The People Who Run Wikipedia

inclusiveness is vitally important to wikipedia's continued success and i'm glad the author raised that concern, but we should celebrate the mutual aid and solidarity that countless contributors have shown to the world by improving access to knowledge.

i donate money and time editing to wikipedia and would (shamelessly) encourage you to do the same. if you have money to donate, i'm willing to bet that you've benefited from wikipedia's breadth and depth at some point, and you can help make the world a better place by enabling others to do the same. if you have expertise to share, people really do benefit from your freely sharing what you know with people. and if you can encourage people whose expertise or backgrounds are under-represented on wikipedia, that would also help to empower even more people to contribute to "the sum of all knowledge".

The author really has no idea what stewards actually do. Mostly it is dealing with spam across multiple different language wikipedias and policing the smaller ones that do not have enough of a community themselves. Basically the only thing they would be doing on the English Wikipedia would be promoting people to bureaucrat and such. They explicitly do not use their powers on any of the projects that have actual communities.

This is yet another article written by an author who has not done much editing on Wikipedia, or any serious research on the issues surrounding the project. The author buys into Wiki-utopianism -- the idea that Wikipedia could somehow become "the sum of all human knowledge". This false goal poisons the well, leading those who run the site, including the stewards mentioned, to believe that the site is perfect, and that it is the site's users that are a problem.

Wikipedia is actually in terminal decline. The number of administrators is dropping and soon there won't be enough administrators to maintain the pages. [1] There is no plan from the Wikimedia Foundation to deal with further loss of administrators. As more editors leave the site expect more vandalism, even less reliability, more bias, and more scandals.

More worrying is the author's glossing over of Wikipedia's gender gap. The article claims that "Everyone can participate and every voice is heard" but that's clearly not true. Wikipedia is written by 90% young white men, and the content reflects their interests and biases. Excluding women and minorities is hardly, as the article says, " a radically participatory model for this technologic age"

It's no secret that Wikipedia's content creation process is one of the most toxic out there. Apart from the arcane and outdated interface, new users, women and minorities are routinely bullied and harassed. Even if they do survive the initial stages editors have to put up with ambiguous rules that are arbitrarily applied by aggressive admins. Admins are all-powerful and groupthink and bias is endemic. Despite a lot of talking about "inclusion" and "diversity," nothing will ever be fixed, because the core feature of wiki software is "content through conflict".

As someone who runs a crowdsourced content site not that dissimilar to Wikipedia, but that has 80% female and minority participation, I have come to realize that the wiki software itself is the problem, attracting young men who are willing to fight for their knowledge to be displayed on the site. But the intensity of that fighting excludes many others. Much of the discussion about why women and minorities don't participate is like the lions at the watering hole wondering why the zebras aren't thirsty.

[1]http://wikipediocracy.com/wiki/index.php?title=Wikipedia%27s...

Deceptive headline. The stewards have virtually zero impact on English Wikipedia. They mainly help with administering the tiny foreign language projects that don't have a big enough community to run themselves, like Cornish Wikiquote.

Perhaps Wikipedia exists due to its willingness to compromise on integrity, something that Western commercial entities were hesitant to do. An free online encyclopedia was a gap in the Internet you could drive a car through.

'I found it on Wikipedia' remains a euphemism for unreliable research, and participation in the project can be understood as an appeal to what Jean Baudrillard[1] understood as our primordial need to reproduce.

Indeed I edit Wikipedia, because I like the sound of my voice. Much the same reason I posted this comment.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard

First read that was "The people who ruin wikipedia." Then realized the real headline. Then realized they're kinda the same people...