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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia internal solidarity politics are just messed up if you approach the inner circle. There is no fixing it. There is a lot of behind the scenes back scratching, horse trading, and manipulation via back channels between the members. Just stay away from them and avoid their gaze. It has also been like this, it isn't new nor does it mean there is impending doom for Wikipedia. It is just how it is. It is like the black whole at the center of the galaxy, you want to just stay away from it.

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Well, some people care about an organisation's internal politics. That's basically what the "delete uber" movement is, otherwise why would the clients care how they treat women internally?

But in the case of Uber, the internal company politics don't really affect my ride from point A to point B. The editorial policy within Wikipedia however may have an impact on the content I read. Particular on politically sensitive topics, it is important to keep a critical mind and be aware of the intentions of the authors.

Seems like an awfully big jump. You can have a crapload of internal politics without harassment, sexism, or anything like that. You'll probably also get some of those in any sufficiently large group of people, but it's possible to respond to them well and still be a political minefield in terms of interpersonal relationships and power games.

Avoiding situations like this has swung me around to the profound organization health effects of regularly shuffling director+ level personnel (e.g. every 2-4 years).

What you lose in efficiency (as they refamiliarize themselves) -- you more than gain in healthier politics, cross-organization cooperation and knowledge, and overall following of rule of law / documentation.

Reminds me of chatting with a director level manager at a fortune 500 firm. He was on vacation between assignments. When I asked why he was being reassigned he said the company moves them around every 2-3 years.

Another example friend lives in a small rural town. The county sheriffs department rotates deputies every two years. Because the deputy needs to be willing to arrest respected members of the community for drunk driving and not be taking bribes from the local meth dealer.

> Reminds me of chatting with a director level manager at a fortune 500 firm. He was on vacation between assignments. When I asked why he was being reassigned he said the company moves them around every 2-3 years.

This is a healthy practice in larger organizations. Not only does it avoid the concretion of personal politics but it exposes managers to a breadth of experience, which is useful if they are promoted. It also ensures that the organization has stretched its adaptation muscles regularly, and is not brittle in the event of personnel turnover.

Well put. Imho, it's especially important in businesses that are stable enough that it doesn't have to be done (e.g. utility, insurance).

I saw functionally identical insurance companies with and without the practice. Those without were, every single time, more disfunctional and less likely to successfully deliver projects.

One of the issues I found with the first company I worked at was because there was little turnover there wasn't a lot of horizontal knowledge transfer that you get at more dynamic companies. Meant their processes, technologies, etc were stale and getting more stale as time went on. Which is why I left.

Best thing that happened to them was they let one of my utterly burned out coworker go, followed by exit of myself and another more sr engineer. Which forced them to hire three outsiders within a short span.

Part of the "Delete Uber" movement was because the company's behavior hurt women customers. For example:

1. Lying about conducting background checks on drivers, some of whom committed violent crimes against women passengers,

2. Illegally obtaining a the medical history of a woman who was raped by her Uber driver in an attempt to discredit her claims against the company,

3. And coercing rape victims into arbitration clauses that mandate silence against the company.

Of course, men can be victims of sexual assault, but it's a crime that disproportionately affects women, and, perhaps, if Uber's internal culture wasn't so anti-woman it's possible they would have treated women customers better as well.

https://www.cnet.com/news/uber-faces-8-9m-fine-in-colorado-f...

http://fortune.com/2018/04/26/uber-rape-victims-arbitration/

This is just how bureaucracies work. In other contexts, it's hidden from public view, and often hidden from internal view as well. Many careers have been knee-capped by bureaucratic factors where the subject never even knows.

I suppose. But for me, that means that it's not worth my time to contribute. I've considered it, now and again over the years, but there's just too much evidence of corruption.

Edit: OK, "too much evidence of corruption" isn't fair. It's just too politically complicated. I came out of academia. There's pervasive criticism and disputation, and indeed that's fundamental, but everyone gets (ideally) a fair chance to publish their stuff. And then, peers either pay attention or don't. But then, I left academia mainly over pervasive politics, so maybe I'm just too impatient.

I stopped editing once I realized what gets onto Wikipedia has absolutely nothing to do with facts and more to do with opinion. I even had edits removing links to malware reverted automatically when logged in because some chucklehead locked down the topic.

I've dipped my toes in Quora. And ran into a situation where some moderator kept deleting an answer about VPN services. Because they thought that Wireshark is a VPN service, and that I was spamming for it ;)

That broad brush of a judgment doesn't work. Wikipedia is so massive, no human will ever have even a tiny clue what's all there. Go look at articles on botany or something and you'll see basically all facts and no opinions. Look at articles on people and politics… well, what would you expect?

I'm sure there's some way to create an evaluation of of the network of editors. We'd see that there are sections of Wikipedia where the editors all overlap and sections with near-zero connections, and those different sections are almost different worlds.

I suspect that there are pitched battles in botany too.

And about areas with sane editors, it's arguable that the rot runs all the way to the top.

I'm totally doubtful that it's anything comparable to cases of people and politics.

You'd be surprised at some of the things that generate massive edit wars on Wikipedia though:

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/wikipedia-...

Your hypothesis is wrong. I find none of those surprising. And they are mostly single pointed facts that are disputed, not complex patterns of edits that involve opinion.

I guess this is one of those many laws of bureaucracies, any time there's enough power and hierarchy the top is self serving tribal warfare. I guess the question is to what extent that warfare is isolated from the interests of the members. If you look in parallel to the government, I guess you're talking about separation of powers - political leaders vs independent arbitrators, does this exist in wiki? There's no overall elections right more a kind of election at each level for the one above?

>There's no overall elections right more a kind of election at each level for the one above?

Not at all! The highest positions in terms of the user rights granted would be Admins and Bureaucrats. The elections for those are the RfA and RfB (requests for Adminship and Bureaucratship respectively).

And contrary to what you might think, anyone with an account is free to nominate themselves, or to chime in on someone else's nomination (to the point that the process can be really hard to go through, as your history will be combed through relentlessly by overzealous users).

Note that those are not traditional elections either, instead of a pure vote, the process is more of a structured discussion to establish a consensus.

Like all places on the internet that grant special roles and privileges, you'll find people hungry for power, but Wikipedia fares pretty well in this respect.

I disagree. I was quite badly treated by a number of Wikipedia admins and it nearly ended in disaster.

Well, I'm not trying to deny your experience, but that's a different thing, isn't it?

The fact is many admins active today were voted in around 2007-2008 when the standards were much more lax, and because the process is so hard to go through fewer admins are elected these days.

I'm just a normal user myself, and sadly I don't have any good answer to that, the best one can do is participate and try to change things for the better.

At the core of it, these are all just people gathering around a common goal.

No, it’s not. I wrote neutrally and sourced my material about a controversial figure and was pursued (wikistalked) by a user who doesn’t make substantial contributions other than page patrol.

In fact, my article remains roughly the same, but is only half of what I was trying to make it because of what they did to me. I’m a hugely experienced editor who was researching the topic openly and transparently but was accused of an agenda because I showed my sources in the talk page of the article.

I complained on ANI and asked for help, but it was shutdown and nobody has ever reviewed the abuse I suffered from the other parties. Those other parties actively canvased on another board, and didn’t bother communicating with me. Then one of the editors actively changed the archives of the talk page of the article I was working on to auto archive in a few days and once all my talk discussions rapidly expired restored the default archive timeframe. Totally got away with it too!

Don’t think for a moment that most admins know what they are doing. They can’t, the topics are too broad and the agendas can often be opaque.

You didn't complain on AN/I. You complained on the 3-revert-rule violation (now Edit Warring) noticeboard, and failed to even mention the edit warring that the noticeboard is about. Again, it's errors like this, and mis-labelling people as Wikipedia administrators when they are not and never have been, that undermine the credibility of this account of events.

Except that I did, multiple times. You need to stop telling me I'm misremembering things that can be easily verified in the history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&title=Special%...

And I never claimed that all the people involved are Wikipedia admins. In fact, I specifically didn't say any names. You will also note that I didn't initiate the edit warring notification.

Ahem!

* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...

"You didn't complain on ANI"

And yet I did.

And I never said I didn't complain on that other board. In fact, if I recall correctly (and on this point, my memory may not be 100% correct, but you have raised this...) it wasn't me who initiated the notice, but I did respond.

What is your point? You are the one telling me I never took it to ANI.

In the end, I was clearly not in my right mind. I started having suicidal thoughts, and I did indeed edit as an IP address but not to evade any blocks. I accept that this was not wise, but in my own defense, I was in a heightened state of anxiety and unwell. After the whole debacle, I left Wikipedia and never came back.

It is remarkable that I didn't mention who I was, yet you know specific revisions from an IP address. Who exactly are you?

It's not that remarkable. You have recounted this hole-filled tale before here on Hacker News.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11795753

And mentioned it several times since.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17111646

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498494

The appropriate response is to kick some of these people out not simply accept that their is nothing to be done.

Exactly.

Avoidance of repercussions for people in positions of authority because of tenure is a steep slippery slope to hell.

Neither of the two main people that you talked to on that talk page were, or are, Wikipedia administrators. If you cannot get that part of the story straight, people are naturally going to ask what else you aren't recounting accurately.

It was an Australian Wikipedia admin who banned me indefinitely. [1] It was Wikipedia admins who allowed this all to happen. My story is completely straight. People should be asking what you aren't getting straight, and your agenda.

Edit: hold on a tick, I didn't mention the article, my username or the people involved. And yet you know the article and specific edits to an edit to a relatively obscure Wikipedia board from over 3 years ago. Who are you again?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/block...

No, your story clearly is not.

That's one, singular, not "admins", plural. And xe blocked you. Xe did not ban you. An "experienced editor" knows the difference. ("Bans are different from blocks" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...

All of the mistreatment that you allude to ("actively canvassed on another board", which was in fact the BLP noticeboard) was not by that administrator, and not by anyone who was an administrator. Indeed, one of the people who was a Wikipedia administrator opined somewhat differently.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Letsbef...

The story of chris_wot versus the Wikipedia administrators doesn't stand up upon investigation.

You really need to have a look at the block log. NickD has an indefinite block on that account. So that's multiple admins who blocked me.

Tim Starling blocked my IP address for a year, on my request (to be clear, Tim is a friend).

You have no idea what you are talking about.

And the board I'm talking about was the Australian Wikipedian's Noticeboard.

And believe me, I'm an experienced editor. I created the [citation needed] tag, started the ANI noticeboard and did a thousand and one other things that you don't know about on Wikipedia.

This is my last comment, the trauma is too great for me (I nearly killed myself over this) and I don't want any more Wikidrama to spill over onto HN. I have just emailed the HN admins to let them know this.

Are you, or are you not, a big fish? O:-)

You'd think you wouldn't get tangled up in a BLP debate like that. %-/

+ I'm sorry to hear you felt so badly about this :-(

> And yet you know the article and specific edits to an edit to a relatively obscure Wikipedia board from over 3 years ago. Who are you again?

Well that's creepy and shady isn't it?

I know I can look this up but can you expand a little bit on "instead of a pure vote, structure discussion...".

What's the actual hard decider? Like for page edits if there's a conflict it basically escalates up the hierarchy right? If there's no consensus what happens in this admin/bureaocrat thing? Who decides what constitutes consensus?

No problem, I'm happy to explain, but this is just my own understanding so you may still want to look it up for the fine details!

The main idea is that because it's not a formal vote, there's isn't supposed to be a hard threshold for passing. Now in practice >75% of support almost always shows strong consensus, and will result in the request being a clear-cut accept. Similarly, if you get 65% oppositions, chances are your request can be closed without further considerations.

But what's important to keep in mind is that commenters are expected to explain the reason for their position, it's not just a +1/-1 system. If several people raised an important issue or found some serious problem with the way you've contributed recently, that's more important than the raw numbers.

When there's no clear consensus, generally your request will be postponed for a couple day until issues are resolved, or eventually fail. (In close cases a public chat with the Bureaucrats — the people responsible for enforcing the decision of the community — sometimes takes place to clear things up, but it's unheard of for crats to go against the opinion of the community)

>Like for page edits if there's a conflict it basically escalates up the hierarchy right?

It's not supposed to, really. If there's a conflict, we would really like everyone involved to go calmly discuss it in the article's Talk page with the community.

No one owns an article, no one who follows the rules has more right to edit it than anyone else.

When that fails and people cannot cooperate at all, it sadly has to escalate and can end in bans for the involved users.

>Who decides what constitutes consensus?

In the end the definition of what constitutes consensus is defined by the community, and that includes anyone that feels like starting a discussion and challenging the status quo. Wikipedia has no firm rules, just guidelines and policies that people have and continue to argue about endlessly.

That's the whole problem with Wikipedia, isn't it? It's full of messy, complicated, imperfect people.

> But what's important to keep in mind is that commenters are expected to explain the reason for their position, it's not just a +1/-1 system. If several people raised an important issue or found some serious problem with the way you've contributed recently, that's more important than the raw numbers.

I've read a lot of talk pages. Mainly about articles that had been deleted, I admit. But anyway, "explain the reason for their position" seems to all-too-often devolve into legalistic debates over rules, procedures and so on. And "several people raised an important issue or found some serious problem with the way you've contributed recently" seems to mostly be about gang warfare, not about the merits.

So basically, people who don't play the game well, and don't go along, tend to get banned.

It'd be far better if those who disagree with the consensus could stand aside, and have their own dissenting fork.

I'd say that your explanation is correct in theory, but not in practice. On some issues people can not see eye to eye and then it is simple majority votes that decide topic matters.

For example, I used to edit articles about international law on Wikipedia. Most of the edits were accepted no problem, but there are some countries that tends to violate a lot of international law. Those countries also have a huge amount of supporters on Wikipedia. Supporters who aren't really interested in international law, but are very interested in improving their countries reputation online. Long arguments doesn't convince these editors at all and due to their sheer number can block any edit they don't like.

Finding other editors interested in international law to combat this is impossible for two reasons. First, not many people are interested in legal topics and second, conflicts are risky. If you go up against "the consensus" too many times, you'll be labelled a trouble-maker and will have a harder time arguing your points of view in the future.

The only real solution is to network as hell and try to make allies ("you scratch my back I scratch yours") on Wikipedia. But that takes years so the only people who do it are those who get paid for their time or those who are truly obsessed zealots.

When it comes down to conflicts over opinions, like whether we should write that X country's behavior technically counts as violating international law or not, consider that both sides arguing their views are in the wrong!

The role of editors is emphatically NOT to write their objective, honest assessment of a subject. It is to find reputable sources, and state whatever opinions they express.

Sources type things down; You report their views.

The only point left to argue is what sources are reputable, which source to pick other which. Only that's a much more productive debate to have since there's often a lot of precedent (the same controversial sources tend to come up again in different arguments about different topics), there are pretty clear guidelines to fall back to, and since it's not about a very narrow topic it's easy to bring outside people to the discussion.

I can't claim that this will magically solve every content dispute, clearly not, but if you're stuck arguing opinions on niche topics it's a good first step!

Unfortunately it doesn't work when people can't agree on definitions. For example, Wikipedia has lots of pages listing all entities of class X (all these list of pages). Who decides if an entity is of class X or not? In my opinion that would be decided by acclaimed experts on X. Wikipedians routinely disagree and will assign entities to class X of their own volition even if no support can be found among acclaimed experts. They will then challenge you to find a source claiming that the entity does NOT belong to class X, or else it should remain listed. That is of course almost always impossible because there aren't many experts out there spending their time publishing articles refuting Wikipedians misconceptions!

One way is for an admin who is not party to the conflict to summarize the presented arguments, existing rules and precedents, and write a decision.

Serious irresolvable conflicts are decided by the Arbitration Committee for the particular language edition of Wikipedia, and the committee's decisions are binding.

Each language editions of Wikipedia has its own slightly different take on how the Arbitration Committee is selected and how it makes decisions, but the general gist is that commissioners are highly active editors (not necessarily administrators) who are elected for a limited term by a vote of active editors.

I think it's often referred to as the "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" - that over time, all organizations for a purpose will be taken over by people who care more about the organization than the purpose. I'm not sure it's actually inevitable, but it's certainly predictable; the more you care about the cause the less time you want to spend on clawing your way to the top, and the more you'll expend your power on achieving things instead of fighting rivals.

It's one of the better pitches for representative democracy, - making rulers at least semi-accountable to people who care about the outcomes instead of the infighting. But I think Wikipedia's "nomination and consensus" approach largely destroys that benefit by primarily engaging the people who care most about the internal politics of the system.

Wikipedia in particular is a target for takeover and subversion because they govern a reputable/widely relied-on source of knowledge. If you're some kind of spook, for instance, and you want to rewrite history in some fashion, or spin it, getting the wikipedia version to match your own is a major win.

Very much agreed, although I think spooks are perhaps not the standard case of this problem.

Wikipedia has a major problem handling inflammatory subculture issues, because the ratio of highly-invested partisans to casual observers is so high, and the topic is too arcane for most administrators to even decide what constitutes a bare-bones neutral article. At best, you end up with something where every single claim is caveated with "side A says, side B says" and so the broad thrust of the thing is incomprehensible. At worst, you end up with something that looks neutral because it has a 'Controversy' section, and obviously everything outside of that is just a review of facts, except it isn't at all.

There are lots of politically charged instances of this, but a fairly tame one is the article for any smallish town or school district. They seem to be written almost exclusively by members of the local Chamber of Commerce or PTA and disaffected high schoolers, because no one else knows or cares about the topic enough to edit, and so the page for every small town I've ever lived in is laughably inconsistent with what any actual resident would recognize.

And of course all of that is prior to 'citogenesis'; I'm pretty sure I've found a couple of claims that exist only because someone put them on Wikipedia. If that's not a win for someone trying to spin an issue I don't know what is.

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