Tldr; it's a combination of wikipedia policies and practical execution; WP:SEALION lays it out in practical terms.
ArbComm and Administrators are by design incapable of blocking users based on disputes over page content. This is fine on paper, but it has resulted in the side effect that if an argument arises, the main thing that Wikipedia ends up policing is less the accuracy of what's being edited (because no authority on Wikipedia may comment on that) but rather the civility of the editors involved.
In practical terms, it's basically impossible to edit or comment on the site without breaking a policy somewhere - Wikipedia's massive list of policies and essays are self-contradicting, meaning that if you complain about a policy violation, a different editor can complain about you breaking another policy.
This means that should a discussion get to the point where administrators (let alone ArbComm) has to be involved, the default outcome is basically that both involved parties will get sanctioned; ArbComm and ANI closure notes have openly stated in the past that they've just given a page/topic ban (or worse) by community consensus to all editors involved because "it might put fresh editors on the page instead".
It's an issue further amplified by the Randy in Boise problem (aka the "fuck experts" policy), where a "sock" user can just behave in extremely polite and civil ways, yet says things that hold absolutely zero ground to the frustration of all involved. All with the goal of eventually escalating it to AN/I or ArbComm so that when their sock gets banned, at least the article is down an expert editor.
Wikipedia largely gets away with this policy on the basis that they'll accrue new editors with time anyway.
> Sometimes that abuse is relatively easy to identify. In 2019, ArbCom disciplined the two editors most involved in this subject area, instituting a topic ban for their “incivility and inflammatory rhetoric.” But what about the more insidious cases when there are no blatant signs of harassment? Wikipedians told me that these “civil” disputes are much more challenging to resolve because of a key jurisdictional issue: ArbCom has authority to decide on user conduct disputes but is not permitted to rule on article content.
Also Wikipedia's toxic culture often refuses to call a spade a spade, and gives some favored problematic editors a long leash to be uncivil, so long as they learn to avoid a few of the most blatant unacceptable behaviors. IMHO, they need to be more consistent and more final with their bans, because a community with a lot of individuals who've been taught how to obscure their misbehavior and/or expertly push it right up to the line is still a shitty community.
> If you see something problematic, why don't you click the edit button and address it? Or if you don't have the necessary know-how, why don't you click the talk tab and bring up the issue there?
In my case, I can't.
I began editing Wikipedia in 2004, and I got banned last year after leaving a message on the talk page of another user telling them not to use aggressive language when interacting with new users. The way oversight on Wikipedia works is that it's incredibly easy for someone to block you if you do something that they read as a slight towards them.
It's something you know all along if you spend any amount of time on Wikipedia. Over the years I was constantly running into people talking about things like overreach and abusive admins, but as an editor, you don't really look into those cases. When you're more interesting in creating content than getting involved, you trust that the admins are doing their jobs properly, and if they ever aren't, then the conflict resolution process will take care of them.
> Wikipedia would benefit from a policy where a sufficient number of individual complaints against a user who has passed some threshold of number of edits to a single article (say 100) would be automatic grounds to block the user from further edits to the article, regardless of fault
So, let's suppose that some particular expert who has a particular level of knowledge or expertise in a given field, and is an established member of the Wikipedia community, accumulates a few hundred edits to some particular page in his area of interest. But this area of interest is politically controversial, and there is a certain narrative about this area of interest that some group of people would like to push, but this expert is too diligent about keeping the relevant Wikipedia pages neutral, well-sourced, and factual. That policy would basically allow large groups of trolls to basically lock that guy, or any other editor who catches onto their monkeyshines, out of certain Wikipedia pages, so that they are free to inject their biases unchecked.
The problem is that not every bad actor is a single person standing behind a single username. Some of them are coordinated groups of anonymous trolls. Giving the trolls an advantage over single people standing behind a single username that they can be held accountable for is a bad, bad move.
If some editor makes 1000 edits to a single page, and they're doing so in bad faith, you have more than enough evidence to prove that. If 100 trolls each make 10 edits to a single page, in bad faith, you can't even prove that they're working together.
> But ideally Wikipedia itself would build some internal mechanism
It has WP:ANI, but it is hard to go against established editors, if they are not writing outright lies or doing harassment. Say, if I want to edit a line from a summary of the Wikipedia page on a person which unfairly represents a person and the established editor thinks it makes sense, then I can't do anything. They are not writing misinformation as they will often have a source for it, but the tone and representation of that on the Wikipedia article can still be unfair.
I would give specific examples here but then I would be accused of trying to influence talk pages with publicity on social media/forums. Moreover, as some of the talk pages have my comments, I don't want my online personas to be linked.
> a user who has passed some threshold of number of edits to a single article (say 100) would be automatic grounds to block the user from further edits to the article
This would not be without precedent. I was an active Wikipedia editor in 2004-2006, and I recall an editor (later admin), who was otherwise a great contributor and a positive force in the project, who had a seemingly unhealthy obsession with singer Ashlee Simpson. After multiple arbitration proceedings, he was restricted from editing her Wikipedia entry under threat of 24-hour bans for each edit.
Here is the notice of the final arbitration ruling [1], mentioning the prolonged history of the case.
To be fair, it was a different time back then. Not sure if a ruling like that could or would be done today.
> Wikipedia would benefit from a policy where a sufficient number of individual complaints against a user who has passed some threshold of number of edits to a single article (say 100) would be automatic grounds to block the user from further edits to the article, regardless of fault
If you haven't yet worked out how that would be abused, think a bit more.
>Wikipedia is notorious for entrenched and highly partisan volunteer edit staff.
That's not really my experience. The main problem is newbies coming in and not understanding MEDRS and other policies.
In fact, there should never be an issue with partisan editors because you can always get outside assistance (from admins, or from other editors outside the page in question).
Anyway, that is a separate issue to the civility of discussion.
> Wikipedia is one of the few very large venues online that I feel really had moderation done right
For years Wikipedia has given a pass to abusive harassing arseholes because those people were also prolific editors.
That puts at risk the main principle of wikipedia - the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, because lots of those anyones are driven away by those toxic but prolific editors.
And wikipedia just isn't very good at acknowledging they're bad at dealing with toxic editors. A bunch of admins will see clear pattern of abuse and will excuse it. "That's not so bad", "it's pretty bad but it's not as bad as it used to be", "no-one has told that person to stop" (despite there being many requests to the person to stop), "it's pretty bad but they're prolific", "I don't think it's bad and so anyone else who think's it's bad should toughen up". (We see most of these in the Fram discussion.)
The worst thing about wikipedia (and we also see this on HN) is the refusal to trust process unless every single intimate detail is litigated in public, and that's something that often cannot happen when you have a person harassing others.
> Trying to edit wikipedia is a hellish experience. The vast majority of articles have one or more de facto owners
I'm so tired of this meme. No one owns an article. [0] You say "de facto", but just because someone disagrees with you on something, it doesn't mean they disagree with every edit or do it only for that article. The vast majority of articles barely have anyone watching them.
> who will do everything they can to preserve control over their turf.
The fact that you describe it as "turf" only further proves that you have this mentality of the article being a battleground.
> They tend to be experts in rules laywering which is how they got their power in the first place.
What power? Even admins on Wikipedia can't overrule consensus and discussion. What's this about rule lawyering too? They just understand the community norms better. I don't walk into a fancy restaurant and complain about "rules lawyering" after I get kicked out for breaking the dress code. Once someone tells you about a rule, you should read up on it, not boisterously claim that you should be above the community rules.
> Just the rules covering acceptable usernames are almost 4000 words long
Seems simple enough to me:
> This page in a nutshell: When choosing an account name, do not choose names which may be offensive, misleading, disruptive, or promotional. In general, one username should represent one person.
Those 4000 words should only matter if you don't find the above to be sufficient explanation.
Not just that, but you will often be summarily blocked from editing by a determined and experienced editor, no matter how good your edit.
Admins now largely make their decisions without much consideration for the issue that is in dispute. It's actually often worse than this: often they claim you are violating even core policies, but they have completely not understood the policy on which they base their claim, and sometimes they even show little evidence they have read the policy at all!
The great irony of all if this is that the policy and guidelines are solid. If they were actually followed then I don't think there would be much of a problem. But if you can be blocked indefinitely for not violating a policy but for being accused of violating a core policy alone, regardless of the basis of the accusation - well, then it's hardly worthwhile making the necessary effort to contribute quality material that conforms to Wikipedia norms and requirements!
> The usual case as near as I can tell is something like:
Based on this I'm not sure you have edited yourself, despite retorting the parent. First off articles don't have guardians; [0] just because someone disagreed with you, it doesn't mean they disagree with everyone or on every article, you're making a huge generalization. Second, I'm not sure why you see talk page discussion as a bad thing; when two parties disagree on something, they usually discuss and try to reach a consensus. [1] Do you believe you're above that or something?
> Someone else tries making a modification, which again is immediately reverted.
This is called edit warring [2] and shouldn't be done. You shouldn't just try to force your revision in after it has been disagreed with.
All you're doing in your comment is painting up some illusory image to discourage someone from trying to engage the system themselves. How about you let them edit and see for themselves if what you said is true? Based on my experience Wikipedia isn't anything like that at all, in fact most articles aren't watched enough for anyone to care how you tweak them.
> It takes hours to create a new article and seconds to delete it.
I think the "seconds to delete it" process you're describing is PROD[1], which is for "non-controversial" deletions and there's no appeals process—it can be added back with no justification at any time if any editor disagrees with the deletion. The full deletion process that takes time to appeal is "Articles for Deletion,"[2] through which articles are deleted only through 7 days of consensus-building. This is the process "Bruce Faulconer" went through.
I know it's confusing, and often really frustrating. I'd encourage you to try contesting your PROD deletion if you're willing to give it another try, because it really will bring the article back instantly. It can be difficult for new editors, but users of this forum are a bit better than the average person at source editing.
On the one hand, this is hardly the first time I've seen someone complain about the arcane ways Wikipedia sometimes seems to be policed by an army of smart teenagers on a power trip. Many years ago, there were some stories about highly qualified academics writing articles, only to see them ruined by well-established wikipedians. And for an outsider it can be hard to figure out how to correct this.
At the same time, there does need to be some degree of policing, or anyone could make any article say anything at all. Of course it's frustrating for a qualified author or academic to not immediately be recognized as such, but to Wikipedia, it's hard to tell the difference between a qualified author and a clever con man. All they can really check is the sources.
So it's a complex issue.
And considering their ban, it's not surprising that the Daily Mail likes to discredit Wikipedia as much as possible. In this case, they do kinda have a point (although from the discussion pages, it seems these people were far more arrogant than the Wikipedians they accuse), but the writing of the article takes it ridiculously over the top in a painfully transparent way.
For example: "‘Axl’ then informed me it was most unlikely that what he called ‘The Community’ of Wikipedia would permit my entry to be deleted. ‘The Community’ sounded like something from George Orwell’s 1984 novel and the faceless men in Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth."
Does the author really think his readers won't know what a community is in this context?
> Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact.
What? Wikipedia's strict rules (really, a hideous mish mash of conflicting obscure scattered policy and guideline and suggestion and essay and convention) detract from the purpose of getting information about a subject from a variety of trusted sources into an article about that subject.
See, for example, the amount of time that goes into deciding whether to allow someone to have a username consisting of a bunch of digits or not. (Such a user name is "confusing". But what is it confused with? It's not confusing by itself. The policy is to prevent people using names that imply power. and so on for several megabytes, several times a year.) And then, when the community has taken several months (at a short time estimate) to agree on a policy they realise that the software has hard-coded limits which are different to the policy anyway. So it all starts again.
SO's mods are doing a good, but difficult job.
Wikipedia's admins, New Page Patrollers, Anti-Vandal Patrol, Recent Change Patrol, twinkle user, rollback user, are doing an inconsistent job.
I'll agree that I'm pretty anti the current WP experience.
> ‘Philip Cross’ has edited @georgegalloway ‘s wikipedia page over 1800 times.
This, and many other political arguments I have seen on it before, really makes me think that Wikipedia would benefit from a policy where a sufficient number of individual complaints against a user who has passed some threshold of number of edits to a single article (say 100) would be automatic grounds to block the user from further edits to the article, regardless of fault. I understand that this sort of obsessiveness is also an important asset to Wikipedia (and so they are understandably reluctant to set up obstructions to what it considers its "10x editors"), but in my eyes this pattern of personal crusading and article ownership causes damage to its utility as a source on any contentious topic far in excess of the damage it would suffer even in the worst case of every single editor that has put more than 1000 edits into any single article quitting.
> The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics and "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible solution was ever proposed...
Yeah, table stakes for editing Wikipedia on anything even remotely controversial is an obsessive personality, limitless time, and patience for an huge amount of toxicity.
> ...instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and banning editors, even on the pages about themselfes, trying to rectify information.
IMHO, it's quite sensible to not allow people to edit pages about themselves, because people tend to have a strong-well understood biases on that topic.
>Why not helping Wikipedia and contributing to this huge open knowledge base? The rules set by the WP community for acceptability clearly do not imply that “actual technologies, projects, products, theoretical electrical components and academic ideas” might be removed if written there, as the author suggests.
There are rules as they are written, and there are rules as they are actually enforced. Wikipedia has long had a great divide here, especially thanks to rules-lawyering deletionists and political cliques amongst editors.
Did you actually read this case? An editor is topic-banned from editing pages about Indian religions after a pattern of advocacy is detected. The ban expires, and the editor resumes contributing to pages on those topics, but without the advocacy; for instance, the user adds negative material about topics he'd previously advocated for.
Another Wikipedia editor notices the resumption in editing and goes nuts, trying to out the user, appealing for the user to be banned, and picking intractable fights.
What conclusion was this case supposed to come to?
Is it your belief that the whole of ArbCom are secretly in the tank for commercial transcendental meditation?
Also, look at how much time Wikipedia sunk into trying to resolve this case carefully. How do you find a way to make that a bad thing?
> Giving the organization very clear rules and goals from the start and making wide range correcting changes towards them even when they hurt the whole organization.
I'm not sure you noticed it, but the people complaining about "editors" being toxic are actually those who are confronted with these "very clear rules and goals" already specified by the community , and they are calling foul once they see their edits being edited based on these established and time-tested processes.
And by the way, wikipedia supports conflict resolution processes which can culminate in articles being temporarily blocked to prevent endless revertions. You just need to flag the article and ask people their opinion.
It's strange how this whole debate centers around abuse, offers all kinds of solutions to perceived problems, but not only fails to acknowledge these processes are already in place in Wikipedia for over a decade but also they don't even wonder what content was added by the editors complaining their edits were reverted. I mean, think about it for a second. Do you think wikipedia achieved a notable level of quality because all edits, regardless of their content, remain untouched in place as-is?
ArbComm and Administrators are by design incapable of blocking users based on disputes over page content. This is fine on paper, but it has resulted in the side effect that if an argument arises, the main thing that Wikipedia ends up policing is less the accuracy of what's being edited (because no authority on Wikipedia may comment on that) but rather the civility of the editors involved.
In practical terms, it's basically impossible to edit or comment on the site without breaking a policy somewhere - Wikipedia's massive list of policies and essays are self-contradicting, meaning that if you complain about a policy violation, a different editor can complain about you breaking another policy.
This means that should a discussion get to the point where administrators (let alone ArbComm) has to be involved, the default outcome is basically that both involved parties will get sanctioned; ArbComm and ANI closure notes have openly stated in the past that they've just given a page/topic ban (or worse) by community consensus to all editors involved because "it might put fresh editors on the page instead".
It's an issue further amplified by the Randy in Boise problem (aka the "fuck experts" policy), where a "sock" user can just behave in extremely polite and civil ways, yet says things that hold absolutely zero ground to the frustration of all involved. All with the goal of eventually escalating it to AN/I or ArbComm so that when their sock gets banned, at least the article is down an expert editor.
Wikipedia largely gets away with this policy on the basis that they'll accrue new editors with time anyway.
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