{"id":2284,"date":"2008-03-21T11:04:09","date_gmt":"2008-03-21T16:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/03\/21\/whats-wrong-with-dave-winer\/"},"modified":"2008-03-21T11:04:09","modified_gmt":"2008-03-21T16:04:09","slug":"whats-wrong-with-dave-winer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/03\/21\/whats-wrong-with-dave-winer\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s wrong with Dave Winer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The inventor of blogging, podcasting, RSS and a bunch of other things has a post up about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scripting.com\/stories\/2008\/03\/20\/whatsWrongWithWikipedia.html\">what&#8217;s wrong with Wikipedia<\/a> &#8212; as he sees it &#8212; and as usual the post says a whole lot more about Dave than it does about Wikipedia. Not that there aren&#8217;t certain things about Wikipedia that could use some work, because there are. Like any social-media effort, it has its flaws. But I think most of what Dave doesn&#8217;t like about Wikipedia has more to do with him than it does with the encyclopedia itself.<\/p>\n<p>The problems seem to revolve around Dave&#8217;s entry &#8212; something he has complained a fair bit about in the past &#8212; and how it doesn&#8217;t give him enough credit for the things he invented (or helped to standardize or popularize, depending on how you look at it). But of course, Dave doesn&#8217;t describe it that way: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scripting.com\/stories\/2008\/03\/20\/whatsWrongWithWikipedia.html\">he describes it as<\/a> &#8220;<em>a vendetta<\/em>.&#8221; That says it all right there. For Dave, there&#8217;s no such thing as a difference of opinion &#8212; there&#8217;s what Dave believes, and then there are the unbelievers who want to destroy what is good and right. He blames the Wikipedia model for:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Usurping authority, and replacing it with anonymity and giving power to those who who tear down creativity, to remove the incentive to share, unless you&#8217;re completely selfless and don&#8217;t mind if others take credit for your accomplishments. That&#8217;s not the nature of creativity, btw, creative people fiercely insist on credit, fight for it.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>See how that works? A different opinion of how RSS developed, or podcasting, or whatever isn&#8217;t a difference of opinion. It&#8217;s &#8220;<em>giving power to those who tear down creativity.<\/em>&#8221; But is Dave right when he says that the nature of creativity is to &#8220;fiercely insist on credit?&#8221; I guess for some people it is. Lots of creative people I know do it because they feel compelled to create, and because they want people to experience something &#8212; not because they want to &#8220;fight for&#8221; credit.<\/p>\n<p>Dave then cites the U.S. constitution for support, arguing that Wikipedia should allow people who don&#8217;t like their profiles to &#8220;confront their accusers.&#8221; As my blogging friend Ian Betteridge notes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scripting.com\/stories\/2008\/03\/20\/whatsWrongWithWikipedia.html#comment-248210\">in the comments<\/a> on Dave&#8217;s post, this pretty much sums up why Dave is wrong about Wikipedia. The whole point of the model is to find the middle ground, the common ground, the mututally agreed-upon version of events &#8212; not for people to pursue vendettas and confront their accusers. On a side note, Frank Shaw of WaggenerEdstrom is <a href=\"http:\/\/glasshouse.waggeneredstrom.com\/blogs\/frankshaw\/archive\/2008\/03\/21\/fixing-wikipedia.aspx\">also wrong<\/a> about Wikipedia.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The inventor of blogging, podcasting, RSS and a bunch of other things has a post up about what&#8217;s wrong with Wikipedia &#8212; as he sees it &#8212; and as usual the post says a whole lot more about Dave than it does about Wikipedia. Not that there aren&#8217;t certain things about Wikipedia that could use &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/03\/21\/whats-wrong-with-dave-winer\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;What&#8217;s wrong with Dave Winer&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}