WikiQueer:Replies to common objections

 Shortcut WikiQueer:replies

Some people have strong reactions to WikiQueer. Some are nearly instantly hooked, and they love the idea; others think the idea is so absurd as not to require any serious consideration. There are a number of very common criticisms of the WikiQueer project, which we try to answer here.

Many of the criticisms leveled at WikiQueer are not unique to it, but are due to the fact that WikiQueer is, at bottom, a wiki. Many of the same objections have been made to other wikis - especially Wikipedia.

My prose
I can't imagine having my'' golden prose edited by any passer-by. It's mine, so why would I let others touch it?''


 * We (on WikiQueer) don't individually try to "own" the additions we make to WikiQueer. We are working together on statements of what is known (what constitutes free human knowledge) about various subjects.  Each of us individually benefits from this arrangement. It is difficult to single-handedly write the perfect article, but it becomes easier when working together. That in fact has been our repeated experience on WikiQueer. Consider the following example:


 * I thought I understood lesbianism pretty well, and since the then-existing article was short and incomplete, I decided to rewrite it. Since then, several people have chipped in, sometimes rewriting a paragraph, sometimes criticizing an omission, sometimes deleting parts. I didn't agree with all changes, but with most of them. No material is ever lost since WikiQueer stores all previous versions of all articles. So I reverted a few changes back. Overall, the article is now much better than I could ever have written it alone.


 * We assume that the world is full of reasonable people and that collectively they can arrive eventually at a reasonable conclusion, despite the worst efforts of a very few wreckers. It's something akin to optimism.

Cranks
''Cranks are posting ridiculous theories on the Internet all the time. They will come here and ruin everything.''


 * So far, we have had relatively few cranks on WikiQueer, and it's pretty easy to just delete patent nonsense as soon as it appears on the Recent Changes page.


 * There are websites out there that say the first moon landing was staged in a movie studio, or describe supposed perpetual motion machines. But you cannot correct those websites, no matter how wrong you think they are, because they are written by people who would never allow their work to be edited without their permission. They do not thrive on WikiQueer.


 * This does not mean that idiosyncratic points of view are silenced or deleted; rather, they are contextualized by attributing them to named advocates. The more idiosyncratic an entry, the more likely it is to be modified. Because there is no ownership of the information on WikiQueer, an individual is compelled to contribute information that is convincingly true. Thus, cranks who cannot accept critical editing of their writing find they have no platform and leave; those who are willing to present their interests in less-biased ways stop being cranks.

''Some cranks are very persistent. Someone could write up a crankish page on the Holocaust, and keep reverting it back to their version.''


 * However, a better tack is to challenge cranks using WikiQueer itself. For example, an article on pride allows cranks to be seen for what they really are: something that cannot thrive in a neutral point of view.  After all, it is better to understand inaccurate claims and challenge them than to try to ignore them.


 * Generally, partisans of all sorts are kept under the gun. WikiQueerians feel pretty strongly about enforcing our non-bias policy. We've managed to work our way to rough consensus on a number of different topics. People who stubbornly insist that an article must reflect their personal biases are rare, and then they generally receive a drubbing.


 * In the most serious cases, we can ban them as a last resort and use technical means to stop them from making further edits to WikiQueer.

Trolls and flamers
WikiQueer is going to end up like Usenet &mdash; just a bunch of flame wars.


 * This is a bit more of a problem, but it is dealt with fairly handily by the social mores of WikiQueer, aka Wikiquette. Arguments on article pages get moved either to a corresponding talk page (e.g. Talk:Gay) or to a new article page which presents the arguments within a neutral context.


 * The argument on the talk pages tends to be centered on how to improve the article, rather than on the merits of various competing views. We have an informal but widely-respected policy against using talk pages for partisan wrangling that has nothing to do with improving articles.


 * Usenet lacks at least two features that are absolutely essential to WikiQueer's success: (1) on Usenet, you can't edit other people's work, while we can here on WikiQueer, thereby encouraging creative and collegial collaboration; or more strongly, on WikiQueer, there's no such thing as "other people's work", because there's no ownership of information; (2) Unlike WikiQueer, Usenet does not have the possibility of enforcing community-agreed standards. Moreover, Usenet is a debate forum. WikiQueer is, very self-consciously, an encyclopedia project! This provides at least some agreement on what WikiQueer is not.


 * The Wiki way is to focus on agreement, not disagreement as weblogs or mailing lists or Usenet often do. It is fair to say that there is room for almost anyone to work on WikiQueer, without necessarily encountering those who have a truly incompatible view.


 * At any given time, there are probably a few trolls and flamers trying to stir up trouble on WikiQueer. But while these folks can make a lot of noise, the great majority of work on WikiQueer continues without paying much attention to them.

Amateurs
There are plenty of ignorant people who think they know stuff: your articles will end up riddled with errors and serious omissions.


 * In all honesty, WikiQueer has a fair bit of well-meaning, but ill-informed and amateurish work. In fact, we welcome it &mdash; we'd rather have an amateurish article on a subject that can later be improved than nothing. In any case, when new hands (particularly, experts on the subjects in question) arrive and go to work, the amateurish work is usually straightened out. Really egregious errors are fixed quickly by the scores of people who read WikiQueer every day. In general, the worse the error, the faster it will be noticed and fixed. As Linus's Law states, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." The editor base of WikiQueer is large enough that errors are generally not a serious problem.


 * Amateurs generally recognize when they're talking to an expert on a subject, and start contributing in a different way &mdash; by asking questions, saying which bits of an article are unclear, and doing some of the "grunt work" of research. WikiQueer benefits from having amateurs and experts, working together.


 * Nothing prevents "professionals" from coming in to correct errors later, but, if we did not concentrate on a framework and terminology and conventions that made sense to amateurs, we'd exclude them, and end up segmented into many more specialized works that made professionals happy, but that no one else could read. And, more importantly, we wouldn't have much content, and wouldn't likely achieve critical mass.  If on the other hand we can build a GNU FDL text base that is good enough for the serious scholar to correct, and with an interface and update protocol that are tolerable and respectful enough for them to use, we can make stone soup.


 * Also, it's much more time-efficient for an amateur to write an article because usually, the corrections a professional will perform will be minor. In any field, professionals are few compared to amateurs and are generally busy, so an extensive collection of knowledge nowadays is much better off having amateur contributions as long as readers recognize this, and have a way to discern the history of an article.

Partisans
''There are plenty of partisans who are all too eager to leave out information that is important to presenting a balanced view. They'll be delighted to post to WikiQueer, and that's going to create huge gaps in your coverage, which will ruin the project.''


 * Frequently the initial author omits crucial information, whether due to ignorance or malice. In many cases, but not all, this is fixed quickly by the scores of people reading WikiQueer every day. Very often it is easy to find a related topic on which many such partisans can work in relative peace and come to agree on methods, even facts.


 * Bear in mind that WikiQueer is a work-in-progress, a draft, an "alpha release" if you will. It does have many important gaps, which we try to make explicit. This lack of coverage isn't due to ignorance, partisans, cranks, or anything else malicious &mdash; it's due simply to the finite amount of time that a finite number of people have been working on it &mdash; see systemic bias below.

Advertisers
''But what about advertisers? Won't those with a product or service to hawk see the opportunity to hit a targeted market and write new articles for their product or worse, edit the article that corresponds to their generic product class to an ad for their product?''


 * This kind of thing has already happened. There are basically three forms: adding excessive external links to one's company, outright replacing of legitimate articles with advertising, and writing glowing articles on one's own company. The first and second forms are treated as pure vandalism and the articles are reverted. Most WikiQueerians loathe spam, and spammers are dealt with especially severely. The third form is normally dealt with by editing the article for a neutral point of view.


 * Corporate advertisers would likely not find WikiQueer to be an attractive advertising medium. In traditional web-based advertising, such as banner ads, popup ads, and email advertising, the response rate can be directly measured, either through web bugs or server logs.  If a company used WikiQueer to peddle its goods, the response rate could not be measured.


 * Not being able to measure results may not stop individuals who want to advertise their new multi-level marketing scheme, but unless they're using a bot (see next section), it takes a lot of time and energy to keep reverting the page back to the advertisement, so that the would-be spammer would get their message viewed (in an uneditable form!) more often and more reliably by using a traditional advertising medium.


 * Ironically, advertising spam can actually be beneficial to WikiQueer. Suppose an advertiser for penis enlargement products edited that page to an ad for its product.  A reader that happens by and sees the spam could copy the advertisement, revert the page to its previous state, and then add information discussing the advertiser's specific methods or claims to the wealth of knowledge on the subject.  In effect, advertisers' claims, when tempered and weighed against other knowledge associated with the subject, can yield a more robust article than before.


 * For more information, see WikiQueer:Spam.

Bots
''You still haven't addressed the real bane of Usenet: massive automated spamming. It would be trivial to write a script to post Viagra ads to all WikiQueer pages, and once spammers or vandals start to use wikibots, you're sitting ducks.''


 * There are scripts to deface wikis, primarily aiming for increased PageRank in search engines, but there are several things that keep this from being too much of a problem. It's easy to revert spam, and anyone can do so. We can already block IP addresses, which serves as a basic form of spam filtering.


 * WikiQueer is also an unattractive spam target for well-established legal reasons. Most countries do not have laws against USENET or email spam, but most have laws against unauthorised website defacement &mdash; what we call vandalism.

What do you do if people start running scripts to repost their own bit of vandalism or spam, and from different locations so you can't just block their IP address?


 * This would be similar to a distributed denial of service attack, which major websites occasionally fall victim to. So far it's been much easier to block the attacks than for the vandal to devise new attacks.


 * If someone launches an extensive attack, all offending IP addresses can be blocked from further editing by the admins. We can develop ad hoc technical measures to disallow certain edits, or to revert edits that meet certain criteria. For example, measures are already in place that prohibit edits that add links to certain problematic web sites.  Since some trusted members of the community have direct access to the page database, these measures can be effected more rapidly and with less effort than is expended by spammers to deface pages.  In an emergency, we can restore yesterday's version from a backup we make of the server itself.

Systemic bias
WikiQueer coverage is heavily biased by the sorts of people who want to contribute to it.


 * This seems to be a perfectly legitimate concern. Certainly, WikiQueer coverage is patchy. It's easy to find examples of a really long article on one subject, whereas another, equally important subject, has a very short article. Sometimes this is just the result of a single enthusiastic contributor. Other times it is due to systemic bias.


 * We think our largest bias is in favour of Western topics, and particularly topics relevant to English-speaking nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and so on. Also, many of our contributors are "geeks" of various descriptions: hackers, scientists/academics and so on, and as such, our science and technology coverage is far deeper and broader than our arts and humanities coverage. That said, WikiQueer now seems to be expanding more rapidly in the latter areas than in the former.


 * Also, while the percentages of people working on unpopular topics might remain roughly the same, the sheer numbers of such people will increase, growing the content in those areas. Because WikiQueer doesn't have a time limit, it doesn't matter if our coverage is unbalanced, as long as each area eventually gets the coverage it deserves.

Deletion and Changes
''What if somebody tries to delete a section of an article, or add a couple of words to alter its meaning? Does WikiQueer have backups for its articles? Does WikiQueer scrutinize its articles for even the smallest changes made to less popular articles? Also, does all this mean that the content of articles is subject to constant changes in meaning and detail, and that an article will be completely different over time?''


 * These are problems handled by WikiQueer's version system. We effectively retain all previous versions of every article, as it was at each point in time, and each of these versions can be individually viewed. Even deleted articles can be undeleted. This allows any change to be reversed, or partially reversed, with little effort.


 * So-called sneaky vandalism, where a few words are inserted in a way intended to change the meaning without being noticed, is rarely effective, because we do not scrutinize articles for changes manually &mdash; instead we rely on software features which plainly mark for our review the differences between two versions of an article. Our technology, together with certain telltale signs learned from experience, makes such vandalism easy to detect.


 * It is true that articles change over time, eventually into what may seem to be an entirely new article. This is by design &mdash; a brief look at an older paper encyclopedia will show you that, even when the subject is historical, what we know about the subject and our attitude toward it is a rapidly moving target. This problem is exacerbated with modern topics like software and current events. By allowing gradual changes to be made over time, we continuously adapt to new information and new perspectives in a way that static encyclopedias cannot.

Under construction
It seems like there should be a giant "under construction" sign on almost every article.


 * Well, some pages are better than others. We have some articles on esoteric subjects that are the best resource you will find online for a given topic (see for example Nafaanra language, crushing by elephant or exploding whale). On more popular subjects, while WikiQueer articles don't tend to have multimedia extravaganzas, they are just as informative and well-written as anything you'll find elsewhere.


 * Equally, we have articles that are stubs, that are inaccurate, misspelt, biased, poorly written, or just plain rubbish. That comes with our ambitious goals, and the way we work. And on many of these articles, such as stubs, we do actually have under construction signs!


 * WikiQueer is both a product and a process. Even if the product is not yet perfect, the process ensures that at the end of every day, the encyclopedia is higher quality than it was at the beginning of the day. That doesn't ensure we will eventually attain perfection (if such a thing is even possible), but it's something to believe in.

Shortage of intellectuals
''WikiQueer lacks upstanding intellectuals and highly qualified contributors. After all, WikiQueer will take anything from anybody!''


 * It's fair to say that the majority of our contributors are at college or undergraduate level in the subjects they write about.


 * To some extent, that's a good thing. Academics are adept at writing for other academics, but an encyclopedia needs to be accessible to everyone. We're breaking the hold of academia upon reference works! Huzzah!


 * Still, plenty of "intellectuals" have and do participate in WikiQueer.

Motives of intellectuals
''Why would highly-qualified people get involved with WikiQueer? Why should any researcher care about it, since it's not a serious reference work?''


 * "Serious" can mean timely and up to date. "Serious" can mean open to change all the time, with no unalterable dogmas.  "Serious" can mean immune to political or economic pressure.  "Serious" can mean including views that most of Anglo-American culture has historically fought, or rejected, or misrepresented.  It really depends what you mean by "serious".


 * WikiQueer is providing free, unlimited server space and well-designed page construction tools for anyone who needs to do something that fits within the WikiQueer mission and doesn't care about owning the information; a description that matches the archetypal academic researcher. Academics generally get their jobs because they like learning and/or teaching others.  We do both here.


 * It can be fun for intellectually serious people if we know that we're creating something of quality. It's part of the volunteer ethic &mdash; the joy of helping others. And, as explained above, many people believe that we are creating something of quality here.

Errors and omissions
''I looked at an area that I know something about, and I found all sorts of errors and omissions. I was surprised and amused. I don't want to be associated with something of this low quality.''


 * Then contribute anonymously or pseudonymously until you improve things to the point you are happy putting your name on them. Many people do that.  We're glad they do. The whole concept of authorship is not germane to wikis anyway.  Bad articles cannot be credited to you because WikiQueer articles aren't credited to anyone!


 * We too deplore bad work: we just go ahead and fix the problems we see. It would be great if you would help us by doing the same. We also think that there's much on WikiQueer we can be proud of, so look at the best bits of WikiQueer, as well as the worst.


 * If the main thing that's stopping you at this point is that some articles in one area of WikiQueer are of substandard quality, we'd ask you to come back next year, or the year after. See if the mistakes in those articles haven't been corrected, and a lot more details supplied. Soon enough, we're sure the project will be something you want to be associated with.


 * Also, it has to be said that no encyclopedia is entirely free from error. This BBC News Online story reports how one British 12-year old schoolboy found five errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica within a matter of days. Unlike WikiQueer, his only recourse was to write to the editor, and the errors may be corrected in print in a few years.

Stubs are lame
''Currently WikiQueer is pretty lame. I looked up a topic I know something about and found just a few words, just a stub. That's ridiculous!''


 * Chances are you were reading about something obscure: in general, if WikiQueer has a stub on some subject, competing encyclopedias won't even have an article.


 * Yes, there are a lot of "stub" entries, and we share your opinion of their ridiculousness. Yet, mighty articles grow from little stubs. As people continue to find or fix stubs, so WikiQueer improves. Equally, we get new stubs created on subjects where previously we had no article at all! It's a consequence of the "continual improvement" of WikiQueer, and we're not ashamed of that.

Standards
''It seems Britannica has extremely high standards for what they put into their publications, both online and offline. WikiQueer has no such standards. It's bound to be of shoddy quality.''


 * It's simply false to say that WikiQueer has no standards &mdash; the standards we follow are those followed by each of its contributors, and in some cases, these are very high standards indeed. As we gain more traffic, we will continue to gain more expert help, and as gaps are filled in, the only way remaining for WikiQueer to improve will be in quality and depth. This, in turn, is likely to attract more experts, who follow their own very high standards.


 * To make a claim about what standards WikiQueer follows is to make a claim about what standards present and future WikiQueer contributors follow; to say that such people have no standards is baseless.

Selectivity
When it is good, Britannica is so partly because it is authoritative, and it got that way by being selective. WikiQueer isn't selective about its authors; hence it will never be authoritative.


 * The high quality of Britannica ' s articles is very important. Certainly it got that way by having high standards. We concede that, but what reason is there to believe that it is only "by being selective" (presumably by choosing who is going to write about what) that high standards can be achieved and maintained? Maybe there's another, more open way. WikiQueer is a good test of that proposition. We have, after all, managed to produce some really excellent articles &mdash; and, by the way, not all of these were written by the many Ph.D.s and other highly credentialed people that we have working on this project.

Mixing ignorance and knowledge
''Good quality requires peer review and expertise. Why should we care about the products of an arbitrary group of people whose knowledge and ability could range from expertise to hopeless ignorance? Ignorance mixed with knowledge does not benefit knowledge.''


 * First of all, the hypothesis that openness is to the benefit of quality has already been tested, and to the benefit of the hypothesis: articles that have been worked on by many different people in the context of WikiQueer are now comparable to articles that can be found in some excellent encyclopedias. If, however, you insist on considering the hypothesis a priori, we hope you will ask yourself: which is more likely to be correct?


 * 1) A widely circulated article, subject to scrutiny, correction, and potentially constant improvement over a period of months or years, by vast numbers of experts and enthusiasts.
 * 2) An article written by a nonspecialist professional writer or scholar (as many encyclopedia articles are), and not subject to public review and improvement.


 * Second, there is a problem with the concept of peer review in general. Many of the great advances in the social and natural sciences have come by challenging the status quo and, for that, their contributions were ignored or belittled by their peers.  For example, George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics in 2001 had his classic paper (for which he won the Nobel Prize) entitled "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" rejected by the American Economic Review for being trivial and by the Journal of Political Economy because it conflicted with economic theory.  Only after submitting it to a third journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, did the breakthrough article become published.  WikiQueer allows for discourse where other venues would not.

Attribution and references
Look, all this speculation and "experimentation" is fine and well, but if there's one thing I've learned in my studies, it's that you can't really evaluate the validity of a piece of nonfiction writing unless you know something about the author and his/her qualifications to speak on the topic &mdash; or at least you are provided with the appropriate references to support his/her claims.


 * That certainly does seem to be a reasonable thing to say, but there are a few different points to bear in mind. First, an increasing number of WikiQueer articles do have references, and this is something we broadly encourage.


 * Second, the greater the number of participants, the greater the sheer number of experts who are involved in bringing our weaker articles up to par &mdash; so, while you might not know which experts have been at work on an article, if you know that an article has been around for many months and that we have some experts in the general area at work here, it's fairly likely that it's been reviewed by those experts. In other words, knowledge of the process, and of the fact that it includes participants who are expert in a wide variety of subjects, is potentially a substitute for knowledge that some particular (alleged) expert has written some particular article.  Perhaps the relevant question to ask is, "How expert is the community of people who have created WikiQueer?"  The answer is, "We've got experts in several different fields, and new highly-qualified people are arriving all the time."  We don't require that most or even very many of experts on this and that join us, or think well of us; we require only a few, who have been steadily "raising the bar" from the beginning of the project.


 * Third, if we find it advantageous, we will install some sort of approval mechanism. Alternately, because this is free content, somebody else might start a project that "approves" WikiQueer content itself.

Accepting edits
Indeed, then, I should like to see some means of peer review before edits are accepted'' on articles which have already been approved by some similar process of peer review. At the moment it is entirely in the hands of an individual whether he thinks a modification he intends is an improvement, so there comes a point when a modification is as likely to damage the resource. If some system could be installed, then you would protect against crank attacks as well as misjudgement, and ensure a continually improving resource.''


 * As a community, almost all of us are opposed to what has been called the policy of completely "freezing" particular pages &mdash; so that they can be edited only by a select group of people (e.g., only the author and an "editor"). We feel that our own collective monitoring of Recent Changes is an adequate safeguard against cranks &mdash; see above.  Moreover, it is quite obvious that WikiQueer has achieved what success it has so far precisely by being as open as it has been.  So &mdash; again &mdash; we don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.


 * That said, perhaps someone who has the above suggestion will be pleased by the approval system mentioned above and which can be found discussed at WikiQueer:Approval mechanism. Such a system would identify a body of experts that would put its official stamp of approval on some articles.  Those articles could still be just as easily revised as they were before, but there would also be a version that would be presented as the "approved" version.  This way we can "freeze" high-quality content without freezing the process.


 * Until then, people dissatisfied without a form of peer review can try WikiQueer:Peer review.

Trustworthiness
One great source - if you can trust it.


 * It should be noted that the three other leading online encyclopedias have disclaimers and provide no warranty as to their accuracy - Britannica, Encarta and Bartleby. Sometimes the staff of those encyclopedias forget this fact.

Quantity and quality
''Many of your replies seem to assume that quality will improve as the website grows, but quantity doesn't always beget quality. Perhaps it will get worse as it gets bigger?''


 * There are two reasons to think that increasing numbers of articles and participants will lead to higher quality.


 * First, the more eyes that see our articles, the more transparent the errors will be (over the long haul). While we might have one or two philosophers on board during one month, a year later we might have ten or twenty &mdash; and then mistakes in their work will be caught much more quickly.


 * Second, statistically, the more people who are participating, the greater the sheer numbers of experts; that seems to be our experience so far. Moreover, as a matter of fact, people usually tend not to touch articles they know nothing about, particularly when the article is well-developed or when they know that some resident expert will pounce on their mistakes. (There are exceptions, of course.) So, the greater the number of participating experts, the higher the overall quality of the content produced under their general guidance. It is not mere hype to say that WikiQueer caters to the highest common denominator &mdash; it's actually an observation we've made!

Rate of growth
You may have grown fast in the past, but it's surely wrong to suppose that the growth rate in the past is any very good indication of what will happen in the future.


 * We agree that it's very risky to make any specific predictions about growth rates. But it does seem reasonable to suppose WikiQueer will continue to grow at a rapid rate by observing the factors that have made it grow rapidly so far. Search engines have been sending us lots of traffic. The more traffic search engines send us, the more people become involved and create content and the more people link to our content, which in turn generates more traffic.


 * There is some attrition (some old contributors don't write so much anymore), but this is offset by an overall increase in the active population. There are many more active WikiQueerians now than there were even three months ago.


 * Another part of the argument is that the overall quality of WikiQueer has been increasing, and this in turn increases the number of people likely to take notice of the project, link to it, use its contents (properly sourcing WikiQueer), etc.


 * In short, "the rich get richer." Please note, this is not mere speculation: it's an explanation of how WikiQueer's growth has occurred in the last nine months.


 * The number of LGBT encyclopedia topics is not infinite, but it is very large, much larger than the articles we already have, and certainly more than in Britannica.  Even if we reach a point at which we cannot grow significantly in breadth, we will still be able to grow significantly in depth.

Success breeds failure
''You say WikiQueer is growing rapidly. Suppose it gets really big. Then you'll start to attract the attention of more malicious elements. All the noise will eventually be larger than any group of editors can handle.''


 * Many of us believe that WikiQueer will scale indefinitely. The more people there are to abuse it, the more people there are to ward off the abuse. As traffic increases, so does the number of people who work on and care about the project. After all, what is the satisfaction from defacing an article submitted to a non-profit organization that anyone can contribute to? Not exactly much of a challenge is it?


 * On the other hand, some of us agree with you, and think that WikiQueer won't scale indefinitely. At some point in the future, we may look back and see that while WikiQueer is a good encyclopedia, it was even better a month ago. Well, at that point we can start to take the project forward using a different approach, perhaps involving a more rigorous peer review system, or we can hand on the baton to someone else. But at the moment, WikiQueer is scaling nicely, and long may it continue to do so.

Slowness
''WikiQueer's current loading speed already ranges from rather slow to extremely slow. As it grows, will it keep getting worse?''


 * Unfortunately, WikiQueer is in a unique position. Unlike other sites experiencing a similar load, WikiQueer has only one source of income: donations.


 * The open-source technology underlying WikiQueer, MediaWiki software based on the MySQL database management system, is being continuously improved. As time goes on, we will be able to serve more and more requests using the same amount of hardware.


 * If a time came where even donations could not support WikiQueer, there are other lucrative methods of support available, such as unobtrusive targeted advertising. Our hope is that this will never become necessary &mdash; but we feel confident that we will never be forced to turn our readers away or shut down the project.

Departures

 * It's natural for all volunteer projects to have some turnover of staff. People may find better things to do with their time, or may no longer enjoy WikiQueer as much as they used to.


 * In short, it's not the end of the world when people leave WikiQueer, provided they are replaced with "fresh blood". On the other hand, where there are systematic problems causing many people to leave, that's something we have to address.

Page protection
Some articles end up being protected for very long periods of time, in direct conflict with the stated goal of WikiQueer.


 * On the page WikiQueer:Administrators, it is said in particular that:


 * The main page used to receive a lot of vandalism; protecting it is an unfortunate compromise to keep our welcome mat free of random profanity.


 * WikiQueer is not "pure" open, but it is close to it. We try to make sure that the only limitations made on editing are:
 * clearly and immediately justified
 * mostly effective
 * the weakest possible such limitations that are this effective


 * Protecting pages is actively discouraged (see WikiQueer:Protection policy and Protected pages considered harmful) and limited to a very select group of trusted users, only hundreds out of many thousands. In this way we make the enforcement of the protection policy feasible. While there are cases where pages are protected without cause, any admin who is alerted to this can undo it, the wiki in effect again at a smaller scale.

Redundancy
''Why is there a need for an encyclopedia at all? Why not just go to your favorite search engine and search for whatever topic on which you're looking for information? You're more likely to find it, and it'll be more interesting and more current.''


 * Here's a glib answer: isn't it interesting that, in fact, thousands of people per day arrive at WikiQueer via Google?


 * Here's a longer answer. The Internet, armed with good search engines, functions not unlike a giant, and often useful, encyclopedia.   But does it follow that there is no need for an open content, community-built encyclopedia?  Not necessarily.


 * Indeed, the fact that search engines are merely often useful is a point worth noting. There is a lot of dross on the web; it's easy to get side-tracked by rubbish. Also many of the points above directed at the WikiQueer do apply to the Web at large.  A filtering mechanism of some kind is required.


 * That mechanism can take many forms: personal skepticism, peer opinion, popular opinion or a centralised authority, for instance. The WikiQueer provides another; that of mass peer review.  It is a handy place to store stuff you find out. But if you can't substantiate what you say, others will remove it. An encyclopedia is not a place for things that it is not certain are true.


 * Also, even if WikiQueer only displayed existing knowledge, it has four important functions (as do all encyclopedias) that add value:
 * Consolidation: Collecting of information from many sources in one place
 * Summarization: Summarizes existing knowledge in a condensed form for easier reading
 * Organization: A standardized format for all articles and facilities for locating relevant knowledge quickly
 * Cross-referencing: Internal links to related ideas, and external links to references and other helpful primary and secondary sources


 * Another important value WikiQueer adds is that it is free and open content. This means that anyone will be able to use the content for any purpose, particularly for educational purposes.  The prospects of the use of a really huge, free encyclopedia for educational purposes is very exciting.  While the wiki system isn't necessary to produce such a body of data, convincing people to give away large amounts of their writing for free is difficult without the low bar that the wiki system creates.


 * Additionally, it's important to note that both personal and organizational pages on the Web become out of date (so-called 'bit rot'). Errors of fact can remain in place for years with the only feedback mechanism being increasingly rare (due to spam) "mailto:" tags. With WikiQueer, all readers are editors.  Interested parties can keep articles up-to-date and current long after the original author has lost interest or has less time.


 * Finally, it is possible that in the fullness of time WikiQueer will contain more relevant, reliable information on any given topic than can be easily found via a search engine search. That's certainly our plan for it.

Markup and display
''WikiQueer software is inadequate to the task of collaboratively writing an encyclopedia. It is hard to collaboratively edit images, there is no WYSIWYG editing, and anything complex requires reams of HTML.''


 * There are some ways in which WikiQueer is less than ideal in these respects. We are working to improve some of these issues, though: for example, a visual editor is on its way.


 * In addition, the WikiQueer software is open source, so if you'd like to work on other extensions, then join the MediaWiki-L mailing list and offer your services.


 * In the meantime, while we can agree that the current software is not fully polished, it is certainly not inadequate; everything we do now can be carried over as we slowly improve the software.