One Utah

Those of you who follow the subject of the theory of Evolution of the Internet, are well familiar with the ongoing discussion surrounding the “problems” that arise in the greatest of all democracies, The Internet.

Statments in the article re-printed below are eerily similar to the statements in a recent comment on a previous post The Untold Story of the August 30 Organizing Committee,

“I was excited to see the energy and new ideas that the newbies brought. I was sad to see them shut down to do a kind of same old- same old rally”

Dessert: And while we “libs” openly debate our issues, Republicans take pause from their closeted meltdowns (here, here, and here) to take shots at us. But moving along…

Opening Wikipedia up to content collectors
September 5th, 2006 by Larry Sanger

In Who Writes Wikipedia?, a Wikimedia Board candidate “AaronSw” makes the very interesting point that the bulk of substantive edits are made by newcomers and outsiders, and that the core group of editors tend instead to make relatively piddling edits. That is consistent with my own experience–I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised. (Actually, like many sweeping generalizations, I’m not quite sure what the claim amounts to.) He then says that Jimmy Wales ought to be encouraging those outsiders, instead of encouraging more insidership. With that I couldn’t agree more. In fact, this is something I personally worried a great deal about: toward the end of 2001, I could already see people dividing themselves into “old hands” and “newbies,” as if having wasted months of your time on an Internet project could somehow convert you into an authoritative encyclopedia article writer. Sorry, folks: old-handship isn’t what will make your work appreciably better; but education will. Granted, working on Wikipedia can itself be educational. But it isn’t as efficient as, you know, reading books, writing papers very carefully, doing drills, and taking classes.

In Who writes Wikipedia?–Responses, our candidate then quotes someone else who really hits it on the nose: “To allow Wikipedia to grow and really pick the brains of the experts around the world, you need to do something to break up this inner gang and the mini empires they are building for themselves.” Probably the central governance problem of Wikipedia is precisely that its trolls and gangs are allowed to run roughshod over valuable contributors. And that of course is what I’ve been saying for quite some time now. But then we have this:

Larry Sanger famously suggested that Wikipedia must jettison its anti-elitism so that experts could feel more comfortable contributing. I think the real solution is the opposite: Wikipedians must jettison their elitism and welcome the newbie masses as genuine contributors to the project, as people to respect, not filter out.

Well, of course, gang rule is not elitism. If you want to open Wikipedia up to really valuable contributors, then you’ll take the advice that I’ve very long been urging: rein in the trolls and give experts their due. Wikipedia, I think, will never do this, however.

This entry was posted Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 6:44 am and is filed under Democracy, Utah Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.