Now I've read Tocqueville's Democracy in America. But the truth is I don't remember much of it. What I do remember is a speaker talking about Tocqueville described the work like this: In the moribund European monarchies when a town needed a new well they approached the ministers of the king and, careful to show proper respect, made supplication requesting the well. Eventual the various official agencies might even provide the new well. In vigorous America the community self organizes into voluntary associations which plans, organizes and carries out the work needed to dig the well. Ok this is doubtlessly the Kiwanis Club version of T's DiA. But it did stick in my mind. Notice they didn't all run out and start digging wells each dotting the countryside with a new hole. They didn't throw dirt in each other's well. They didn't poison other competing wells when nobody was looking. They collaborated in reasonable, organized and planned way.

Collaboration in an encyclopedic project doesn't have to mean drive-by, haphazard and contending edits. It must be possible to develop a better way. The idea of people working together and that work being facilitated by technology is surely a good thing. So let's talk about what might be a better way than the laissez faire model of WP. Some of these idea are similar to CZ and some are borrowed from other open source management models such as SourceForge.

Here is an outline of one such approach:

• Editors
  Not writers but people who guide and manage article creation and maintenance.
  
• Article Request Board
  A place where anyone can suggest an article for coverage.
  
• Volunteer Offerings Board
  A place for volunteers to indicate what area of interest and types of volunteer services the are willing to provide. Each offer is linked to a userpage that sufficiently describes identity, credentials, knowledge and experience of the volunteer.
  
• Article Team
  Volunteers are selected, based on the Volunteer Offerings Board, by an Editor accepting responsibility for an article to serve on a team that works on the article. Each volunteer has well defined tasks and responsibilities such as Managing Editor, Researchers, Writing Team, Copy Editors, Fact Checkers and Finish Writer. The team would work out a plan for addressing the article on the discussion page. The desired product is a high quality, coherent articles that assure good editorial practices.

This is one approach. I would be interested in other posters comments as well as their own visions of how this can be achieved.

I think the key to success at this stage is clarity from the beginning. Things shift too often at Wikipedia to have any consistency and allow the fights to break out and the nasty types to become the alpha dogs.

By saying "This is what we do, and this is how we do it, and this is what's allowed, and this is not," you can weed out the folks who don't want to get involved from the beginning, as opposed to seeing everything shift.

Real life accountability will solve most problems. A solution as simple as it is complex.

I think the Wikipedia model could essentially be used, but the key differences that I would like to see are:

(1) Make it a compendium of everything. Why can't an encyclopedia be a business directory, a biographical list of every person you've ever known, an historical record of stock prices, a guide to every minor league baseball player's stats, a collection of widgets and mash-ups for current news and data, etc.?

(2) Contentious articles about controversial non-living subjects must leave space for every verifiable opposition view.

(3) In cases of current legal entities (persons, active estates of deceased persons, corporations, city/county/state/national governments), the entity itself has the right to take control of the article about itself and write it how it wants. The community still has the right to describe the entity on the article's Talk page (which would not be indexed by search engines).

(4) Motivate the writers of articles about legal entities to write high-quality articles by allowing them to add Google AdSense or other advertising spots to the article space, which they can keep 100% of any proceeds until that day (if ever) that the legal entity takes control of the article.

If you like the sound of that model, we're already trying it in Internet space, at Centiare.com.

Greg

A lot of this parallels cross-departmental feature teams and other real-world management techniques that have some track record of success. Having said this, I'm not convinced that removing anonymity will fix more than it breaks. I think we can adapt what's worked outside the Internet to the special needs of the online world.

Al

Interesting and I agree with much of those propositions. Each person who has the right to edit the mainspace of articles should provide their full credentials and identity. The other editors are free to remain under a username but they can only edit the talkpages of articles which are not accessible for people who are not logged.

HaHa, he said Tokeville …

Jon

I know folk hate Jon reviving thread but this was a very good principle.

Of course, it will never therefore be adopted. You would not allow an anonymous author to write the front page of the NYT, would you? Wikipedia ranks higher.

I've just been noticing how similar a lot of the stuff we say today is to things we said 1, 2, 3, … years ago, very often more clearly the first time around. (I said "very often", not "always", so don't all soil yourselves digging through the garbage pail to find the e-minent x-ceptions.)

Jon

Exactly. I have been having a lot of those "I've/We've been saying that since 2007" moments of late.

Centiare. LOL.

First we said it in anger.

Then we said it in well-reasoned essays.

Then we repeated it in big-font rebuses.

Then we said it in cartoons, satires, and song parodies.

What's left, short of a comic opera?

Illustrated leather jackets and custom chopper bikes?

Moulton rides off on his split-pipe Harley, sporting his colors, a slick black jacket with a flaming skull made of the letters BLP, with twin crying faces receding into the background.

It's gonna need a soundtrack, with good sound effects and a musical score.

Bye Bye Bardie



Jon

Heh.

I'd dump Jon Awbrey for Ann-Margaret any day.