Shocker. Wikipedia editors are anal-retentive control freaks.
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If it doesn’t carry oxygen, what’s it for?
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This would suggest that the two kinds of people are mutually exclusive. I don’t think that is the case in most situations, and it suggests that the institution of public education is torn down by unions protecting bad teachers, as opposed to chronic underfunding, political interference and racism to name a few other problems. The example suggests that sacrifice is more important than creating an environment that is fair to teachers. Could it be that many good teachers leave teaching because they are worked to the bone and tired of being strung up as the bad guys?
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I restored the earlier version of the article (before the two anonymous edits). It’s the first admin task I’ve performed in a minute; my activity there has dropped considerably over the past year or two…
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Certainly, you can. The trick is that “authority” has become a loaded term to many, its roots are that in an illiterate culture, literate people have a hierarchical position of control over others. If they can read and write, they codify the laws and thus the society itself. So it comes down to whether you think of writing and authority as still being imbued with this connotation of hierarchy, or if it has caught up with the egalitarian nature of contemporary literacy.
How I would balance it is that control is absolute, but only over what one writes themselves, with no provisions for “control over others”. This could maybe work as having a wiki page read as a tree showing every edit ever made.
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That’s also a pretty good description of what’s happened to the American political system!
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I wrote dozens of articles, mostly San Francisco and California history, starting back in 2005, and most have stood the test of time though I’ve been busted for cut-and-paste copyright issues, but recently someone tried to speedy delete my California Green Party Archives page. My collection is now housed at Stanford’s Hoover Institution which has the largest political archives in the West, but that fact apparently wasn’t enough for the deletionist. I did get two or three friends to argue against deletion and the tag seems to have been removed.
All the fun has gone out of it…
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I used to be a local government bureaucrat and have recently finished a PhD in public administration. And I’ve been (very lightly) editing Wikipedia for a good number of years. So I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about this. It’s pretty clear that the existing setup has been suboptimised and there is a pretty good chance that if you got to redesign from scratch you’d choose to end up somewhere else.
But… fixing organisations is a really hard problem. Culture is a powerful thing, and most organisations are in some form of equilibrium. If you think there’s a better place to be, you have to “unstick” the existing organisational culture, influence in the direction you want it to go, then get that new culture to embed itself again. This is really difficult without substantial power in the culture, and those with such power are normally those who have achieved power under the system as it is (so both are more likely to like the existing way of operating and have a vested interest in its continuance). [Edit: and managing volunteers is famously particularly hard, as they tend to be emotionally invested and you have no employment control over them]
Let’s say that you are absolutely certain that Wikipedia would be better if it had fewer !voting opportunities and less article deletion. And let’s assume that you’re actually right - it turns out that this would ‘fix’ the project to the benefit of knowledge seekers everywhere. You still have to persuade the existing stakeholders in the system to make the changes (or at least not to be deliberately obstructive to them). What do they have to gain from that? They probably strongly believe you’re mistaken in your diagnoses, that the resulting project would be overrun with spam and trollies, and (reasonably) that their favourite leisure-time activity of improving an encyclopaedia by arguing about policy will be taken away from them. Why on earth would they support you?
So there are ways it could be done. The Wikimedia Foundation has positional power as a result of owning the servers and having ultimate control over the content, and could try to force such a change at the expense of alienating their active userbase. This would likely trigger a rearguard action by the existing nomenklatura to maintain the status quo (or possibly a fork) which would be very hard to manage and disruptive, but it could be done. Or you could try solving the collective action problem of getting all those who believe the project is on the wrong track to either (1) re-engage en mass or (2) fork with greater activity and promise than the existing project so that it collects the momentum and the survivor is the fork rather than Wikipedia. That’s mindblowingly hard. There may be other options, but they aren’t obvious.
Basically, path dependency is a thing. Wikipedia has made some choices around policy and culture which have led to where it is now, and those choices constrain the possibilities for the future.
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To be honest, it seems like you don’t even know what Wikipedia is. I know you say that you work for the Wikimedia Foundation, but how can you seriously suggest that someone could work within Wikipedia’s truly god awful, idiotic system to effect change? That is a baffling suggestion. It needs to be blown up and rules need to be enforced from the top down by competent professionals, not mob rule.
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Except Pournelle is one of those libertarian types who wrote long essays on how entire departments of the US government should be shut down. And well, that choice of example is pretty interesting.
I do not, actually, think too much bureaucracy is the issue here. If only wikipedia admins considered the wellbeing of wikipedia as an organisation in its actions! If only wikipedia admins would fight to retain good editors, let alone incompetent ones.
What is plaguing Wikipedia and government are not people who care too much about the organisation, but people who don’t care. People who hold above all an arrogant desire for power, convenience, or status, or apply ignorantly dumb principles like deregulation or deletionism.
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Thank you for the thoughtful reply, it was insightful.
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I didn’t suggest we should work in the system ‘as is’ and be OK with that. Apologies if that came across in my reply. I genuinely would like to hear your thoughts on how else to do it. Blowing something up, with out a plan, isn’t much of a strong argument to suggest it as a path forward. You said, “created by people who have no business doing so” so what would your suggestion look like? What group of people would be running it?
I’d like to point out your fallacy in claiming that my employ at the foundation some how requires me to be expertly knowledgeable in every area of the Wikimedia movement. If someone worked at Boeing, I wouldn’t expect them to know how to build an airplane. 
I’m knowledgable, and continue to learn and improve. I hope you do the same and please consider this reply in good faith.
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This is a key problem. One faction thinks a stub is better than no article, and the other thinks no article is better than a stub. The latter is winning, for sure.
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You asked this question once before as if it requires an answer. If I said, “This film should be directed by a professional,” no one would question what that entails.
Yes, I’ve often thought that a free-for-all fork similar to the early days pitted against the entrenched version might lead to an interesting competition. However, most free-for-all users were driven from the project long ago and probably have no enthusiasm to try it again. Explorers usually get displaced by settlers.
I believe that only when a viable competitor emerges will Wikipedia be forced to change, in the same way Britannica was forced by Wikipedia.
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If I remember correctly, stub articles use to be widely accepted (and common!) in the early days. I wonder if as time progressed and Wikipedia became more popular if there wasn’t some pressure (unconscious or not) to remove cruft; and stub articles were seen as such. Or that there were just more folks with a critical eye.
Looking at Category:All stub articles there’s still 2,025,510 stubs out of 5,323,000 articles! That was surprising.
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Well put. As someone with several thousand edits who can hardly stand even correcting typos anymore, I can say you really hit the nail on the head. As the article:editor ratio grew, apparently mainly people with bureaucratic tendencies chose to remain.
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Well, I am trying to have a civil discourse with another human over the internet. It’s hard to convey my intent, but I am genuinely curious to your opinion on how to solve the issue you brought up in your original post.
random users should not be given the power to create rules and vote on how to implement and enforce them.
I’m trying to approach that as a valid criticism and am politely asking you to help me understand who then, in your opinion, should be making the rules, who should vote on the approval of said rules, and who should implement and enforce them?
What would that look like? Would Wikipedia (the movement of volunteers) have some sort of vetting process in which individuals would apply to be on a governing board? Would it be a public voting process? Would it require credentials from specific academic backgrounds or organizations? Could people serving in these functionary positions be editors? Would they have to be?
I’m not asking for an essay here, but giving me the gist of how you think this problem could be addressed would be helpful in understanding your argument. I am trying to take it seriously and appreciate your involvement in the discussion. You’re obviously not obligated to respond in kind, but it would be appreciated.
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If you want something different from Wikipedia, blowing up Wikipedia seems unnecessary. Just go buy a set of Britannica, which is what you are asking for.
The point of Wikipedia was to be different from the 19th century projects that inspired it, in exactly this way; to combine Ward Cunningham’s ideas about user interface with global accessibility and rely on Aristotelian “wisdom of the crowd”.
[quote=“boingboing, post:1, topic:95045”]
Wikipedia went from people writing an encyclopedia to people writing rules about writing an encyclopedia, or writing bots to defend an encyclopedia, but without enough safeguards to save content from deletionists.[/quote]
Article deletion obviates the point of Wikipedia. If article histories exist, information converges on accuracy; deletion removes the history and degrades the entire project, self-evidently.
My experience, also.
And my reaction, too.
I still occasionally add things to Wikipedia, but only on a quid-pro-quo basis. Somebody helps me accomplish some worthy task, I agree to hack the Wikipedia culture and get a useful article put in for them. It can take weeks, though, to bend the editors to my will through obsequious flattery (the fastest, most reliable method) so I rarely do it.
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As if professing to do a thing is more meaningful than what one actually does! This is how we get such entrenched norms, expectations, and practices in the first place. If people prefer to go that route, they are better off not using a wiki format. Otherwise it becomes hardly any better than YouTube’s business model of profiting from the rigid control of user-generated content.
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