[p2p-research] Who Writes Wikipedia? (blog post by Aaron Swartz)

[Ryan Lanham]

It seems we all violently agree on Wikipedia from lots of perspectives.

The issue is one of governance.  The issue of the commons is always modes of
governance.  People hope for coordinated love ins.  Sadly we've been short
of those.

How does one govern the commons openly and freely without a heavy "curtain
twitcher" -- which I love as a metaphor -- hand.

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 1:25 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not sure if anyone's interested, but this has already happened with some of
> the Wikia sites - the one I'm familiar with is the Transformers wikia, whose
> most regular editors forked into TFwiki.com in a dispute over imposed banner
> ads on the Wikia site.
>
> In my experience, Wikipedia has a lot of crap around it because there's a
> bewildering array of rules and policies, admins have a lot of power and the
> place also attracts the online equivalent of curtain-twitchers, who use and
> abuse both procedural and 'illegal' lines of action for their own
> advantage.  I've contributed a few times and had perfectly good articles or
> paragraphs removed over all kinds of nit-picking, most of it subjective.
> There is a horrible "mission creep" - policies which don't look bad on the
> surface, and were introduced for clear reasons, undergoing
> passive-aggressive misuse as a way to fight disputes over different
> opinions, to keep out rival viewpoints and so on.
>
> This said, any project of this kind would have to have some way to handle
> content disputes where users are committed enough to persist in reverting or
> repeating edits (which is a very different issue from outright "vandalism",
> though often conflated).  One possibility might be to have redirects to
> different versions of the same article.
>
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-- 
Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
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P.O. Box 633
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