QUOTE(Moulton @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 9:54pm)
Larry, I'd like to entertain a serious conversation with you about the pluses and minuses of alternative methods, ranging from 1) the invocation of legal remedies to 2) the promotion of higher standards of academic excellence and journalistic ethics to 3) the use of satire and parody to focus attention on the problem.
Moulton, if you mean alternative methods of getting the public to understand Wikipedia's problems, and putting serious pressure on Wikipedia to reform in various ways...well...
I think two things could help. The first is what I'm doing now--encouraging legal remedies and the light of public exposure that would inevitably follow. The second is a major expose from a first-rank journalist in a first-rank journal like Harper's or The Atlantic or The New Yorker, which completely humiliates the rascals most in need of humiliation. The articles from a few years back by Stacy Schiff and Marshall Poe were interesting but they didn't go into the dirt.
For a long time I guess I just thought that Wikipedia's irresponsibility and stupidity were common knowledge. Then, in this recent conversation I had with the EDTECH mailing list people--technology directors at school districts, I would have thought they'd be more plugged in--I discovered that all of these otherwise quite technically hip people had apparently bought the Wikipedia hype lock, stock, and barrel. They thought the main problem with it is that it is produced by amateurs, and they are still all goggle-eyed over the power of collaboration. One women who makes a living giving such people advice actually advocates for the de-filtering of Wikipedia; well, she didn't know what "NSFW" meant, and apparently didn't know anything about all the porn on WP either. Oddly, all the discussion of the issue quickly stopped when I posted my FBI message there. (IMG:
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A way to solve the problem in a different way is for another reference website to overtake it in size and reliability, rendering it less relevant. Well, it's still possible, but who will do it and when remains to be seen.
And then there's another way I thought of the other day, inspired by some person's very clever post here on WR: form a new Wikipedia (political) party. Formulate a strategy to seek political power in Wikiland. Force the people in power now to form a party themselves. Then let more robust democracy, and the open society that results, do their magic.