User:Cburnett/wikipinion

My opinion of Wikipedia and its various issues


 * I welcome you leave a note on my talk page about what you think.

A read of my user page would tell suggest to anyone that I like and enjoy Wikipedia (WP). Since discovering Wikipedia, my searching for general knowledge is first done at WP then at google. The web is too freelance to expect to find reliable information on general topics. To me, this is the single best thing about WP.

Accuracy
The latest political rage is to lament WP for hosting inaccurate information. What escapes most lamenters is that everything in life is a trade-off. The, perhaps, most well known is the space-time tradeoff in computer science. WP is no exception.

For WP it's a trade-off between access/control of editting privileges and quantity of editors. By removing restrictions, more editors come. With more editors comes vandalism and inaccurate edits.

The real question should not be about the accuracy but: what's the optimum balance between access/control and quantity of editors? I think the bar is too far away from access/control.

Peer review
Recently there have been talks about implementing a form of peer review as well as marking "approved" versions of articles.

I predict that neither of these methods will work all that well. Why? The underlying assumption is that all edits should not be trusted. It's another example of imposing on the masses to control the few.

I suspect that the better method would be to define a "karma" akin to Slashdot.
 * All editors start with a neutral karma.
 * An edit marked as "vandalism" subtracts karma.
 * An edit not marked as "vandalism" adds karma.
 * Two thresholds would be needed:
 * The lower threshold is the mark below which all edits must go through a peer review approval process
 * The upper threshold is the mark above which an editor can start peer reviewing
 * Administrators get a fixed boost in karma (but could still be countered by bad edits)
 * Marking an edit as "ok" to have it countered by other editos as "not ok" reduces karma for both the original poster and the reviewer

This method reduces the quantity of edits that requires peer review by assigning trust to users who make good edits.

Thanks to User:Peregrinefisher dropping a comment on my talk page, I'd like to point out that this method addresses the type of editor an editor is and is not to address an article's quality. The stub, start, B, A, & FA method and good article methods are good ways to address the quality of the article. We need both...
 * ...a method to address the "quality" or "ranking" of an editor as an editor and...
 * ...a method to address the quality of an article as an article

...analogy time...

If I had to pick one, I'd have to go with editor ranking. As the comp sci aphorism goes: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Not entirely fitting but I'd have to go with sapphire rings on a mostly-clean floor rather than diamond rings on a garbage-and-sewage laden floor. :) This goes back to the intro to this page: I go to WP before google.  Why?  It's so much easier to find sapphire-quality articles on WP than have to wade through the garbage on the internet with google to maybe find a diamond quality page.

If WP can foster editors who can convert Cracker Jack plastic rings into diamond rings while making sure others don't dirty the floor......then rock on. Makes more sense to me to make sure editors don't dirty the floor rather than trying to add more and more cleaners to the more and more dirtying editors.

...if you survived that analogy...congrats. :)

Inclusionism
As I've stated above, WP makes a trade-off between access/control and quantity of editors. The content of WP is also another trade-off. On one end you have a compendium of everything; on the other end you have few, coarsed-grain articles on the "major" topics.

I think the bar is to far away from a compendium.

I would like to see the bar moved such that Memory Alpha (MA) and lostpedia (LP) could be merged with wikipedia (nevermind the differing licenses).
 * I don't want advertising articles.
 * I don't want articles on mundane things that only the author cares about.
 * I don't want articles with unverifiable information.
 * I don't want articles without a NPOV.
 * I don't want articles with original research.
 * I don't want articles that are not WP.

I want articles with content that people care about and I think the bulk of MA & LP fit the above list, but it tends to be written off as "fan cruft" and non-notable. IMO, both "fan cruft" and "notability" are peacock terms.

Personal opinions
Personal opinions: everyone's got them. Ignoring opinions ignores the differences between us. However, none of these opinions belong anywhere but on user pages. This means they do not belong on main namespace articles nor their talk pages.