User:Ian Lee/Critque of Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Ian Lee |
| Me | Talk |
| Essays |
|---|
| Critique of Wikipedia | Why Wikipedia Owns Britannica |
| Wikipedia Stuff |
| Autograph Book | Wikipedia And I | Barnstars And Awards | This Navigation Box |
- The following is incomplete
- The author of this essay would like it if you only made minor edits (ie spelling/grammer)
Wikipedia's vision is a very enthralling one. To have an online encyclopedia that contains the collective knowledge of the whole of mankind, that can be accessed by virtually anyone on the face of the earth. This is not possible, as perfection is not, but the act of approaching it is. However, I believe that Wikipedia is not at any close trajectory to the path of this chase. This hurts me. But what hurts me more is that simple, abundant actions are not being taken to nudge the cannon a little upwards.
Essays, policies, proposals, bureaucrat, admins, and regular users, are you anywhere near? We continually complain about how Wikipedia is going down hill on our userpages, and the few essays that have been written, but is anybody doing anything? If we want change is the angle going to change itself? Would the United States of America have existed if we just talked and not taken action? The answer to all these questions is 'no'.
In this essay, I'm going to take action by listing what can be done to help this disastrous situation, and later, upon completing this essay, trying to get these changes made. However, change cannot happen when only a single person speaks out, and so my actions alone would be in vain. This means that I would have to have support, but that's thinking way ahead of myself. For now, let's lock and load.
Contents |
[edit] Make Strict Rules
"Ignoring all rules" is an idiotic policy that should absolutely be ignored. Communities are built on rules and if there were suddenly no rules, there would be much chaos. The only reason why Wikipedia is not completely, uterly chaotic, is because the underlying concept of Wikipedia, is that it is an encyclopedia. If Wikipedia were representative of life, there would be much discord. The fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not life, however, does not discard the fact that Wikipedia is falling appart.
[edit] So What Should We Do?
Wikipedia needs to have firm rules that need to be enforced. When people break rules repeatedly on Wikipedia, and when people know about it, nothing happens, because users don't report them to administrators, and administrators let it slide.
A solution? I think that we should all promote strict rules to the point were it is highly looked upon of to do report rule breakers. This, in probablity is like Communism — idealisticaly very good, but realistically probably wouldn't work (although it would be nice to try), but I have a second idea so don't pull your hair out just yet.
My second idea is that we introduce moderators. Moderators would be a stopgap between regular users and administrators, but would only have the ability to ban people, and even still for only a short amount of time. This way, there would be a sufficient amount of people (as it would be easier to become a moderator than an admin) that could ban other people, without having to many people having the ability to have the powers to have what administrators/beurocrats want.
One may argue that having firm rules would mean that rules would then become restricive. This is not true however, because of reasons explained in the following section.
[edit] Make Rules Easily Changeable
If we have firm, stricly enforced rules, how is anybody to go about contributing if it obstructs them from doing so? Encourage users to propose ammendments to the rules. If a rule is obstructing someone from contributing, the rule is not well writen. This way, rules would actually improve, instead of being ignored, and will get closer to being perfect. Of course a rule will never be perfect, as there will always be some person obstructed by a rule, but that's the beauty of it. And additionaly, I believe that Wikipedia would run much more smoothly if people followed strict, but easily changeable rules, than if people ignored them. Just my two cents.
[edit] How?
I have several ideas for this. First, we could add a "Request a policy change" to the navigation tab at the top-right of this page, therby easily making policy changes accessible. Secondly, we could add something about policy changes in the greeting that newcomers get, thereby informing newcomers to the start about policy changes. Thirdly, we could make it a celebrated thing in the community, although this one's a stretch.
[edit] Conclusion
In conclusion, I believe that Wikipedia as of right now is a complete mess, but I also believe that it can be saved as well. In my personal opinion, I believe that in order to save Wikipedia, we must make strict rules that need to be enforced possibly by way of making moderators, and making it readily easy to make these strictly enforced rules changed. These rules are always going to be not perfect, but the approach to perfection, is better than nothing at all. Wikipedia needs to be saved, and this is way to fix it.
— Ian Lee
