Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Tiago's avatar

I find Wikipedia brilliant, and think they have stumbled upon a great way to do collaborative work. I also agree that adversarial collaboration is a key component. Where I think my proposal could (emphasis on could) over the Wikipedia model in some circumstances is in ditching the necessity of consensus. While Wikipedia works very well (particularly comparing to other websites) it has some limitations. The consensus model allows for some protracted "Wikipedia wars". Moreover, Wikipedia is by construction limited in its ambitions because of its open nature - e.g., 1) neutral point of view prevents it from taking stances on matters that do have a truth value but are not consensual, 2) no original research. I must stress that this is not a proposition to reform Wikipedai in the direction I mentioned; Wikipedia is working great as it is. But a similar approach with some key distinctions might add value where Wikipedia now can't.

Expand full comment
duck_master's avatar

Seems interesting.

Incidentally, as a Wikipedia editor*, I happen to know about how Wikipedia articles are written: basically, people individually amend the article to add text/references/images/templates/cleanup tags/etc, and if anything is controversial people argue it out on talk pages, and the semi-miraculous(?) thing is that articles end up being reliable anyways despite being generated by a potentially-very-unreliable source. This makes me think that the key component is adversarial collaborations, which both Robin’s proposal, the parliamentary model, and the Wikipedia model all encourage (by forcing potential adversaries to only be able to collaborate on a single shared work).

*My username there is “Duckmather”, for anyone who wants to check.

Expand full comment
10 more comments...

No posts