[WikiEN-l] Rules, expertise, and encyclopedic standards

Sun Mar 6 02:42:57 UTC 2005

Michael Snow wikipedia at earthlink.net :
"On the other hand, if 172 wants to deny any significance to the name he has 
chosen and give us no personal information, then we have no evidence to back 
up his claims to expertise and might as well disregard them."

I agree wholeheartedly. This is case with every other editor who choses to 
contribute to Wikipedia anonymously.

In case it wasn't clear earlier, I'd never asked to be afforded any special 
status based on my work outside Wikipedia. I made this clear a few months 
ago. After I'd initiated the Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards 
page, I used that new forum to propose a system for editorial arbitration. I 
then declared that as an anonymous editor, I would be unqualified to serve 
on such a pannel. (See 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Forum_for_Encyclopedic_Standards_%28archive2%29#Editorial_arbitration 
Some users, such as Adam Carr, took note of this observation: "I commend 
[172's] acknowledgement that he, as an anonymous editor, should not be a 
member of such a group.")

I'd like to use the above claification as a chance to illustrate my salient 
point concerning expertise. My frustration was never that I'd failed to 
receive sufficient deference from 'non-experts'; the root of the problem was 
never my treatment. The problem is that there are mechanisms for enforcing 
some policies but not others.

Wikipedia has a court reprimanding users for breaking the 3RR and making 
personal attacks. But it lacks an authority reprimanding users for 
chronically undermining Wikipedia's progress with original research, POV 
nonsense, and ungrammatical prose. My suggestion on Wikipedia:Forum for 
Encyclopedic Standards was an alternative arbitration committee with public 
credibility, composed of qualified encyclopedists who have the calhones not 
to edit anonymously. (Such a review board would "kill two birds with one 
stone": making Wikipedia more "expert"-friendly and solidifying its public 
credibility.) However, other people may have better ideas, and my suggestion 
is certainly not the only one on the table warranting attention.

Since the behavior of contributors is influenced by the options afforded to 
them by Wikipedia's governance-- as behavior is rooted in process and 
structure in every organizations-- a formal organ on Wikipedia delegating a 
special role for **non-anonymous** professionals, academics, graduate 
students, etc. would have a profound, positve effect on the culture of 
Wikipedia. Right now, far more talk is generated when a serious user commits 
a faux pax (e.g., violating the 3RR or 'calling a troll a troll') than when 
a troll spews crap into an article. Here's the reason: Wikipedia has 
mechanisms enforsing rules of PROCESS (e.g., Wikipedia:No personal attacks 
and Wikipedia:Three revert rule enforcement) but lacks mechanisms enforsing 
rules of PRODUCT (e.g., Wikipedia:Manual of Style, Wikipedia:No original 
research, and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view). As a result, when a policy 
related to product is broken, the dispute usually stays on talk, handled 
only by a handful of serious editors actively watching the page; but when a 
policy related to process is broken, it will attract a huge contingent of 
users fussing over who reverted whom, how many reverts there were, and what 
did or did not constitute a revert. The rules are shaping a culture on 
Wikipedia utterly obsessed with process, but incognizant of product.

I'm not arguing that rules of process ought to be discarded. Instead, they 
ought to be supplemented by rules emphasizing and ENFORCING quality. I say 
"supplemented" because of the likelihood that far fewer good users would act 
rashly if already-existing rules mandating encyclopedic standards were 
enforced.

In short, I'm not laying out a detailed case for policy changes here. I'm 
just pointing to a problem that ought to be addressed. Right now the rules 
create a culture on Wikipedia resulting in large amounts of attention to 
some policies but a lack of  attention to others. This asymmetry ought to be 
addressed, before more users committed to undermining NPOV, no original 
research, and stylistic conventions figure out how to accomplish their ends 
by exploiting the over-emphasis on other policy guidelines. Others may 
disagree with solutions that I am proposing. But that doesn't mean that the 
problem does not exist. If my proposals are wrong, please come up with 
better ways of handeling the problem.

-172

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