“I don’t think Wikipedia can be saved at this point, but I might be wrong.” | Hacker News Reader

“I don’t think Wikipedia can be saved at this point, but I might be wrong.”

markbernstein.org

54 pointsjarcane64 comments

I apologize if Mr. Bernstein is reading this, but does anyone else feel like this post as well as many of the others he linked in his article are meandering, circumferential... maybe even raving? I really cannot follow his reasoning or discussion at all. I was genuinely interested though because I have heard all about this 'infamous' topic but have had trouble finding objective sources (if they exist?).

The end of the post should say TL,DR:

I think Wikipedia admins are sexist and it is hurting Wikipedia.

TL:DR The Wikipedia processes lead to a lot of discussion. That discussion takes a long time. This can be gamed by some people to make the project include information that is used to harrass others. This does not require sexist admins, although they do exist. It just requires a few accounts who know how Wikipedia works so that their posts are not instantly reverted and ignored.

Trolling is a metaphor taken from fishing. Wikipedia is a big barrel full of hungry fish.

I agree about the rambling post. Surely it would be better to recruit people to guard against gaming of wikipedia; people who encorage an anti-harassment culture and who encorage a culture of non-engagement with toxic trolls.

The thing is, events like this have a chilling effect on anyone who could possibly attempt to do that. As he highlights, Wikipedia is not a democracy, it's a bureaucracy, and it responds to attempts to change its culture exactly the way bureaucracies do. It's this effect in fact that's allowed hate groups like GG (and assorted other kooks and psychos over the years) to get away with stuff like this. Any organized effort perceived as 'external' is often met with surprising backlash from the established editors, who will very often ignore any concerns at best (preferring to argue bureaucratic protocol), or worst, react as they have here, banning the wrong people merely because they're perceived as being insufficiently 'neutral' to be allowed comment.

Even if it was a democracy, the problems with it wouldn't automatically be fixed.

People talk about democracy as if it was some magic pixie dust that makes everything better. But democracies have their own problems, and in order for them to work at their best they have to have the participation of an educated, well-informed, engaged elecotrate, among a host of other things. Needless to say, Wikipedia does not have that. And even if it did, its problems still wouldn't automatically be solved because even working democracies can make mistakes.

I'm not saying I have the answer or know of a perfect system of government (for Wikipedia or anything else), but democracy isn't automatically the answer.

"Trolling is a metaphor taken from fishing."

It really isn't. Perhaps you're confusing it with trawling?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_%28fishing%29

"Trawling" is using nets. "Trolling" is using lines.

I read Bernstein's original post a couple days ago, and followed up by reading the wikipedia arbitration.

The real crux of the problem is that there's a mismatch between the broad scope of what Wikipedia's rules try to prevent against (biased editing) vs what gamergate is using Wikipedia for (a tool of harassment).

So the question is whether Wikipedia's rules are sufficient to prevent fiddling with the site and its purpose in order to harass people and are simply being misapplied, or whether Wikipedia is just structurally unable to prevent obvious coordinated campaigns of harassment.

non-engagement with toxic trolls

What does this mean in detail? Reverting their changes while refusing to discuss it?

I agree, although my biggest criticism of the trio of Bernstein's articles is that they are all so vague; I have many questions that I'd like to see answered, and neither this series of posts nor the linked news posts by The Guardian, Wil Wheaton et al. helped.

1. I don't know who the "gamergate supporters" are, who the "opponents" are (and thus I can't read the Arbcom's decision at all).

2. I don't see any representative edit from either party and I don't know what the war is about specifically.

3. I didn't see links to the arbitration committee proceedings; is it [1]? If so, it says that the case is currently open but the Open Tasks page at [2] says decision was due on the 21st. That is very confusing as well.

4. The decision page and the talk page of gamergate [3] are indeed too long and too unformatted for me to read.

5. If it is true what Bernstein says, that the feminists and anti-Gamergate editors have been topic-banned, does it reflect already on the Wikipedia page itself? [4] I have skimmed it but it seems fairly okay to me (and I consider myself a feminist); am I missing something? Or are the pro-Gamergate edits yet to happen, after the Arbcom's decision is finalized?

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

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:ArbComOpenTasks

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gamergate_controversy

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy

Re [1], you will want the current revision of the proposed decision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... (which is the same confusion i tripped across, because wikipedia's arbitration structure is as byzantine and confusing as the rest of their governance structure).

This is more writing of the kind that draws excessively far-reaching conclusions from little data.

Wikipedia, as an open project, is just as susceptible to "groupthink" as any other. This certainly causes issues, possibly like the one highlighted here (though it's difficult to figure out what the actual complaint is in this case).

But it's not possible to draw the conclusion that "Wikipedia can't be saved" on this basis. Broadly speaking, Wikipedia seems like a fantastic resource that is still growing in useful ways. The fact that it has problems doesn't really mean it can't be saved, and this conclusion seems like overblown nonsense.

Agreed. The prospect that wikipedia, which provides information to millions of people, is doomed because of a couple of dubious edits could be most charitably described as shortsighted.

I suspect most people are up-voting this story because of the link-bait title.

The author's blog posts don't really give much in the way of a substantial explanation of what's going on here. The impression I get is similar to other comments here: he comes off as raving and kind of irrational? He's mad about something on Wikipedia and he says he's been blocked, but then doesn't say why?

If you're interested in actually figuring out what's going on, it's worthwhile to read the actual page, which goes into a lot of detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

As far as I can tell, none of the journalists who wrote stories about this read that page, and none of them talked to any of the members of the Wikipedia ArbCom committee. Seriously. Check out Wikipedia ArbCom member Molly White's twitter over here:

https://twitter.com/molly0x57

and https://twitter.com/molly0x57/status/558687811298000896

She's pretty angry about the press' interpretation of the events here, wherein many of the articles basically flat-out said that "feminists have been carte-blanche blocked from Wikipedia!" The press loves to feed off controversy on Wikipedia, and also loves to not do their homework.

That said, Wikipedia does have an editor gender gap, but I'm not sure there's a lot that can be said based on these blog posts here.

Yeah, I'm familiar with GamerGate (it is currently my favorite internet drama), and I have trouble figuring out what Bernstein is talking about.

I quit Wikipedia many years ago when I recognized that opinion-pushers willing to dedicate way more time that I had could dominate articles.

That's really all it takes. Opinion-pushers can work completely within the rules of Wikipedia, and if they collectively have more time to dedicate to pushing their opinion than their opponents, they can use the Wikipedia process to push their view to the exclusion of others.

Arbitration and referendums are often ineffective against this; especially when long, long threads with lots of technical details, citations and counter-citations are involved, and when the arbitrators or referendum participants are themselves biased.

Most people just don't have the time or interest to read through long arguments. So arbitrarors and voters often make decisions with scant knowledge of what they're deciding on, or do so with a foregone conclusion in mind and without consideration of the evidence.

Frankly, I'm surprised that Wikipedia works as well as it does, and I still find it useful. But I just don't have the time or energy to endlessly fight off all the opinion pushers. As a consequence, I try to take what I read on Wikipedia with a big grain of salt.

Which sucks because the people that have the most time are those that are paid for their time. So that means that moneyed interests can push their messages via Wikipedia. And it will only get worse as more marketers realize this. In other words, Wikipedia is like every other medium out there. The reason Wikipedia works as well as it does is the same reason Google Search works as well as it does, for topics where there is no money it does a fair job.

A gender gaps exists on Wikipedia, and the community has been consciously working to address that for several years.

Encouraging contributions from females has probably been the Wikimedia Foundation's largest policy effort. Increasing Wikipedia's coverage of notable women is a common theme in edit-a-thons, events where Wikipedians get together at a library or cafe and edit Wikipedia together for a few hours. There is more to do, but these are effective and useful efforts.

I am not familiar enough with the editorial conflicts surrounding Gamergate to make an informed comment on Mark's post, but thought I would offer some broader context.

I agree that Wikipedia is dead - because instead of encouraging contribution, it's become a place dead-set on enforcing endless rules specifically to prevent people contributing.

I run my own public wiki about a niche topic, and one of the hardest parts is convincing potential new contributors that their contributions will be welcomed and they won't be lynched for doing the "wrong" thing. Everyone says: "I know how wikis work - they're a bureaucratic nightmare". I have to continually tell people our wiki is nothing like wikipedia, other than the "wiki" part.

I originally thought that building my wiki on the same software as wikipedia would add credibility, when in hindsight it's done the exact opposite.

StackOverflow has a (sightly?) different bureaucratic structure that I can't see or evaluate for fairness, but I still make the occasional anonymous contribution. I know from past experience with Wikipedia and others, that I'll eventually look up a few of those contributions and see how they fared. _Based on too little data_ I'll decide whether it's worth contributing in the future.

(I'm not going to make an account, there's no point in arguing that I should, and the same is true for the majority of potential contributors.)

Statistical information about edits, reverts, accounts and subjects, etc... could be a way forward. Published and standardized stats built-in to the Wikimedia software could let visitors peek into the culture and bureaucracy of a wiki. Lone operators like yourself, could also see who's contributing and who's trolling.

It's worth noting that the lady who was the center of the gamergate thing:

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoe_Quinn

Her wikipedia entry, which would probably not exist if not for gamergame, doesn't mention anything about the details of her ex's blog post, who her ex is, what she was accused of, or anything that could be viewed negatively about her. Given all of this, I would say that wikipedia is capable of handling these situations delicately and Mark is a bit hyperbolic by saying wikipedia is incapable of doing this.

It should be noted that the link is to a supplemental, providing running updates on the response to Mark's series of articles:

Infamous http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Infamous.html Thoughtless http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Thoughtless.html Careless http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Careless.html

As such, it will be hard to read, appearing like a rant when taken on its own. A better place to start will be with the above articles, which provide context for the Reckless post.

Why is it that the more I read about "Gamergate," the more I think it might be the long sought after anesthetic that can put anyone into a deep sleep with virtually zero risk?

Watch out---patient responses will be bimodally distributed. It induces a catatonic state in the vast majority of people, but it's an amphetamine-like stimulant to a tiny minority of partisans.

It's boring stuff when you sit and listen to the reasonable people, both sides which have completely valid points which all should be taken care of ("pro-gg" caring about ethics in journalism, "anti-gg" caring about mysoginy and sexism in games).

If you follow from that side, then you see that the entire ordeal is two sides that have valid points and that aren't inherently conflicting.

The "conflict" is a self-feeding circle of hatred on disgusting platforms such as twitter which only serve to point the finger. "Look at what those mysoginistic arseholes are saying" and "Look at what those unethical cockroaches are printing", more or less.

I spent five minutes reading through the feed of some gg-related (pro or against, doesn't f-ing matter at this point) "moderator". I got deeply affected. Way, way too much. The guy was fighting the "conflict" and not doing either side any favour. I got physically ill and wanted to cry.

The worst of the worst on the internet usually doesn't affect me, but this did, maybe because it showed me that sometimes, humanity is pretty damn hopeless.

Thanks a lot, Twitter, for enabling such senseless hatred to develop and literally destroy a large part of the gaming community. To enable the worst in people and harass people, I must stress, on both sides of the pointless conflict. An absolute waste.

I can only recommend people to stay the hell away from the entire subject and ignore it. If you care about ethics in game journalism, you should stay the hell away from gamergate. And if you want to improve the situation regarding women/feminism in games, being "anti-gg" won't help your cause. At this point, it's just a hopeless bunch of people arguing on twitter over the argument itself, rather than the actual talking points.

If "pro-gg" cares about ethics in journalism, doesn't that mean that "anti-gg" denies that journalism has poor ethics? What does mysoginy and sexism have to do with ethics in video games?

You're starting to understand why this conflict is pointless.

Disclaimer: I work for Curse, a gaming media company which has had no involvement in the subject. What follows is obviously my own opinion and recollection of events, not of my company.

TLDR: The conflict has its roots in conflicts of interest centering around a certain female indie game developer who had a relationship with a journalist at Kotaku. From there, the debate split between reasonable people talking about journalistic ethics and ... less reasonable people having disgusting reactions like you'd get in any heated debate on the internet (especially in a fairly younger demographic).

Several gaming news sites involved in the accusations started focusing on the mysoginy part in order to save face and the original issue of journalistic ethics was replaced by a debate on sexism in video games, the lack of female characters etc etc (a debate which, by the way, we regularly have in the gaming community).

So no, anti-gg doesn't specifically care about journalism ethics. There is a massive misunderstanding in what "gamergate" actually is and if only this pathetic debate moved to a platform which ACTUALLY ALLOWS DISCUSSION FFS, it'd fairly quickly be cleared up with the noise filtered out. This is why I recommend those who actually care about the actual issues to distance themselves from this disaster.

The anti-GG side claims that no reasonable person would expect journalism about video games to be ethical or free of corruption. Therefore, the "true" purpose of GamerGate must be something more sinister.

On misogyny:

1. Many of the gaming journalists GamerGate have specifically called out as unethical (Nathan Grayson, Ian Miles Cheong, Shanley Kane, Arthur Chu) are public advocates of identity feminism.

2. Gamer culture, in general, leans more toward equality feminism. Many of the gamer bloggers doing the calling out (Georgina Young, Jennie Bharaj, Angela Night) are public advocates of equality feminism. Christina Hoff Sommers, the founder of equity feminism (a related branch), has issued several pro-gamer videos.

3. Identity feminists consider equality feminism and equity feminism to be reactionary, misogynist, anti-feminist movements.

With these factors combined, you get a category 5 internet shitstorm. Wealthy white men are writing newspaper articles denouncing women as misogynists, because those women wrote blog posts calling out the journalists as corrupt.

Thanks for this - I've never heard about the different "branches" of feminism before, it's going to be an interesting read!

Edit: actually, could you help me get any more info (or the definition) on "identity feminism" and the difference between it and "equality feminism"?

The wiki article is a reasonable starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_and_gender_feminism

Boring to read about SWAT teams getting sent to people's homes, because they're family of an outspoken woman?

About weird-ass "gamers" whose lives are so devoid of meaning that they become psychopaths?

Wow.

You're doing exactly what I spoke against in my post above. You're singling out one side and pointing the finger yelling "bad people! bad!".

Do you really think the argument is "bad people" vs. "good people"? That the pro-gg side's argument is "let's be psychopaths! being a psychopath is fun!"?

Think for a moment. Please. I looked at your other posts, you seem like a smart and completely reasonable person. Why didn't it occur to you that whatever is happening on twitter is foreign to the actual talking points?

And why didn't it occur to you that both "sides" are full of raging psychopaths who have done the worst of the worst? How can your mere association and sympathy with one of the sides make you so blind to its own actions?

Maybe we're here seeing why the two-party american political system is such a clusterfuck.

Edit: Jesus christ the downvotes. "Screw anyone who tries to bring sanity to this debate! I want my chaos back!". You're better than that, HN.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Balance_fallacy

There's probably a fallacy where the person trying to retort just sends a link to an external article supposed to "inform", thereby avoiding the effort of thinking through an actual point.

... but if I linked you such an article, that'd be a bit of a catch-22.

So, what's the point you're trying to make? Do you even have one? Or did you, too, pick a side and decide they were more right than the other, blindly ignoring the three posts I've written about it?

And will you actually try to answer, or are you, too, going to instead whine on twitter that "{pro,anti}-gg people are being mean again!"?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/la5/neoreactionaries_why_are_you_neo...

So Mr. Gerard, how's that hobby of attacking intelligent and fair minded people for engaging in civil discussion going?

[Above link gives context on David Gerard's standards of discourse.]

Ha, I didn't even realize it was that David Gerard; it's been years since I paid any attention to that name.

It's sad to see people don't evolve.

'Cause you're apathetic, presumably. We all get tired of caring sometimes.

The real question is why you feel compelled to brag about it, instead of just closing the tab and reading something that suits you.

>The infamous draft decision of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) on Gamergate is worse than a crime.

Yeah, it's not good writing.

Wikipedia has always had problems with vandalism, though it has always mostly been adept to fighting it. There's been infamous high-profile cases such as John Seigenthaler being implied in JFK and RFK's assassinations, Bertrand Meyer (of Eiffel fame) having his death faked, Willy on Wheels using automated scripts to conduct mass article redirections and other shenanigans, a made up Polish historical figure receiving mainstream coverage, and other examples.

I don't see why some instances of vandalism that are puerile but directed towards certain women imply a downfall of Wikipedia just like that, especially when the author is so disjointed and unable to provide concrete data. This analysis seems awfully selective.

The problem, as detailed quite extensively in the other articles in the series, is that this isn't simply vandalism.

It's calculated and organized action, explicitly aimed at manipulating Wiki's hopelessly bureaucratic and clueless system. This isn't just some dork defacing a page, it's a whole virtual platoon of really hateful people playing at false good faith just long enough to keep their libels active almost perpetually, while tarring anyone who actually questions them as obstructionist.

The worst thing is, I'm ultimately not at all surprised. I stopped even attempting to edit anything on Wiki almost a decade ago, because the system was as hopelessly broken then as it is now. The site is, ultimately, run by a lot of amateur bureaucrats who're more interested in the fantasy than the reality of the system they've concocted. Yes, it mostly works, but it's more or less constructed to make actual good faith efforts to correct the site an uphill battle for anything but trivialities, while making it easy for local tribalism and policy to be used as a tool for nutjobs and fantasists to keep their version of 'wikiality' on the front page of Google for another day.

An irony here is that some of the WP policies most hated among outsiders --- particularly in the nerd community --- stem from one of its oldest principles, WP:BLP, or "Biographies Of Living Persons". BLP is all about preventing stuff like MRA trolling or bogus accusations against Seigenthaler. It's also one of the major reasons for "deletionism".

Wikipedia is causing controversy? Glad to hear it's still working.

On a more serious note, "Wikipedia is wrong" and "Wikipedia is doomed" really need to be separated. These clickbait headlines are getting excessively tiring, particularly if anyone is taking them at face value. A solid attempt at collecting the whole sum of human knowledge will obviously have issues given the nature of how we operate.

However, claiming some >current and developing< topic being misrepresented spells the doom of the best attempt at a concise and well-indexed source on human history, the development of our species, and the thoughts/ideals that our civilization stands on is a bit much.

Perspective, please.

I think the author is taking the totally wrong action. If he wants Wikipedia to change, he should become MORE involved, not less. Like it or not Wikipedia is considered an authority and is here to stay. As terrible as the instances may be, the vast majority of people are not going to boycot Wikipedia for a few occurrences of misogyny.

How can he become more involved, if he's been banned from contributing to the site in the first place?

On top of that - GamerGate itself has already made it through to mainstream media. All that's needed in this scenario is for some BBC/Sky/CNN/Fox/... news reporter to pick up on the story, and before you know it, "Wikipedia promoting harassment of women in technology" hits every front page in the western world.

I believe he's only been temporarily blocked, but he doesn't say why (which doesn't lead much credence to his argument, IMO)

Wikipedia is DMOZ. It suffers some of the same problems the DMOZ group suffered, no coincidence.

It will be replaced in spirit by dramatically more capable 'soft AI' (I know, I hate that term too) systems capable of answering most any question. That is, Google is coming.

Until that happens, Wikipedia will reign supreme at what it does.

Google's AI looks up most non-commercial topics on Wikipedia.

I have not heard of "GamerGate". While reading the first half of the article, I thought it was intended to sound ironic. I had a hard time to find out what side he is on and what the actual point is.

When you criticize an institution the size of Wikipedia over one aspect of their culture and illustrate this through some fight of teenage boys vs feminists, then conclude that the institution is therefor doomed and go on to encourage people to tweet that they are not donating to it anymore, you risk to sound very childish. Especially when the article is written that bad.

On the other hand, I do not know him so this could also be a fantastically executed troll.

For those having a hard time with the site color(s):

  (document.getElementById("content")).style.backgroundColor = "black";

Also consider dragging one of these to your bookmark bar: https://readability.com/bookmarklets

My eyes!!

It seems the OP is upset about the outcome but can provide no arguments whatsoever about why it's wrongful. The arbitration pages are viewable by everyone, you can take a look at the evidence posted there and make up your own mind.

Wikipedia has shown itself to be firmly in the SJW/Quinn/Sarkeesian/Wu camp. So I'm not sure what he is upset about.

off topic, but my god - that is a terrible background/font color combination. I couldn't read the article and my eyes are still adjusting.

Just to go against the no-doubt-incoming influx of 'what's with the colours?!', I have absolutely zero problems with reading the text on this site.

Complaining about this sort of thing is ridiculous

I understand the annoyance. But surely coming from a site full of power users, people can just change the CSS, or copy/paste the text elsewhere.

What gets me, is that any site that pops up on the front page here that isn't black-text-on-white-or-light-grey-background gets hammered because of the sensitivities of those commenting.

This, despite the fact that the text on the vast majority of these sites is perfectly legible.

You are right, though - select-all+copy+paste is trivial.

... and send-to-pocket is even easier

No one has yet complained about the text colours.

> This, despite the fact that the text on the vast majority of these sites is perfectly legible.

To you. To other people they're not perfectly legible, they're unreadable. Why deliberately chose to exclude people?

There are two top-level comments complaining about the colors that were posted about 10 minutes before you posted this.

Yeah, I don't see why it's so bad to point out that the site is completely illegible. Reminds me a bit of Wired magazine circa 1997.

It's fine to point out that the colors are troublesome. It's bad to complain about how you can't read it and your eyes still hurt, as if there's no way to avoid it.

And apparently not only do people feel a need to complain about something they can trivially fix themselves, but they also need to downvote people who point out that they can fix it themselves. Guys: how about taking some responsibility for yourselves? If you have a problem that you can easily fix, then you don't actually have a problem.

I'm wondering if there's some kind of physiological thing happening here, because to me it's as legible as anything I've read. Maybe some degree of colorblindness brings the red and yellow closer together? I dunno.

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