So how do you get people to stop peopling?
How do you get the function of WP without the petty politics inherent in any group of people? I see brigading on here FFS, and this is a tiny community. How do you fix?
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Hmm. I left the sex of my Wikipedia identity undefined. When I have guessed the sex of an editor, I’m frequently wrong. As for race, I wouldn’t have a clue.
I can see it happening for some subject matter, but I don’t understand how all claimed user sexism/racism is even possible.
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I think creating some various sets of admins exclusive to certain topics would be a good start. I don’t know anything about some things and shouldn’t be patrolling them against people who do. Right now it’s a game of oneupsmanship.
Next I’d look at setting up clear rules per each group of topics. It would probably look like some of the better modded communities of Reddit.
I would also create a “try to fix it before deleting it mentality” and to set up groups for helping get articles up to speed. Some are obviously not worthy but no one can tell me Hitomi Tanaka shouldn’t be on the porn section of Wikipedia, while the various people there think she doesn’t belong.
A lot of this is already in place, it’s just not being used because it’s fun to stroke your ego and get stuff deleted.
Those would be starters.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I teach a course at the university level about research and writing using technology. One of my primary goals for the course is for students to become more literate about Wikipedia–many of them have never looked at the history or talk pages on a Wikipedia article. One assignment tasks them with improving a stub.
Over the last five years, more and more of my students have had their work summarily deleted by overzealous editors–worse, they treat their (often imperfect) edits as some sort of vandalism or attack, rather than valuable contributions that can be improved in various ways.
The effect is to undermine the spirit of small-d democratic participation that makes Wikipedia possible. I mean, some of these entrenched Wikipedia editors have been intensely policing the site for 10, 15 years–who’s ever going to want to do this when these crusty old dudes aren’t?
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Hay, some of us are white male dad-jokers with a cod damn penchant for fish puns.
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Here’s the post in question, BTW:
I did, in fact, conflate the two threads; I hadn’t realised they were separate. Given the highly similar tone and content, I don’t see that as a major issue, though.
You may note that I didn’t say that people shouldn’t try to fix Wiki. What I did say is that minorities and women are not responsible for fixing the well-documented flaws of Wikipedia. For reasons similar to those described here:
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Well, the way it originally functioned - back when so much great content was so quickly created - was that a contribution (typically a “stub”) was made by someone like me, and instead of haughtily deleting it, other people kindly improved it.
It used to be a collaboratively built encyclopedia, founded on the idea of human kindness; I freely gave of my resources with no thought of reward. Now the editors collaborate to impede the growth and improvement of the shared whole, supposedly in the name of quality, but really in service of human spite and hunger for authority.
And that’s why people are upset, and abandoning the project. When the Cabal got miffed by High School teachers branding Wikipedia as “not authoritative” and so-called “original research” became heretical, the kindness that wikipedia was founded on was the first casualty.
In other words, don’t delete, improve or get out of the way.
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Exactly. If an article gets up that has issues the first thing anyone should do is say “How can I help YOU make this better?”. Instead of “How can I help MYSELF by using my authority to get this deleted?”.
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how do you know that the editors in question aren’t already people with degrees in librarianship?
you really think it’s an ego thing?
Do you understand what “projection” means?
so you’re setting the rules. Which ones are “obviously” not worthy?
What if someone disagrees with you?
are you going to manage the whole thing?
If I wanted to destroy Wikipedia, I’d have a team of bots out reversing the edits of new editors.
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Here is my recent issue. So, I did some cut and paste editing and though I’ve started and worked on nearly 180 articles, and edited many more, I am under investigation for copyright infringement. I ADMIT IT, I cut and pasted a few things, like a friends obit from the local papers and some other stuff, and this is what I get;
And on the internet, I always use my real name. (except F@#book)
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That actually seems like it would intensify the problem, not rectify it. If you have the same five people on a topic they will rapidly become a group with all the standard biases.
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If I recall that was the issue with the local bands stuff for me ages ago. I referenced some zines so not online means not valid somehow.
Different cultures sure do have different standards about what gets put in for sure. Lots of Japanese people will look first at the localized version and then also check the English or other language one as well.
A while back I was wondering who were the translators for William Gibson’s books, went to the Japanese entry and found out that they are all dead. Translating Gibson into Japanese will kill you!!!
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What do you mean about them wasting the women’s time? What did they do?
I like Internet Movie Database better for that
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I too had a similar experience. My conclusion was that my efforts are better spent elsewhere.
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Thanks. Excellent explanation. And I think that’s eminently sensible for Wikipedia. FWIW, I’ve asked Jimmy Wales what he thinks about all this, at the risk of him thinking I’m a nob of course. Let’s see if he replies.
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