Tuesday, March 06, 2007

On Webcomics, again

It does occur to me that a good way to improve relations between webcomic authors and Wikipedia might not include trolling.

Are all webcomic authors jerks, or just most of them?

3 comments:

  1. If I decide to store my life savings as a pile of money on the sidewalk in front of my house, do I really have the right to complain when it -- gasp! -- disappears overnight? Are the people who took it "jerks", or am I just incomprehensibly stupid?

    Wikipedia is a system wide-open for general abuse, both from within and and from the outside. Not only that, but the system is apparently designed with this as a "feature". And, to add to even that, this design is carefully incubated and defended: political extensions that go toward this are embraced, those that try and repair the problems are calumniously voted down.

    Many cases can be cited here, but the recent Essjay scandal tops it all off.

    So I find it highly remarkable that, given the above, the denizens of Wikipedia and their expatriates are Shocked and Appalled when the system is actually abused. If you really don't want it, why do you field a system that basically begs for it?

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  2. If you decide to store your savings on the front porch, and someone takes it, yes, the people who took it are jerks, no scare quotes necessary.

    And it is a sad thing when we are considered stupid for not expecting other people to be jerks.

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  3. We're all jerks, so Wikipedia needs to hurry up and delete all instances of webcomics. Well, wait a second -- surely the webcomics published under Oni Press and Viper Comics are notable, since those have entries -- oh, my! Those were also put up for deletion.

    Well, maybe the only thing left should be the entry for "Webcomics," with some early examples of webcomics, like Keenspot, the first actual collective that -- oh, they're planning to delete Keenspot for being non-notable too! Okay. And the only way to combat this without being called a meatpuppeteer is to spend even more time editing Wikipedia than the editors who are currently in charge of the Wikiproject for webcomics.

    It's fascinating that those that have that kind of time to ascend to that post are the ones who are the least aware of what's actually going on in the field. Wikipedia, for emerging topics like webcomics, is dominated by the Peter Principle.

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