Comments on: A Criticism of Wikipedia Now Exceeding a Scream

By: p4r

p4r — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 07:41:23 +0000

Why? Currently, it works. Yeah, the process is tedious, there’s a big learning curve that makes it hard on newcomers — most of my first edits (starting new articles) got VfD’ed. However, I don’t currently see a need to add a big barrier to entry. And, most important, I don’t see HOW you could build such a barrier.

There have been discussions on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team about making a more formal thing, and it finally seems to get some steam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Pages_to_be_rated) — that stuff has been discussed since early 2002, and at some point Wales thought we’d reach 1.0 somewhere in 2003. Give it time, I say.

By: Jason Scott

Jason Scott — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 19:39:29 +0000

Media criticism and commentary is only useless if nobody ever hears it, p4r. Better to discuss the tenets of a medium and question them and get a dialogue going than never to have a discussion at all. My essays indicate that, as time goes on, Wikipedia will be less and less “successful” and will ultimately divest itself of the energy it needs to succeed.

Wikipedia, a collaborative medium with thousands of folks working in the same space to make coherent informative entires with some level of accuracy and usefulness, should, perhaps, have a bit more control than a web forum… don’t you think?

By: p4r

p4r — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 14:12:56 +0000

In the beginning, wikipedia was running a simple usemod wiki. There were no such things as user pages or authentification. That’s were it comes from. With the adding of some process & code, it gave us the current wikipedia, which a lot of people call ‘not bad’. As long as the wikipedians see themselves as successful, arguing for big bad control — you seem to argue for stricter control than most internet forums — is useless.

By: Elias Ross

Elias Ross — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:42:03 +0000

The Wiki folk seem to think the lower barrier of entry makes for better content than a higher barrier. I wonder if it is merely an ideological belief or one founded in reality?

There must be some threshold in which a high barrier creates a worse Wikipedia rather than a better one, and immediately below this level the barrier is optimal. I don’t know if this can be done experimentally. In any case, the Wiki folk need accept the possibility that the threshold is too low. If they are unwilling to consider optimizing the threshold, then they must at least accept many people are going to fork or move their project.

I suggest they seriously consider a list of policies and tools and weigh each possible positive result against a list of negative results. They should be willing to publish this list and use it to defend (or attack) suggested policies or policy changes.