Hello people, thanks for the reactions! I actually did not mean conservative in a strict political sense, and I am a big fan of Reagle's book. It seems to me that some people in the movement identify strongly with the (political) term "progressive", and, depending on their personal circumstances, that can be very understandable. The risk is that their thinking about WP, WM and knowledge is very much predetermined by these political views.
On the other hand, I see the risk that some other members of the movement think that they - and the movement - are automatically "modern" because they use wikis. With this attitude they may not see much need for change. Allow me some comments between the - very interesting - lines. See below Kind regards Ziko Am Fr., 29. Mai 2020 um 09:43 Uhr schrieb Amir E. Aharoni < amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il>: > Aspect1: Fact-checking, trust, and reliability > In non-wiki encyclopedias the writers > are selected by the publisher: the publisher trusts the writers, and the > readers trust the publisher's brand. [...] The Wikpiedia attitude > to sources, known as "Verifiability" in the English Wikipedia, solidified > around 2005. It makes a lot of sense for a wiki encyclopedia, and it is one > of our cornerstones, at least in the larger languages. (The details of the > policy in each language may be different, but the general idea is the same. > If it's significantly different in your language, please tell me.) > Indeed, cornerstone is a great word here. We don't check the contributors as persons, therefore we have to externalize the truth-question. So what does a co-contributor check when seeing the edit of a contributor? Not whether the contributor has thematic or scientific competences but only whether she has "publishing" or wirting competences - meaning, whether she is capable of selecting good literature, using it and writing accordingly an unpersonal encyclopedic text. Within the wiki, it would be difficult to check whether she has scientific competences. But it is possible to check within the wiki whether she has writing competences, because we see these writing competences in her previous edits. So in Wikipedia, it works that we only care for the "wiki identity" and "wiki status" of a contributor. By the way, it would be an interesting research question: are there Wikipedias that significantly differ from this cornerstone (and other cornerstones)? In my own comparison between WP in EN, DE, NL, AF and FY I did not find such a difference. no access to academic publishing? Some people propose relaxing the demand > for external reliable source for such topics, and while I'm totally on > board with the social justice aspect of this attitude, it doesn't suggest a > solution to the trust problem: some people will use it to enrich Wikipedia > with information that can't be found elsewhere, but some people may abuse > it to add made up stuff. > Yes, indeed. My thought was: if we allow sources of probably lesser quality, e.g. "grey literature" for marginalized people as an article topic, what would that mean? That we find it okay that a Wikipedia article about a woman is less reliable than an article about a man? > I have a proposed solution for this problem, and although some people would > disagree, I call it conservative: Keep the demand for verifiability, and > help people who have been historically disadvantaged get access to trusted > academic institutions and conduct and publish their research outside of > Wikipedia first. > Interesting. Some might ask whether this is a task of the Wikimedia movement. (It all would depend on suitable partners and what the role of the movement would be.) If we see there a tunnel like this: reality - primary sources - secondary sources - tertiary sources, then the solution would not be at the final stage (tertiary source = Wikipedia and its rules), but earlier, at the stage secondary sources where there is a social filter. > Aspect 2: Technology > reasonably modern design principles and implementations. We are outdated in > some ways: [...] We shouldn't be *too* progressive, though [...] > Talk pages are a particularly curious kind of disaster. Many Wikipedians > tend to be very conservative about them and don't want any technology > changes in them, but talk pages are not a continuation of any previous > tradition of encyclopedic writing or of Internet culture—they are > Wikipedia's own invention. Good point, Amir. This is a dimension I have not looked at very thoroughly in my research. It blends in with the general question how software is interconnected to content and to the behaviour of the contributors. Maybe the current state of the software used has for some Wikipedians the function of a cultural marker or element of self-identity. > Aspect 3: Presentation style [...] > Like the bold font, it is also a typographic tradition. It > has gotten out of hand in Wikipedia thanks to otherwise good things like > the diversity of writers and the availability of fonts for various > languages. Should we just kill it? Probably not, because this tradition is > also mostly good, but we should move the excessively long stuff from > parentheses to footnotes or infoboxes. > Good observations - I remember indeed that there were some statements in the "strategy recommendations" that were a good starting point for discussion, but no conclusion on which we can build a strategy. Like the statement that "young people don't read anymore". Written text has always have and will always have certain advantages (and disadvantages) in comparison to non-text. +++ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
