[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia

Wed Mar 9 08:59:04 UTC 2005

Jim Cecropia wrote:

>> Though if they've been properly retrained, meaning they abide by
>>
>>the spirit of Wikipedia's policies, no further restraint should be 
>>necessary.
>>    
>>
>An amusing comment (though I see no smiley) but I think it goes to the core of the problem. The strength of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it, and supposedly the forces of right will outlast the forces of wrong (as it were).
>
I detect a bit of Miltonian optimism there, perhaps as a form of 
mainstream Christian theology.  I would settle for a good karmic balance.

>As with censorship, when we "restrain" some users, the question is who is to be restrained, who proposes the restraining, who decides on the restraining, and who enforces the restraining.
>
The risk of Juvenal delinquency is always there.

>Do not tell me these rules are applied equally. I don't edit certain articles anymore because I'll research an edit, back it up with sources, and bring the information down to an NPOV minimum. But how many like me realize that hours of work will be relentlessly reversed by the majority bias on the subject? That's the weakness of Wikipedia.
>
All editors are equal, but some are more equal than others.

>Of course, one will say "that's Cecropia's OPINION that his writing in NPOV." Well yes, and we are too close to our opinions to always catch our own biases. However, most anyone who has ever written more than a church fund-raising recipe for money knows when they are presenting something in a neutral fashion, in an advocacy fashion, in an aggresive fashion, or are writing a puff piece.
>
This refreshing honesty is hard to drink.  I once had a chat with a 
person who had been in West Africa with Doctors Without Borders.  His 
project was to provide clean drinking water to rural villages.  The 
fresh water was rejected by the inhabitants,  It seems that this water 
was not as sweet as the water from their old dung-polluted wells. 

Ec