User:Bratsche/Thoughts/Maru

The Ascent of Worse is Better

A Wikipedian's Thoughts
 * by maru dubshinki
 * 21 February 2006

Not an Encyclopedia
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. The ideal and examples of other encyclopedias provide a initial aim, a base set of ideals and practices (and in the case of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, actual articles). That goal is to be respected, for having uniformly interesting, reliable, and well-written content. We can think of ideal Encyclopedias as being a restricted, cramped subset of what Wikipedia should be; of undeniable worthiness to be sure, but ultimately lesser. The restricting idea that Wikipedia should (and only) be an Encyclopedia is somewhat distressing to me.

I think it is far too limiting. One can think of the ideal Wikipedia as a immense tree- a veritable Tree of Knowledge, say. At the very root of the Tree are things no one in their right mind would doubt are historic- major battles, philosophies, discoveries, and suchlike. Things that are Encyclopedic with a capital "E". But each one of those things links to, branches off to, bifurcates and references less "notable"/"Encyclopedic" other things. Like perhaps any given word- its definition, etymology, examples of usage and other material; all of these are of less notability. Or an image- articles on the coding scheme it uses, what camera it was taken with or the software product used to create it, to say nothing of the subject matter (with even more endless branching of subjects). Those articles themselves would have branches extending from them to others, and so on recursively until one bottoms out some point where material peters out, and the small branches should be merged, or start becoming unverifiable, or have no branches linking to them rather than them linking to other branches.

To take an example from one of my recent articles, a number of Emacs-related articles link to or mention the Dired program (a program written in Emacs Lisp, which manipulates files and directories); I grew tired of seeing something that should have an article (being essential to the most advanced text editor around) remain a red link. So I wrote it. I know some other people have read it, since Lupin fixed some of my formatting mistakes. Would this be a good branch? It is linked to from some major branches, so probably.

In essence, a lot of deletionist and inclusionist debates (with mergists as spectators to the fight, chanting "Merge'em all and let Jimbo sort'em out!") boil down to the simple question: Where do we chop off the bottom of the tree? Where do we draw the line and say, "No more on this subject!" A regular Encyclopedia must set the bar very high, as economically the process does not scale well; most problematic is simply affording to print it all out, and to simply handle the sheer bulk of information. A lot of articles and pictures and definitions and How-Tos and original texts must get tossed out the door.

We don't have to do that. We can follow the branches as far down as they go, as far afield as they can go. We can have videos, music, pictures, definitions, How-Tos as much and as detailed as we want, essentially. Ah, but how do we judge what should be included? Well, remember, the readers are the ones writing and creating all this content.

This suggests a utilitarian view point, rather than a rule-based approach to notability. In the end, an Encyclopedia (or a Wikipedia...) is only of use because of the service it renders its readers. They are the final and highest judge. If a reader finds Wikipedia lacking in some respect, and cares enough to create some content, and someone unrelated and not in their narrow interest group finds it interesting or useful enough to peruse the content, then odds are we should keep it (by which I mean, if I put up a biographical article on myself, and no one but other Wikipedians and family members care to read it, then it probably shouldn't be up).

Wikipedia will be complete when everything a branch links to has a complete and fully-linked article there. But it will not be an Encyclopedia even then.

Worse is Better
Worse is better is, for better or worse, whether you realize or like it, the guiding principle of Wikipedia. Our principles of freedom, usability, modifiability, ease of use (just try to modify another site's pages as easily as Wikipedia's!), and getting something good enough now rather than waiting for perfection later are all key features. (This last can be seen clearly by any Wikipedian who also runs a GNU-based system- just like we have cleanup or NPOV, that other great example of "Worse is Better", Linux, has man pages with "Bugs" sections).

Free redistribution attracts effort because one's efforts cannot "go down with the ship", and not least because of its pervasiveness. The Seigenthaler Affair, for all that it has hurt Wikipedia's reputation, shows that strength: we no longer have a bad article on Seigenthaler. Like the hydra, specific criticism of Wikipedia is through the alchemy of openness and malleability transmuted into an unwilling participation into the project- involuntary bug reports.

Simplicity and usability are important: by expanding the pool of contributors, less is needed of each contributor. One can imagine a supply and demand curve- as the demand on a contributor's time decreases, the supply increases. Furthermore, the supply curve is elastic. This is because of the distribution of skill and willingness to invest effort is not a straight line, but more like a steep curve. If you cut the difficulty of contributing in half, the increase in potential contributions will not double but more than doubles. Simplicity is also the only way to manage such a huge project; I can travel from Fujiwara no Teika to Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity to the Prophets of the Dark Side to ratpoison or even across projects (to Bast Castle or Legion), and still feel at home, with all the accustomed policies, templates, and tools.

The principle of completeness of course needs no further comment.