Observations on Wikipedia Behavior (2008)

The key is to understand they're quite sincere; when they think it through, they have this massively successful encyclopedia as evidence that solidly justifies their conviction that their current way of doing business works.

And people who don't like it tend to leave and their voice goes unheard; as the piece correctly indicates, this is pretty normal.

This is a common problem. For an institution or organization to work, the members of it have to build up and disseminate institutional knowledge, often by trial and error, and much of it can't be fully explained. That then leads to inertia: you can't formulate a convicing challenge to the way things are done unless you understand them, but at that point you're selected by the other members of the institution to accept their way of doing things.

Generally, for a given organization, it takes an outside shock to really force them to reevaluate how they operate. If Wikipedia started losing patrons or saw their readership decline, they'd probably reconsider, but it's hard to imagine how much they'd collectively have to screw up for that to happen.

When someone complains loudly about censorship, you may be certain they do not share the views and value of the majority. Otherwise they would not get censored.

> 16. Some trolls and POV-pushers are best fought with a time delay. Let them make their edit; then change it an hour or two later, or even the next day. Trolls are easily bored, and are more likely to go away if you hold your fire for a bit. (Blatant vandalism of course needs to be reverted immediately.)

There’s an important UX principle here not to make negative feedback more responsive than positive feedback, or you might adversely induce your users to do more of what you didn’t want them to do. Consider using a different format for negative feedback (use email rather than in-app notifications), and find ways to stop the user from doing further harm immediately but notifying them eventually.

> 60. It is easier to get a sincere "thank you" for reverting "you're a f____" from someone's userpage, than it is for writing a researched, thorough, and referenced encyclopedia article on an encyclopedic topic. The best way to continue as a writing Wikipedian for many years is to be, as the Buddha recommends, "indifferent to both praise and blame."

There’s a running theme in the list about how conflict is more engaging than collaboration, and it really makes you think about how social media platforms have primarily become places for public conflict. Wikipedia has the goal of being an online encyclopedia first so they can actually strive to lessen conflict rather than come up with innovative ways to convert conflict into user engagement (Twitter ratios, the FaceBook mad emoji, etc.)

> 6. Any logged-in user whose first edit is vandalism of a user page, or a nasty personal attack on a talk page, should be immediately and permanently blocked, without comment.

> 30. Many of our best contributors began with a few shabby edits. Be kind to newbies, even though it is a test of patience to see the same mistake hundreds of times over several years.

> 38. Try to be as tolerant as you possibly can regarding edits by established contributors. Should you need to revert one, leave as polite an explanation as possible, with room for compromise: and if they're simply wrong, don't rub their nose in it. The loss of long-established contributors due to avoidable conflict is one of the greatest threats the project faces. People who have been here a year or more, and made thousands of contributions to the project, are its greatest asset, and this cannot be overstated.

There’s a great case to be made, when creating a community whose primary goal is not raw engagement, to segment users into new and established members. The first actions a user takes on a platform are clear indicators of what kind of user they will be, and it’s important to distinguish users who will provide no value versus users who might not know the niche norms of the community. I really think a lot more online communities would do well to add quizzes to the user registration process (Which of the following actions are harassment?). In addition, you should never use the same moderation tools (especially automated moderation tools) on established community members, because they’re that much more valuable.

Independent of your views of how Wikipedia is run this list is written by someone who’s been in the trenches, and has, in my view, a really solid understanding of the work that goes into internet moderation.

I don't at all want to accuse you of the second type of edit, but that type would not be universally seen as an improvement, no matter how well sourced and explained.

I never contributed again. I don't recall the response I got along with the revert, if any, but I felt like my help wasn't wanted.

However, when Wikipedia donation season rolls around I definitely feel my help is wanted.

It's not even that bad ordinary vandalism is a lot harder to revert. They should just fix the UI and let the end user pick the version like most api documentation.

If op wrote an autobiography it would be 31, to be fair I could do the same.

For the first point, Wikipedia has pretty comprehensive guidelines around editing articles. Consider for example the guidelines around editing biographies of living people [1]. Pushback due to non-compliance with the guidelines isn't censorship.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...

> When someone complains loudly about censorship, you may be certain they are up to no good.

No, you probably did censor them. You wouldn't even need to promote their views. Just put it in the criticism section and be done with it. It may be value added for every reader, even if the editor already dismissed the opinion.

Wasn't the top admin banned by the foundation few days ago? Someone told me there were controversies... again...

The attitude is indeed disgraceful and pretty much against anything Wikipedia once stood for.

The ones who raise this point 99% of the time _are_ up to no good.

It's the Occam's razor, again: there's no censorship conspiracy and if anything of such user's comments got deleted, it probably insulted everybody under the sun.

Reasonable people argue on the relevant points they disagree with, and can understand when to stop if their idea simply doesn't get traction.