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Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia
blastboy writes By pretty much any logic, Wikipedia shouldn't work: A vast website, built on the labor of volunteers, with very few tangible rewards and a fairly weird hierarchy. From the article: "The stewards would prefer to go unnoticed. Only one has ever had any real fame—Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales served as a steward from 2006 to 2009. They operate above the fray, giving and taking user privileges and intervening in matters that lower-ranking editors can’t handle. You can summon them for emergencies in the Wikimedia Stewards IRC chat room by typing '!steward.' Their secrecy has a certain irony, given the very public product they manage, but perhaps it’s emblematic of Wikimedia as a whole. When your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge,' hierarchies become a necessary evil."
Citation Needed or GTFO
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
And because nobody pays attention to the stewards, they're not held accountable.
A better system is one where each has ultimate control over their view into wikipedia. Censorship should be at the client, not the server. Each viewer can customize the view to their heart's desire, without infringing on anyone else's right to free speech. Technology provides us the tools to implement such customization of views (i.e. slashdot comment threshold settings, etc.).
Great, just what an encyclopedia of facts needs: a way for readers to filter it to present the reality they want to see. Why don't they just subscribe to blogs if they only want to view things they agree with?
Saying hierarchies are necessary is saying some people have to be controlled. Why, though?
Because some people are tremendous assholes. See also, laws, prisons.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Well, someone hell bent on protecting and defending his little private version of "reality" will do so, no matter what any encyclopedia will say. For reference, see religion. It's not like there has ever been any amount of proof that some people couldn't wish away by putting the fingers in their ears and yelling "lalalala, I can't hear you!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem with Wikipedia is one we've seen with Communism, repeated over again.
Or as Animal Farm put it, "All animals are equal, just some are more equal than others".
We've seen it happen with Wikipedia - the statement you quoted pretty much says "everyone is equal", and we've seen it deteriorate to "everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others".
Wikipedia's "No original research" policy is second in asininity only to its "let's delete articles because we can" policy.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
The thing I hate most is the "consensus" obsession. It leads to -- and I've seen this even though I rarely contribute -- people just making shit up about Wikipedia policies to support their positions and claiming it's "consensus". A lot of it comes down to who has groupthink on their side and, even more troublingly, who can bluff and bluster the best.
Wikipedia's community is toxic. I'm amazed the results are as good as they are, and it saddens me that the site could probably be so much better if it were better managed.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Of course, many people who bitch about Wikipedia and how it doesn't work complain that their edits were undone, often because they added information without a reliable source for verification.
The issue I've run into is that sometimes there simply isn't a "reliable source" other than people that are intimately familiar with the topic at hand because the written information is under an NDA or otherwise inaccessible. In my particular case, it dealt with the monorail system at Disney World - I worked there for years, was a trainer on the system, and know a fair bit about the internals of the trains and control/signalling system, as does any other driver with any experience. However, Disney and Bombardier are pretty strict about controlling the availability of any official detailed printed/electronic documentation, so in the end I ended up just giving up and letting the incorrect information that was in the article and the half-assed "citations" stay there because the only authoritative citations were in documentation that was unavailable to the public, and I got to the point where I just didn't care anymore whether Jimmy presented bogus info while claiming it was accurate.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas