Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Occupy Wikipedia

Description
Seeking grounds for a populist overthrow/softening of some of Wikipedia's more divisive policies. Towards a Wikipedia that works best for the most people. Regardless of status. A meta/temporary project if anything. Truth Glass (talk) 07:36, 9 November 2011 (UTC)


 * List of important pages and categories for this proposed group
 * occupy_movement (number of pages in the category: a lot)
 * wikipedia_policies_and_guidelines (number of pages in the category: a lot more)
 * occupy_movement (number of pages in the category: a lot)
 * wikipedia_policies_and_guidelines (number of pages in the category: a lot more)
 * wikipedia_policies_and_guidelines (number of pages in the category: a lot more)


 * List of WikiProjects currently on the talk pages of those articles
 * Please invite these and any other similar groups to join the discussion about this proposal. See WikiProject_Council/Directory to find similar WikiProjects.




 * Why do you want to start a new group, instead of joining one of these existing groups?
 * Your answer goes here.

The name is catchy and timely. The group may be redundant, but hey. --Truth Glass (talk) 08:14, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Support
Please specify whether or not you would join the project.
 * 1) Truth Glass (talk) 07:36, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Proposal Created: Thoughts?
Hello World! I have just created this group, because it does not exist, and I thought may as well. For a long time I've been a little disappointed in Wikipedia. Which sucks, because Wikipedia is definitely the coolest thing mankind has ever cobbled together, but it seems like a few people are consistently bringing a lot of undue negativity to Wikipedia, which is increasingly turning more people off from contributing, and making it more difficult to find helpful information within the confines of Wikipedia which would not otherwise go against style guidelines.

I am not qualified by any means to spearhead this sort of thing. And well I am assuming Wikipedians have been following the news here lately. Occupy "this and that" is the new dance craze. It's a leaderless dance, much like Wikipedia for the most part. I really don't personally have the time to contribute as much as I would like to to Wikipedia policy politics. But I think anyone reading this gets the gist of what this proposal is about.

I am very impressed with Wikipedia personally. It's just some of the aspects about it seem to not yet be in their final most perfect form. This group is or would be (however this works) as "I" imagine it, be about trying to build new guidelines that would change the landscape of Wikipedia in a fundamental way if adopted. The model is OWS style consensus building. It's just like Wikipedia, except you are not welcome here unless you feel like you are disenfranchised in some way that cannot be couched in terms of pre-existing cultural institutions already vying for dominance within Wikipedia or you just don't know what the hell is going on, but don't like the smell of it.

So this is not about inclusion vs. deletionism. Its about how to make everyone happy, or at least the most people happy. If anyone should not be happy its going to be a small minority in other words. --Truth Glass (talk) 08:14, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

For Example
I have given a lot of thought to this kind of stuff in the past. But this proposal was just a spur of the moment thing I did. The best idea I think would be to come up with a balance for the notability criteria and a balance for all the authoritarianism that runs rampant/hurts Wikipedia's public image probably more than anything. I am not a Wikipedia guru. I read the site daily and edit little things in always anonymously whenever I can. I am surely not qualified, but I always thought a nice sounding guideline to challenge WP:N would be a policy that implicitly recognizes fuzziness when it comes to inclusion/exclusion. Something like Wikipedia:Borderline...

Just recognize that if an argument for exclusion is contortionist from a common sense POV but can be argued from a purely technical POV then the article would get a pass. One of my things is I like to be able to find information on all kinds of media. But media that is older, pre-internet, particularly foreign, for example it can be hard to find a secondary source for this kind of stuff from the perspective of an establishment review, but nonetheless the thing exists and in many cases is not even hard to come by if you want to. The information may be trivial, but its part of a tautology that people who like information desire access to. And for the same lack of sourcing there may be no other place to find reliable information than Wikipedia. In these cases the fact that anyone can contribute to Wikipedia makes it a more reliable source than anything else. Most sites if they exist do not have that infrastructure or the user base. That is what makes Wikipedia a resource for humanity. It is an encyclopedia, and some kinds of content are desirable and others are not, but representation should not be disputable if uncontested on factual grounds. Granted some kinds of subjects should be held to higher standards, and that is what a notion of fuzziness would be about without going into detail here (leave that for a guideline page... if someone would like to bang one out)

Secondly I feel like Wikipedia should be mainly edited anonymously, and at the very least the fact that someone edits with a login identity should not be a measure of anything. Some functions need to be connected to an identity, but most do not. The number of edits or the content of edits should have no sway over anything at all. Doing so if nothing else discriminates against people who prefer to do good deeds purely for the goodness of the deed itself. Tying edits to IP addresses is also less than ideal. I have a revolving IP through my ISP, that's just not a good basis for policing things. People may not want to contribute an IP address out of privacy concerns. Anyway. A more anonymous culture might also produce a less authoritarian environment... which if nothing else would keep certain amount of steam from going to the heads of certain types of editors.--Truth Glass (talk) 08:14, 9 November 2011 (UTC)