User:Leifern/On Wikipedia

My point of view on Wikipedia, etc.
No matter where you end up on the various controversies surrounding Wikipedia, you can't help but be amazed at this enterprise. This is now, by far, the largest encyclopedia in the world, and is growing by every measure - including quality - all the time. And its philosophical underpinnings are holding up, though they are strained from time to time.

I have my own reservations, of course; and things I get mightily annoyed about. But I'm hard pressed to be alarmist about them - things seem to work themselves out here. But I think we could improve quite a bit if we were more vigilant about the principles I'm about to propose, and that's always something.

The Wikipedia community needs to:


 * Insist on intellectual honesty. This is a tough standard, but one that any committed editor should aspire to. We should all know and rigorously avoid rhetorical fallacies, hold each other responsible for constructing solid prose, and happily concede when we're wrong.
 * And as a corollary, stop accepting so readily a presumption of good faith. All too often, I've run into editors who are up to mischief and then hide behind the AGF principle. The result is that criticism of bad behavior is more often punished than the bad behavior itself, and that gives the smart POV Warriors a pretty free rein. I've proposed before that we classify knavishness as a lesser crime than vandalism, but still a punishable offense.
 * On the other hand, be more forgiving of crimes of passion. Wikipedia benefits much more from the excitable editor who commits multiple 3RR and NPA violations than the sneaky editor who stays narrowly within the guidelines but pushes his/her POV at every turn.
 * Expect more from experienced editors and certainly admins. At some point, "you should know better" has to matter, but sadly it seems that established editors seem to get away with more than others; it should be the opposite.
 * Resolve the inclusionist/deletionist issue once and for all. The inclusionists have it right, and while their/our case certainly can be overstated (I don't think an article about me is warranted, for example), Wikipedia is not paper. Nominating an article for deletion should not be a cost-free exercise for those who take it as their mission to decide what is noteworthy.

It can be argued that all these have self-correcting mechanisms. NPOV eventually encourages intellectual honesty; knavish behavior eventually is self-destructive; people learn to temper their passion to be more effective; you will only become an experienced editor if you learn to do things right; and there is no question more articles are being created than being deleted.

But it's a painful process, and some of these issues point to cultural elements that are dysfunctional.