[WikiEN-l] New York Times article

Tue Jun 20 21:37:21 UTC 2006

On 6/20/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> The Cunctator wrote:
> > Well, BoingBoing just published Jimmy's propagandistic stylings on
> > semi-protection (it's not a restriction, it's a freedom!) with the
> lovely
> > heading  "NYT falsely reports that Wikipedia has  added restrictions".
>
> Gee, that is hardly what I have said.  We used to fully protect in cases
> that we now semi-protect.  That's a net gain for openness.

I hope you'll get Boing Boing to correct their title.

> It's
> > difficult to tell and Wales isn't particularly interested in doing
> honest
> > critical analyses of the effects of his policies.
>
> Wow, that's a hell of a thing to say after we have known each other for
> years, and after I have spent a week gathering statistics and doing
> studies of how semi-protection is used.

Sorry. This is mainly a reference to the whole "Today, as an experiment, we
will be turning off new pages creation for anonymous users in the English
Wikipedia." I still think you were being a bit disingenuous (if
unintentially) about the experimentality of that decision.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so harsh -- I think you're essentially the best man
for the job, and as I admitted elsewhere in the thread, I'm prone to
hyperbole.

> As an admin, I've also turned
> > on/off semi-protection in various cases. I just wish people (aka Jimmy)
> > would be will to admit that there are shades of gray instead of shouting
> > that it's black and white.
>
> Excuse me?  I have spent the last several days writing dozens of
> journalists and bloggers explaining precisely this: that there are
> shades of gray and that the matter is much more complex than "Wikipedia
> is locking down" or "Wikipedia is total fucking chaos".

But when you go and write something like "The New York Times gets it exactly
backwards" that doesn't sound like someone explaining shades of gray. It
sounds like someone getting pulled into a black vs white fight (which is
easy enough to do--just look at how heated my rhetoric has been in response
to what you wrote in response to what they wrote).

> The truth is: Wikipedia is incredibly open,

Yes, yes, and yes.

and it is my intention that
> we look at the places where we have been unable to be open in the past,
> and find clever ways to slice those so that we are more open.  Like, for
> example, semi-protection instead of full protection.

I'm not sure we have identical definitions of openness. Sometimes not
letting anyone edit an article is more open than letting particular subsets
of people edit.

I think your motives are exactly right. I think sometimes your methods for
coming to decisions aren't always the best, and your understanding of the
nature of Wikipedia is imperfect. That's true of anybody, but you're a
special case, so you get criticism from the likes of me.

There's more, but rest assured that I do think about history.