User:FvdP/ProConWikipedia

How relevant is the Wikipedia effort ?

This is an incomplete list of arguments mostly for my own record. If you want to discuss please do it on the corresponding talk page : I'll incorporate here what I find interesting. Links to similar pages or relevant discussions are also welcome on the discussion page. --FvdP

I don't necessarily agree with all of these !

Pro

• From User:PedroPVZ in Talk:Wikipedia:
  • There is a substancial problem in this issue in the article. Wikipedia can have innacuracy problems, but when the subject is foreign countries is more reliable than English language paper Encyclopedias. When I read Portuguese-related info on paper Encyclopedia in English it is FULL of innacuracies, at least in here there are several people that is from various countries and correct many innacuracies that are found in paper enc. ~just my 2 cents. -Pedro 19:25, 13 May 2005 (UTC)

Con

See Criticism_of_Wikipedia.

User:172's arguments (version on May 13, 2005).

• expertise:
  • no "authoritative public review process"
  • and "the absence of one fosters a total disregard for expertise in this community"
• irrelevant and bureaucratic functioning:
  • "a dispute resolution process fetishizing increasingly rigid (and idiosyncratic) community norms and customs without reference to who's writing encyclopedic material and who's not"
  • "The admins are increasingly obsessive of process, disregarding the public credibility of the project"
  • "Far too many [admins?] seem to get off on "patrolling" conflicts between other users that they do not understand"

User:Fred Bauder's and WikInfo's arguments: (see [1], [2], [3]...)

• Policy:
  • NPOV is a problem as it encourages discord and edit wars, WikInfo's Sympathetic point of view attempts a solution.
• Technical:
  • Software is badly designed, costs needlessly much resources to work. (was it really WikInfo who claimed that ? --FvdP 21:59, 13 May 2005 (UTC))
• ...(to be continued)...

Jason Scott ([4], [5], — etc?):

• This is what I mean; you have a brick house that, from a distance, looks decently enough like a house that people say "see, community building works". But what isn't obvious on the surface is how many times those bricks have been pulled apart, reassembled, replaced, shifted, modified, and otherwise fiddled with for no good reason other than battling an endless army of righteous untrained bricklayers who decided to put a window there... no, there... wait, no window at all. If you declare the final brick house a "victory" while ignoring the astounding toll of human labor required to get it so, then you are not understanding why I consider Wikipedia a failure.
• And all of this wouldn't be important at all, if we didn't start to see the Wikipedia definitions propogating throughout the internet, being something you get automatically on a lookup from Trillian or Yahoo using it as a way to get facts. That goes beyond scary.. it borders on negligent.

Misc.:

• hype : excessive esteem of the participants for the project, blindness about the weaknesses. Group-think.