blockquoteBut we already HAVE a system like this. It’s called “The Internet”./blockquote
Unfortunately, you and I can’t edit “The Internet,” like we can Wikipedia. That’s a deal-breaker for your analogy. Wikipedia is more public than “The Internet.”
Anyway, this all seems to be a namespace problem. Perhaps what we could all agree on is that static disambiguation pages suck. Let’s figure out a better, contextual filtering system.
“And as that pagerank and search dominance goes up, so do the stakes for gaming the system.”
Wait, are we concerend about esoteric pages in the backwaters of the wiki, or are we really concerned with the Wikipedia’s influence itself. It sure seems like the discussion has drifted from “why allow all that junk”.
First, I don’t buy the argument that specialized knowledge belongs only in specialized databases. Of course there should be specialized databases, but one of the things I have learned about the Internet is that any resource that I grow to rely on vanishes one day or becomes a sold out malware installation point with popups of doom. (My favorite board game site, BoardGameGeek look in imminate peril of going over the edge these days).
I can’t say whether the Wiki or IMDB will go away first, but redundency on the Internet? A benefit, not a curse.
The second argument about pagerank and all that does indicate that the Wiki may become more “locked down” over time than it already is. Unless we are arguing that the Wiki shouldn’t have influence for what it has achieved.
Frankly, I’m not seeing the harm behind more a more locked down policy either as the point behind “everyone contributes” was to create the critical content. The content is there, leaving, for the most part, niche articles to contribute. The established articles should become more and more like a traditional encyclopedia as they need fewer and fewer edits over time.
Bah.
I wonder how many people here would find the Wikipedia “Marvel Zombies” entry relevant at all?
“Unfortunately, you and I can’t edit ‘The Internet,’ like we can Wikipedia.”
Does anyone remember a little app called “Third Voice”? It allowed users to place comments more or less directly on websites for all users of their app:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/06/11/third_voice_slammed_for_defacing/
Today you can more or less “edit the Internet” with tools like GreaseMonkey and BlogEverywhere.
It’s unsurprising to me that [[as of 2007]], Jason Scott’s predictions haven’t come true. Nor has Jeff’s prediction that Wikipedia would require e-mail verification to edit, thus becoming a “walled garden” of the sort Jeff now dislikes:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000898.html
WP’s culture is very much anti-walled-garden and anti-elitist; it should have been obvious to anyone in 2006 (or even earlier, say 2003) that WP would resist AOLization, the subscription model, paid advertising, non-anonymity, and the rest, very forcefully.
Wikipedia will never, and should never, be regarded as a solid source. Therefore, trying to make it like an encyclopedia to rival britannica is ridiculous. Wikipedia should simply be a receptacle for human knowledge. Call me a bleeding-heart inclusionist- almost no articles should be deleted.
I was always under the misconception that Wikipedia was a place to find episode summaries and “strange” knowledge that you couldn’t find in a regular encyclopedic source. This image I had was shot down pretty hard in the past few weeks. I’ve started looking for places to put the info that wikipedia is wholesale deleting. I’ve found a few interesting sites, like wetpaint.com and fancruft.net that embrace fandom info, but it still makes me a little sad that I used to enjoy having all of the questions I had answered with one little search box that I could contribute to. Fancruft is close, having saved 10’s of 1000’s of articles from wikipedia and billing itself as a comprehensive wiki for sci-fi / fantasy… but I would have liked to see Wikipedia reach its potential.
Carlos, I totally agree. To use Jeff’s own example of comic books, I rarely need to find out detailed information on Spider-Man (I know most of it), and it’s relatively easy to locate on official websites. When I encounter Doctor Bong, I need to look him up for the story to make sense. In some ways, the pages that will never be deleted, like “Superman” and “Batman” are less useful than “Jubilee” and “Monica Rambeau”.
I have always leaned staunchly toward the inclusionist side of this debate until I read this article, because the “Katamari Damacy” argument for deletionism seems strong.
However, you’ll never find Jubilee documented in Britannica, because it’d be a waste of paper and printing resources - so why not allow us to document obscure comic book characters on the web? That’s the only place where the availability of resources makes sense to do so.
The thing that disturbs me the most about the “deletionism” is the eagerness to prune articles documenting internet subcultures and esoterica - because the web is the only place on which those things ever have a hope of being documented! The prominent example that springs to my mind is the push to get rid of articles covering web comics - not that they’re a bastion of world culture or anything, but come on, let them have a few kilobytes of Wikipedia. If you’re worried about clutter, provide a stronger organization system.
I think you have to take in aspects of both inclusionism and deletionism, and mix them in with a good helping of common sense and logic. Exercising something like that may be alot harder than just saying it.
what is preventing us, ultimately, from having a Wikipedia entry for every man, woman, and child on planet earth?
I’m not too familiar with Wikipedia’s rules and guidelines, but I think the “no original research” and citations rule would suffice. If someone’s not mentioned elsewhere on the internet, you couldn’t write an article about them without the article being original research.
Hi, Jason Scott, the guy who did the speech. Just wanted to mention someone did a transcript which I posted a href="http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt"here/a.
A few people are speculating what I was trying to say and draw conclusions based on the title/discussion, ostensibly because they don’t want to sit through a 45 minute audio file. While the transcript loses a ton of my emphasis, tone and humor, it’s better than nothing.
I’m firmly on the side of the inclusionists, of the “Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgements About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn’t Mean They Are Deletionist” stripe.
THe core of Wikipedia is “I trust people and I trust process, despite knowing both are often broken.” It’s a particularly sappy and particularly naive way of looking at the world, but it’s worked (wonder of wonders) so far.
There’s also something about the unlimited freedom to edit that scares people. When they see an error on Wikipedia, I hear “Someone should fix that!” The Wikipedia answer is “you should fix that.” The assumption that you have the responsibilty to fix things, that there’s no “owner,” that this is actually your problem to fix… scary! What if this got into the wrong hands! I’d rather stricter seperation of author and reader, thanks! Disable those edit buttons, that’s not appropriate for me.
Seems this ethic invades most client pieces of software. I know of very few pieces of software that have the wiki ethic of “anonymous you have the power to change anything at any time.”
Editing anonymously is held up by a number of contributors to Wikipedia as a flag of pride, where they show they can both maintain quality, continue openness, and function without locking people down into “accounts”. The fact it will go away will disappoint/drive away significant people.
On the Internet, a sizeable percentage are NOT anonymous, actually. They make no attempts to be so and are trackable down to the person.
My predictions sort of came true, but also didn’t. I should have expected things would move in a more nuanced fashion.
Wikipedia now treats anonymous edits very shoddily; sometimes stuff goes through with no problems, but if you edit anonymously and someone with an account undoes your work, you will lose. Try it sometime. Jimbo has gone on record more than once and said "I won’t discuss your issue until you get an account. Anonymous accounts are a slave class, allowed to do heavy lifting but suspicious and dismissed at many juncture points.
Wikipedia started heavy cut-down of user pages over the past few years; there was a userbox war (many userboxes were deleted, but they came back), and people constantly go through each other’s user pages and play “Homeowners Association”. It is very hard to have more than a two-page (user and discussion) userspace on Wikipedia, where before it was implicitly allowed.
Wales has had his power utterly curtailed. He’s no longer head guy of the board, he is shut down by his own board a lot (his call for “credentials” after the Essjay scandal was tossed on its ear by his own board), and he’s now actively given the finger when he wanders in and tries to “Jimbo” a discussion. But he’s not been kicked out entirely, and many people still perceive him as the voice and face of Wikipedia.
It is SO HARD to edit entries on living people on Wikipedia. I stand by this one 100%. You have to cite anything and everything, and woe be to you if you write something non-positive on someone. It is a nasty, uphill battle and often comes out with the entry being the poorer for it.
Wikipedia has gotten payment for being used in a Cisco commerical, and sells copies of itself to Answers.com and other entities for their (advertising) use. So they found a way to do it without hurting the main cow. That said, things are looking more and more like the board will go for some sort of advertising in the future.
So yes, my black and white predictions? Totally off. I should have expected that the outcomes would be “the same but different” and I take full responsibility for not calling that.