As many of you have no doubt heard, Wikipedia, aggressive bastion of open
collaboration, is strongly considering finally giving in and closing its
editorial process somewhat. The new model being proposed and supported by a
majority of wikipedians, including its founder, is that anyone will be able to
edit, but all edits (perhaps constrained to "all edits on higher traffic
pages")
will need to be approved by a "trusted" editor, of which there are many
(thousands?). (01)
Pure openness was key to bootstrapping wikipedia's content, but now that it is
among the most frequented and trusted web sites, it has become a common target
of spam, pranks, and general maliciousness. (02)
I know there are many in ontolog who prefer a purely open forum, but I think
the
failure of SUO and the continuing nonsense in this forum - which make it the
butt of many jokes and keeps a lot of otherwise serious ontology people away (I
include myself in this category, you may argue with the "otherwise serious"
bit)
- are evidence that the open model doesn't work here. (03)
This forum is not taken seriously because it is too open. I suggest adopting a
model like the one Wikipedia is considering, in which we establish a sort of
active editorial board - a group of trusted moderators rather than just one,
any
of whom can approve a post and thus the flow of information will not be
significantly slowed, power and control will not be in the hands of one person,
and the quality will increase. (04)
--
Dr. Christopher A. Welty IBM Watson Research Center
+1.914.784.7055 19 Skyline Dr.
cawelty@xxxxxxxxx Hawthorne, NY 10532
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/w/welty (05)
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