[WikiEN-l] On Transparency

Tue Dec 27 20:50:45 UTC 2005

What makes admins so special? A lot of them are mostly
janitors. Non-admins do the majority of content edits,
which is what Wikipedia's credibility is based on. Why
not require a real name, address, email, and phone
number to register? That would do more for
accountability for contributions.

I don't find it hard to believe at all that admins are
showing "resistance" to having their identity
revealed. There are a lot of wack jobs on the Internet
that could use that information for nefarious
purposes. Frankly, when revealing one's real name
becomes a requirement for adminship, I'll ask to be
desysopped.

-Hermione1980

--- Steven Ericsson Zenith <steven at semeiosis.com>
wrote:

> A brief contrarian point of view.  If Wikipedia is
> to succeed in any 
> measure to move beyond its tabloid status then
> transparency is essential. 
> 
> That is, every admin must necessarily have their
> identity exposed and it 
> surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here -
> and I find it hard to 
> justify.
> 
> Authority (in the sense of an encyclopedia) comes
> because the 
> individuals involved are transparent and respected
> in some conventional 
> sense.  Hidden identity provides no basis for
> authority since the 
> landscape of individuals is unknown and the changes
> to that landscape 
> impossible to track. Such that, even if a group of
> anonymous admins is 
> able to command respect for a period, there is no
> guarantee, no way to 
> judge, that a group of admins have the same capacity
> in the future. 
> Indeed, if the current group of admins do manage to
> establish public 
> confidence then the public is immediately at risk
> since that group can 
> be opaquely usurped.
> 
> The short end is that for the long term welfare of
> Wikipedia admins - 
> all contributors - need to be transparent -
> otherwise Wikipedia is 
> simply a propaganda engine.
> 
> That the journal Nature should give any support to
> the scientific 
> articles in Wikipedia is a cause of great concern -
> since Wikipedia is 
> not a specialist encyclopedia they have by inference
> given unfounded 
> credence to the whole.
> 
> With respect,
> Steven
> --
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stevenzenith
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