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WALK_AWAY


                                                 August  8-17, 2013

The ones who walk away from wikipedia.

I'm yet another wikipedia critic, though
like most I have to grant it works better
than you'd think it would, and despite my            LEAKS
many reservations about it, it can
certainly be a fast way to get basic info
on many subjects.
                                                            WICKED_WORLD
But trying to work on wikipedia articles gets old
very fast.  It's like being locked in a room full
of madmen and hired shills, with no way whatsoever       COMMONS_OWNED
of resolving any disputes outside of stonewalling
and hoping the other side gets bored and goes               THE_TOY_WEB
away.

Note: the wikipedia "conflict resolution process"
might better be renamed "the runaround".  And
Wikipedia moderators have all the maturity and depth          BEAT_PATROL
of insight of a typical irc admin... they can call
the most obvious questions right, but only the most
obvious.



It's been known for some time that the
original contributors to wikipedia have been
walking away from the project, it's growth in      I've seen a very
number of pages and so on has been declining.      impressive looking
                                                   graph with a hump
                                                   and a long dwindling
                                                   tail, but can't find
                                                   a reference.

                                                   This 2011 study is
                                                   often cited:

At slashdot, a "Kagato" asked Wales                   http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/5/664
about this, and he responded that
"Things have mostly stabilized."
                                     http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/13/08/04/1425214/interview-jimmy-wales-answers-your-questions
Which is to say that that
dwindling tail has leveled off?

My contention is that the reason it's
leveled off is that the new contributors
are being drawn from the professional ranks.
They're the hired marketers, shills,
propagandists and political flacks that
make up the new bestiary of the internet.
They won't just leave, because it's their
job to stick around.


The faith that Wales shows in the idea
of a GUI-editor is interesting...

    "One of the most exciting developments is
    the visual editor, which I hope will
    bring in a whole new class of editors who
    were turned off by the complexities of
    wikitext. As I put it: there are lots of
    geeks who aren't computer geeks."

I can imagine how it might help (a
bigger pool to draw from), but can also
imagine how it might dumb down the             They're *trying* to bring
entire project (because of that bigger         about an eternal september!
pool).


    They're stuck on the idea of radical
    inclusiveness-- because they're competition
    has tried artificial barriers and failed.

    But there have always been "barriers" of a
    kind: (1) in the early days the volunteers
    were a "self-selected elite"-- not just
    anyone would even hear about wikipedia;
    (2) there was little reason to try to subvert
    wikipedia before it's popularity and
    importance was established-- the most
    difficult element to deal with, the hired
    propagandist, had not yet arrived.


         I've a gut-level conviction that

         (a) some access restrictions
             are needed


         (b) these restrictions need not
             take the "experts only!"
             form that's been tried already.

                "Access restrictions" can
                be implicit.  A set of rules         User agreements now
                about disclosing conflicts, etc.     have legal force!
                                                     It is (or at least
                                                     can be?) a felony
                    CONSENUS_ILLUSION                to violate one.

                                                         That strikes me as a
                                                         dubious state of
                                                         affairs, but it would
                                                         also seem it's an 
                                                         opportunity for legal
                                                         experiments.  
                                                                       
                                                         Much like the
                                                         "copyleft" was
                                                         used to subvert 
                                                         copyright, a tight
                                                         TOS might make it 
                                                         legally dangerous 
                                                         to try to subvert 
                                                         successors to 
                                                         wikipedia... 



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