[p2p-research] disagreement by deletion/addition

[Henrik Ingo]

Few more words on deletionism

On Dec 6, 2007 8:46 PM, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com> wrote:
> Basically, DbD tends to become more desirable for wiki communities that are
> gaining larger "audiences", larger collections of inbound and outbound
> links, and more usage/activity. When one (openly editable) wiki begins to
> build up lots of links and usage, some of the people invested in the wiki,
> and even new comers might decide they want to control the message through
> deletion, often giving the reason that they don't want to encourage certain
> patterns of usage by making it seem as if their existence is tolerated.

This inspired me to write some comments on lifecycle of a wiki or an
Open Source project:

The (first) thing that is remarkable about Wikipedia is that it has
succeeded in creating an encyclopedia that competes with the
traditional ones (Britannica) and almost with no paid labor to write
the articles. As was proven by the first unsuccesful Nupedia projects,
the *only* successful way to do such a project is to go for radical
openness, which Wikipedia did (you are allowed to write even bad
articles, no need to register, etc...).

Once Wikipedia becomes more important it is only natural to see a
shift on focusing more on quality. Not only quality of articles, but
categorisation etc... Inevitably this will also raise the bar for
participating, for instance one justifiable way to exclude somebody
from contributing to Wikipedia is if one contributor writes a really
bad article (grammar mistakes, etc) and another contributor then
replaces that with a better text.

This kind of shift happen in Open Source projects too. It is not for
anybody to get code included in the kernel, apache etc...

So it is good to understand that what has happened with Wikipedia is
part of a very natural development cycle for any p2p project. What is
unfortunate is that deletionism is a very idiotic solution to the
problem. There are multiple better alternatives: I already wrote about
Editions, or if incorporated within Wikipedia itself they could
perhaps be created Views, different rating systems (Slashdot, Digg...)
and so forth.

Common with all these solutions is that everyone is allowed to
contribute, yet you are not guaranteed to actually be included in the
subset of some editions of "better quality". The audience on the other
hand is free to choose between reading a (supposedly) higher quality
subset of the full Wikipedia, or the full "raw version".

Come to think about it, could it be that Wikipedia suffers from a lack
of competent programmers? All of the good solutions would require
technical changes, whereas deletionism is something the administrators
can have adopted as a policy themselves. Even if I'm sure good
programmers could be found, if the leading personalities in Wikipedia
are non-technical "humanists" (as is likely, they are encyclopedia
editors after all) they might not be able to see these solutions in
the first place.

**

BTW. Is what I'm writing obvious to anyone, or not?

I feel a bit like Sam, I'm used to spending time with people to whom
even basic Open Source concepts are amazing, and the situation of
having peers like you to talk with is kind of new to me.

henrik
-- 
email: henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
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