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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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