[WikiEN-l] Chrome Pussycats, Twiddlers & Whackjobs

Wed Mar 2 23:34:22 UTC 2005

And at the same time this is the overwhelming beauty of the whole 
system. Not only do we set knowledge free so as to stop others from 
owning it but we also set it free so that you can pick up a set of all 
the tools and drive your car down to where you've bought your own 
garage and proceed to set up a shop with managers, and lead mechanics.

Christiaan

On 2 Mar 2005, at 10:04 pm, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> 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