Wikipedia is great entertainment, but you'd have to be insane to use it for real research. By that, I mean quoting material from Wikipedia, not following the source trail.Exactly. I've used Wikipedia a couple of times when I wanted to do some research on a subject (comparing and contrasting native american creation myths with those from asian cultures), and it provided some great starting material. After the first fifteen minutes of skimming, though, you have to wander off to follow references, hunt down books or dedicated professional sites on subtopics, etc.
It would be interesting to replace the idea of 'correcting' an article, and instead let each edit live as a separate entity. A viable instance from a set of articles, all of which compete for the recognition of editors. Editors who themselves compete for recognition based on peer review of their editing decisions.Guess What? That already exists. It's called Everything2, and it's a shithole. There are a few good writeups (the bitter, sarcastic ones), but It's mostly shit, especially since Wikipedia came in to being.
This idea that having the One True article about Tibet, for example, is preferable to having many articles at varying degrees of accuracy from several points of view, open to consensus about Tibet creates some of the editing fights Jason mentions. And he explains the objectivist philosophical beliefs Jimbo Wales adheres to which mandate that there can only be One True article about any given subject.
I'd like to see a multiplicity of articles which give readers and writers the choice and ability to rely upon their wits, to figure things out for themselves, along with everyone else, at the same time.
This would work like the Slashdot moderation system; when you don't want to read Funny's, you just want Troll's or Informative's, you create a filter. Very effective. The difference here being that filtered items would be open to editing, which would spawn a new instance of the original item (article), which then competes with it's source material for moderation marks of it's own.
The key feature then becomes managing filters and creating allegiances to editors you consider trustworthy. The beauty being that the entire system is inherently subjective, and anyone can change adherences, but no one expects to find perfect explanations for anything. The truth of something should be borne out in it's applicability, un-true statements which fail this test would be filtered out.
posted by airguitar at 6:46 PM PST on April 13 [!]
This is a space for studying strategies of moderation in groups that conduct some or all of their communications online. The principal content of this wiki is a proposed "pattern language" -- a description of the common patterns of these moderation systems -- for developers to consider when deploying or altering social software.posted by scalefree at 5:13 AM on April 14, 2006
Now, this brings up an interesting idea, which I've tried to push, which is that unknowingly, and these kind of things happen, unknowingly Wikipedia happened on a form of human addiction. That is to say, it turns out that if you give people a stage, and you give them a stage where they have total control, even if it's for a short amount, they will not rest until they can do it again.... and that's where alarm bells start going off, because I realize that what I'm looking at is really easy to understand in terms of what Hoffer described as the "faith of the fanatic". If the reason for that association doesn't immediately clear for you, consider the old saw: "There's none more zealous than the whore turned respectable." Or the "addict" in "recovery." Or more angry than a jilted lover.
In other words, if you say to somebody "well if you go and you edit this entry on Jimmy Carter ... for however long it is in there, you are the authority on Jimmy Carter, and everyone will know it," this is a completely addictive process. It's what keeps a lot of people going to Wikipedia as an editing faction, because when they use it, they end up saying "Wow, I've done it, I've done it, I've changed the world," and to some extent they're correct. ...
Two: We will not see any real hints of what is to come in information wars until really existing groups with real funding and power in the real world try to spike the Internet. What has gone on in the Wikipedia is mostly "playing by the rules." It is not a good predictor of what will happen when some group decides it doesn't have to.We've already seen that, with Scientology. The battle for ARS was the first Class III* information war fought on the Internet. It's interesting to note that they haven't (yet) gotten involved as an organization in writing/editing the WP entries about them.
*Class I: Personal information warfare. That area of IW concerned with personal privacy issues.posted by scalefree at 7:02 AM on April 14, 2006
Class II: Corporate/organizational-level information warfare. That area of IW concerned with espionage issues.
Class III: Information warfare viewed with an open / global scope. That area of IW concerned with cyber-terrorism issues.
(from GLOSSARY: The Convoluted Terminology of Information Warfare.
In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch-doctor to priest to beaucrat, it is all the same; a governed populace must be condition to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding; symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation, or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that it's users are accumulating some form of power.posted by sonofsamiam at 7:54 AM on April 14, 2006
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posted by airguitar at 4:32 PM on April 13, 2006