Hi,

I am not sure if mustering an army of competent editors would be enough.
Shunling Chen, formerly Harvard Law School (with Lawrece Kessig and the
like) has studied wikipedia with regard to rights of indigenouos people
and the commons. According to her analysis which forms part of her
doctoral thesis, a big problem are the rules of Wikipedia. Under
pressure from various sides, Wikipedia began to increasingly adhere to
academic standards of citation. While I am not against academic
standards in principle this creates problems in specific areas, such as
for instance, so called subaltern groups and areas of new knowledge. By
definition, the knowledge of subaltern groups tends to be marginalized
and less well documented in book form. However, academic standards means
that priority is given to sources that you can cite and that means,
mostly, books. It is very different to refer to other forms of knolwedge
such as oral history, customs, or tacit knowledge inherent to cultural
mores or knolwedge shared by communities of practitioners (such as
hackers). This does not only affect areas of knolwedge production which
are marginalized for geographic, geopolitical or neo-colonial reasons,
but also new knowledge. In the kind of areas in which we are acting, the
really good stuff is usually not yet printed, its spread over blogs,
mailinglists, informal meetings and shared knowledge from events, etc. .
I think this is quite a difficult problem and either one treis to
influence policies of existing resoures or maybe i is better to create
new ones, where more specialized knowledge can be published. My
experience is that WKPD is usually a quite good starting point for
things that I know nothing or little about; it gets you started but then
you need really authoritative sources. Because on WKPD often the
conflictual stuff indeed has been sanitized so that its hard to find out
"why stuff matters" ... well and of course besides what I just argued,
the sycophantic editor problem does indeed exist ...

best
Armin



On 2014-10-30 09:33, Carsten Agger wrote:
> On 10/30/2014 08:25 AM, jaromil@??? wrote:
>> PArdon the ranty.scared tone here, but really nowadays WKPD seems a
>> Foucaultian nightmare to me.
>>
> I think that's probably the drawback of a do-ocracy as Wikipedia - the
> quality of the outcome entirely dependent on who have the resources and
> the passion to be the doers.
>
> And many Wikipedia entries are aggressively patrolled by people who have
> an agenda they feel strongly about. I once had a fight with one such
> editor over some critical remarks on the physicist David Bohm's "quantum
> revisionist" theories - the other editor was apparently a fervent
> disciple, and in the end he seemed to care much more about the contents
> of this random Wikipedia article than i did, at least he seemed to have
> more time to invest in the discussion.
>
> So I suppose: If we could muster an army of competent editors who were
> ready to mend the error of various Wikipedia entries' ways, would that
> even be the best use we could put that manpower to? I tend to doubt it -
> Wikipedia is important, but I find it dificult to see wiki editing as my
> life's mission.
>
>
>
>
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