The Depths of Wikipedians
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Is it? Wikipedia was massive and respected in 2014, too, but it wasn't dominated by the problems discussed immediately beforehand—WP:BRD didn't neuter WP:BOLD, and egoists with "standing" didn't have free reign to antagonize newcomers who followed the rules.
The problem with Wikipedia and other WMF projects nowadays is the entrenched folks with standing not being subject to rules and being permitted to apply new ones pulled out of thin air, not to mention the insidious circling-of-the-wagons when they're challenged and comrades come to their defense by trying to attack and smear the perceived threat.
In a well-ordered and functioning society you can avoid running afoul of the law by following the rules—you can get by without having to pay speeding tickets by simply not speeding. Wikipedia and other WMF projects that have been infected by Wikipedia admins and their toxic mindset are more like a society where impunity might as well be codified—like a cop who says, "It's like this because I say so."
My lifetime achievement is getting one those assholes banned.
Exactly as you say - rules dont aplly to them.
Also using the "standards" to delete everything even when fully cited, while their own articles are slop.
Not to mention people who edit good articles just to have more edits. Often for the worse.
The worst trend recently is putting 5-10 paragraph quotations in articles. Often by some randoms (self promotion?). Those look like articles written by 5th graders.
Wikipedia should be concise!
The challenge here is that "the community" really doesn't want the Foundation doing that. The interview mentions the last major flare-up along those lines: FramGate, though it amusingly got mis-transcribed as "Forum Gate".
The WMF handed out a 1 year ban from English Wikipedia to an admin called Fram, who this interview describes as "gruff, not friendly, not the most empathetic", for unspecified harassment. There was a great big "community" revolt over it, and the WMF wound up backing down by letting the English Wikipedia arbitration committee undo the ban.
The Foundation has a lot of practical power, in that it runs the servers. On a pure technical level, it can do absolutely anything and nobody can stop it. But it worries a lot about driving away the admin structures that keep Wikipedia working. Wikipedia would melt down very quickly under its own weight if the entire admin infrastructure was legitimately pissed off and stopped contributing.
(I keep putting "community" in quotes because in wiki parlance it gets used to refer specifically to the set of people who involve themselves in Wikipedia governance, rather than the broader community of people who use and edit Wikipedia. There's a lot of power assigned to a fairly small group of people who invest their time in on-wiki politics. It's kinda like local school boards in that way.)
Imagine if on hacker news, if your comment broke a rule, that instead of dang deleting it, you got sued! I don't think that would make a good community.
Name me one of those societies that would prove your argument.
> free reign to antagonize newcomers
Nobody has "free reign to antagonize" anyone including newcomers. It's hard to come to a new large community and project with somewhat unusual norms, and established editors should try to do a better job helping people learn the ropes, but at the same time I have gone to look repeatedly when some newcomer complained about being antagonized (either complained here, or other forums, or on Wikipedia) and maybe half the time the newcomer making the complaint was being a total jerk to everyone but really didn't like being called out.
If you (the generic you reading this comment) want to put a bunch of volunteer effort into finding newcomers who are having a tough time and helping them out that would be a valuable contribution. On an all-volunteer project people do what they are interested and unfortunately intermediating on newcomers' behalf is usually not it (I do try to help when I can).
> in 2014, too, but it wasn't dominated by the problems [...]
To my recollection is has been continually dominated by similar kinds of issues, since close to the beginning. It was then, and still is now, often a frustrating slog when multiple editors disagree about something, especially if there's some kind of (typically unstated) ideological motivation involved, e.g. promoting one ethnic group or nation. There are various dispute resolution processes, which work more or less, mainly by attracting more eyeballs any time there is a stuck conflict, but trying to form consensus with a pseodonymous global group of volunteers is just an inherently hard problem.
The main differences between the first few years vs. today are that (1) many topics at least have some kind of article written about them (often still mediocre, especially parts from the early days that haven't seen much dedicated focused effort) which means that there's a bit more bias toward preserving what is already there (an understandable tendency in the face of a constant onslaught of vandalism and entropy), (2) people recently tend to demand a bit better sourcing for claims than was done up to about 2010, so there's sometimes a bit of a disconnect between the quality standard applied to existing material vs. newly added/changed material, and (3) there's a bit more focus than before on earning little gamified badges like stars or green + signs in the corners of articles.
I'm referring specifically to experienced editors who take the stance that some action by a new/IP account is coming from an confused/uninformed place for no other reason than because it's an inexperienced editor—a bag of foregone conclusions and the kind of presumptuousness that, perversely, your comment exemplifies.
And you're wrong about 2004 Wikipedia versus 2014 Wikipedia versus 2024 Wikipedia. It's much, much worse in 2024.
(I began editing Wikipedia in 2004, by the way. I am not the newcomer described here, but I've absolutely seen other experienced editors behave this way, including in response to IP edits that I've made when I happened not to be logged in.)
> at the same time I have gone to look repeatedly when some newcomer complained about being antagonized (either complained here, or other forums, or on Wikipedia) and maybe half the time the newcomer making the complaint was being a total jerk to everyone but really didn't like being called out
Uh, okay? So if in a group of totally unrelated persons who have nothing in common except for the fact that they're all inexperienced, at least half of them are in the wrong, then it supposed to cancel out or something?
Even if 999 new editors behave badly and 1 new editor doesn't, then that 1 editor has a legitimate grievance when they're being wronged (instead than being the one who's in the wrong themselves). They have no control over and bear no responsibility for the actions of the other 999.
You're really doubling down on this line of reasoning, even though once was already too much. I'll be even more blunt: it sucks. It's shoddy reasoning.
Tammi says that she's the kind of person that others usually end up taking advantage of, especially at work. But she's wrong. They don't.
Sammi says that she's the kind of person that others usually end up taking advantage of, especially at work. She's right. They actually do.
Do you see how no matter how many Tammis there are, it doesn't negate whatever is true about Sammi?
If you do, and you actually grasp the principle that "you have to actually go look at the specific examples before trying to draw broad conclusions from that", then what possible reason would there be, when Sammi appears or someone tries to discuss her case, to respond by bringing up how often Tammi has made the same complaint? It changes nothing, and it's a shitty thing to make Sammi deal with if she's already having a below-baseline-level experience.
> please assume good faith
Side quest: What does that phrase actually mean to you?
I've literally only ever seen it used pre-emptively as an explicit or implicit accusation—violating the very guideline that the person invoking WP:AGF is trying to claim the other person is guilty of. The only reasonable conclusion is that they either don't know or don't care what it actually means, because it's accepted as the universal response when you want to bundle something up with WP:CIVIL, since it's free to allege WP:AGF violations and there are no consequences for accusing someone spuriously.
Translation: you're not welcome unless you adhere precisely to established editors’ views and practices. There is no room for introspection, civilized discussion that questions the status quo, and hence, no room for improvement.
Flyby contributors don’t know how much effort there is to keep things going even at good enough level. It’s up to the newcomer to convince that the new opinion matters and new risk is worth taking.
Maintainers can’t distinguish between troll and flyby-contributor-never-to-be-seen-again and genius-that-will-sacrifice-everything-for-the project.
I get that you can’t convince of anything if they don’t discuss, but that means one must earn the right to discuss, by becoming part of current organisation.
Illustrative analogy from open source project (not mine).
Project had top level directories like “ext” and “external” and “vendor” (which is confusing at the first glance). Potential contributor made PR to rectify it (memory slips on how; but seemed reasonable at first glance). Owner/Maintainer rejected this help. The would be contributor got frustrated, later complained here that the project did not care about code quality and best practices and is hostile to new contributors. I see Chesterton’s fence here and a bit of entitlement on the would-be-contributor’s side.
Wikipedia explicitly does not have owners.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content>
The statement that "one must earn the right to discuss" alone has the minor problem that it is totally antithetical to the actual policies and guidelines that Wikipedia aims to adhere to.
Established old-timers have significantly more authority than newbies in any organisation.
Trust built over time matters.
A unicycle and a hula hoop have similarities.
As I said, the distinction matters. The argument by metaphor in your previous comment is off-base.
Feel free to address concretely what I wrote in my previous comment.
(Though I have doubts about the quality of any insights that might be offered; no one referring to Wikipedia as "Wiki" is informed enough about Wikipedia to be informative about it.)
Well, the wiki’s policy is irrelevant. Or only 50% relevant.
I see that the policy tries to provide some “spirit of the law” and/or hints to avoid edit wars and such, but evidently many follow the policy only in letter and just know what not to mention, i.e. to not trigger the policy. (instead of rejecting edits with “I own this” or “I know this better”, edits get rejected with “citation needed”)
> As I said, the distinction matters.
I see you sincerely believe that it does, but I’m of different opinion.
People in any group form a hierarchy, and have (frequently unwritten) “traditions”. And those are features, not bugs.
Hierarchy is not necessarily strict or formal, but it helps with coordination.
“Tradition” is the actual way how things are done. “Tradition” can be changed by policies, it may even implement the policy to the letter, but it always encompasses more than the policy contains. Because it’s almost impossible and most undesirable to have policies for each breath we take.
> Feel free to address concretely what I wrote in my previous comment.
Somebody has older account then me here and is feeling authoritative I see. Thanks for good practical illustration.
If you dismiss peoples opinion ("quality of any insights") on the basis of their choice of words or abbreviations instead of the content, it becomes really hard to assume you're arguing in good faith.
My point is that not every contributor is as welcoming as I wish they were. This is a very difficult community problem, without any obvious easy fixes, considering that the contributors can be anyone in the world, are pseudonymous volunteers, and nobody is banned from contributing unless they're being quite disruptive.
There is significant room for introspection and civilized discussion, but people also disagree about what articles should say and how, and it's impossible for everyone's preference to be met. If you ask both sides in a disagreement a newcomer to an article might say that a long-time editor of that article is being a grouchy gatekeeper, but the long-time editor might say that the newcomer is e.g. adding nonsense, is not adequately providing sources, is unhelpfully changing the scope of an article with material that would better fit somewhere else, or is outright wrong (etc.). Sometimes both of those complaints might simultaneously have some basis.
But [someone] isn't the one who started the project. They're a different person. And even if they read the rules, they are not motivated by the rules.
Yes, editing Wikipedia is harder than it needs to be and you better have your Kevlar underwear on before venturing into hot potato topics, but there's a lot more to Wikipedia than that and contributions to more obscure/factual articles are generally more than welcome.
Despite this, the wikipedia articles remained entirely credulous of these accusations until only a few months ago. A couple editors suppressed any inclusion of exonerating information.
1. Taylor Lorenz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Lorenz
2. Christopher Rufo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Rufo
Both have had their fair share of controversies. However, you would never know it from reading the first second of Lorenz's article. In fact, much of the article focuses on the harassment she has received. Rufo's article doesn't have a section dedicated to the harassment he has received. (I don't know for a fact that he has, but I just expect him to have been the victim of some harassment based on his public position.) Lorentz's article does touch on some of her controversies, but the tone is totally different.
N.B. I don't know much about either person, I'm just noting that their articles have different tones which I suspect is for ideological reasons.
If I said "the justice system gives men harsher sentences than women for the same crime", I wouldn't necessarily have to know whether men should be given more lenient sentences or women should be given harsher sentences, if I only wanted to say that the current situation is unfair and something should change.
I think it's fine to put all of Rufo's controversial stuff at the beginning of his article, but they didn't do it for Lorenz, and I didn't see a plausible reason other than "they like Lorenz and don't like Rufo".
Do you also expect there are reliable secondary sources describing the harassment that you expect he’s received?
I have no ideas how Wikipedia could or should better handle these food fights. Ideas?
Edit: it's been discussed before [1], I'm not sure why it's flagged
[0] https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40928248
... but? Really? After that first part of your sentence, you think there’s a “but”?
> contributions to more obscure/factual articles are generally more than welcome.
They are absolutely not. I stopped editing in the 2010s when it became clear that more and more of my contributions are just going to get reverted or deleted. Everyone I know personally feels the same way: contributing to Wikipedia is pointless because it all just gets deleted anyway. I don’t know anybody who thinks Wikipedia is a welcoming place, and the supposed goal to collect “the sum of all human knowledge” is a farce.
From your comment, it’s clear that you’re not experiencing this. Clearly you have adapted well to the rules, perhaps to the point where they have become second nature to you. That means it will become harder and harder for you to take a step back and think really deeply about the ways in which they hinder the project to collect “the sum of all human knowledge”.
Kamala Harris and her case against Daniel Larsen.
https://www.splinter.com/kamala-harris-and-the-case-of-the-i...
https://prospect.org/justice/how-kamala-harris-fought-to-kee...
The case now only exists on the page of the California Innocence Project, and now has dead links to where it initially pointed to: Kamala's page.
(Before the Jan 2019 wipe)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kamala_Harris&old...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190101103708/https://en.wikipe...
(Now: Daniel's case is now nearly non-existent, and has been memory-holed on both her main page, and her page as California A.G.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240620214511/https://en.wikipe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris_as_Attorney_Gene...
And even if you think I'm wrong or can't be trusted - I suggest comparing the version of it now to the version of that same article a year ago. It is far less biased, as are many articles about Israel, reflecting a concerted effort to change Wikipedia to a different narrative, on this topic at least.
Ctrl-F "bias": 0 results
Wikipedia is simply not trustworthy on anything remotely political due to the extreme ideological slant of its editors.
This reminds me of when the BBC reported that they get "complaints from people who feel that [their] reporting of the conflict has been biased against Israel, and complaints from those who feel it has been biased against the Palestinians" [1]. In my experience with the French Wikipedia, it’s the same there, with people from both sides complaining the encyclopedia is biased in favor of the other side.
[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/complaint/israel-gazacoverage
I think we humans have the unfortunate tendency to view things as binary - you are either biased for one side or another. However when we are talking about something like wikipedia with lots of authors or even something like bbc where different articles are written by different people, i think its entirely possible for it to be biased against both sides (and for both sides) in different aspects.
We've got pretty clear kickbacks happening from a Ukraine company to a high ranking US official. It is likely legal in the same way that congressional insider trading is legal - it'd be illegal except for the fact that it affects politicians. Wikipedia doesn't consider there to be anything there worth talking about except for a page on Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theories despite there being, as far as I can tell from reading the related pages, no plausible explanation for what was going on except corruption.
Then you go to the Trump page where he prods the Ukrainians to investigate what, prima-facie, looks like pretty serious corruption and we get the short thesis that is the Trump–Ukraine scandal page.
In the very few areas where I am well read or even an expert, the Wiki articles I read horrify me. I consider them wholly misleading and improper. As such, I do not read Wiki articles on anything subjective (history, people, etc) because such articles of this type I am in a position to judge, I judge very poorly indeed, so I have reason to think all articles of these types are no good, at all.
For some classes of articles, such as math or computer science concepts, I find all Wiki articles utterly hopeless - the explanations only make sense to someone who already understands.
I'm conscious also of the massive propaganda efforts being exerted by various entities on various pages, such as, for example, the Ukraine War, or the Russian Government.
This leaves the balance, articles on simple, fairly non-subjective and uncontrovertial subjects, and they seem okay.
It's not great, and when I really do need to know about something, I consult an actual, curated, non-mass-edited encyclopedia.
Also, many years ago, I used to edit/contribute, but that stopped, because it became increasingly difficult and unpleasant due to other editors, and in any event, anything you added sooner or later would be removed or edited away, one way or another.
Oh and then have the Foundation, doing it's voodoo-idiocy in the background, such as the amazing new editor which no one wants or likes.
I also think that with CS and similar articles, it boils down to the learning type of the person in question. I can personally grasp new concepts very well through articles just because of the linked structure, that if I don't yet know something, I can just click on it and create a connection.
We looked at the Wiki page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization
A huge page, and for someone who doesn't know what normalization is, totally and utterly useless in every possible way.
Hell, I've been using computers since I was a child, read the Date book, wrote my own relational database from scratch, and I don't know what some of the stuff on that page means. Explaining everything in terms which themselves need explanation is not useful, and it is the absolute hallmark of science wikipedia articles.
So what I would say is this : you can't learn from Wikipedia articles. They do not teach. Which makes me question their value. What are they for?
Thinking about it, this is exactly what I would expect from a process that overemphasizes formal rules of evidence and precision over being of value to the general public.
The Wiki page is here;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
To my eye, it presents a wholly and utterly misleading picture of events.
The Vietnamese simply wanted independence, because they were sick of the brutality of French rule. Everything that happened after came from the French not wanting to go away, and hood-winking the Americans into supporting them, and then the French went away anyway, and left the Americans carrying the can.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Indochina_War
Do you perhaps consider them part of the same longer war? It's hard to break continuous history into neat article chunks.
That's why all serious researchers need access to the primary literature, original research reports, reviews of collections of reports, all clearly attributed to known sources. If you're working in the field you'll also know about the biases of the lead figures and can take that into account in your reading. Wikipedia is a mess in comparison, it's just for entertainment.
That's what I like about Wikipedia, it may not be always 100% accurate but it's quick, isn't filled with ads and it gets things right most often.
It's either that or looking at seo optimized website for dozens of minutes.
I don't donate nearly enough considering the time it made me save.
God knows how it would be for a new user.
This one went through OK though :)
>It's mostly just like — hey, can we cool it? Can we cool it with the German hymns?
Especially with the meme equating Wikipedia with "knowledge," it's worth highlighting that Wikipedia invariably reflects the biases of the people who write it, and they're weird people with weird personality traits.
> All of which leads to my larger question, which is — is the writing and editing process working?
> AR: I mean, the answer is no. There are people who just kind of wait for their opponent to get carpal tunnel — and that's not productive for anyone. I would call those sorts of debates tendentious. You're not trying to find consensus....
> AR: If you're putting anything out into the world, please do not cite Wikipedia! Do not do that. I don't trust it. Ever. That's why you check all the sources. Ideally, every single thing, every single piece of information besides, like, “the sky is blue”-type stuff should be tied to a source. I would say, just cite those because people interpret things weirdly sometimes, and you never know.
Wikipedia is a great outlet for propaganda, even if it's mostly pushed by opinionated people who "put a low value on their own time."
And it's naive to thing it's this fair adversarial thing where all the sides fight and the truth pops out. There's a meta-game where one side (usually the one that's more in tune with the Wikipedia's general baises) uses the rules to get the other side excluded or otherwise boxed out.
> Back in the day, there were five — call them guidelines, decrees, commandments — sent down from on high from the less good co-founder, Larry Sanger. And the last one was: “Ignore all rules.” And ha! That's still there.
"The less good co-founder"? Why the swipe?