I have noticed two things about Wikipedia: 1) Despite repeated suggestions over the years that it would eventually dissolve into chaos and fall apart, it has pretty noticeably done nothing but continue to improve and be more and more reliable, and 2) For contentious issues, you really can’t trust it. Both, paradoxically, remain quite true, and although it has mechanisms for dealing with dissent, a determined group can completely overwhelm dissenting voices. I’ve seen this happen myself as a frequent contributor (I’ve done thousands of edits of Wikipedia over the last few years) and I’m not the only one. Lawrence Solomon notes a case in point.
It raises the interesting question: what happens when corporations, or government entities, pay people to spend large amounts of time devoted to making sure Wikipedia and other online entities reflect the proper “party line?” People obsess over the idea that a crank or irresponsible jerk might put something up, but it appears to me that this is a much bigger concern than casual goofballery or vandalism.
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Or NGOs, or political campaigns.
Or worse: political supporters. In my brief time as a campaign worker, I discovered there were people you DID NOT want working on your side, who did so on their own initiative. They do more damage than good; but because they believe they’re On The Side Of Truth, they think anything they do to Fight The Forces Of Evil is automatically good.
Unwanted volunteers have lots of time on their hands for Wikipedia tomfoolery.
Wikipedia needs a lot of busybody editors shot. There is an article for every train station in england. Don’t believe me? Just go look, it’s true.
But just try to get a webcomic up, and unless it’s Penny Arcade, it won’t stay there for long. Add to that Jimbo Wales’s abuse of his power, the bizarre cabal of liars given the Wiki-equivalent of unlimited cosmic powers, and the increasingly dense jargon used in wiki-’discussions’ and… well, the easiest way to improve wikipedia would be to trim back the deletionists and let inclusionists have a greater reign, but that’s never going to happen.
I’m not predicting its death, but already other websites/wikis are growing in marketshare. Wikipedia may, in another 18-24 months, be one of equals instead of top dog.
There was an article about more wiki silliness at the instapundit too. (Which may be what brought about your post)
Elisha Feger’s last blog post..Something I want to play with…
Yep, yep, yep, and yep.
Hm. My comment seems to have gotten caught in a moderation cue.
Elisha Feger’s last blog post..Something I want to play with…
More than four links or so and it automatically traps you as spam. Not sure how to get it to stop that.
Anyway, your comment is released.
Well, Penny Arcade is a special kind of awesome. I got Gabe to draw Jesus on a poster I purchased from them in ‘06. The rule was he’d draw any character that showed up in a Penny Arcade strip and Jesus shows up, well, a bunch.
The look both Gabe and Tycho gave me was kewl. It was clear they’d never gotten that request before. Upon my request they noted that Jesus was exactly what the poster was missing.
Dean: Go to the Settings menu, then pick Discussion.
On that page, you’ll find a place where you can set the number of links permitted before moderation is enforced.
This assumes you’re using WP 2.5, btw. If you’re using an earlier version, the steps will be similar, but I can’t guarantee they’ll be the same. I find four links is generally adequate for comments, but of course YMMV.
Well OK, but what to set it to besides 4?
Try this resource instead.
–|PW|–
Dean: Your choice!
Try setting it higher and see if that causes any problems. My spam filter (Akismet) is pretty good at catching the spam comments. Whether it or the 4-link limit is keeping the spam composed of 50+ links to porn sites is immaterial to me: they get blocked.
It’s a good time to reread “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer. It’s one book that should never be forgotten; a book to be read by all who prefer liberty and privacy over history’s onslaught of authoritarians and the human proclivity for mass psychoses that sweeps them into power.
As for Wikipedia, the bureaucracy, I tried to email my concern about Solomon’s treatment and the unfounded disparagement of the incomparable Benny Peiser to someone in executive management to investigate the editor involved.
Have you ever tried to email a person of executive authority at Wikipedia? The system impossible. What is not virtually indigestible is functionally inpenetrable.
This is neither a good sign, or an indication of a well-balanced self-regulating organization.
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