[clug] Wikipedia and Deletionism

[Daniel Pittman]

Sam Couter <sam at couter.id.au> writes:
> Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:
>
>> You run into the same sort of petty, silly, and essentially wasteful
>> power-play behaviour in building management for shared title, school
>> boards, and small clubs all the time.
>
> Indeed. When I was a strata title property owner, I found the best way
> to defeat these people is: Be active in the corporate body, join the
> executive committee, denounce morons and make sure bad decisions don't
> get made. Same for clubs I've been involved in.
>
> Maybe that makes *me* the petty power-player? I don't think so, but
> those who didn't get their way may disagree.
>
> On the scale of Wikipedia, you need to get a bunch of like-minded
> intelligent people together to do it successfully, and I don't know if
> that can reasonably be done. Wikipedia's time may have come.

Like any group, my experience is that what you really need are clear social
goals for the people around the project, and both the will and the ability to
enforce those.[1]

Wikipedia might do it, or it might not — thinking about this more I don't see
it as more significant than the next fight over what matters, or doesn't
matter: it isn't much different to the fight about deletion of relevant
historic figures as "not notable", while every individual Pokémon creature
had a page.

The interesting part will be how well they handle the social aspects of the
problem, and until that settles *and* we see how people react[2] to their
enforcing whatever social stuff.

        Daniel

This is probably OT for CLUG, though, even if I find it interesting. :)

Footnotes: 
[1]  ...our two requirements are the goals, the will, and having those goals
     not suck.   ...no, wait, let me come in again.

[2]  ...because people, as groups, are flighty and prone to huffy
     overreaction; that can kill your social thing stone-dead without having
     any actual *reason* to do it — on the wings of belief.

-- 
✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel at rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 155 707
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