Abd wrote:The early Wikipedians were naive about structure. Consensus governance works in small, reasonably tight groups, with unity of focus. In that context, protective structure, designed to increase reliability, may not be necessary, so it is not created. By the time it becomes necessary, an oligarchy has formed, which will resist change, since, they think, it works for them. Until they gradually, over time, the better ones, burn out. What's left is the control freaks with no real life.
Perhaps. There are arguments to be made that protective structures wouldn't be necessary even now, if they had managed to properly evolve, finding a way to keep consensus based governance, but on a large scale. Counter intuitively, this would have required strong leadership from the top, to ensure that unity of focus.
Abd wrote:There are projects afoot that will eat Wikipedia's lunch.
We've heard that before!!...
Abd wrote:They will harvest the crowd-sourced WP material, but add a layer of review, with more traditional or hybrid organizational structure. The goal would be "Wikipedia, but reliable."
No, this would be a dumb move. There's so much wrong with Wikipedia's content, any proposed replacement really is better off, from both a time and liability perspective, just starting from scratch. Even their indexes wouldn't be much use as a guide - their category system is a joke, thanks to being undermanned and unappreciated, and titles aren't much better. The only reason a Wikipedia replacement needs to be looking at Wikipedia, is to be able to spot sources corrupted by citogenisis.
Abd wrote:Remarkably, the recent mess on Wikiversity over cold fusion and parapsychology and me created a new environment where starting a study of a fringe topic is prohibited without prior approval. For all users. Previously, anything could be studied on Wikiversity. The goal there was not "reliable articles," and opinion could be expressed, as long as it did not pretend to be commonly accepted fact. One of the original Wikiversity goals was "source studies." So if you wanted to study a topic, collect, on a Wikiversity page, sources. Documenting what is in the sources would be normal. Reviewing them as to interest or other aspects would be subjective, opinion, and thus to be attributed. Subpages could be created for details.
Not my area of expertise. Have you noticed any parallels with the rise of the phenomena of no platforming?
Abd wrote:So Wikiversity allowed balancing possible imbalance on Wikipedia,
Perhaps, but this could hardly have been its official goal. Officially, Wikipedia is balanced, right? That it is not, is why we exist.....
Abd wrote:but more than that, the collection of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia and Wikiversity as allowing extended study of subject with no restrictions on notability, made the sum of the two a far more complete "compendium of all human knowledge." That has now been trashed.
Did it ever really get started? It's taken them ages to set up the WikiJournals, and it doesn't seem like they're going mainstream any time soon.
Abd wrote:Hence someone else will do it.
Hopefully not in a way that solidifes Wikipedia's position though......
Abd wrote:Deletionism was dumb, it might as well have been designed to create continual conflict. Rather, there were, long ago, proposals for -- say -- junkyard space. The old junkyards were places where material of relatively low value could be collected, to be re-used or recycled. So where a present decision would be Delete, the implementation would be a move to junkyard space. Excepting actually illegal material.
There was also Pure Wiki Deletion, where pages on non-notable subjects would be blanked instead of deleted. Anyone could read the content in history. The Deletionists, however, too often, were full of hatred for cruft or fringe or other detestables. For them, "All Human Knowledge" means "All That We Approve."
And it is likely all these issues would have been resolved, had the governance system evolved. Crazy that they still go back and forth on what constitutes the border region, this is undoubtedly one of the major reasons people pack up and leave.
Abd wrote:It was not necessary to set up the high-conflict Wikipedia environment to build an encyclopedia, but that is precisely what they did.
I wouldn't say they set it up to be this way, they just didn't stop it from evolving that way.