[p2p-research] disagreement by deletion/addition

[Michel Bauwens]

Henrik,

thanks for your cogent explanation, and I think that is indeed what
happened, they found a wrong solution to a right problem, i.e. the quality
issue ;

the problem with deletionism is that it is often hijacked for political
agendas, i.e. objectionable material has to be removed by relying on a huge
number of rules that are incomprehensible for laypeople, and require
political mobilizations to reverse, making it a high treshold activity that
becomes exclusional ...

On Dec 7, 2007 4:04 AM, Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi> wrote:

> 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
> tel:   +358-40-5697354
> www:   www.avoinelama.fi/~hingo <http://www.avoinelama.fi/%7Ehingo>
> book:  www.openlife.cc
>
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