[roenxi]

More than whatever process was used, just looking at his user page I do think some sort of ostracism-like response was inevitable. The thing about communities like Wikipedia is when you have a group of volunteers coming together to do something the culture has to be somewhat intolerant of cultural change, otherwise it'll fall apart pretty quickly. To repeat that another way, culture defines who is part of the in- and out-group, so once the group has formed it is very slow to change or the group collapses.

I quite like what he's going for with these 9 theses - the ideas of the public rating articles or enabling competition between articles seems like a clever compromise position - but frankly I don't see how the Wikipedia community could treat this as anything other than an attack whether or not the ideas are improvements. The parallel with Martin Luther and the Catholic Church was appropriately foreshadowed by Sanger.

Organisations eventually become corrupt. Wikipedia might already be there or it might have a ways to go, who knows. But this sort of change might require a new project or some sort of schism among the Wikipedia editors, it sounds pretty radical. Especially in the post-Trump era; I expect his presidency has been a traumatic era for the English Wikipedia project.

[coldpie]

I mean this in a friendly way: you are falling for it. Sanger's goal here is to get low-quality sources allowed on Wikipedia to promote his personal political beliefs. This was relatively politely argued down by Wikipedia editors, but he chose to try to recruit a brigade to swing the discussion in his favor, which is not allowed. There's no attempt to improve Wikipedia going on here.

[mschuster91]

> I quite like what he's going for with these 9 theses - the ideas of the public rating articles or enabling competition between articles seems like a clever compromise position - but frankly I don't see how the Wikipedia community could treat this as anything other than an attack whether or not the ideas are improvements.

The problem with the "competing articles" is that the end game is quite obvious - the far-right wants to get crap like Musk's "Grokipedia" or "Conservapedia" out of the gutters where it belongs and into the brand protection of Wikipedia.

And that, frankly, is an existential threat.