CIO magazine has a long article by K. G. Schneider, writer of the Free Range Librarian blog, about Wikipedia’s difficulties as it “emerges from its charmed childhood to struggle with its awkward adolescence.” She describes some of the symptoms of the encyclopedia’s in-bred bureaucracy, such as the proliferation of private and exclusive jargon:
As Wikipedia ages, its editors increasingly write in a bureaucratic patois thick with internal jargon and acronyms, making it difficult to decipher the rationale for their decisions. The webpage discussing the suitability of Salon as a source for Wikipedia articles tosses around terms such as BLP (Biographies of Living Persons), WP:RS (Wikipedia: Reliable Sources), WP:AGF (Wikipedia: Assume Good Faith), or WP:RfAr — the ominous-sounding “Wikipedia: Requests for Arbitration,” also described as “the last step of dispute resolution on Wikipedia.” WP:RfAr turns out to be a misnomer, because articles can go on probation. When this happens, Wikipedia cautions that “[Editors] of such articles should be ESPECIALLY mindful of content policies, such as WP:NPOV, etc. and interaction policies, like WP:CIVIL and WP:NPA” (respectively, Neutral Point of View, Civility, and [Personal] Attacks).
Schneider notes that, in contrast to Wikipedia’s public image as a radically egalitarian undertaking, “edits made by those outside the informal circle of leadership may not stick very long. The quieter rumblings about Wikipedia have less to do with vanity edits or poor maintenance of content than they do with the organization’s increasingly arbitrary editorial overrides and deletions and rapidly thickening in-group culture.”
Wikipedia culture has been thickening fast since it’s creation: it should be as penetrable as a stone now, and soft like raw marble. Is it so hard to contribute? So many the claims were just over-exagerated.
hmm, any thicker than the academic culture that pervades the current paper bound encyclopedias ?
There are a few changes likely coming with the help of Luca de Alfaro. While the Foundation has stressed that no irrevocable decisions have been made yet, a certain co-founder of Wikipedia found Prof. de Alfaro’s ideas to be the most exciting idea presented at Wikimania 2007. I support Dr. de Alfaro’s work, but it means that we will have a simple number attached to our account. Well… in so many other technical forums, accounts accumulate points of some kind for providing answers to questions posed. But any 13-year-old administrator from Andorra who feels like it will be able to revert your work because of a low score on your account (all to “protect” the encyclopedia, naturally) and block you if your resist. And you, Prof. Carr, will have to sit that and not let it bother you. What can you expect for free and when you or other agree to work for free and give up your rights to the results of your work? A real outsider gets is right when Kyle Gann wrote
Sand Castles of Knowledge The inclusionist agrees to go to the beach, build the castle and wait for the bully to come along and kick it over, mumbling some acronyms and mumbo-jumbo along the way.
If you want to complain about deletionist activity, I would advise against picking articles about animated cartoon characters. I mean, really, Monty is still right there, if you enjoy reading the three short sentences that he ever got in Monty’s old article. I think that he should have been merged rather than just whacked. He now gets a mention in the the Jetsons article. You should pick important events like case law, crime, science and government. The ego-obsessed teenaged deletionists don’t yet know to care about that boring stuff.
Jimmy still does the occasional
courtesy blanking which maybe should be done in some cases, but certainly not by him because it sets such a bad example for his teen-aged and 20-something admins.
In any real dialog about quality, I usually just point people to
the list of those who hae ever written an FA article. My experience is that they are primarily inclusionists. As has been said, being a deletionist is easy: it does not require much brains or effort. Of course, Wikipedia insiders are encouraged to
defend each other agianst outsiders using every imaginable piece of jaron short of just coming out and calling outsiders “evil”. It is a seige mentality. When Wales starts a stub, he does get some flak from a few knee-jerk deletionists but, ultimately, he gets red-carpet collaborative support for his Mzoli’s article Jimmy started this on 17 September 2007 and now it is already filled-out and protected.
Possibly notable people can still attempt to do autobiographies of themselves. Or your can start them about notable people you like or even know. But you have to follow an undocumented and rigid format. Here was a bio doomed for AfD: The old John Culkin article and then somebody came in got it to conform. The current Culkin article conforms to the undocumented format and the Culkin AfD has turned around.
That undocumented format for these short but important biographies includes:
In my opinion, the real sin that the deletionists commit is that they are not helpful. They simply tag your article with a template like db-reason (speedy delete) or a prod (medium-speed delete) or an AfD (delete by slow torture). They do not help you. I have to wonder if their motivation is an ingrained need to, as often as possible, tell somebody else that they are wrong. We all know such people (including legitimate authority figures) and we are sickened by their success. They are just being lazy and selfish.
I love radical, unique and maybe misfit lives that represent a struggle for freedom. Here is a biography I worked on to save: Nikki Craft You would have a harder time adding that article now. The information she maintains about her accomplishments even on her own web site is still scattered and is heavily diluted by her social/political “message”.
I have worked on some other biographies and one thing I have found that among second-tier notable people, the network of friends has, maybe, four degrees of separation, not six like in the general public.
When trying to save the Culkin article, I also advocated that they should deliberately skew their biographies away from porno actors and towards academia even though I realize that porno actors (or celebs or wrestlers or cartoon characters) might provide a higher short-term entertainment value. In my opinion, it is a matter of pedagogy: the academic is going to lead one to the library while the entertainers are going to lead one to the saloon (In Jimmy’s terminoloy, that would be “encyclopedia” and the “community”, respectively). Here is the education code that the Foundation falls under. I assume that these teenagers realize that “adult eduation” is not like “adult film” and that “education” does not just mean “sex education”. Who knows? Perhaps their idea of reading the traditional newspaper is scanning the comics and the TV/movie listings and then plopping down in front of the glass teat or playing a ideo game or playing “deletionist” at Wikipedia until bedtime.
I sometimes challenge editors to think about Wikipedia not as a online encyclopedia but as a communications network where the goal is not education but entertainment. Sometimes it shocks people into being more helpful, but more often it just insults them because they have such a high opinion of themselves. It is their ego that causes them to be untrusting and unhelpful. It is often their ego that drives them to be an admin. It is ultimately their ego that causes them to join and further polarize the clique. Well, that and the fact that they have accepted Jimbo Wales as their personal savior. As the Court Chamberlain said to Mozart in film Amadeus: “A little humility, Mozart, might suit you well”. Jimmy Wales and the Wikipedia community, some of whom are now are finding full-time paid employment via Wikia and the Foundation(s), could do with a little more genuine humility, inclusivity and, when practicable, genuine and non-condescending helpfulness to newcomers. Sadly, too many of the insiders want the authority relationship with newcomers akin to a secondary school and to be strictly a teacher/student one where sending the student off to the principal is an ever-ready option.
An important component of the psychological poison that Jimmy Wales imbues the project with is the false reward of seniority and privilege. One must never forget that Jimmy Wales is, in his heart and in manner that he will always be primarily, a money changer. Compare his life-choices and academic talents to those of someone such as Florence Devouard, who is a working scientist and obviously cares much more about sharing knowledge rather than holding childishly holding grudges. The Essjay incident was a wonderful probe into these peoples minds. Jimmy, after showing the World that his respect for the Truth and for Stacy Schiff’s love of the Truth was zero, takes the thug approach: “contributors to the site who claim certain credentials will soon have to prove they really have them.” Florence just wants that authentically better-than-Britannica encyclopedia and evaluates edits not by author but by content: “I think what matters is the quality of the content…”.
Florence knows that a fair approach to to the wikiclique and to the sclerotic effect that seniority has brought upon the project is to set account quotas. Naturally, the account User:Jimbo_Wales would be forever disabled. Anyone who has “had their turn” at Wikipedia (which is not so much an online encyclopedia as it is real-world communications network not unlike HBO and other “media” corporations – that is why it is called “WikiMedia”, don’t you know). Such quota-exceeding users have advanced their personal agenda amply and should simply forever lose their current account. They can always go and get another, start at zero, re-demonstrate that they care about both the encyclopedia (and the politics, if they wish), and, just like after a vacation, get a fresh and more loving start in their volunteer efforts. You might think of it as “term limits” for insider Wikipedians. Most people think that term limits keep project and government good-smelling and authentically fresh. This approach would soon cure many of those insider users who claim they are suffering from what they call “editcountitis”. Some quotes might be:
Imposing quotas by policy as such would clear out the web of cliques and insiders that the venomous spider Jimmy Wales arrays around himself. Sooner or later, you would, of course, have to pluck the spider out of his web (which, admittedly he himself built but I do not any know of anybody who authentically feels sorry for Jimmy Wales these days). Ideally, it would be the initial event, but one should remain flexible and careful. After all, that web (the project, which we want preserved) is easily damaged if one is too clumsy or hasty while cleaning out the gunk.
In case any of your readers fail to recognize the power of Wikipedia’s influence, they should read Fred Stutzman’s and the scholar Andrea Forte’s opinions: The New Influencers. Quote: One of these editors, Wasted_Time_R, stood out as the top editor on both the Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rudy Giuliani Wikipedia entries. With over 200 edits in the interval I sampled, Wasted_Time_R has had a profound impact on shaping the identity of these two presidential candidates. The article provides Wasted_Time_R’s real name and it is easy to confirm the he has a presence on the internet in the form of journal publications and technical forum posts. One can easily determine his current employer from this information. Any curious child in middle school should be able to figure such out in five minutes or less.
Over at Wikipedia, the wikiclique exercises such complete and intrusive control (in the style of Cold War Eastern Europe) that suggesting such a thing would earn you a block because they are accustomed to dispensing permission as to what can be thought and
what cannot be thought within the neural network of the project. They do not want to acknowledge the extent of the influence they peddle. They are high-minded, hard-working and well-educated, much like Robespierre. Public safety (the safety of their entrenchment within the clique) is their number-one concern. But when they are shown to be nothing more than the Wizard of Oz, the man behind curtain, a new kind of Nixon with a new kind of enemies list, then they fall silent because the blood of Danton chokes them.
Florence would have to, of course, impose terms-limits on herself, but she rarely edits anymore at Wikipedia so losing User:Anthere should mean little to her and she is still a relatively new Chairwoman of the Board (she prefers the gender-specific term). (OMG! I revealed who Anthere is!) The only question is: does she have the gravitas to clean out the gunky wikiclique in a fair manner and thus restore an authentic spirit of egalitarianism within the project and live by her own country’s admirable goals of Liberté, égalité, fraternité?
One other somewhat obvious comment. Those authorized as developers at Wikipedia (except for Jimmy, of course) need have no term-limits imposed. Developers at Wikipedia, just like the network of developers that Linux Torvalds surrounded himself with when he changed our world for the better, are not like a dime-a-dozen pundits, policy wonks and petty tyrants. Their time is worth money. This notion is validated by the success or failure of their real-world careers. It is not very difficult to demonstrate to oneself that, despite their elevated access, developers are a miniscule component of the wikiclique because they rarely involve themselves in the politics, rarely perform administrator actions against others and, for that matter, they rarely edit Wikipedia content because they are busy coding.
Here is another important development: Wikipedians are not part of the “outside” real world despite the advancement of their personal agendas realized via their powerful and influential communications network. In other words, they remain unaccountable for their the highly-leveraged influence they wield via their edits. That influence is especially among that ever-important demographic: affluent 18-34 year olds. Of course, the discussion does not deal with the reality of Wikipedians who are also notable as demonstrated by this list. Why? Because that would require policy that displayed some non-zero level of logical rigour and honesty in the sense understood by academia and those typically entrusted with educational tasks at the level of higher learning. Whenever I try to read Wikipedia policy, I am offended by the constant insinuation that the target the policy is an emotional and irrational entity and the enforcer the policy (the wiki-clique) is a serene, enlightened and caring custodian of the target. All too often, Wikipedia policy, which the wiki-clique hides behind, is about as rigor as the sentiments expressed by this senior jurist of yore about a hard-to-define enforcement matter: “I know it when I see it” Oh! Now I understand exactly where the boundary is, Justic Stewart. How can mankind ever thank you enough for completely and forever resolving the matter in so few words?
SallyF: Don’t monopolize the comments. Nick
Understood.