Results matching “wikipedia”

Meanwhile, I was all, bugger National Novel Writing Month.

Don't get me wrong. It looked fascinating from the outside. I wasn't going to discourage anyone from doing it. It's probably a valuable tool. Some people could even get a useful, publishable novel out of it. Some lucky person may even swing a iPod Nano out of the deal. The buggery wasn't meant for them at all. I wasn't even approaching them with the pitchfork, although I would quite like to play with the adorable gadget.

What I mean to say is that I chased NaNoWriMo out of my room with fourteen marital aids.

When I say "fascinating from the outside," I mean, "There is a window here made of transparent aluminum. We can see each other. I can do my best puppy impression, but all I'll leave are smears. This is four inches deep. This will never, ever break."

(Also, my inability to describe my emotions without referencing both puppies and Star Trek means that I should never, ever, ever be allowed to write a novel. Or poetry. Or even one of those God damned "postcard stories" that my "creative" writing teacher was so keen on, back in the day, really.)

I can't write prose fiction to save my life. If I'd figured this out when I was much younger, we would all have been far safer, I assure you. I won't deny that I've written novels, or large chunks of novels. A few times, in fits of youthful optimism, I managed somewhere over the NaNoWriMo word count during my free time. The first stab was destroyed in a tragic hard drive failure; subsequent ones... well, someone really should have told me how bad the short stories from the same period were, say, and done so months before I'd generated a couple of hundred more pages on something new. The manuscripts went straight into the trash once the point finally got driven home.

Nothing better ever came out.

I stuck to newspapers after that. Newspapers, pseudonyms and locked diaries. Much easier that way. At least, when the editor tells you that your article's worthwhile and it just needs some work, they're usually not lying to you. If they are, you figure it out pretty fast.

I have friends who tell me just to generate output, and not to care if it sucks. That way lies disaster. You may have read pamphlets, once, on clinical depression in all of its many forms. Some of them explain how telling a person to just "snap out of it" is not only bound to fail, but likely to be counterproductive; if they could turn off the depression, well, they wouldn't have clinical depression. Tell the afflicted depressive this, and they'll not only remain depressed, they'll feel worse because they can't snap out of it. Same goes for telling people not to dwell on their problems, or not to think so much. Same goes for reminding them that, down in Methylparabenia, there are folks with far greater problems than yours; you should be happy.

I can't shut off that sort of creative terror any more easily than I can flip a switch and make major depressive episodes go away. Trying to make myself not care exacerbates matters; I don't even know how one forces oneself not to have an emotion. NaNoWriMo was tempting, and has been tempting for a couple of years running now. I'd love to pretend again that I could write a book. But I know better than to think it would be helpful, or fun, or likely to generate anything better than a daily panic attack. I have enough things going on right now, in any event; playing the Red Queen's Race with wordcount wouldn't work, because all I'd be able to do is remind myself that I'm no good at this sort of thing. I wouldn't be able to do this any more than I can straighten my hair, or change the wind's direction, or calculate the tip.

This is not to say that I don't compensate, where I can. I'm just inclined to respect my own personal limits. I know what I can write, and where I'm capable of improvement. I can give myself permission to suck if I know that I can get better, but I'm always going to care. I have to have some idea of where to channel the energy so that it's not exclusively self-destructive.

I'm not bad at short pieces.

I'm also not bad at choosing wine. Not great; I made a horrible mistake the other night with a Rhone syrah that really should never have seen the barrel. But I know from wine, and I know well enough to have an enjoyable night with it.

I've written while intoxicated on a number of occasions. It was the only way to get through the last disc of Broken Saints without undue emotional trauma, for example, especially given that Hunter S. Thompson had just shot himself and it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. I won't pretend that the results are any better or worse than what you get out of a sober writer, or that it's something anyone should rely upon for more than the occasional piece. (I felt differently when I was younger, but I was also stupid.) The fallacy of the writer who's Always Better When They're All Messed Up is usually exactly that; HST aside, I suspect that most such folks are good in spite of the alcohol. But, if you can't actually distance yourself from your anxieties very easily, and there's something that you need to do, a glass of wine is a good jumpstart. Three quarters of a bottle of wine is a calculated risk. (Anything else, and you're probably on your own.)

Writing while tipsy is actually kind of fun sometimes. And I like not having anxieties for a little while.

So. Y'all can go off and write a book. I'll bet your book will totally kick ass. I, meanwhile, intend on partipating in National Drunken Writing Night on the evening of 5 November, and I make no guarantee as to the results.

They'll probably suck. I'm okay with that.

So, last weekend, a user named Hahnchen began the process of "weeding out" non-notable webcomics over at Wikipedia. He doesn't seem to be a bad person. He just figures... well, that somehow he knows what's notable and what isn't. He's admitted he doesn't know much about webcomics, but he figures it's somehow obvious. I guess. I don't know.

One of the people who got weeded out was Patrick Farley. So... I guess Webcartoonists Choice Award nominations, academic work, being cited and singled out for documentaries, multiple citations as one of the best webcartoonists of last year, articles about him at Comixpedia and the Webcomics Examiner (and, for that matter, here) and the opinions of dozens of webcartoonists and thousands of webcomics fans don't have as much bearing as... well, Hahnchen's snap judgment. I thought Ryan Estrada being purged as "non-notable" highlighted a failure in the model. Patrick Farley being purged as non-notable is downright stupid.

And it highlights the core problem with Wikipedia. In the end, it's not the issue of whether or not Wikipedia can be trusted -- which is what critics have said from the beginning. I think the record shows it's pretty damn solid in that regard. No, the problem with Wikipedia is a bizarre amalgamation of elitism and anti-elitism which will ultimately come down to "whatever editor is more stubborn than all the others."

We saw that with John Byrne, who managed to purge out anything negative from his bio largely because he was stubborn enough to continually revert his entry, over and over again, regardless of questions of point of view. And we see it with monumental disparities between guidelines for inclusion based solely on whether or not a significant number of editors are fans of the work in question or not. Go through the Star Wars, Star Trek, West Wing, DC Comics and Marvel Comics sections, and you will see the most mind numbingly obscure bits of trivia developed. Go to webcomics, and you have criteria based on voodoo and prognostication put forth.

This again highlights the driving need to use the Comixpedia.org Webcomics Encyclopedia instead. It's already vastly more useful to a student of webcomics than Wikipedia, and it's only getting better. What's more, its driving principle is "comprehensive." Wikipedia wanted at one point to be comprehensive. Now they want to be "legitimate," but their practices seem doomed to consigning it to illegitimacy with time. I suspect that more and more esoteric subjects will be "weeded out" (to use Hahnchen's term) by people who don't actually know anything about the subject. (The distrust of authoritative review has been highlighted before. One of the original members of the Wikipedia team, Larry Sanger, has gone on record on this subject:

The root problem: anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise. There is a deeper problem--or I, at least, regard it as a problem--which explains both of the above-elaborated problems. Namely, as a community, Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated). This is one of my failures: a policy that I attempted to institute in Wikipedia's first year, but for which I did not muster adequate support, was the policy of respecting and deferring politely to experts. (Those who were there will, I hope, remember that I tried very hard.)

I need not recount the history of how this nascent policy eventually withered and died. Ultimately, it became very clear that the most active and influential members of the project--beginning with Jimmy Wales, who hired me to start a free encyclopedia project and who now manages Wikipedia and Wikimedia--were decidedly anti-elitist in the above-described sense.

Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they will--at least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversy--be forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts. This is not perhaps so bad in itself. But if the expert should have the gall to complain to the community about the problem, he or she will be shouted down (at worst) or politely asked to "work with" persons who have proven themselves to be unreasonable (at best).

This lack of respect for expertise explains the first problem, because if the project participants had greater respect for expertise, they would have long since invited a board of academics and researchers to manage a culled version of Wikipedia (one that, I think, would not directly affect the way the main project is run). But because project participants have such a horror of the traditional deference to expertise, this sort of proposal has never been taken very seriously by most Wikipedians leading the project now. And so much the worse for Wikipedia and its reputation.

This lack of respect for expertise and authority also explains the second problem, because again if the project participants had greater respect for expertise, there would necessarily be very little patience for those who deliberately disrupt the project. This is perhaps not obvious, so let me explain. To attact and retain the participation of experts, there would have to be little patience for those who do not understand or agree with Wikipedia's mission, or even for those pretentious mediocrities who are not able to work with others constructively and recognize when there are holes in their knowledge (collectively, probably the most disruptive group of all). A less tolerant attitude toward disruption would make the project more polite, welcoming, and indeed open to the vast majority of intelligent, well-meaning people on the Internet. As it is, there are far fewer genuine experts involved in the project (though there are some, of course) than there could and should be.

It will probably be objected by some that, since I am not 100% committed to the most radical sort of openness, I do not understand why the project that I founded works: it works, I will be told, precisely because it is radically open--even anarchical.

I know, of course, that Wikipedia works because it is radically open. I recognized that as soon as anyone; indeed, it was part of the original plan. But I firmly disagree with the notion that that Wikipedia-fertilizing openness requires disrespect toward expertise. The project can both prize and praise its most knowledgeable contributors, and permit contribution by persons with no credentials whatsoever. That, in fact, was my original conception of the project. It is sad that the project did not go in that direction.

He is, of course, right. The more that true experts on given fields feel like their input is not only disregarded but dismissed in an effort to be egalitarian, the more that said experts will simply stop writing for Wikipedia. In researching the extended criticism page, I went to the Wikipedia entry on Deconstructionism. At the top of the page, there is a note saying the entire page needs a complete rewrite. Going to the talk page shows the reasons this is being done. One of the comments (from an avowed engineer) is as follows:

[The entry on Deconstructionism needs] a concise definition. Even controversial articles like abortion and religion start with such definitions. I seriously doubt that there is anything special about the deconstruction article. If something is truly not-definable, it can't be recognized for study, and thus does not deserve an article. People are recognizing and studying deconstruction and it does merit an article, thus it must have a definition.

Part of the entire philosophical debate surrounding Deconstructionism -- something that is core to the study of Deconstructionism -- is its lack of definition. Jacques Derrida himself said that he has spent his life and every essay he ever wrote trying to define Deconstructionism and failing. Now, I'm no fan of Deconstructionism, and I think its very opaque nature makes it specious as a literary critical theory, but I absolutely don't feel Deconstructionism should be eliminated from Wikipedia -- and the assertion that "abortion" and "religion" have definitions, so Deconstructionism must as well, is patently ridiculous. Philosophy isn't so easy to categorize, and Deconstructionism is ninth level philosophy. Someone who doesn't know anything about the field, criticism, analysis, or the interplay of philosophical viewpoints and how they relate to art in the mid to late twentieth century has no more business saying it "must" have a definition than I have saying that a computer "must" have a carburetor because my 1969 automobile and speedboat both do.

(No, I don't have a '69 car or any speedboat at all.)

Now, I just mentioned I went to Wikipedia for that article. This is true. I use Wikipedia right now. I believe in Wikipedia. I think that a dynamic, user-edited encyclopedia isn't only competitive with other models, but will ultimately supplant them. However, I also know that at this point I wouldn't recommend Wikipedia to anyone for any webcomics related article. I have no faith even in the webcomics articles they do think warrant inclusion. I will always direct those folks to the Comixpedia Webcomics Encyclopedia instead. Always.

And I think that's a symptom of the deeper problems that are beginning to surface in Wikipedia. Either it will need to remake itself in such a way that expertise is rewarded and inclusion guidelines be set by what's actually significant to a field instead of flawed indicators set by the uninformed masses (and those inclusion guidelines be relaxed across the board, for that matter. Whether or not something is "notable" does me no good whatsoever if I show up looking for information on it. If I do a search, it's clearly notable to me, isn't it?), or ultimately Wikipedia will simply be an evolutionary step, and either a loose collection of specialist encyclopedic wikis will form surrounding it and ultimately supplanting it, or someone will fork the Wikipedia project, pull all the current data, and set up a competing project that does incorporate both respect for expertise in a field and much broader guidelines for inclusion, and Wikipedia will be left behind.

No bets on which way it'll go, right now. I just know that taking out Patrick Farley (and having someone who doesn't know webcomics going through and deleting things in general) is indicative of a future that's not so rosy for anyone.

Gossamer Commons has been added to the new comics wiki. No, I didn't add it.

For the record, it had been cut from Wikipedia as non-notable. I supported that decision. I voted for its deletion.

But, I have to admit... it's very very nice to see the entry in the new encyclopedia.

Hey all!

So, Comixpedia's webcomics encyclopedia is go. It's in the extreme early stages, of course, but we're up to 110 entries imported from Wikipedia (under the auspices of the Free Documentation License) and some original work to boot. A good number of people have jumped in, and more are coming all the time.

And I'm a little amazed. It's still rough, sure -- but remember, we didn't start talking about this until September second. Here it is, one week later, and it exists and is growing, quickly.

There's still stuff to do. A name needs to be settled on. A logo needs to be prepared. The front page needs to be designed both for people who are looking to contribute and for people who are coming for information. We need to start putting the word out. We need to start recruiting more help.

And we need to reach out to the other Wikis out there. The Comic Genesis Wiki project, started to facilitate similar goals for the expansive Comic Genesis/Keenspace community is an obvious first step -- clearly, they should be able to draw off of our work and we the same for them. However, they're operating under Creative Commons, and we're under GNU FDL, and I'm not entirely sure how the two interact with one another. (If we alter and derive from their text, the new text needs to be released under the same Creative Commons license, for example. But we need to use the FDL to continue drawing off of Wikipedia.)

But these seem like resolvable issues, really. My suspicion is that the folks at CGWiki will want to pitch in, and I know we'll want to help support them. I think the same is likely to be true of things like the Achewood Wiki, which is under the FDL, so we can definitely cross information back and forth as needed. The amazing thing is, this is a project that really can cross all the different cliques and communities. This is something that could be of benefit to Penny Arcade fans, PvP fans, Scott McCloud fans, Keenspotters, Blank Labelites, Modern Talsians, Webcomicsnationalities, Drunk Ducakises, BuzzComixii.... you know. The whole nine yards. Everybody. It's like Babylon 5, only in convenient wiki form.

It's astounding to me, though. Every so often, I have to remember how new technology like this really is. When I was 18 years old, the internet was text-only and a project like this would be impossible. Not that there were webcomics at that time. Today, not only is this project possible... there's nothing stopping people from just up and doing it. "Hey, that is a good idea. Right! I've created it!" "Cool! I've imported the first five entries!" "Cool! Hey, here's some templates we can use!" "Cool! Hey, here's a list of categories we should flesh out...."

Astounding, really. We do in fact live in the twenty-first century, and there really are some dramatic changes.

Head on over, have a look, and pitch in. This belongs as much to you as anyone. And there's lots to do for everyone.

Xerexes, over at Comixpedia, has taken up the challenge of a Webcomics-specific wiki based encyclopedia! You see? A good idea gets proposed one day, elaborated on with some truly fantastic comments and discussion, and acted upon the next!

My understanding from Xerexes is that all the folks who expressed a desire to be involved on many levels will get an opportunity to do so. And beyond those who want to pitch in with the myriad administrative details, pretty much anyone on Earth will get a chance to contribute material and depth to the encyclopedia.

Like we said in the comments of the last snark, we're not looking to replace Wikipedia. Or compete with them. However, Wikipedia doesn't currently fit the needs of the webcomics community (and there's no reason they should -- they're a general encyclopedia). And rather than try to force them to change into what we need or could better use, it makes sense to... you know, create the resource we need or could use ourselves.

Vive l'Internet.