Philip Sandifer wrote:
I just had dinner with [[Scott McCloud]], and,
unsurprisingly, the
conversation turned to webcomics, and, eventually, to Wikipedia's
treatment of them. (This was partially spurred by the Kristopher
Straub debacle, about which I will say only that it demonstrates the
degree to which the bias is overwhelmingly towards deletion across
many areas of Wikipedia right now)
Deletion to the point of sterility.
McCloud is somebody who knows comics. He quite
literally wrote the
book on them. In the course of the conversation it became clear that
he was pretty well completely fed up with Wikipedia. And it should be
noted, this comes from someone who has been on the forefront of
digital technology debates several times. He makes clear his
admiration for the concept of Wikipedia. He makes clear his
admiration for how Wikipedia got started. His problem is with how it
works now.
The problem he has? Notability. Specifically the arbitrary and
capricious way in which AfD targets things, questions their
notability, and uses guidelines that make no sense from the outside.
I know nothing about webcomics. That's enough to qualify me to stay
away from any specific deletion debate about any of them.
Our efforts to ensure reliability have come at the cost
of a great
deal of respect - and respect from people we should have respect
from. We are losing smart, well-educated people who are sympathetic
to Wikipedia's basic principles. That is a disaster.
It has the appearance of a project that has lost its way. Time was that
the public mantra was, "Wikipedia is not reliable." The "Nature"
article showed that we weren't so bad, but by then a lot of editors (and
perhaps Jimbo himself) had been spooked into an obsession for accuracy.
We have now gone to the opposite extreme. Our size has brought us into
seriously uncharted territory about the nature of collaboration and
inclusivity, and many of our editors schooled in old hierarchical
structures have yet to make the leap into an environment which cannot be
subject to the controls with which they are familiar.
Reliability does matter. Still there will always be issues where
reliability remains uncertain or unattainable. Are we to pretend that
that world of uncertainty does not exist because we are missing Reliable
Sources? Sometimes we need to simply admit that the information has not
been verified or cannot be verified. We warn the reader that he uses
the information at his own risk.
And it's a disaster that can be laid squarely at
the feet of the
grotesque axis of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]] - two pages that are eating
Wikipedia alive from the inside out. (And I don't mean this in terms
of community. I mean that they are systematically being used to turn
good articles into crap, and have yet to demonstrate their actual use
in turning bad articles into good ones.)
Notability has been a consistent thorn in the side for as long as I can
remember. Reliable Sources started later as one more of many means to
deal with the notability problem. None of these means has succeeded.
Ec