Well start with Wikipedia's head, Wales. Where does he come from, how does he think? We know he ran an Ayn Rand mailing list before becoming involved with Wikipedia, but how does his personal, political thinking influence Wikipedia? Well he himself has said that conservative Friedrich Hayek's work "is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". While he is not always blatant and draconian in politically influencing Wikipedia, this has cropped up again and again.
For example this Arbitration Committee spoken of - in mid-2005 Wales appoints an editor so biased against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that Wikipedia Review has a whole forum on this editor - JayJG ( http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showforum=46 ). People find him incredibly biased and the vote of all Wikipedia in early 2006 for ArbCom members kicks him out. But Wales is not happy with this and decides to stuff ArbCom, like FDR threatened to stuff the Supreme Court. So Wales creates a new ArbCom seat. Does he appoint the Wikipedia-wide next highest voted neutral editor to ArbCom? No, he reappoints this Arab and Muslim hating editor JayJG.
You can find many examples of this sort of thing. With Wikipedia, the rot starts at the top. One day, a rival wiki encyclopedia will come into play and trounce Wikipedia (or at least be an alternative to it).
Wikipedia doesn't have an emergency. Jimbo Wales had large ideological axes from the beginning, including topics such as who started Wikipedia. As Wales once said that conservative "[Friedrich von] Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". Wales went from running an Ayn Rand mailing list to running Wikipedia...but he's totally neutral of course.
As an example of this bias, Wales appointed the rabid editor JayJG to the highest authority, the ArbCom in mid-2005. He was voted out in early 2006 - but Wales used his power to reappoint him any how. Most of Wales's political position pushing has been behind the scenes, but here it was blatantly obvious.
I got tired of this sort of thing and pulled back from Wikipedia around that time. I'm very skeptical of the idea that everything has changed since Wales has less power now though. It's kind of like when the military takes over in a coup, kills off or exiles the opposition, and then holds an election. Once you have sculpted the infrastructure enough to your advantage, you don't need to be as heavy-handed any more. I guess I would be one of the exiles (and some excellent editors threw in the towel over this sort of thing - very educated people who could write well).
You seem to be unaware that Jimbo Wales was an avowed Rand disciple when he set up Wikipedia. Her views of how societies should be organized were very much the model for how Wikipedia initially was organized.[1] (For once, a link to Wikipedia is probably the best I could do for sourcing this statement.) Mr. Wales may not have exactly the same point of view today as he had then, and FOR SURE he is quite interested in deepening ties between the Wikipedia editing community and actual expert scholars to further improve the encyclopedia's content quality, but as an editor in the trenches that is the editorial culture I encounter as I try to improve the encyclopedia. Wikipedia's editing culture is not a professional editing culture--I've been a professional editor, and I can tell the difference. It may be that Wikipedia's internal organization will have to change for the Wikimedia Foundation to meet its goals for article content quality.
Other commentary on the writings of Ayn Rand, who definitely has some of the most dedicated fans I have ever met, can be found in a famous blog post by John Rogers.[2] I invite all the participants here to read it and see what you think.
I don't trust Wales to run the organization effectively. I think that things are just going to get worse for Wikimedia as they get more money. My opinion on Wales is not high generally and Wikipedia has implemented some policies that I find rather undesirable in the recent years. Wikipedia has also done little to really actively improve the encyclopedia; they make all the wrong organizational changes, which in general tend to further stupid political bickering and turf wars, and these are the biggest problems to successful Wikipedia editing. Good governance would move to minimize these so that editing remains (or now, becomes) reasonable for people who don't have time to sit around for six hours a day and justify every change they make over and over again until the other guys get sick of it.
What it comes down to is that Wikipedia is really one great big edit war, though they'll never admit it.
You've written a lot of gut-check stuff here about why you distrust Wales, and I respect that. But you really only made two substantive criticisms of the project's actual work:
* That Wikipedia didn't go to bat for fair-use images, and instead adopted a harsh policy of copyright attribution that can be used by activist admins to require forms-in-triplicate process to get an image posted.
* That Wikipedia's conflict resolution processes add up to make it impossible to contribute to controversial articles.
Both of these may be true, but my response is, "so what?". The outcome you've spelled out here isn't the end of the world. The encyclopedia is still epic in scope and useful even to a cynical bastard like me. It dominates the top spot on most Google SERPs and by doing so drastically improves the quality of virtually every Internet search in the English-speaking world.
Particularly regarding controversial articles: seriously, just go edit somewhere else. You were a busy editor in your time, and you know exactly why those draconian rules exist: because controversial articles are massive neodymium magnets for crappy edits. Between daily attempts to rewrite the entire flow of articles to specific POV's (often in nitpicky work-to-rules fashion deliberately designed to incite days worth of arguments over how to revert) and mindless vandalism, how is anyone supposed to get anything done anywhere on the project if everyone has to patrol the articles cleaning up all the nonsense?
You bring up lots of valid points, but you don't seem willing to consider the other side. I might actually entirely agree with you about the project, but for the fact that your comment is overtly misleading.
Who edits wikipedia? There's some serious concerns there, by the co-founder of wikipedia. Basically, you can hire firms to edit wikipedia relatively easily and there's some extreme bias on anything even remotely political.
Although Wales serves as a sort of public face of Wikipedia and has some persuasive authority, the headline implies (the article less so) that he's running the show, i.e. in a position where he could "agree" or "refuse" to comply with censorship on behalf of Wikipedia. He used to make those kinds of decisions, but has long since turned over control to a more stable, less benevolent-dictator-for-life kind of setup. Nowadays policy is ultimately set by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees (where he's one of ten trustees), and day-to-day decisions would be up to the Wikimedia staff, in consultation with people on wikis and the mailing lists, overseen by executive director Sue Gardner.
In any case, I do think he is accurately conveying the general sentiment held by all those parties, so the substance of the article is right. But I think the current setup actually makes that view even stronger, because even if Wales somehow changed his mind and argued for censorship being the least-bad option, he would probably have a hard time pushing that through; hence Wikipedia's position doesn't depend on any one person.
I know some people have some concerns with Jimmy Wales, but he's done a good job as far as I can tell, and none of the complaints about him really seem that important. For example, so what if he claims to be the "sole founder"; only he and Sanger know that first hand, but it's not necessarily an important issue anyway. So what if he tried to edit his own biography; it's not like he thought people wouldn't notice, so he must have assumed it wasn't a big deal. So what if he slept with somebody who has an article on Wikipedia; that was practically inevitable. There just don't seem to be any really solid examples that show that Jimbo actually is "shady".
The writing style on the sight you linked me to is, to say the least, highly "editorialized". The site whines about a bunch of things which one could legitimately assume were done in good faith. In browsing through it, whatever is actually so bad about Wikipedia certainly doesn't pop out at you; maybe I could find it if I looked hard enough. My point here is that the authors of that site could do a much better job of pointing out problems with Wikipedia if they focus on the really big/obvious problems rather than whining about things that don't matter or aren't necessarily unethical.
I think your first idea is, potentially, a great idea, but I'm not enough of a wikipedia insider to say.
I don't agree with "expert certification," because how do you determine who the experts are? Certainly "experts" disagree on lots of things. And the people who hate wikipedia would claim that expert selection is biased (as well as people who don't hate wikipedia but actually think it is biased).
Can't disagree with the statement that rules should be enforced.
You have a lot of complaints and they are probably valid to a certain degree, but as a casual wikipedia user who sometimes edits articles, I have had an almost flawless experience. I don't run into these issues, personally.
I started editing only this after I saw some other HNers mention that they are wikipedians. I plunged in gradually to make edits to articles on the subjects that I have been researching the longest for both work and recreation, including topics I've been producing bibliographies or working papers on since 1993. I got the nerve to do that, after seeing how appallingly bad the Wikipedia articles on those same topics have long been, by reading the books How Wikipedia Works and Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
I'm very turned off by the amount of poorly sourced point-of-view pushing that goes on on Wikipedia. I've tried to light a candle in the darkness by compiling source lists in my user space (which I link to from article talk pages), and by mostly adding current reliable sources to articles, but even at that a lot of my edits get reverted by POV-pushers (or their sock puppets or meat puppets) on ideological grounds. This continues to happen even after one group of articles I work on went through an Arbitration Committee case in August of this year. The sanctioned editors learned how to cheat on their sanctions, and the conscientious editors are still badly outnumbered (at least as to visible accounts actively editing the articles at any one time). The administrators are beleaguered, and aren't using their mops actively to clean up the mess.
I have severe doubts about the statement made by Jimbo Wales quoted in the submitted link here: "'I’m not a wiki person who happened to go into encyclopedias,' Wales told the crowd at Oxford. 'I’m an encyclopedia person who happened to use a wiki.'" While I give many of the high-edit-count old hands a lot of credit for trying to maintain encyclopedic standards on Wikipedia, I can't agree that their sound editorial judgment characterizes most of Wikipedia's editorial culture. On any topic that is the least bit controversial, the culture is all about ideological edit-warring, and many active wikipedians seem to be quite proud of their lack of acquaintance with libraries or the other resources used by genuine scholars. There doesn't seem to be anyone at the top of the leadership of Wikipedia backing up the wikipedians who are doing the best work for the project and adding the most reliably sourced content.
If pg has said that someone could do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica (where and when did pg say that?), I'd like to know how to join that effort. What have any of you heard about efforts to bring about a friendly competitor to Wikipedia? The best way to help Wikipedia might be to build a point of comparison that does better work, just as East Germany was best helped by the continually visible example of West Germany until the Stasi couldn't make the East Germans afraid anymore.
At least some of the Board members who are proposing this move are people who I wouldn't exactly consider politically neutral (although, to be clear, they have made great contributions to the project, and I don't mean to diss them or anything). I think Wales is more centrist than they are if anything, although he does have a slight Objectivist slant.
I'm not sure political bias in Wikimedia governance is actually a problem though. The Wikimedia movement doesn't claim to be neutral, it has a normative mission to support free knowledge, and has pushed for certain political goals in the past (e.g., the SOPA blackout, suing the NSA, supporting human rights activists in authoritarian countries, and politically titled editathons like Art+Feminism/WikiLovesPride, all of which I personally agree with btw). Article content itself should be neutral, but that's a separate matter from governance. Everyone comes to the project with their own biases and there's no such thing as a "neutral person", but we aim to put those biases aside when editing content. (At least on Wikipedia; some smaller sister projects like Wikiversity don't have "neutral point of view" policies.)
Like a lot of people here, I have sporadically read Wikipedia for years. I came on board as a Wikipedia editor in May 2010 after meeting the project's co-founder and his family in person the year before. I've since seen some of those immediate family members on another lengthy occasion. My children regularly interact with that family in an online education community. Through a web of mutual friendships, I thought I had some sense of what the community norms would be like on Wikipedia before I started. Moreover, I began editing only after reading the several published books about Wikipedia available at that time (as disclosed on my Wikipedia user page), and came on board as someone who has actually had both academic journal editing positions and paid journalism editing positions before Wikipedia even existed.
Even at that, I get a lot of well sourced edits reverted by ideologically motivated drive-by I.P. editors as part of an ongoing process of edit-warring on articles that I happen to know sources for.
For some controversial topics, no amount of good-faith editing by editors who actually know how to look up reliable sources and how to have civil discussions of controversial issues can overcome the flood of point-of-view pushers (both I.P. editors and registered editors who are sock puppets or meat puppets of previously banned editors) who want to drag down the project to below the level of a partisan blog. There simply isn't any incentive in today's atmosphere on Wikipedia for readers who actually know what encyclopedias look like and who have actually engaged in careful research on controversial topics to devote any of their time and effort to Wikipedia.
My number of edits per month has plummeted, and mostly I wikignome to clean up copyediting mistakes on miscellaneous articles written by young people or foreign nationals who didn't write grammatical English in the last revision of the article. The way to increase participation by productive, knowledgeable, literate editors is to drive away the ideologues and enforce some reasonable behavioral norms on article talk pages and user talk pages. I see no sign of that happening over at Wikipedia, and until I do, I will heartily support anyone's effort to build a competing resource, either limited to a specialized topic or a direct attempt to build a better quality general online encyclopedia.
I think the "Lamest Edit Wars" page in project space sums up much of what is amiss about Wikipedia.
Why do you think it is more likely that a given obsessive editor is a good-faith Wikipedian who cares about an unbiased and comprehensive encylopedia than an agenda-pusher? My proposal was implicitly based on the opposite assumption, namely, that removing obsessive editors will reduce the agenda-pushing set much more than it will the unbiased encyclopedist set. I think that, considering the real world, this is reasonable: we clearly see many more people dedicating an extreme amount of resources, up to and including their lives, to political causes than to abstract values such as objectivity and the accuracy of the historical record. The example that spawned this discussion certainly seems to involve a highly active editor being driven by a political agenda (do you dispute this?), and this is the case for almost all other instances I am aware of (though of course there is a selection bias here). Do you actually contend that the subject of the opening post has no agenda to push, or do you count him as a force for an unbiased and comprehensive Wikipedia because you think that his agenda is correct?
It's quite hard to take this comment in good faith, because the politics of wikipedia community of power editors is well documented and criticised. But since you've decided that out of all the comments in this thread, that my one somehow demands more robust empirical scrutiny, here's an empirical study for your reference [0].
> I really don't understand either how editing a wikipedia article gives you power over someone
It is impossible for me to take this comment at face value. I don't believe that it is not immediately obvious to you how exerting editorial control over the 7th most visited site on the internet, a site that is aiming to represent "the sum of all human knowledge", represents a significant source of power to influence society.
It's great that you've enjoyed the process of contributing minor edits, and content to niche fields. But you can't ignore the fact that a majority of the content comes from a tiny minority of the userbase, and that their motives demonstrably resolve around a desire to control information in many cases.
> Based on empirical data drawn from a series of interviews and an exhaustive analysis of its cases between 2004 and 2020, this paper examines the ways in which the Arbitration Committee handles conduct-related disputes between editors, and the impact of social capital, summarily defined as the “capital captured through social relations” (Lin 2001, 19), on this process. My empirical material indicates that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially facilitates a social contest by considering the position of each disputant within the community of editors. Ultimately, the Arbitration Committee seeks to “cancel” these disputes in order to preserve Wikipedia’s social fabric.
There's also tons of censorship on Wikipedia based on nothing but ideology. Just look at how the Grayzone can no longer be used as a source, based on claims it is "state-affiliated" media, despite ZERO evidence after literally years of such BS claims and now documented evidence of Western states targeting them (look up the exposé on Paul Mason) because they report inconvenient facts about what the security state is doing. There are many more lower-profile harassment campaigns carried out by "editors" looking to smear intellectuals (especially on the left) so that they can't get speaking gigs, print articles in major media, etc. Jimmy Wales himself went after the Grayzone.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-...
Yes, and that was what I myself thought as I scrolled past.
"Jimmy Wales also hasn't exerted control over Wikipedia policy in a long time, and as of this year no longer even nominally has the right to overrule ArbCom."
Except these two facts niggle.
He's on the board, and will always be the founder. He is SV aristocracy in a town where the money you earn is less important than the people you know and the things you have built. He will always have influence and it's naive to believe he wouldn't. So, it is not entirely accurate to say he has no control, just less control than he did. Is it too little control? Perhaps, perhaps not.
If I wanted to construct a set of policies that drove traffic to another site, I would make them quite like Wikipedia has now e.g. Wikipedia is not a gamers manual. Then I would target for deletion much of the nerd content, quite like now. This is quite a coincidence.
I'm not attached to this theory. Also, I don't like spreading negativity. But to me it seems at least somewhat plausible, and that possibility disturbs me a little.
There is a lot of demand to control the narrative on political articles. Some political groups [1][2] have mobs of Wikipedia editors trying to influence what you read. I'd be surprised if they didn't have a few moderator roles otherwise a lot of their work would be reverted.
For example this Arbitration Committee spoken of - in mid-2005 Wales appoints an editor so biased against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that Wikipedia Review has a whole forum on this editor - JayJG ( http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showforum=46 ). People find him incredibly biased and the vote of all Wikipedia in early 2006 for ArbCom members kicks him out. But Wales is not happy with this and decides to stuff ArbCom, like FDR threatened to stuff the Supreme Court. So Wales creates a new ArbCom seat. Does he appoint the Wikipedia-wide next highest voted neutral editor to ArbCom? No, he reappoints this Arab and Muslim hating editor JayJG.
You can find many examples of this sort of thing. With Wikipedia, the rot starts at the top. One day, a rival wiki encyclopedia will come into play and trounce Wikipedia (or at least be an alternative to it).
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