User:Burressd

I am a retired economist still working on a book. I'm going to use this user page to make remarks about the Wikipedia enterprise, as seen by a regular user.

I'm glad Wikipedia exists. I'd like it to be better than it is, but as an institution it seems to have topped out at a certain level of quality. Perhaps my experience will be informative as to why.

I often visit pages where I believe have some degree of expertise in some aspect of the contents. I make comments in the talk page on occasion, and more rarely make direct edits. I make far fewer edits than I think of, and I will probably never contribute a page, though there are number of pages I could contribute. Here's why.

1. To make any serious changes in Wikipedia, it appears I would need to be prepared to defend those changes against critics. That's not bad in itself. However to defend adequately I would have to become somewhat expert in internal Wikipedia culture, politics, and quasilegal code of procedure. I have neither time nor energy left in me to take on that whole new project.

2. I know some things about law, and from what I can see the Wikipedia quasilegal tradition is probably not very well crafted. Working in a badly crafted system of law isn't any fun.

3. I don't like the abusive style of discourse. Abuse is controllable. Most importantly, anonymity is the enemy of civility. Every editor ought to be fully identified, so that long-term reputations are at risk with each edit or comment. Wikipedia also needs a more transparent and swift trial procedure for removing editing privileges from abusive authors.

4. Truly controversial topics are handled very poorly. Instead of trying to create a neutral scientific consensus where none exists, I'd set up unsettled issues like a debate, with some consensus points (if any) plus two versions of the truth. I am by no means saying that climate change deniers should have a page, but I am saying that truly scholarly issues (e.g. feminist and non-feminist views of an issue) might be clarified by a more open conflict not confined to the talk page.

However where there are more than two viable scholarly versions of the truth, then I'd go to a meta-omniscient view that just listed and summarized the various positions.

5. If I were reorganizing Wikipedia I'd assign a lead editor to every page (subject to appeal to higher editors). The lead editor would have mainly traffic cop rights, but also an ability to settle extended debates.

Burressd (talk) 01:32, 5 March 2014 (UTC)