Dennis Brown wrote:Renée Bagslint wrote:I think this discussion has proved most illuminating. It seems pretty clear that Wikpedians regard their so-called encyclopaedia project as being run for the benefit of the writers, not the readers. What is important to them is whether a contributor has been treated well, not whether there are thousands of articles lying around waiting for cleanup. They want the kudos of having written an encyclopaedia without doing the actual hard work of learning stuff and writing it properly.
I get what you are saying, but from the reader's perspective, a copyvio doesn't diminish the quality of the article, and may actually improve it since that means it was likely originally written by a real writer. [duck] So the reader's experience is the same or better, assuming the copyvios came from quality sources.
I guess it's not surprising, but there seems no appreciation in this comment that the primary task of a Wikipedia editor is not copying other people's work, it is to summarise it.
You're not, in theory at least, building a knowledge database, but a reference work. So for virtually every case of editors simply copying sources, even if assuming decent sources, the reader coming to Wikipedia looking for an "encylopedia" will obviously be worse off, since what ends up in Wikipedia through that process will most likely not be comprehensive or unbiased.
Best that can be said about such material, is that it would be accurate. It would also be choppy in narrative, tone, style and grammar, arguably to the point of being unreadable for any sane person brought up on quality sources. Even then, the basic expectation of accuracy, all other issue notwithstanding, is not a given - one of the purposes of consulting multiple secondary sources to create a tertiary one, is to root out errors. Granted, there are some topics where there is only one authorative source, but even in that case, by definition, straight copying would not be serving the reader of an encyclopedia, only summarization would.
The only sense that editors straight up copying stuff would be good for a reader, is in the case where what they're copying, is content from other encyclopedias. That still wouldn't serve the reader, since by definition the content would be unverifiable, as well as being unlikely to meet Wikipedia's other myriad content and style standards, which exist, nominally, for the benefit of the reader.
And there it is. That's now easy it is to debunk the assumptions of Wikipedians. Given their lack of training or expertise, it is almost certain that whenever they're talking about what's best for the reader, it will inevitably be wrong.
It's no surprise that lots of Richards edits, even when using out of copyright material, consist merely of dumping a massive body of text on the page, and calling it a quote. Why does he do that? Because he has literally not one clue how to write an encyclopedia. It's the same reason he seems obsessed with lists.
The only people who benefit from straight up copying to Wikipedia, in an environment of lax concern for copyright, are those desperate for it to be seen as a useful resource. It's just one more example of the real truth - the entire enterprise is one big con-trick. The WMF want your eyeballs and your money, and the mechanism to achieve it is amassing a pool of cult followers who buy into the idea that amassing any old crap, even illegal crap, is better than nothing. All other concerns are secondary. They'll get round to clearing out the illegal crap eventually, once more important goals have been addressed.
