I’m with Shankar and that meme: Stack Exchange used to be good, but isn’t any more.
Regarding Wikipedia, I’ve had similar thoughts, but they caused me to imagine how to deeply restructure Wikipedia so that it can collect and synthesize primary sources.
Perhaps it could contain a system for “internal primary sources” where people register as such, and start offering archived testimony (which could then be cited in “purely secondary articles”) similarly to the way random people hired by the NYT are trusted to offer archived testimony suitable for inclusion in current Wikipedia stuff?
This is the future. It runs on the Internet. Shall this future be democratic and flat, or full of silos and tribalism?
The thing I object to, Christian, is that “outsiders” are the people Wikipedia should properly be trying to serve but Wikipedia (like most public institutions eventually seem to do?) seems to have become insular and weird and uninterested in changing their mission to fulfill social duties that are currently being neglected by most institutions.
Wikipedia seem, to me, from the outside, as someone who they presumably are nominally “hoping to serve by summarizing all the world’s trustworthy knowledge” to not actually be very good at governance, or vetting people who can or can’t lock pages, or allocating power wisely, or choosing good operating policies.
Some of it I understand. “Fandom” used to be called “Wikia” and was (maybe still is?) run by Jimbo as a terrible and ugly “for profit, ad infested” system of wikis.
He naturally would have wanted wikipedia to have a narrow mandate so that “the rest of the psychic energy” could accumulate in his for-profit monstrosity, I think? But I don’t think it served the world for this breakup and division into subfields to occur.
And, indeed, I think it would be good for Wikipedia to import all the articles across all of Fandom that it can legally import as “part of RETVRNING to inclusionism” <3
Wikipedia seem, to me, from the outside, as someone who they presumably are nominally “hoping to serve by summarizing all the world’s trustworthy knowledge” to not actually be very good at governance, or vetting people who can or can’t lock pages, or allocating power wisely, or choosing good operating policies.
Given that by your own standards there are no big institutions that are “very good at governance” or “allocate power wisely”, is it any surprise that this is true for Wikipedia?
Even if Wikipedia’s institutions could be improved, just letting people who don’t understand the way the gears inside Wikipedia work buy policy changes isn’t going to lead to either good governance or wise decision making.
He naturally would have wanted wikipedia to have a narrow mandate so that “the rest of the psychic energy” could accumulate in his for-profit monstrosity, I think? But I don’t think it served the world for this breakup and division into subfields to occur.
While Jimmy Wales might have made decisions in the first decade of Wikipedia’s existence that were good for Wikia, Wikipedia’s guidelines on inclusion & exclusion are in a constant flux via RfCs and you have people arguing for both sides. Some RfCs get adopted while others rejected. Jimmy is neither voicing an opinion in most of these discussions nor would have a way to decide the outcome that goes beyond what anyone who writes well could achieve.
Decisions about those RfC’s are made in a democratic and flat way within Wikipedia. Your proposal about making them via people paying money, is not moving it into making them more democratic and flat.
Are you a wikipedian? Is there some way that I could find all the wikipedians and just appeal to them directly and fix the badness more simply? I like fixing things simply when simple fixes can work… :-)
(However, in my experience, most problems like this are caused by conflicts of interest, and it has seemed to me in the past that when pies are getting bigger, people are more receptive to ideas of fair and good justice, whereas when pies are getting smaller people’s fallenness becomes more prominent.
I’m not saying Jimbo is still ruining things. For all I know he’s not even on the board of directors of Wilkipedia anymore. I haven’t checked. I’m simply saying that there are clear choices that were made in the deep past that seem to have followed a logic that would naturally help his pocketbook and naturally hurt natural public interests, and these same choices seem to still be echoing all the way up to the present.
At the moment there for example a discussion about whether “Should all British National rail stations be presumed notable as an exception to WP:NTRAINSTATION”. If you think of it in terms of deletionism vs. inclusivism, the inclusivity position would be to grant notability to all the British National rail stations while the deletionist policy is to reject automatic notability of those rail stations.
There are constantly small decisions like that, where the border of what’s notable and what isn’t gets shifted. There are 81 sites worth of achieves at Wikipedia_talk:Notability that span a variety of proposals to change notability rules that have been accepted and rejected.
However, in my experience, most problems like this are caused by conflicts of interest
If that’s what you believe you have to understand the interests of the people who currently vote in the decisions about how the lines of notability shift and not just what interests might have existed twenty years ago.
What I’d prefer is to have someone do data science on all that content, and find the person inside of wikipedia who is least bad, and the most good, according to my preferences and ideals, and then I’d like to donate $50 to have all their votes count twice as much in every vote for a year.
Remember the OP?
The question is “How could a large number of venal idiots attacking The Internet cost more damage than all the GDP of all the people who create and run The Internet via market mechanisms?”
I’m claiming that the core issue is that The Internet is mostly a public good, and there is no known way to turn dollars into “more or better public goods” (not yet anyway) but there are ways to ruin public goods, and then charge for access to an unruined simulacrum of a public good.
All those votes… those are a cost (and one invisible to the market, mostly). And they are only good if they reliably “generate the right answer (as judged from far away by those who wish Wikipedia took its duties as a public goods institution more seriously and coherently)”.
Yes, there are a lot of people complaining about quality standards on StackExchange and don’t want to engage in the work it takes to write quality questions.
Meme about the experience of using StackExchange: link.
I’m with Shankar and that meme: Stack Exchange used to be good, but isn’t any more.
Regarding Wikipedia, I’ve had similar thoughts, but they caused me to imagine how to deeply restructure Wikipedia so that it can collect and synthesize primary sources.
Perhaps it could contain a system for “internal primary sources” where people register as such, and start offering archived testimony (which could then be cited in “purely secondary articles”) similarly to the way random people hired by the NYT are trusted to offer archived testimony suitable for inclusion in current Wikipedia stuff?
This is the future. It runs on the Internet. Shall this future be democratic and flat, or full of silos and tribalism?
The thing I object to, Christian, is that “outsiders” are the people Wikipedia should properly be trying to serve but Wikipedia (like most public institutions eventually seem to do?) seems to have become insular and weird and uninterested in changing their mission to fulfill social duties that are currently being neglected by most institutions.
Wikipedia seem, to me, from the outside, as someone who they presumably are nominally “hoping to serve by summarizing all the world’s trustworthy knowledge” to not actually be very good at governance, or vetting people who can or can’t lock pages, or allocating power wisely, or choosing good operating policies.
Some of it I understand. “Fandom” used to be called “Wikia” and was (maybe still is?) run by Jimbo as a terrible and ugly “for profit, ad infested” system of wikis.
He naturally would have wanted wikipedia to have a narrow mandate so that “the rest of the psychic energy” could accumulate in his for-profit monstrosity, I think? But I don’t think it served the world for this breakup and division into subfields to occur.
And, indeed, I think it would be good for Wikipedia to import all the articles across all of Fandom that it can legally import as “part of RETVRNING to inclusionism” <3
Given that by your own standards there are no big institutions that are “very good at governance” or “allocate power wisely”, is it any surprise that this is true for Wikipedia?
Even if Wikipedia’s institutions could be improved, just letting people who don’t understand the way the gears inside Wikipedia work buy policy changes isn’t going to lead to either good governance or wise decision making.
While Jimmy Wales might have made decisions in the first decade of Wikipedia’s existence that were good for Wikia, Wikipedia’s guidelines on inclusion & exclusion are in a constant flux via RfCs and you have people arguing for both sides. Some RfCs get adopted while others rejected. Jimmy is neither voicing an opinion in most of these discussions nor would have a way to decide the outcome that goes beyond what anyone who writes well could achieve.
Decisions about those RfC’s are made in a democratic and flat way within Wikipedia. Your proposal about making them via people paying money, is not moving it into making them more democratic and flat.
Are you a wikipedian? Is there some way that I could find all the wikipedians and just appeal to them directly and fix the badness more simply? I like fixing things simply when simple fixes can work… :-)
(However, in my experience, most problems like this are caused by conflicts of interest, and it has seemed to me in the past that when pies are getting bigger, people are more receptive to ideas of fair and good justice, whereas when pies are getting smaller people’s fallenness becomes more prominent.
I’m not saying Jimbo is still ruining things. For all I know he’s not even on the board of directors of Wilkipedia anymore. I haven’t checked. I’m simply saying that there are clear choices that were made in the deep past that seem to have followed a logic that would naturally help his pocketbook and naturally hurt natural public interests, and these same choices seem to still be echoing all the way up to the present.
I’m an admin at Wikidata and I have engaged some in the German and English Wikipedia.
On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment you have a general page that explains how RfCs get made and which also links to the individual categories.
At the moment there for example a discussion about whether “Should all British National rail stations be presumed notable as an exception to WP:NTRAINSTATION”. If you think of it in terms of deletionism vs. inclusivism, the inclusivity position would be to grant notability to all the British National rail stations while the deletionist policy is to reject automatic notability of those rail stations.
There are constantly small decisions like that, where the border of what’s notable and what isn’t gets shifted. There are 81 sites worth of achieves at Wikipedia_talk:Notability that span a variety of proposals to change notability rules that have been accepted and rejected.
If that’s what you believe you have to understand the interests of the people who currently vote in the decisions about how the lines of notability shift and not just what interests might have existed twenty years ago.
What I’d prefer is to have someone do data science on all that content, and find the person inside of wikipedia who is least bad, and the most good, according to my preferences and ideals, and then I’d like to donate $50 to have all their votes count twice as much in every vote for a year.
Remember the OP?
The question is “How could a large number of venal idiots attacking The Internet cost more damage than all the GDP of all the people who create and run The Internet via market mechanisms?”
I’m claiming that the core issue is that The Internet is mostly a public good, and there is no known way to turn dollars into “more or better public goods” (not yet anyway) but there are ways to ruin public goods, and then charge for access to an unruined simulacrum of a public good.
All those votes… those are a cost (and one invisible to the market, mostly). And they are only good if they reliably “generate the right answer (as judged from far away by those who wish Wikipedia took its duties as a public goods institution more seriously and coherently)”.
Yes, there are a lot of people complaining about quality standards on StackExchange and don’t want to engage in the work it takes to write quality questions.