[WikiEN-l] Chrome Pussycats, Twiddlers & Whackjobs

Wed Mar 2 22:04:14 UTC 2005

Think of Wikipedia as a massive garage where you can build any car you
want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are there, and
you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every one else,
and I mean everyone else in the garage can work on your car with you.
There's no "lead mechanics", no "shop floor managers", no anything. In
fact, the people who are allowed to work on your car can completely
disregard what you were doing with it. They could have flown in from
Boola-Boola Island 2 hours ago, not know the language, can't read the
manuals, and just go in and paint your car pink. And drive it. And leave
it somewhere. Now, since tools are free and paint is free and you can
easily go and retrieve your nice car and get it back to something
resembling sanity, a lot of the people in the garage see there's no
problems. But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time you're traipsing
down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted,
covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you're kind of inclined to drive it
into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning.

This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It's that there's a
small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and
twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the
mass of triddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content
generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be
that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can prove
something, you're now in the situation that anybody can change it. And
while that's all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way,
it's when you realize that the people who are going to change it could
have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see
where we are.

(I plagiarized the above from Jason Scott, but I agree with every word.)

Uncle Ed