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)”.
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)”.