I fixed the quote, Morganni.
So first, we have go back and define what TV Tropes actually is. And therein lies the problem. I hear phrases passed around on the forums like "It's Fast Eddie's playground, and he lets us play in it." In contrast, other wikis like Wikipedia refer to themselves as a commons, and I tend to think of all large wikis in this way. If you look at it from the former perspective, as only a piece of private property, then what Fast Eddie -- and by extension, the admins and moderators -- say is always appropriate, because Fast Eddie is the Giant in the Playground.
But if the latter is true, then the wiki is a quasi-public space, which retains private ownership -- but due to the contributions of thousands of others is also property of the community. And if it is a public space, then Fast Eddie is only the caretaker of the space. He derives income from being the head caretaker of the public space, which is completely okay, since I would expect the groundskeeper of the Boston Common gets paid too. But any attempt to regulate the messages that appear in a public space is a form of censorship. It's not about loaning the megaphone so much as telling you what kind of messages you can put on a bulletin board.
So there are those of us debating whether it's too much censorship, and the rest don't see it as being related to censorship at all. Looking at it through that lens, a lot of the actions of Fast Eddie and the admin staff make a lot more sense now. You don't have to inform the community of your actions if the wiki is your property, after all. And the P5 wasn't an attempt to make the censorship regime look more legitimate, but just a way to parcel out the work. And a ban for making the mods angry is just fine, even if I was violating no written policy.
However, I feel that this is still wrong, and that the weight of all of the thousands of contributors makes it a digital commons. And that people who wrote all of the trope and work pages submitted their work on the assumption that they were helping to build a public resource. And if they don't believe that they're building a public resource, a fork probably is in order.
-- ∇×V
Morganni Wrote:See, I'm not convinced that declining to loan someone your megaphone is censorship.Thank you so much for posting that. My first thoughts on reading that were "chigau yo!" but I couldn't identify why right away. Which means that I've started my argument on assumptions that we don't have in common, and therefore we'll never agree. Vorticity: Bad philosopher. After a few minutes of thought, I discovered the deeper problem.
So first, we have go back and define what TV Tropes actually is. And therein lies the problem. I hear phrases passed around on the forums like "It's Fast Eddie's playground, and he lets us play in it." In contrast, other wikis like Wikipedia refer to themselves as a commons, and I tend to think of all large wikis in this way. If you look at it from the former perspective, as only a piece of private property, then what Fast Eddie -- and by extension, the admins and moderators -- say is always appropriate, because Fast Eddie is the Giant in the Playground.
But if the latter is true, then the wiki is a quasi-public space, which retains private ownership -- but due to the contributions of thousands of others is also property of the community. And if it is a public space, then Fast Eddie is only the caretaker of the space. He derives income from being the head caretaker of the public space, which is completely okay, since I would expect the groundskeeper of the Boston Common gets paid too. But any attempt to regulate the messages that appear in a public space is a form of censorship. It's not about loaning the megaphone so much as telling you what kind of messages you can put on a bulletin board.
So there are those of us debating whether it's too much censorship, and the rest don't see it as being related to censorship at all. Looking at it through that lens, a lot of the actions of Fast Eddie and the admin staff make a lot more sense now. You don't have to inform the community of your actions if the wiki is your property, after all. And the P5 wasn't an attempt to make the censorship regime look more legitimate, but just a way to parcel out the work. And a ban for making the mods angry is just fine, even if I was violating no written policy.
However, I feel that this is still wrong, and that the weight of all of the thousands of contributors makes it a digital commons. And that people who wrote all of the trope and work pages submitted their work on the assumption that they were helping to build a public resource. And if they don't believe that they're building a public resource, a fork probably is in order.
-- ∇×V