[Cogito]

Yeah, I've been following r/spacex for a little bit.

When they started trying to work out some good questions a day ago someone suggested that everyone upvote the resulting questions but the mods there quickly shut that down. [1]

The reasons given for deleting the comments was specifically what everyone was trying to avoid, that is voting brigading. As far as I can tell no one was asking for votes, simply working together to produce some high quality questions.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/lBCWvQh.png

[jacquesm]

That's the attitude that they say murdered wikipedia. Rules are there to foster a better community, not to kill off good community initiatives. As soon as the adherence to the rules becomes more important than the quality of the product you've basically lost it. The whole trick is to know when not to apply the rules. AMAs are an exceptional item and a different ruleset for AMAs would not be all that hard to imagine. Pity.

[debacle]

Reddit hasn't been about community in about a year, and /r/IAmA is a huge part of that. It's a huge profit center for reddit and they moderate it heavily.

[jebus989]

"Murdered" Wikipedia whose fifth pillar is "ignore all rules"?

[jacquesm]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638

http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

And many others like it.

[jebus989]

Sure editor numbers are in decline, that doesn't support your point. Ignore All Rules is one of the fundamental principles the site was founded on.

[jacquesm]

The point is that that fundamental principle seems to be ignored by people that prefer to bicker over the rules rather than to be otherwise productive:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596682

And that this in turn is what drives editors away. So it very much supports my point.

[darkmighty]

Wikipedia at this point is one of the primary sources for everything on the internet. At the early days of wikipedia, you could pick any topic and there would be major articles unwritten. It was far best to have some article than a great article. I can't comment exactly on the editor situation of the wiki, but it's to be expected a shift to more specialized and aggressive "curation" of articles, specially of more solidified topics. Wikipedia's fantastic performance contradicts this argument.

[jebus989]

You're making leaps of logic based on the occasional HN anecdote. Numbers have been in decline since 2007, what percentage of those left over bickering about rules? Do you have any evidence for this given that IAR has been in place as a core principle throughout?

IAR can be and indeed is invoked all the time, making Wikipedia a bad example of how strict rule adherence stifles a community. It was quite a simple point that needn't warrant downvotes, italics and so many HN searches.

[DanBC]

"The encyclopedia anyone can edit" is another rule the site was founded on, yet that's clearly not true. Look at the hostility that IP editors face even though most good wikipedia edits come from IP editors and IP editors are less anonymous than logged in editors.

Try using WP:IAR anywhere on WP today and you'll quickly see how far WP has moved from founding priciples.

EDIT: I mean, just look at usernames. You're supposed to be able without a login, but sometimes that causes problems. So you go to create a username. The software has a list of words that you can not use (very. Few people think allowing a username like "JewKiller666" is a good idea). But then there's a username policy. This has been reviewed to make it more friendly to new users. But the application of those rules is still pretty hostile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username

That's the policy. See the changes to the "misleading" names section. That section had to be expanded because editors using their real name in a different script (eg, Japanese users) were being told their unicode name was misleading. Or a user with a eg psuedo-random string of characters was told that their name was confusing, even thoigh there wasn't any other name or namespace to confuse "kejdhdkaksaas983" with.

The "dealing with inappropriate usernames" section required a lot of work to prevent the admin-wannabe users from making many reports.

Once you've picked a name that gets past the software's filters but which an editor -or bot- thinks is bad you face:

1) templates. {{subst:uw-username}}

2) a RFC http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RFC/N

3) an administrator notice board http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_adminis...

Notice that bot reports which the not admits may be low quality get sent to UAA, not the lower levels of discussion.

4) a holding pen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_adminis...

This convoluted conflicting mass of policy is hostile to new users, especially in the way it gets applied by editors. Just try using "WP:IAR" during this process.

[DanBC]

Wikipedia has spent many megabytes of text to argue about hyphen, minus, en-dash, and em-dash.

These arguments (different arguments among different people) spread over diffferent pages and different spaces. They happened on article talk pages; in meta space (village pump, the WP manual of style); in admin spaces (ANI); even with some ARBCOM case.

There's easily 500,000 words about hyphen, minus, en-dash and em-dash on wikipedia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600342

[grecy]

> fifth pillar is "ignore all rules"?

Go and make some useful edits and see how that works out for you. Rules are strictly enforced above all else.

[jebus989]

Unsure of how much editing you've done but I've made over 10,000 edits over the past 9 years and that's not been my experience (google my HN username + wikipedia).

[grecy]

I wonder if it's an experienced editor vs. newbie thing.

Everything I try to do is immediately reverted and sixteen rules are cited. Extremely frustrating, and it happens to many others in the community I'm in (Driving around the world) to the point I setup our own wiki so we don't have to deal with the BS bureaucracy of Wikipedia.

[DanBC]

One of the few things you can do that will get Reddit admin attention is to "manipulate" votes. It's not surprising that mods are cautious when people say "get this whole sub to upvote the post".

From a first reading that screenshot sounds like vote-brigading, not like using a single thread of questions within a sub to organise a list of great questions.

[Cogito]

Yes you lose some context in the screenshot.

That comment was posted to the single thread of questions in the sub, and was quickly shot down by the subs mods (u/EchoLogic). Here is a link to the actual comment if anyone is interested in having a look:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2rb303/elon_musk_is...