Comments on: Wikitization

By: User:Chris9086 from wikipedia

User:Chris9086 from wikipedia — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:47:52 +0000

Don’t blame that on wikipedia, that was my bad.

By: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Wikitization

DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Wikitization — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 10:34:53 +0000

[...] Read it. Bureaucracy will get you if you don’t watch out. [...]

By: samiam

samiam — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 09:57:51 +0000

Plenty of rules in any bureaucracy, Wikipedia’s strength is in its dynamicism. That is also its weakness, but like freedon itself, the upside justifies the down. If you want fully vetted articles with all controversial content redacted that have stood the test of time, go to a library and use a paper copy of the EB. Regarding page formatting, a couple of approaches may have merit, singly or in combination. It might be wise to make the formatting a superset of proper html, so that there is crossover with the web development community. It might also be both advisable and feasible to create a lightweight editor to allow easy use of a subset of _that_, sort of NVM for Wikipedia.

-S

By: …My heart’s in Accra » links for 2007-08-17

…My heart’s in Accra » links for 2007-08-17 — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 04:19:03 +0000

[...] Keywords ‽ Wikitization Excellent piece by KerinF on the increasing bureaucracy of English-language Wikipedia (tags: wikipedia community) [...]

By: Alexandre

Alexandre — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:20:06 +0000

A point that is often made among semi-outsiders to Wikipedia has to do with scale, in social contexts. And there is a larger anthropological point to be made, here, about "ordered anarchy" in small-scale societies as opposed to the bureaucratic apparatus of state-level societies. Many neo-evolutionists assume that population density and state-level organization are hallmarks of progress. Lots of connection with Collapse, Non-Zero, and The End of History. For a project which is currently in the "if rules hinder your progress, don't follow them" mode, you could look at LibriVox.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 09:20:43 +0000

Larry,

Thanks for your comments. I think I might have been putting words into Joseph Reagle’s mouth there, as I don’t think he said exactly that. However, even though it says on Citizendium that the site is “expert-led, not experts-only” I think the general impression that got out when you first set it up was that regular folks need not apply, and that impression certainly was present in the discussion we had at Wikimania. (Your name came up several times.) I’m glad to know that this is not the case.

By: Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 06:12:25 +0000

Interesting. As to your main point: don’t hold your breath.

The wording of “Ignore all rules” was: “If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the wiki, then ignore them entirely and go about your business.”

It’s incorrect to say that it was Wikipedia’s “first rule.” It was the first rule on the “RulesToConsider” page, but I am pretty sure that before we even created that page, we had various naming conventions and, if I’m not mistaken, I created the “Wikipedia is not a dictionary” page and maybe also “What Wikipedia is not.”

I don’t know if it was Joseph Reagle who said I am “looking to limit some of these problems by keeping the community much smaller,” with Citizendium, but that’s just silly. We want CZ to become bigger than Wikipedia, and in time, we will be. We are going to limit the problems by addressing them more intelligently, that’s all.