On 5/25/06, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/24/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com>
wrote:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php
It is worth noting that Nicholas Carr has taken note of this thread to
announce the death of Wikipedia. Apparently, 154 articles
semi-protected out of 1,151,768 is the end of open editing.
Not that your argument through statistics is in any way meaningful.
154 /1,151,768 is more than 100 ppm; 100 ppm of carbon monoxide, mercury,
arsenic, sulfur dioxide, nitric oxide, vinyl chloride, formaldehyde,
benzene, ammonia, etc. would kill you dead. Or at least give you any number
of horrible cancers.
Water is fluoridated to 1 ppm.
Motorcycles cause 0.22 deaths per million vehicle miles. New Zealand has 100
maternal deaths per million births. Drugs kill about 100 per million people
in US urban areas.
In other words, that 154 articles are semiprotected out of a population of
1.2 million could be insignificant, great, or terrible.
But on its own it's just a factoid, not a counterargument.
This is pretty rich coming from someone who just complained that we
shouldn't argue with appeals to emotion. If comparing semi-protection
to mothers dying while giving birth to babies isn't an appeal to
emotion, I don't know what is.
All your analogies are useless. The chemistry ones are just
ridiculous, there is no analogy between how poisons damage the body to
how semi-protection damages the encyclopedia. There's to much science
you're ignoring, the way chemicals work.
The deaths per millions analogies are not only pretty cheap shots,
they are also just as flawed. The reason why 100 maternal deaths per 1
million births is not a tragedy because it's such a high number
(because it isn't), it's a tradgedy because people are *actually*
dying. 1 death per million would be tragic. 1 death per billion would
be tragic. The numbers are meaningless.
The fact is, the numbers do provide a good argument in this case.
Calling for the death of wikipedia as a wiki because of
semi-protection *is* ridiculous when there is only a vanishingly small
fraction of articles that are semi-protected (and lets remind everyone
that any user that is actually dedicated to the project can edit any
semi-protected article. It's not that horrible, semi-protection.)
So no, the numbers are not just a factiod, they're a very good counterargument.
--Oskar