My experience as a Wikipedian suggests that Wikipedia's administrators need to be much more alert than they have been to the possibility that the Wikipedians motivated by money (or by ideological bias) will stay with the project and persist in making edits contrary to Wikipedia policy. They edit more articles, and edit in greater numbers, than most admins guess or notice. And the point-of-view-pushing editors often inject so much wikidrama into discussions about how to improve articles that they drive away the participation of conscientious editors who know reliable sources about the article topics.
A current example is the article on Rupert Sheldrake,[1] which has recently been subjected to vigorous edit-warring, perhaps as part of a publicity campaign by followers of Sheldrake. (I just saw a new book by Sheldrake at a library yesterday, and perhaps that book's publication set the timing for the editing push.) But there are examples like this all over Wikipedia, and, again, I think most casual users of Wikipedia massively underestimate the percentage of articles that are edited mostly in the interest of pushing a point of view for commercial or ideological reasons.
The article kindly submitted here says, "Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but only a carefully vetted few are promoted to admin status on the site." And that is laughable. Describing the current group of Wikipedia as "a carefully vetted few" does violence to the English language. Nothing has ever been careful about the process for checking the background of administrator candidates or choosing which candidates become administrators. There are some very, very, very good administrators on Wikipedia (just as there are many very helpful everyday volunteer editors), but there are other administrators who are power trips to maintain conduct contrary to Wikipedia policies for building a good, free online encyclopedia. The Vice article submitted here does, at least, link to an Atlantic article[2] reporting that Wikipedia's rate of bringing new administrators on board is slowing. At least some of the administrators have been caught taking payoffs for editing articles to publicize the persons making the payoffs, so it will take more than just the current administrators being more alert to fix this problem on Wikipedia.
- provide content until an admin revert said content without explanation.
- try to engage discussion with said admin and get referred to a wp policy that actually states this admin was wrong.
- point the admin to his error and engage in wikipedia conflict resolution.
- said admin sneakily changes said policy to confirm his views, and unleash a small army of followers to intervene to support him in conflict resolution and revert my edits. get banned
- circumvent ban to protest, get banned for circumventing the ban. repeat until other admins take notices and discuss my case in secret channels.
- find out that this has happened before quite a few times, escalate to head of wikipedia. get dismissed.
- do as others did before, replace a specific high profile page with your story, revert the replace. now your story is there in wikipedia history for future investigators to find.
- never contribute anything to wikipedia ever again, use wikipedia as a better than google search engine for official websites until duckduckgo.
This mirrors my own experience on Wiki, which dragged on for months after admins were caught removing content for internal political purposes and alienating tens of thousands (according to objective metric) who used those pages. Conflict resolution there is centered almost entirely on people-drama and almost never on content or _anything_ of substance which is rather the point of an encyclopedia. This is plainly evident from reading any of their notice/resolution boards which are often little but favor-currying.
Wiki-lawyering (citing policies in purposefully cryptic and usually erroneous ways) is rampant, and all these problems exists because admins aren't appointed due to domain expertise (or any sort of expertise for that matter) but being in the good graces of other admins. This conflicts with most wiki content editors, who are often domain experts rather than bureaucrats/politicians. I ended up being banned for doing a reasonably popular reddit AMA about all this, and apparently violating the rule to never talk about wiki administrating outside of wiki.
In sum, the system only works because talented and intelligent people want to create encyclopedic material, and there generally aren't enough admins to stymy this.
I now run my own niche wiki, and it's shocking the number of people that come across it and say
"Oh man, I tried to contribute to wikipedia and ended up having all my stuff reverted and I got yelled and I kicked out. I'm never touching wikis again."
I personally think Wikipedia is giving open wikis a bad name, and I go out of my way to tell people my wiki is nothing like wikipedia in that regard.
> said admin sneakily changes said policy to confirm his views
How can actions be sneaky when the history tab is just right there. If the policy got changed without discussion, revert it and open up a new subject on the talk page. If no one comments in a few days, then reach out to people through rfc or the village.
This is true for most community projects. Send a push request to the kernel and get denied by a gatekeeper? Talk to the community. Got a policy issue with debian? Talk to the community. Wikipedia is a community project, plain and simple. You got to interact with the community if you want to fix something.
> circumvent ban to protest, get banned for circumventing the ban.
Well yes. you do indeed get banned for circumventing a ban. If I get banned on HN, any circumvention of the ban will result in me get more banned. Same goes for any community, website with logins, and any social groups for that matter.
Wikipedia has a system for lifting bans. If that doesn't work, send a email to the foundation. If that too doesn't work, then ... blog about it. at some point, either the community agree with you or it don't.
> - circumvent ban to protest, get banned for circumventing the ban. repeat until other admins take notices and discuss my case in secret channels.
translation: be a dick
> - find out that this has happened before quite a few times, escalate to head of wikipedia. get dismissed.
be a dick
> - do as others did before, replace a specific high profile page with your story, revert the replace. now your story is there in wikipedia history for future investigators to find.
be a massive dick
> - never contribute anything to wikipedia ever again, use wikipedia as a better than google search engine for official websites until duckduckgo.
If being nice solved the problem, he never would have gotten to that point then, would he? It would've been a polite, "excuse me, I believe this was wrongly reverted and doesn't clash with any WP policy" followed by a polite, "Gee, you're right; sorry about that; I'll fix it."
> I think most casual users of Wikipedia massively underestimate the percentage of articles that are edited mostly in the interest of pushing a point of view for commercial or ideological reasons.
Yup. I read a dicsussion recently around an article about Piers Anthony's obsession with pedophilia in his fiction, and a number of people were surprised none of the controversy around e.g. his scenes with 5 year olds havign sex with adults was mantioned on Wikipedia. It's buried behind a couple of layers of Talk pages of course, likewise the whitewashing of Eric Raymond's.
Wikipedia is easy for obsessive rule-lawyers to show the information they want to show.
Like with any such claims, I opened up a tor-browser and looked if the claim can be supported by sources. Demanding sources, is the one rule that Wikipedia can never drop, in the same way that HN can't drop rules against spam. If HN became a cesspool of spam, HN would die. If Wikipedia dropped the requirement for sources, it would die.
So... its a fair chance to include such statement if someone used those sources to support such edit. Without any sources however, any such edit should not be on wikipedia. If you want to complain about whitewashing, please leave out discussions where a bunch of opinionated people are simply voicing their opinions but can't be bothered to do a simple google search.
Surrounding yourself selectively with intellectuals, is a luxury only super rich can afford(or can they?). I can live with a little bit of bias, PR or bullshit here and there. Of course, I assume, probably incorrectly, that I can tell the difference ;-)
I like Wikipedia 100x better than Hacker News. 50% of the chatter here is robots repeating: logical fallacy, citation needed, not science, anecdote detected!, over and over. Like broken clocks, they may be right sometimes; but that is far from my idea of intellectual. 30% is short comments that don't add much, like this one. (Notably, that's up from 1% about 4 years ago.) I'm only here for the last 20% or so.
Same here. HN still requires some energy on my part to parse the information as there is a significant amount of noise on account of self promotion/PR. On wikipedia my hit rate is almost 100%. I usually get what I want...
There are generally two types of "editors" on wiki. The talent who contribute content, and the bureaucrats who do administration. Some of first type are intellectuals, and most all the latter are anything but.
Much of the internal conflict within wiki exist because the power rests with the bureaucrats but they often lack the domain expertise to appreciate much less write the material people come to the site for. So whenever there's contention over content, it quickly turns into contention over people, and it's not hard to figure out who wins in such a conflict.
Wikipedia should indeed be more alert to paid editing. Its commonly discussed in the village, Jim's talk page and other places (blogs, podcasts and so on). So far no definitive decision has been reached, and for good and bad, paid edits are evaluated on the basis of content rather than the motives behind the edit.
However, the admin process is not exactly an easy one ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RFA_Guide). Added that administrators are viewed under harsher light regarding civility (they can and do get banned for actions that non-admins don't), and the refresh rate of new administrators is indeed slow.
> At least some of the administrators have been caught taking payoffs for editing articles to publicize the persons making the payoffs.
Did those administrators retain their administrator status? If so, then the community is working as intended. Just because HN successfully ban people for spamming on hacker news, it doesn't make HN a failed community. Why would wikipedia have failed because they too managed to ban people acting in contrast to the project?
I'm an admin. My RfA went swimmingly (97 supports, 1 oppose, 3 neutrals). But even though it went well, it was still nerve-wracking. Much more nerve-wracking than any job interview I've ever had. A week-long process where everyone is looking for examples of when you've fucked up and asking questions to try and trip you up.
I can understand why people are reluctant to run for adminship.
I now check for (archived) talk pages and deleted articles on any article I'm looking at seriously. I trust that wikipedia users will raise major issues. I don't trust that the admins do a good job of sorting it out. perhaps they should restructure to make this kind of use easier and more normal rather than claim the (ever changing) main article as definitive
A current example is the article on Rupert Sheldrake,[1] which has recently been subjected to vigorous edit-warring, perhaps as part of a publicity campaign by followers of Sheldrake. (I just saw a new book by Sheldrake at a library yesterday, and perhaps that book's publication set the timing for the editing push.) But there are examples like this all over Wikipedia, and, again, I think most casual users of Wikipedia massively underestimate the percentage of articles that are edited mostly in the interest of pushing a point of view for commercial or ideological reasons.
The article kindly submitted here says, "Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but only a carefully vetted few are promoted to admin status on the site." And that is laughable. Describing the current group of Wikipedia as "a carefully vetted few" does violence to the English language. Nothing has ever been careful about the process for checking the background of administrator candidates or choosing which candidates become administrators. There are some very, very, very good administrators on Wikipedia (just as there are many very helpful everyday volunteer editors), but there are other administrators who are power trips to maintain conduct contrary to Wikipedia policies for building a good, free online encyclopedia. The Vice article submitted here does, at least, link to an Atlantic article[2] reporting that Wikipedia's rate of bringing new administrators on board is slowing. At least some of the administrators have been caught taking payoffs for editing articles to publicize the persons making the payoffs, so it will take more than just the current administrators being more alert to fix this problem on Wikipedia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-char...