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Which part do you disagree with? That its easier to enforce, or that its sufficiently effective? The former is intuitively true; finding good rules to enforce

by setr 9y ago

Which part do you disagree with? That its easier to enforce, or that its sufficiently effective? The former is intuitively true; finding good rules to enforce strictly is difficult, but enforcing is simple (is the act explicitly allowed/banned or not?). Find broad rules is trivial, but then you spend all the enforcement time arguing edge cases (see: US gov) The latter is defended by the assumption that wikipedia/overflow do indeed follow such a policy, and its difficult to argue that they are not successful. There might be something better out there, but at least currently the market seems to have converged on this policy; ala "democracy is the worst form of government, except for the all other forms we've tried.

sanderjd 9y ago
I disagree with the part about it achieving the goal of being an encyclopedic source of knowledge. Except it largely comes down to how you define "encyclopedic". I would like it to mean "broad and inclusive", but it often means "highly curated", which tends to translates to "conservative". I don't think the convergence of the market on this sort of policy provides any indication one way or the other, because of network effects. Both of those sites won their space before the culture we're discussing here became entrenched, and because of network effects, it is not realistic to unseat them.
- setr 9y ago
  Im not sure you can easily argue either is "highly curated"; they both cover an extremely large domain and cover at least a substantial subset of it. It's hardly the case that any one/group handpicked particular subjects of interest, rather they denied anything not of interest (and accepted the rest) I imagine rather than "broad and inclusive", it should be "broad and authoritative", which then tends towards conservative when contraversial (which makes sense: how can you be authoritative when a general agreement can't be reached?) And ofc, wikipedia was preceded by c2wiki, and stackoverflow by innumerable Q&A sites, both predecessors being substantially more liberal in what they accepted. And both beat out their predecessors, presumably largely because quality control was made much more difficult, and often absent, in the face of liberal acceptance.
  - sanderjd 9y ago
    > And both beat out their predecessors, presumably largely because quality control was made much more difficult, and often absent, in the face of liberal acceptance. That doesn't mesh with my experience of what made the sites popular at the time of their growth. Wikipedia was the only wiki that anyone had ever heard of, and SO was the only software focused Q&A site besides expertsexchange which had a freemium model that made it unusable (not to mention a funny domain name!).

by setr 9y ago

sanderjd 9y ago

I disagree with the part about it achieving the goal of being an encyclopedic source of knowledge. Except it largely comes down to how you define "encyclopedic". I would like it to mean "broad and inclusive", but it often means "highly curated", which tends to translates to "conservative". I don't think the convergence of the market on this sort of policy provides any indication one way or the other, because of network effects. Both of those sites won their space before the culture we're discussing here became entrenched, and because of network effects, it is not realistic to unseat them.

setr 9y ago
Im not sure you can easily argue either is "highly curated"; they both cover an extremely large domain and cover at least a substantial subset of it. It's hardly the case that any one/group handpicked particular subjects of interest, rather they denied anything not of interest (and accepted the rest) I imagine rather than "broad and inclusive", it should be "broad and authoritative", which then tends towards conservative when contraversial (which makes sense: how can you be authoritative when a general agreement can't be reached?) And ofc, wikipedia was preceded by c2wiki, and stackoverflow by innumerable Q&A sites, both predecessors being substantially more liberal in what they accepted. And both beat out their predecessors, presumably largely because quality control was made much more difficult, and often absent, in the face of liberal acceptance.
- sanderjd 9y ago
  > And both beat out their predecessors, presumably largely because quality control was made much more difficult, and often absent, in the face of liberal acceptance. That doesn't mesh with my experience of what made the sites popular at the time of their growth. Wikipedia was the only wiki that anyone had ever heard of, and SO was the only software focused Q&A site besides expertsexchange which had a freemium model that made it unusable (not to mention a funny domain name!).