Exactly what is it we're supposed to be looking at here? And what does "Wikipedia", as an entity, mean in your comment?
Not a wikipedian, but from my nerdish poking around and learning about how wikipedia works, it was my impression that these boards are supposed to be public forums to openly discuss issues, in line with its spirit of open collaboration. The fact that editors closed it immediately is evidence that, as KalHolmann says, there is circling of wagons going on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest...
I try to be aware of it but I see myself mindlessly agreeing with someone just because they took the superior tone for the given format.
In the end, good faithed users contribute in thier spare time. Once certain interests are involved, you are faced with bad faithed actors who make their livelihood sabotaging this.
Catch enough controversy and this will ruin almost any project where people cooperate in their spare time to inform about something.
(1) instructing KalHolmann not to canvass (this is one of WP's older rules and comes up all the time in AfD, where people will canvass WP and Twitter to get votes to keep marginal articles)
(2) backing out KalHolmann's canvassing comments
(3) responding to KalHolmann's question about where to direct his concern by telling him to take it to ANI
(4) advising against him taking it to the "COI Noticeboard" (I'm not sure I know what that even is but I guess I can guess and I'm not surprised it exists)
(5) after KalHolmann takes it there anyways and complains about the outcome, telling him again to take it to ANI.
None of this seems bad to me; it seems like a WP admin going out of their way to be helpful (in a WP'ian sort of way) and getting slagged for it on HN.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contribut...
I should also add that the people targeted by Cross all have a fairly large audiences on Twitter, and have been vocal about this issue. Jimmy Wales is aware (he's tweeted to them, as I say in another comment, but to dismiss the matter). I, too, would conclude they were trying to protect him if I was met with that kind of response.
What seems more likely to me is that people have very legitimate concerns about Cross's POV, but aren't following WP norms in raising those concerns, and are getting shut down as a result. That's an expected outcome, not a sign of something nefarious happening.
If I can take a stab at guessing what is happening, the Wikipedia admins probably feel like a super-active member is one of their own, and he/she is being attacked by "outsiders", so what they're doing is defending him with made-up reasons to fool themselves that what they're doing is just. A bit like US police, they're meant to be a part of the community and serve them, but after demonstrations against them because a few members did terrible things, they think they're under attack and their response is to protect their own and treat the public as the aggressive enemy.
One of the reasons for those norms is that on controversial issues, everybody can marshal a plausible argument. WP's processes try to make sure that admins can make procedural rather than substantive decisions to resolve conflicts. It's reasonable to have a couple thousand people who understand a process. It's not reasonable to expect a couple thousand people to be authoritative for all the substantive controversies litigated on the encyclopedia.
Another reason is that the norms are interdependent. For instance: many of the rest of WP's processes don't work without the "no canvassing" rule. Admins and 'crats can't evaluate an argument if it's flooded with partisan complaints. Admin decisions aren't votes.
But I emphatically take issue with the idea that it's reasonable to shut down what sounds like, in your words, "very legitimate concerns" instead of guiding the concerned users through the proper process, fostering a healthy discussion. If I'm being harsh, isn't that the role of an admin, someone who should know better?
It's important to follow rules, and I could ironically cite you a dozen Wikipedia guidelines that argue for[4][5][6][7] or against[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] the idea that not following proper process should get your concerns shut down.
But one of the founding and most important principles of Wikipedia[2] is precisely that it has no firm rules. What it has are guidelines that have been found to work well, and policy that one is expected to follow unless there is a reason not to.
The moment that heavily codified process is used by experienced editors against less experienced ones or against people who have a legitimate concern, that is not helpful process and not a fair or acceptable outcome.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Cabal
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CABAL
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:5P5
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:LAWYER
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOCOMMON
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RECKLESS
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CAUTIOUS
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:EXPECT
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IAR
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BOLD
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SNOWBALL
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTBURO
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTFATRAT
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:COMMON
- File this form in triplicate here sir!
- I did, but it was instantly rejected within 2 minutes. Where should I file my appeal?
- File your appeal with the same person.
- But it will get rejected again. Can't I appeal to someone else?
- You can only file your appeal somewhere else if you fill out this form.
- OK, I did that. It was rejected in 6 minutes by the same person.
- Sounds like you're out of appeals. Stop trying to play the system.
I'm thinking of the FORUMSHOP justification for closing the discussion on ANI in particular, and I'm more generally responding to your posts in this thread.
About this incident, I think it's fair to say that the administrator in question, with 13 years of experience and over 100k edits might be more experienced with the rules and policies than User:KalHolmann.
Now if the COI guidelines do no justify filing a report to the COI Noticeboard, that is one thing and closing that request is understandable, but ANI is a place for discussion, and since we're using it as an example the FORUMSHOP close reason comes across as exceptionally severe and opinionated to me.
I see a person being told to file grievances somewhere else, and an administrator who at the very least may have forgotten to Assume Good Faith in response.
If an organization is publishing some info about me, it sounds like a giant pain in the butt if I have to learn their bureaucracy to get e.g. false information changed. At least have an ombudsman who could represent my grievances, if you built such a site. But nooooo, it seems because anyone can join and be involved in the mud-wrestle, that's what they have to do to be heard!
I wonder if politicians/celebrity can GDPR (to use that term as a verb) Wikipedia to delete all info the site has about them. After learning about this 5 minutes ago, I'm outraged! (Do note, this sentence is tongue-in-cheek!)
Yes, anyone can send in a patch.
No, only a very small subset of the world population has the knowledge and experience to create a patch that gets accepted.
Yes, they do want more contributors and want to encourage all users to contribute.
No, they can not accept all patches.
Linux patches generally gets accepted based on technical merit, some politics aside;
But it seems like most Wikipedia contributions are subject to the inside political considerations and bureaucracy.
See this example that illustrates the policy using the flat earth theory[1]:
> "Wikipedia is not worried per se about whether the theory that the Earth is flat is true. There must be current, reliable and independent sources substantiating claims that the Earth is flat. But there are no such sources that are current (almost no scientists have thought the Earth was flat since about the fourth century BC), that are reliable (reliable sources are reviewed for accuracy), or independent (a journal published by a Flat Earth Society would not be independent.)"
> "If Wikipedia had been available around the sixth century BC, it would have reported the view that the Earth is flat as a fact without qualification. It would have also reported the views of Eratosthenes (who correctly determined the Earth's circumference in 240 BC) either as controversial or a fringe view. Similarly if available in Galileo's time, it would have reported the view that the Sun goes round the Earth as a fact, and if Galileo had been a Vicipaedia editor, his view would have been rejected as "originale investigationis". Of course, if there is a popularly held or notable view that the Earth is flat, Wikipedia reports this view. But it does not report it as true. It reports only on what its adherents believe, the history of the view, and its notable or prominent adherents. Wikipedia is inherently a non-innovative reference work: it stifles creativity and free thought, which is a Good Thing."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_cannot...
And to add an anecdote to this, in multiple occasions, my contributions were reverted with some jargon that I suppose suggested that my sources (local journalist) were not credible, after adding more mainstream (CNN or Washpost, can't remember), the whole article was deleted yet with some other jargon that I couldn't bother figuring out.
So, from where I stand, the notion that Wikipedia contributions are not subject to political considerations is laughable.
What you're not promised is the ability to win any given debate between yourself and other editors. What would you expect? How could the project possibly work otherwise?
Should we not be more concerned about blocking those who are clearly in the wrong here?
I don't know what "clearly in the wrong" means. Cross and I don't share a POV; from the little I know about him (exclusively: this article) I find his politics noxious. But I would be extremely disturbed if my opinion about his politics somehow controlled Wikipedia.
I'm not suggesting anyone base the block on their opinion of his politics, but of his behaviour on Wikipedia. There's clearly a conflict of interest when someone who is openly hostile toward someone else and taunts them on Twitter, then goes and makes the kind of edits he's making to their Wikipedia page.
There's of course a bigger issue of how Wikipedia deals with this problem more broadly. But the fact that they're unwilling to act on a single editor whose actions have been exposed doesn't inspire much confidence.
Arguably that works well, but it's almost meaningless to call it a wiki.
"if you make an edit which is good-faith reverted, do not simply reinstate your edit – leave the status quo up" ... "propose your reverted change on the article's talk page or pursue other dispute resolution alternatives." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reverting
I am not saying the policy is unreasonable, but it combined with the interface does discourage people.
As to an improvement, if Wikipedia sees the same edit applied twice it could detect this and walk someone through the policy.
You're essentially refuting yourself by making the same claim again, and yet still without offering a single example of something you are claiming is rampant. If there are "plenty" of examples, it should be easy to link a few.
I'm skeptical, because I've made many small, always anonymous edits over the years, mostly correcting spelling mistakes and bad grammar. Most of these edits were even made from dynamic IPs - and yet none of them were reverted.
Why is is harder to get Twinkle and Rollback now than it used to be, and why is their usage more closely monitored?
It's because people were rapidly reverting a lot of edits, and many of those edits were correct and should not have been reverted.
There's a bunch of discussion on ANI and village pump about this.
But, feel free to dig through the reverts they are really common and not just for regional variations in spellings.
PS: I realize listing even 50 in all of Wikipedia is not nessisarily meaningful so no I am not going to waste my time tilting at windmills.
Note all the editors messing up the correct Pittsburg(h) with and without the h in various settings. Lot's of +/- 1 edit lengths.
Now, did some how instantly validate my point? No.
PS: But it does illustrate the situation something is popular enough that many people see it, complex enough that it takes a little thought for someone to notice an issue fix it in good faith and then get reverted.
(Unless "don't criticise a top-1000 user" counts as a Wikipedia norm, I suppose.)
I disbelieve that that the admin in question is both a neutral arbiter and capable of determining within two minutes that Cross is not an "avowed rival" of Galloway (see WP:BLPCOI), particularly given the "And being attacked by RT and George Galloway is a reasonably reliable indicator that you are doing something right" bit on his talk page.
[The relevant part of BLPCOI is:
« Therefore, an editor who is involved in a significant controversy or dispute with another individual—whether on- or off-wiki—or who is an avowed rival of that individual, should not edit that person's biography or other material about that person » ]
Under pressure from outside, the wikipedia admins decided to reopen this case. They fairly quickly came to consensus that Cross was violating the paragraph of the biography-of-living-persons-conflict-of-interest policy quoted above and banned him from editing Galloway's article.
There's continuing discussion of whether Cross is doing anything more seriously wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest...?
We all have biases. But we have conflicts when we have direct relationships with topics.
Similarly: edits are supposed to have NPOV. But editors almost always have a POV.
It's very easy to see how someone might view this as being up against a "they".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:JzG
Also no apparent connection to the topic.
There over a thousand admins on Wikipedia; most of them don't know or have any connection to each other.
Regarding JzG's reply, it sounds a little disingenuous when they claim Cross is "editing with an opinion" and those bringing COI up are "people with a vested interest." I probably believe those against him have a vested interest, but that Cross who openly admitted to having a feud with the pages of people he edits (TFA's point) is the one operating with acceptable behavior is okay is strange.
It seems like me the best way to address the warring is just to openly discuss it.
One Wikipedia editor is trying to highlight the problem of Cross' edits and have him marked as having a conflict of interest on certain articles. The Wikipedia admin (or superiour, I'm not familiar with the Wikipedia hierarchy) shuts him down very rudely and doesn't appear to want to address the issue at all. Leaving the editor to give up: "Forgive me for concluding that Wikipedia is circling its wagons around Philip Cross...I know when the deck is stacked against me."
That said, I went looking around, and there appear to be politicians and russian media involved here. This is not a "Evil admin stomps on poor innocent victim" story, for sure.
Seeing a link to Meatball is also a blast from the past - i just about remember the drama when it split off from Ward's Wiki.
Reminiscences aside, i suppose these are both reminders that Wikipedia is a living fossil; it was started in the early days of the web (not the early early days, but early enough), drew its participants and culture from other places which existed at the time, and has been evolving on its own terms ever since.
"I went looking around, and there appear to be politicians and russian media involved here." - Is that the level of evidence needed to do whatever you want on Wikipedia?
Obviously, things are not adding up. We can both agree on that much ;-)
What I don't quite get is why fivefilters.org is interested?