Yahoo知識+剛上線測試時，Schee曾說”blogger們可以趁beta階段，一舉大幅攻克奇摩知識頻道”。 過了一個半月，不知道有沒有哪位blogger成為知識名人？或是有哪位知識名人有在寫blog？ 我覺得除了Ri…

The responses from some corners of the Wikipedia community were predictable when Larry Stanger, part of the team that developed Wikipedia, published a long article on kuro5shin arguing that “anti-elitism” and “trolls” were undermining this user-contrib…

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Wikipedia is, fundamentally, founded on anarchist/communist principles, which propose that people working as a collective will be stronger than whacko individualists locking out the people and controlling all the toys for themselves. Any divergence from these principles immediately lose the kind of people who are deeply into Wikipedia.

That is, once you start adding these barriers to entry, then come the natural concerns about elitism, the belief that “they” will pull the power in for “themselves”, and in most ways, that people will be shut out of “the club”. And since this openness, this very thing I claim turns the endeavor to crap, is what the whole project is founded on, I just don’t see reconcilliation.

As it is, my pages are actually sort of a collaboration. If you look at my BBS Software page, it is the result of dozens of people mailing me software and suggestions and stories, and I implement them with attribution. But this wouldn’t be acceptable by Wiki standards, nor should it.

I should mention that I’ve actually spent several years doing work for an organization, using software that is, basically, a Wiki. However, there’s only about 12 of us with access, and of the 12 maybe 6 are frequent contributors… And I thought this is how they all were. We just didn’t get in each others’ way. It was quite a shock to be on Wikipedia.

So I don’t know if I’m helping here. I would say that Wikipedia is definitely advancing on one side: the software that allows people to work on the same bits of data without stepping on each other in more mundane hey-where-the-hell-is-my-paragraph version control issues. And guess what… that software is maintained by a very small amount of people compared to the users, who submit their changes to them.

The ever brilliant Jason Scott has a ather long rant up on his site about collaborative writing, and the effect it has on quality of content. This is something I’ve come up against so many times on the KDE docs….

I really liked Kevin’s idea:
“I think one start is mostly unlimited viewing access for most general content while having a hierarchy of users which limit modification of content or at the very least have a moderated approval process of content. I think there’s still a place for limited access to viewing and editing certain content before it’s released for general consumption.”

That would help. And maybe a more broadly-conceived and regulated page-locking policy, even though page-locking is not a good habit and kind of goes against the whole principle.

Can you think of other improvements that would benefit, if not Wikipedia, other collaborative projects that are using Wikipedia as a guide?

Obviously the NPOV doesn’t effectively attend to “people [who] make little empires, have their agendas, push through ideas and themes they want, and disregard and delete things they do not” or to vandals. As you said, it’s more like a weapon than a guideline. Maybe a NPOV commission or system instead of delete-first-blame-later?

What about something that can accommodate individualist researchers, like a project manager who has demonstrated a level of knowledge receives help and can opt to refuse help on their locked pages? I don’t really see why it has to be “Collaborate or Die” in Wiki land. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?

The copyright problem is probably something that Wikipedia is experiencing now more acutely, since copyright is just this big, big problem with any cultural creation now.

Some forums have “newbie” or some ranking system which could locate people who don’t have anything invested in the project. I wonder if that could be implemented in the software somehow to (passively or silently) deal with the problems you’re bringing up.

I’m also wondering if these problems are limited to Wikipedia’s controversial pages or if it is a problem system-wide.

Sorry if I’m blasting questions here, just trying to learn more about collaborative projects in general.

Thanks to author and authors of this post/comments.

Part of my theory is a smaller number of participants, but also that there were often hierarchies of access, often even to find the bbs number or initial password to gain access to the bbs before you could even ASK for access (which you’d get from other people you knew or from BBS lists from other similar boards).

Then once you were on, there’d be general boards that you would be able to post on, but there were often other boards that you wouldn’t even know about until you were approved by a sysop/cosysop or some similar higher trusted user. You had to gain acceptance by ‘proving your worth’ in some sense, varying depending on the board. (large numbers of post, providing content, uploading, etc).

Now, one hard part in all this is how you balance general wide access and appropriate limited use that seems to generate a high quality user community and experience.

I think one start is mostly unlimited viewing access for most general content while having a hierarchy of users which limit modification of content or at the very least have a moderated approval process of content. I think there’s still a place for limited access to viewing and editing certain content before it’s released for general consumption.

Given that I work for a living with inferior development tools (gdb, anyone?) that are in widespread use because, let’s face it, worse is better, I feel your pain.

Jason Scott has an interesting critique of Wikipedia, from the standpoint of a contributor. He isn’t criticizing the , from the standpoint of a contributor. He isn’t criticizing the

To a toolmaker and tooluser, that is, an information gatherer and disseminator, a researcher who is specifically trying to better the world by showing their findings, I find it very, very problematic, as I spend a lot of time in the sausage factory. And therefore my problems are completely on a different plane from yours and likely many readers of this weblog, or users of Wikipedia.

While a newspaper might report on a race car driver’s work in a way the race car driver wouldn’t, that doesn’t mean that the final stuff doesn’t have some use, even though it omits details the race car driver wouldn’t in describing his work. And the race car driver would be miserable working for the newspaper.

That’s really interesting!