More Wikipedia wars

[jsburbidge]

There's been another kerfuffle in the Wikipedia/fandom intersection area, over adding information re Fred Saberhagen's death.

In the course of a discussion on james_nicoll's LJ, dd_b noted:

I see this change in focus to be the fundamental change in structure of how the project operates. At first, it was "if you know something that we don't, improve the article". That's gone by the board; now it's "if you can cite something to a source acceptable to us, by vague standards, then make the change you want".

What happens every time this sort of stupidity comes up is that it reveals that Wikipedia is is a strange world of its own.  It started out as a genuinely open concept -- "read the work; if you see something you can add, feel free to add it".  And indeed, it still allows anonymous edits logged by IP, so that random visitors can improve the site.  But every time something like this happens it works against that concept: there's an implicit demand by the denizens that in editing you conform not only to common sense, or the usual standards which govern professional writing, but by an arcane set of rules which require extensive parsing.  "Well, no.  That set of rules is general, but it doesn't apply to biographies of living persons.  Yes, he's dead, but we still treat him as living.  No, I know there's no debate about whether he's actually dead, but we'll still treat it as contentious..."  It's this character that makes Quatloo look like a total idiot: it displays at its worst the character of the site which makes it not only resistant to outside participation but actively hostile to it.  (The first reaction of admins and other defenders to somebody who complains about having to fight edit wars over areas within their competence against people with less knowledge is that they have to persevere to get the changes to stick; but most people don't want to have to stick around (and, for that matter, master the arcana of the various Wiki policies and guidelines) -- they want to add their two cents and move on.)

I suspect that much of the residual goodwill people have towards the site is based on its formally "open" structures and the theory of its sociially open nature.  Every time something like this happens it just wears away at that goodwill.