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Airplane construction with Wikipedia, lessons from the strategy project, logic over rhetoric

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By Lumos3 and Tilman Bayer

Kenyan man said to have used Wikipedia as principal source to build his own airplane

It was widely reported that a 42-year-old Kenyan man, Gabriel Nderitu, has built a full size aircraft, designed by himself, in his front yard. His claim that his principal source of information was Wikipedia received a lot of media mention - he was quoted as saying "I read up on the mechanics and science of flight on the internet, downloading about 2GB of information. Mostly I used Wikipedia – it gives you all the specs, that's the good thing". Mr Nderitu, an IT engineer, made the plane largely out of old car parts and scrap, including an engine from a Toyota Corolla. While the project has generated a lot of enthusiasm in Kenya, the plane has yet to fly, and the country's Civil Aviation Authority has served Nderitu with a letter ordering him to "refrain from further construction or development". See The Guardian, Time magazine, The Independent.

Foundation's strategic planning process as a model for companies?

An article titled "Can You Open-Source Your Strategy?" that appeared in the October issue of the Harvard Business Review looked back at the Wikimedia Foundation's Strategic Planning process, as a successful "crowdsourcing" experiment that offers "valuable insights for companies looking to revitalize their own strategy formulation processes". It was written by Barry Newstead (who was involved in the process as a consultant from the non-profit Bridgespan Group and is now the Foundation's Chief Global Development Officer) and Laura Lanzerotti. The article presented four lessons learned ("often the hard way"): To present ideas early to the crowd, because "too much polish" leads to simple pro/contra voting instead of insightful feedback; to "share the raw data" because this enables contributors to find new patterns in it; to allow sufficient time for feedback; and to "recognize when a crowd is just a crowd" ("Contributors can help on many strategy issues, but some—such as resource allocation trade-offs—benefit from C-suite engagement").

(See also earlier Signpost coverage: Sister project report: Strategic Planning update and Eugene Eric Kim (User:Eekim)'s guest article The challenges of strategic planning in a volunteer community)

Wikipedia's notability guidelines criticized as one-sided emphasis of logic over rhetoric

Wikipedia's practice of accepting only established knowledge was criticized in a recent editorial in the scholarly journal AI & Society - Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication, published by Springer Verlag (Gill, Karamjit S. (September 2010). "Beyond logic and rhetoric: the argumentative scientist". AI & Society. doi:10.1007/s00146-010-0301-7. ISSN 0951-5666.). It was prompted by the outcome of an AfD debate in February which had led to the deletion of the article "naturoid" about a concept that had been propagated by Massimo Negrotti (a professor at the University of Urbino and occasional contributor to the journal) for about two decades, but was found by the closing administrator to be "a neologism which has not (yet) achieved the notability required for an article" on the grounds that it hadn't received enough coverage outside Negrotti's own writings. AI & Society argued that "the argument that knowledge is accepted only if it is attested is a reductive view, and it seems to invalidate any future work that is theoretical, methodological or philosophical [...] If WP is an international depository of knowledge, then surely we could reasonably expect hospitality to new knowledge and understanding of the diversity of views in order to benefit from them." The editorial went further to frame the deletion as based on an over-emphasis of logic over rhetoric of knowledge:

Briefly

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In this issue
1 November 2010 (all comments)
  • News and notes
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    Mumbai meetup

    An audio recording of Jimmy Wales' talk in Mumbai
    Regards, HaeB (talk) 11:51, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    Another summary of Jimmy Wales' talk, and an interview with him: [1]. Regards, HaeB (talk) 20:23, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    The news...

    Um, this is fantastic. Article about non-notability establishes notability. Next it will be PRODed for a WP:1E violation, then restored after a contentious AfD in which a comment about how the nice lady 'hasn't done anything worthwhile' turns into a BLP libel issue that is covered in national legal media, and then re-un-re-deleted for being a meta-cluster-f@9!, and we all know that cluster-f@9!'s are allowed on WP:META but not on WP:WIKI! Sigh. Ocaasi (talk) 12:11, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    Say again?

    Could someone translate the quotation from the critical editorial into plain English? I consider myself fairly well educated but I have no idea what it's trying to say. Powers T 13:08, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

    I was gonna say the same thing. Apparently it's written in High Academese. --Orange Mike | Talk 13:22, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    It reduces to something very simple: they want to use Wikipedia for original research, rather then a place for the straightforward presentation of established views. I think they understand us correctly; they just hoped for something more to their liking, and it reinforces our standard position about the need for removing promotionalism. DGG ( talk ) 19:37, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    They sort of understand us. They are right to say that WP favors "attested" claims of knowledge. But when they then go on to say that this approach favors "logic" over "rhetoric", they don't understand us well at all. The truth is closer to the opposite. Our notability rules allow articles about completely contradictory beliefs, provided there is sufficient public discussion of them. They seem to think that we have articles on subjects because we favor them and delete articles because we think the claims they document are false or invalid. That might happen sometimes, but it isn't WP policy. --RL0919 (talk) 03:31, 3 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    They get us, they just don't like it. They don't approve of the hierarchy of knowledge in which socially approved views are privileged over new ideas. They are looking only at the margin, however, since it won't be long before any 'new' view worth repeating is repeated. They are making an sociological/epistemological point--that knowledge can't be confined to socially sanctioned memes--but they are ignoring the pragmatic issue; if we don't use a notability/reliability guideline, how do we separate the wheat from the chaff? Sure new ideas can be good, but which? All scholars fancy their ideas wheat. That doesn't help up a) with the scholars who are wrong; and b) with everyone else who's not a scholar but wants to be treated as one. Ocaasi (talk) 08:25, 3 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    the rhetoric of WP "inhospitality" to the diversity of new knowledge is pretty entertaining. is he not notable enough for a bio and passing discussion of the book and idea? (full professor) if he gets a higher h-index, or on google scholar, then we can revisit. Accotink2 talk 16:02, 3 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    "hospitality to new knowledge and understanding of the diversity of views", they should go to wikiversity, they'll get lots of that there. --Enric Naval (talk) 09:48, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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