The Decline of Wikipedia (2013)
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
It's not as impactful as physical mass vandalism, such as what occurred in the world's great revolutions, but that makes the job of dealing with it all the more unrewarding and annoying. I can imagine it would wear me down. It would be interesting to attempt a formal quantification of vandalism received by different projects susceptible to it. I'd be willing to bet that Wikipedia has been more targeted than anything else out there, and by a wide margin.
It's good to point out the flaws in the WP's inner workings, but you have to take a step back and realize the task of keeping the whole thing working is quite difficult (I might even have said "impossible" but somehow they're doing it.)
Simple vandalism is more or less under control. Areas of high controversy (abortion, Israel/Palestine issues) are a huge headache, and much of Wikipedia's bureaucracy spends time dealing with those issues. In between those extremes are attempts to use Wikipedia as a promotional medium.
Wikipedia doesn't allow advertising. A lot of people don't get that. I sometimes take on tasks from the Wikipedia conflict of interest noticeboard. This is usually someone trying to promote their band/DJ/company/product, or themself. Most of those are routine, but sometimes it gets out of hand.
There are at least three wealthy convicted criminals who have PR people trying to erase, or at least gloss over, their history on Wikipedia. There's a company with a sketchy financial product that set up a massive effort to delete their regulatory and legal problems from Wikipedia. There are several companies which don't like prominent mentions of their product recalls. There are many consumer product companies who try to push their marketing pitch onto Wikipedia, and don't like that their pitch is turned into a cold discussion of their history, mergers, finances, and problems.
Without the Wikipedia bureaucracy to push back against that tide of paid promotion, Wikipedia would look like the happy news world of ads and PR Newswire.
> When asked to identify Wikipedia’s real problem, Moran cites the bureaucratic culture that has formed around the rules and guidelines on contributing, which have become labyrinthine over the years. The page explaining a policy called Neutral Point of View, one of “five pillars” fundamental to Wikipedia, is almost 5,000 words long. “That is the real barrier: policy creep,” he says.
I've said this before but WP has easily half a million words on en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus. Here's a search (with handy word counts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...
> Their version reads: “The encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.”
They should probably have "and has the stamina to out-last the people incorrectly reverting good edits for spurious reasons" in there somewhere.
This has been the source of endless debates that haven't done anything to change the position of the senior contributors in control. So we have an absurd situation where a non-trivial amount of Spanish toponyms are more accurate in the English Wikipedia than in the Spanish one.
In the global context, this is probably a small issue. And yet I wonder how many people are put off contributing when they perceive that a small in-group is able to push their opinion like this.
Why did you include this? It seems out of place, unless you're saying it's the heavy skew of males that's causing the beurocracy?
I edited the quote.
HN has easily several million words on Apple. Here's a search https://hn.algolia.com/?query=apple&sort=byPopularity&prefix...
that doesn't mean that it is impossible for anyone to know anything about the culture and the policies on HN.
Posting something on WP using the wrong sort of dash might have your changes reverted and hours of work tossed in the garbage followed by weeks of fighting with self-righteous poorly socialized neck beards who bury you in hopeless bureaucracy on the off-chance that your work will be reinstated. All solved much more easily if the WP editor simply changes the dash like they wanted and everybody moved on with their life.
Once you've ploughed through all that can you transfer your new dash-knowledge to other articles? No, that other article will have its own thousands-of-words long discussion about the correct dash to use.
That's bad enough, you can probably ignore dash types and let other people sort it out.
But it's a great example of how Wikipedia fails. Any discussion is won by the person who has the time to win.
Management wisdom of the crowds.
If you ignore most of the pedantic self-important editors/trolls on WP, it's actually a great experience to contribute. I write a lot of articles on Canadian/British law and history, and the WPProjects are very supportive and generally polite. Otherwise, I don't really need to interact with anybody. I simply enjoy contributing to the organization of human knowledge. Nearly a decade and thousands of edits (on various accounts for reasons of anonymity) later, I have yet to have a real negative experience that has affected me in one way or another.
I understand why Malvinas / Falklands is going to be tricky.
I don't expect to have to go to arbcom because I disagree with someone about - versus – versus —.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitrat...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_electio...
Voting requires 300 edits on a Wikipedia or other Wikimedia project ever and 20 in last six months.
We're years in on the issue and WP keeps asking like they don't have any idea what's wrong, even though likely millions of words have been bled on the topic. The only people who don't seem to understand it is WP themselves and the only conclusion one can reach is that they're doing it on purpose.
Complicating the fact is that the relationship between the Wikimedia foundation and Wikipedia is not like that of a conventional private company to a product they've built. The WMF intentionally delegates large parts of the governance of Wikipedia to the community and cannot autocratically come in and force change without community buy in.
This is a philosophical position that was established a long time ago and one which the WMF supports, even if it makes the process of change harder.
The issue or course is that they don't publicly acknowledge the issue. They'll produce hundreds of pages of reports on the issue and end it with a "what could the problem be?" with shoulders shrugged.
Acknowledging the problem is the first step towards finding the solution.
Here's me almost 1500 days ago (4 YEARS!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598491
Here's the recent thing that was going on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168
Here's an article on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272466
And another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638
This discussion goes back to 2011 at least, and WP just can't seem to admit that there's a problem.
It's absolutely the right place to look if you want to know how to 'jump the shark'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gamergate_controversy
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@Gamaliel: What new accounts? What does your closing and hiding of this thread have to do with new accounts editing the article? The thread had nothing to do with new accounts editing the article or not editing it. We were talking about how people respond to reader feedback on the talk page, not editing the article. What kind of grounds for closing and hiding a thread is this? As the grounds given for closing and hiding this thread make no sense whatsoever, I will open it again after waiting an appropriate amount of time. Chrisrus (talk) 20:40, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
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Chrisrus again unilaterally declares that “the grounds given for closing and hiding this thread make no sense.” They make sense to the rest of us. This is simply disruptive editing. Will someone please take the appropriate steps already? Thanks! MarkBernstein (talk) 21:23, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
It's kind of like when you have a jury trial, but anyone and everyone can get on the jury at any point, disguising themselves as anyone they are or are not, and there's no limit on how many jurors there should be.
I've remained neutral to Gamergate as much as possible, but kept myself informed. One of its core problems is that it kept the name "gamergate" for a lot of similar-but-unrelated issues which makes it encompass a lot more than is humanly digestable by anyone looking it up for the first time.
People get kind of crazy when they hear that "women are being attacked", and never really want to hear the full story.
The following blog post is one of the most descriptive of the actual issues and comes from someone who was on the side "against" gamergate. I recommend it:
http://geekswithwives.com/experiencing-gamergate-from-all-si...
Edit: As an aside... while I'm neutral, as a gamer and someone who has worked on the sides of the games industry for the past decade, I can't help but feel targeted whenever someone blames "gamergate, and by definition gamers" for whatever B.S. they endured from some random twitter troll under a hashtag anyone can use at any time they feel like.
Definition of jumping the shark: A late episode of the TV program Happy Days involved a major character jumping over a shark on a pair of water skis. He had done previous stunts involving jumping over things on a motorcycle. Basically the writers ran out of ideas and resorted to things like this to keep viewers interested (not altogether successfully). So now we have the term "jumping the shark" to indicate a decline in quality.
edited to change jet ski to water skis
Also, it wasn't just a major character, it was The Fonz.
The Fonz was originally a minor character, but he was so popular with fans that he became a main character, and is the most memorable character on the show.
My favorite "Jump The Shark" actor is Ted McGinley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_McGinley
He's joined the cast of several once-popular shows as they were on the decline.
A: "Games journalism is being corrupted by woman-centered bias. Here's the damning proof: This guy says his ex-girlfriend repeatedly traded sex for positive reviews of her game."
B: "That is provably untrue."
A: "Yes, okay, that was a lie. Why are you so hung up on that when the real issue is that women are ruining games journalism?"
Which I found sexist, because those people got pampered by the game publishers all the time and no one cared...
> Which I found sexist
Huh?
I don't think I saw a focus on how "those girls were sleeping to the top" over the more general issue of "look at how those guys would trade sex for undisclosed favours".
I want to be perfectly clear, though, that neither of those things ever happened. The story that various writers accepted sex from Zoe Quinn in exchange for good reviews was the founding event of the Gamergate movement, and it is 100% false.
Fact is, I can tell you first hand that the industry I'm in is massively corrupt. I'm glad some people are casting a light on it. Devs, journalists, indies, companies, it's rotten all over. Full of people abused for working their "dream job", full of undisclosed deals to promote such and such game (makes sense when your livelyhood literally depends on it)... and full of seriously low quality wannabe-journalism to top it all.
I love what I do, but god damn do I hate the environment I do it in.
As a matter of fact!
Eron Gjoni accused Quinn of sleeping with 5 guys, whom he named. (http://gamergate.wikia.com/wiki/5_guys) Four of these guys were game designers, not journalists. Nathan Grayson was the only journalist among them, and he mentioned Quinn and her game exactly twice, in passing in larger articles--one for Rock Paper Shotgun in January, one for Kotaku in March. (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-quest-v..., http://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-time...) Gjoni himself says that Grayson and Quinn didn't sleep together until April at least. (http://geekparty.com/eron-gjoni-clarifies-the-zoe-quinn-nath...)
So, yes, the idea that Quinn traded sex for reviews is provably, definitively a lie, and all of this information has been publicly available for around nine months.
> but either way, does it matter?
Yes, the truth matters, especially when lies are being used to harass someone.
This is exactly what I was talking about in my original snarkpost. You're absolutely right that the gaming press is full of corruption, and has been for as long as there's been a gaming press, but gamers in general have never given two shits. Remember when Jeff Gerstmann got fired from GameSpot for giving Kane & Lynch a 6/10, and the bloggers tutted over it for a week, and then everybody forgot? It wasn't half as controversial as, say, that time the CODBLOPS tutorial level was too hand-holdy. Who cared if some guy lost his job? The games kept coming, and that was all that mattered.
But when a woman is accused (falsely) of using sex to boost sales of her (free) indie game, oh ho ho, now it's time for a fucking movement. THIS INJUSTICE SHALL NOT STAND.
And when you show these guys incontrovertible evidence that the accusation against Quinn was a lie, then they immediately backpedal and say it was never really about Quinn, and go right back to raging about Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu and ignoring guys like Gerstmann.
There are people who've aligned themselves with Gamergate who actually care about ethics in game journalism, and it's a damn shame, because Gamergate is rooted in lies. If you really want to do something about corruption, don't do it while riding the coattails of a "movement" that was only ever a wildly-successful troll.
> There are people who've aligned themselves with Gamergate who actually care about ethics in game journalism, and it's a damn shame, because Gamergate is rooted in lies. If you really want to do something about corruption, don't do it while riding the coattails of a "movement" that was only ever a wildly-successful troll.
If you look in my post history, you'll find that I said exactly this a few months back. I'm convinced that Gamergate's #1 problem is how the name is reused for everything and based on a hashtag (which makes it easy to abuse as a "dialing my personal army" kind of thing). Twitter doesn't allow for intelligent discourse anyway, and encourages this kind of "us vs. them" mentality. (Maybe you're familiar with CGPGrey's video on it, if not, I very highly recommend it: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry)
The tipping point that boosted GG's popularity wasn't specifically the Quinn scandal but the onslaught of "gamers are dead" article, which was followed by more and more revelations (and I'm sure a fair share of them were false). The Quinn scandal was one starting point, but it could have been anything else.
But does it matter what started a movement, really? Because right now, the controversy's is fueled by the people who stand to gain the most from the attention. Quinn is the least guilty of it, but if you look close enough, you'll find that the harrassment claims are really just claims. Just the other day, one of those recurring names was claiming she had to "flee to Europe because of the threats", and then when few-months older tweets surfaced about a "planned vacation to Europe" surfaced, the narrative changed. (Again, I apologise for no sources but I dislike giving those people attention - my email is accessible from my profile if you want to continue in private).
I'm sure they get their fair share of death threats but... don't be on twitter then? It's not just a horrible medium for discussion, it really encourages this behaviour. Anyone mildly popular and controversial gets death threats. Just like anyone mildly rich will find people asking for money.
I try to remain neutral, as I said. But it's hard to feel sympathy for those people. The only thing that can be done about corruption is that people find out and talk about it, and that won't happen without momentum. GG just happens to have the momentum.
Thanks for trying though.
Try http://deepfreeze.it - complete with citations for pretty mcuh everything.
So.. why?
b) New accounts cannot downvote anybody. By operating here with an alt account instead of my main account, I give up my ability to downvote.
Given A and B, your entire premise is totally messed up.
c) It's sad that you've resorted twice to the "it's sad" shtick. The comment was a non-aggressive, good faith one. How about you not take it as an attack? How about you take it as a genuine request? How about you consider following through with the request on that token?
Do better than that response, too.
Also, please spare us the Tumblr level "do better," unless of course you "can't even."
As for c... "Do better", what? "Do better" is not a valid comment. This is a valid comment, your previous one was not.
Do you want me to explain what I said in further details? I thought it was self-explanatory. PhasmaFelis has decided to take an issue which is clearly controversial to even members not involved and "nutshell" it extremely disrespectuously.
Much as it's petty twitter wars for some, it's also extremely serious issues for others. Jobs can be lost. Jobs have been lost. Some because of ethical concerns, corruption being unveiled etc. Some other jobs have been lost because random idiots decided to false-flag people to their companies until they got fired. Some have been lost because of out-of-context, selective quoting (hey, remember the PyCon forking drama? Yes, like that).
So yes, it's sad that someone who is probably not involved further than the petty twitter wars would choose to either adopt such a dismissive and diminishing attitude, or would choose to lie to further whatever cause he may have had in mind.
Edit: As for actual downvotes, there's some serious downvoting on actual discussion going on in this entire sub-thread. That, too, is sad.