There Is No Technical Problem

From CrazyThingsThatMightSaveWiki

PMA - positive mental attitude (for example, I wasn't aware this wiki needed saving, I've had loads of fun so far). I know this statement reeks of a mixture of Oprah Winfrey-style self-help talk and denial, but has it been done yet? No, pages that guide WikiZens in how to behave in this wiki are not promoted, pages about the self-buoyant nature (meaning that it's like a mirror - you only get out what you put in - put in criticism, that's what you get back, put in excitement, that's what you get back etc.) of wiki are not referred to. I think people here just need to relax a little and be

a) a bit more tolerant to other people's right to have an opinion on something (even if it's wrong), i.e. "I may do my damndest to discredit what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

(Attributed to MrVoltaire - loose translation. According to http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tol%C3%A9rance - "La seul version connue de cette citation est de l'écrivain anglaise Evelyn Beatrice Hall, «I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.», The Friends of Voltaire, 1906. Elle s'inspire de la lettre à monsieur le Riche (6 février 1770) où Voltaire écrit «Monsieur l'abbé, je déteste ce que vous écrivez, mais je donnerai ma vie pour que vous puissiez continuer à écrire.». That should be: "La seule version...", of course.)
The only known version of this quote is from the English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." (The Friends of Voltaire, 1906). She inspires herself from the letter to Mr leRiche (6 Feb, 1770) where Voltaire writes "[Monsieur l'abbé], I detest what you write, but I would give my life so you could continue writing."

b) note that wiki is a bit like the universe in that it constantly changes shape and size and cannot be controlled by one person; so big, in fact, that there's room for everyone and if you don't like it, go find another sector to play in. Or maybe I completely missed the point of this page, in which case feel free to plop this on my homepage or under the CategoryRant. Cheers. -- SusannahWilliams?

I'd say automated vandalism is a serious issue, Susannah. We can tolerate trolls. We can tolerate flame wars, but when we start having the wiki equivalent of tanks rolling over the green fields of our fair wiki, we've got a serious problem and the wiki does need saving. This is a real problem. Even worse, these tanks aren't surgically accurate, well-coded and targeted things. These aren't so bad, because at least they stay in one part of the wiki and we can put up minefield warnings. The scripts that our recent antagonist has been employing are the scorched-earth type, killing a huge number of pages based on various criterion. It's a very bad situation. -- DaveFayram

You are of course entirely correct, Susannah. The only problem with your advice is that it's impossible to implement, because it runs up against human nature. Back in the good aulde days of yore, the range of opinion and attitude on C2 was much narrower, so it was possible to achieve some sort of consensus without crippling too many people's opinions. Nowadays, the range of opinion and attitude is broader, so, as a consequence, the proportion of people whose opinions are being stifled, butchered, mangled and destroyed is correspondingly greater. So the problem has always existed, but it's now so much bigger that many more people are being affected.

In these cases, there isn't a real difference between social and technical problems. Wiki exists to support discussion and community, and what's important is that the implementation matches the sort of discussions and community it provides. Where one should concentrate reform efforts depends only on what you want the outcome to look like, and how inevitable you think certain problems are.

The narrow definition of the problem is "editing by automatons," and it is likely we can agree that this ought to be prevented. One approach I'm seeing more frequently of late is the display of an automatically generated "noisy graphic" that contains a short string of nonsense text: human beings can see what it says, and therefore type it into a text field for validation, but it has been made resistant to OCR-like approaches. Adding such a graphic and field to the edit page would consume little space, and it is hardly too much to ask of guests here that they do a little, uniquely human thing in the process of editing. (I am aware that this solution runs afoul of the need to support the visually impaired user. Perhaps an alternate password, available by application, would answer this objection, or else the audio analogue of the "noisy graphic.")

See CaptchaTest and discussion of this on WikiSpam.

CategoryWikiProgress