they're talking about aren't engaged in editing Wikipedia, so what's stopping them from setting up their own network? I've written three featured articles, all of which are, as featured articles go, of pretty middling quality. But each is the best free access online resource on the subject. That may not be true of all FAs, but it's true of a good many of them. Wikipedia has actually driven the creation of free access online information that, by all the evidence we have, would not otherwise exist in such a form.Besides that, there is utility in Wikipedia's organization, which is actually among its stronger suits; the interconnectivity of Wikipedia articles provides utility to the reader that would not exist from your mostly hypothetical diverse network of sites and documents. |
Somey |
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#5
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Can't actually moderate (or even post) ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Moderators Posts: 11,816 Joined: From: Dreamland Member No.: 275 ![]() |
...Wikipedia is decidedly not better than a rich and diverse internet of independent sites and documents, created by people who actually understand the topics they're involved in. So why doesn't that network exist? Surely the people who actually understand what they're talking about aren't engaged in editing Wikipedia, so what's stopping them from setting up their own network?Cost, time, energy, liability issues, and all sorts of other concerns, one would assume. The World Wide Web, and to some extent the internet in general, wasn't set up or organized to maximize convenience and reliability in information aggregation. Technically, it was set up to ensure survivability of information in the event of a catastrophic event such as a nuclear war, but for most practical purposes that translates into a system that allows a large number of people to redundantly disseminate information to anyone and everyone with the technical means of accessing it. Things like security, bandwidth, search, and the accountability of site owners/operators were all afterthoughts. It's obviously unrealistic to think that the internet can re-work itself in the short term, but until it does, people who run websites have to deal with ISP's of varying levels of competence, software of varying levels of reliability, and of course, hackers, phishers, identity thieves, spammers, scammers, "script kiddies," "trolls," and (occasionally) lawyers. This doesn't mean Mr. Destroy is wrong - a richer and more diverse internet would be a good thing, and Wikipedia is clearly preventing that diversity from growing by providing a cheap (and anonymous) alternative for people who only want to share a relatively small amount of information, don't feel any need to get paid for sharing it, and don't particularly care who else gets to mess with it after the fact... and, in so doing, handling some (but not all) of the various headaches that come with running a website. The more interesting question, to me, is whether Wikipedia and its sister sites are doing the world a "net-positive" favor by providing that alternative. I'd say they probably would be, if they split the site into a fairly large number of smaller inter-linked ones with separate low-level administrations, operated under a more ethical standard of governance, each with reasonably accountable (and perhaps more identifiable) ownership - a consortium, essentially. As it is though, I'd have to say no. Because of the Google factor and also the nature of domain ownership, Jimbo and the WMF will fight any decentralization or "official mass forking" effort tooth and nail, though they'll probably claim they're not fighting it the whole time they're doing just that. And I'd imagine there are all sorts of additional arguments against that kind of decentralization, not the least of which would be based on pure practicality, not to mention the intimidation factor that comes with being so large and well known... but if WP is ever going to go from discouraging web diversity to encouraging it, that's what has to happen. |
Cla68 |
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#6
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Postmaster ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Regulars Posts: 1,763 Joined: Member No.: 5,761 ![]() |
The more interesting question, to me, is whether Wikipedia and its sister sites are doing the world a "net-positive" favor by providing that alternative. I'd say they probably would be, if they split the site into a fairly large number of smaller inter-linked ones with separate low-level administrations, operated under a more ethical standard of governance, each with reasonably accountable (and perhaps more identifiable) ownership - a consortium, essentially. As it is though, I'd have to say no. Because of the Google factor and also the nature of domain ownership, Jimbo and the WMF will fight any decentralization or "official mass forking" effort tooth and nail, though they'll probably claim they're not fighting it the whole time they're doing just that. And I'd imagine there are all sorts of additional arguments against that kind of decentralization, not the least of which would be based on pure practicality, not to mention the intimidation factor that comes with being so large and well known... but if WP is ever going to go from discouraging web diversity to encouraging it, that's what has to happen. Someone who used to be involved with the WMF emailed me once with the same idea of splitting the english projects into smaller sites with stricter administration. Perhaps that's one reason why that person is probably no longer welcome at the WMF office. I think it's a good idea. |
MBisanz |
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#7
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Senior Member ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Regulars Posts: 478 Joined: Member No.: 5,693 ![]() |
Someone who used to be involved with the WMF emailed me once with the same idea of splitting the english projects into smaller sites with stricter administration. Perhaps that's one reason why that person is probably no longer welcome at the WMF office. I think it's a good idea. While that is an idea, I would worry about the impact such a fork would have on the generalist editors. Cla, if I'm right, you have a strong interest in military history, so forking along the Uni model of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Natural Sciences probably wouldn't limit you, since you would focus on Social Sciences. But a large number of wiki functions are performed by editors who don't have a particular topic area. Take for instance my clean up of the File talk: namespace, that crosses all academic fields since it is just clean up. I could probably cover all of the English language wikis, but I like to be able to take a large list and have a large impact quickly. Or look at User:Addbot, that is a bot that substitutes templates to reduce server load. It works well because it can use one rule set to work on a large amount of data. Having to fork it to work on 10 wikis might increase the difficulty to the point that it would not be worth it. Another thing I do is close AfDs. I've noticed there are a large number of professional AfD editors who find and vet sources for nearly all disciplines. For them there is not a gain by forking, since they work well where they have a massive list of 70 things, to which they can apply the same rule set everyday. Even in the FA/GA sphere, take a generalist like Malleus, would he really want to learn 10 different sets of GA rules on 10 different wikis to review 10 sets of 23 articles (he reviewed 228 in the latest GA sweeps)? At some point forking leads to a lot of small wikis without a lot of dedicated editors willing to learn the different rule sets. You can probably best see it at Wikispecies Recent Changes, which is a quasi-natural science fork and lacks a base of generalist cleanup editors and at Memory Alpha Recent Changes, which is so specific that it doesn't attract the variety needed to get cleanup specialists. |
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