User:Jossi

What Wikipedia is and how it works

I reproduce here a statement by Slrubenstein that I consider to be a succinct and brilliant explanation of what this project is about, and the tension between policy, content development, and collaboration:

Wikipedia policies have never functioned to assure the quality of the information included in articles — it is our being a wiki community, in which everyone in the world (i.e. people having a wide range of knowledge) can add to the encyclopedia, and everyone in the world (including many people with good judgment) can delete things, that is meant to produce a quality encyclopedia ... this is the whole gamble of the project, the dare to be wiki and have faith that the result will be quality content, that distinguishes us. Policies have never and in my mind should never police quality. On the contrary, they provide the framework for a wiki community to function. This is why the core policy is NPOV: a large heterogeneous community can work together because none of us will use Wikipedia to forward his or her own views, and because people with contradictory views will not paralyze an argument over who is right (who knows the truth, the objective reality). NPOV does this by insisting that we provide an account not of the truth or objective facts but of diverse views. These views must not be our own ... thus giving rise to our No Original Research policy. Since they must not be our own, they (including views that are synthetic!) must be attributable to some source ... thus giving birth to our Verifiability policy. Many people reasonably see NOR and V as two sides of the same coin: do not do x, instead do y. The distinction between attribute and attributable is important for the same reason that what distinguishes us is the wiki nature of the project. Each article is a product of the community, not a single author — because we know that multiple strengths will outweigh multiple weaknesses. I add what I know to an article but of course it is not everything; someone else adds more. I add one view, someone else adds another view. Similarly, I add an attributable claim, someone else adds the attribution — this is the very nature of collaboration which is at the heart of Wikipedia. Slrubenstein 13:07, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

This is also a very pertinent comment:

Here's the deal. There is a growing group of people who are coming to the realization that Wikipedia is not always a force for good. In particular, when we record for posterity the minor details of people's lives, they have to live with a Wikipedia article coming up as the first hit on Google for the rest of their natural life. That's not necessarily fair, nor is it necessarily good for the long-term of the encyclopedia. I don't want to be involved with a project whose mission of human knowledge has been so twisted as to require us to document with meticulous detail for all eternity the lives of anyone who ever did something funny, stupid, criminal, minorly newsworthy or got converted into an Interwebs meme. That's not just me - it's a lot of other people, too. In these cases, Wikipedia has the potential to actively harm people by preventing people from ever forgetting something happened. We're prolonging 15 minutes of fame into a theoretically-permanent Wikipedia article. In my, and many others, opinions, that is not a good thing. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a permanent record of everything any person ever did that got in a newspaper. Either you get on this train of thought, or you're going to be left behind, because this is the direction the encyclopedia will go. End of story User:FCYTravis 14:28, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

The simple songs are the best

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See the log of blocks, deletions, page protections, moves, and uploads performed by me as an administrator:

Jossi (talk • contribs • blocks • protects • deletions • moves • rights)

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