User talk:Universaliss

Problems with the wiki model?

Due to its nature, the wiki model fails in preserving accurate information content. This is more pronounced in more contentious issues in the sphere of the humanities. Conflicts of opinion or attribution may arise in scientific topics, but they much more easily resolvable and less emotionally vested than say articles relating to religion.

For all its promise and potential, the wiki model effectively removes the concept of authorship, ownership of an article (not in the intellectual property sense though) and the quality of the information in it.

At best, the resulting articles reflect the opinions or inclinations of the users, rather than any disinterested discourse. If the majority of, or the most active the users are politically pro- position A on a given issue or history, for instance. An article deriving from position B on the same issue will not maintain its integrity for long. As a result, disputes arise, and eventually a sysop or admin will intervene to freeze an article - usually in the form that favors the position of the majority, position A.

This neither makes the article's content more accurate, nor more democratic - simply because the active user base need not reflect the population at large, who are mostly not even aware of wikipedia.

A case in point:

the Qiyamah (the muslim account of the judgement day) article. A user insisted on a certain order of events, even though neither does he speak arabic to read the Qur'an, nor does the qur'an itself give a clearly discernible succession of events, especially when it comes to minor details. He insisted for instance that the moon gets eclipsed, in contradiction of the authoritative classical commentaries on the quran. To him the classical arabic muslim commentators of the quran were irrelevant, and he insisted on restoring the passage every time I deleted it. Nor was it clear to him that such minutiae are completely irrelevant when treating a subject such a judgement day, in which the fashion in which the moon is destroyed or whatever is hardly relevant to the main thrust of the article. I could not impress on him these points, and as it stands, he keeps restoring that faulty and irrelevant piece of information into the article. Some that contravenes my original intent and attitude towards the article. I do not know how to resolve this. And I am convinced that this must be the case in all articles relating to religion (particularly the islamic religion). To point out to him that the most authoritative sources we have on the meaning of the verses are the muslim commentators themselves, which have been accepted as authoritative by a consensus of muslim scholars for centuries, earns me the label "fundamentalist."

Likewise, in trying to derive the information on the day of the judgement only from the Quran and the hadith, in order to avoid spurious accounts and interpretation prone details, and to make the article a survey of what islam's primary texts say about that day, again earned me the labels "fundamentalist" and "salafi" whatever that means from a user called Zora.

I believe this is a serious shortcoming of the wiki medium.

Another case study (political articles):

Take for instance articles on the middle east. Much as the narrative that predominates western press is largely non representative of the narratives local to the middle east, wiki articles reflect the same biases and therefore perpetuate a political will, rather than a scholarly treatment of the subject.