User:Zebrasandrobots
Welcome, my fellow earthlings.
Interesting reads
[edit]Who writes Wikipedia?
[edit]Aaron Swartz's method and result: Who Writes Wikipedia?
An outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders [are] account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.
Lesser side of Wikipedia
[edit]Criticism of Wikipedia that I can get behind:
Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices.
In Wikipedia, debates can be won by stamina. If you care more and argue longer, you will tend to get your way. The result, very often, is that individuals and organizations with a very strong interest in having Wikipedia say a particular thing tend to win out over other editors who just want the encyclopedia to be solid, neutral, and reliable. These less-committed editors simply have less at stake and their attention is more distributed.
— Wikimedia advisor Benjamin Mako, http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/the-institute-for-cultural-diplomacy-and-wikipedia
Tiring out one's opponent is a common strategy among experienced Wikipedians [...] I have resorted to it many times.
— Wikimedia steward Dariusz Jemielniak, http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/killed-wikipedia-93777
[Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy] hides behind a reliance on corporate media editorials [...] they are against independent analysis or research, which seems to mean you cannot reorganise information from a variety of sources.
Novices can quickly get lost in Wikipedia's Kafkaesque bureaucracy [...] The proliferation of rules, and the fact that select Wikipedians have learnt how to handle them to win arguments, now represents a danger.
— Andrew Lih, http://www.economist.com/node/10789354
Still, a lot of good work—verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange—is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow, almost grade-schoolish notion of what sort of curiosity an on-line encyclopedia will be able to satisfy in the years to come. [...] It's harder to improve something that's already written, or to write something altogether new, especially now that so many of the World Book-sanctioned encyclopedic fruits are long plucked. There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking peoples' work—even to the point of laughing at nonstandard "Engrish". They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away.
— Nicholson Baker, http://www.fembotcentral.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8288
(paraphrased) Because the purpose of Wikipedia is not about providing correct and definitive information about a subject, but to present, as editorially dominant, the majority-opinion perspective taken by the authors of the sources for the article; therefore, the uneven application of the undue-weight policy creates omissions (of fact and of interpretation) that might give the reader false knowledge about the subject matter, which knowledge the reader has based upon the factually-incomplete content of the Wikipedia article.
— Timothy Messer–Kruse, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/