User:KeithTyler/WP and cabalism's next failed attempt

You know what's great, is that peer review a la "karma" has fucked up nearly every online reference project and turned it into a cabalized, niche project whose proponents insist is still widely used but in reality has about the same number of active users as Gopher.

One major flaw with these systems is that they end up rewarding for large corpuses of mediocre work over smaller corpuses of more meaningfully created work, resulting in a rank system where free-time-loaded high school and college students and others not having a productive use for their time rise more rapidly than more educated, experienced, sensible, and wise contributors.

Jason Scott of textfiles.com and I got into an aborted debate at WP between the time he posted his "why WP sucks" rant and then erased it all from existence (or something), and it came down to cabalism vs. collectivism.

Some feel that an inner circle of arbitrarily and subjectively chosen warders (based on some selection criteria the proponent personally deems as infallible) will result in higher quality work. Unfortunately, such bodies tend to become Old Boy Networks, stuck in antiquated, elitist, and/or closed-minded thinking, driving a project into further and further irrelevancy on the greater scale. WP tends to be affected by this sort of influence anyway, but it is illegitimate (or no more fundamentally legitimate than the converse) -- though it has crept into the body having the power to expel contributors.

At WP, when it so occurs that the continuted activity of a contributor is to be decided, there is no rigid, inhuman mathematical figure by which the jurors can have their decision simplified. Instead, the corpus of the contributor's work must be evaluated wholly. In the end it comes down to subjective assessment, and tendencies of value judgement have clearly formed, but the difference is that the decision-makers have to think about it, and handle each case uniquely, beyond a nice, disempowered "less than X" basis.

I wish that body was less of a kangaroo court, but I have to appreciate this, as well as the generally devolved form of article government. At any given time the content of a broadly-attended-to article may be intensely debated, forcing rethinking and defense of position (Jason Scott hated this, arguing that contributors should not have to spend time defending their work on its own merits). Content review on WP, then, is constant, provided that the article doesn't suffer from a) an influx of fanboys, b) an overwhelming multitude of subject areas and angles, or c) lack of interest.

Ultimately the best solution for one's problems with WP is for one to contribute, and when one has done so, to find more to contribute. But you have to have the interest in helping the project succeed rather than being predisposed to either having it fail, digging up its flaws to laugh at them, or having it elevate you and your work to an ostentatious level of specialness where your name appears in bold bright text across your contributions.

Despite the examples presented by the critics (who did nothing to improve them, despite clearly having better information or ideas), those critics would be (and seem to be) rather hard pressed to find better references on any of them. That is, "better" by an encompassing range of criteria -- such as price, reusability, lack of bias, clarity, comprehensiveness, or maintenance.