Wednesday, July 13, 2005
The Thin Line
Sometimes Wikinews seems to be walking a thin line between greatness and madness.
On the madness side of things we have people who both seem to disregard existing policy (often carefully created to keep things sane) yet at the same time make up stuff as they go. Such characters wouldn't last five minutes on Wikipedia; but as was been pointed out on a mailing list recently, some Wikinews editors are only here because Wikipedia would not tolerate them, and we're too wolly-minded to do anything about them.
You also have to wonder about the other editors who are so willing to cut people slack - what is our aim? To create a first class news service or to be nice and wikiloving to every troublemaker, even when they are harming the site?
And sometimes you just get total nutters, like the guy who is creating blank article after blank article, and another who wrote a 'news' story complaining that Mediawiki doesn't feature RSS.
On the other hand, sometimes we get things very right. But not, it has to be said, as often as we get it wrong. These moments though show our potential, and are the motivation for why I carry on...
On the madness side of things we have people who both seem to disregard existing policy (often carefully created to keep things sane) yet at the same time make up stuff as they go. Such characters wouldn't last five minutes on Wikipedia; but as was been pointed out on a mailing list recently, some Wikinews editors are only here because Wikipedia would not tolerate them, and we're too wolly-minded to do anything about them.
You also have to wonder about the other editors who are so willing to cut people slack - what is our aim? To create a first class news service or to be nice and wikiloving to every troublemaker, even when they are harming the site?
And sometimes you just get total nutters, like the guy who is creating blank article after blank article, and another who wrote a 'news' story complaining that Mediawiki doesn't feature RSS.
On the other hand, sometimes we get things very right. But not, it has to be said, as often as we get it wrong. These moments though show our potential, and are the motivation for why I carry on...
// posted by Dan @ 10:13 pm 
