Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software
17 March 2010 in UncategorizedThis isn’t a typical Ubuntard post, but I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!
To preface, this post covers the recent controversy over the attempted deletion of dwm, among other things. The first few paragraphs are an introduction to Wikipedia’s environment and policies for those unfamiliar with it. If you do happen to be familiar, the “mad as hell” portion starts about two paragraphs above the image.
It’s an ambitious and commendable goal, to make a free encyclopedia based on the contributions of millions. However, with large size comes logistical issues that must be dealt with. Wikipedia’s solution to this was to create dozens of policies and guidelines, which can be seen here. Now, considering who writes Wikipedia, some may see that as a bad thing… And they’d be right.
Casual contributors would rather contribute their knowledge than spend hours reading the exhaustive list of policies and guidelines. Wikipedia purports to understand this, and exhorts that new users should be able to contribute effectively without reading the rules, even having a policy titled “Ignore all rules”, but it’s not what it seems. While casual editors do contribute new content, veteran editors rarely do. They gleefully list their staggering edit counts on their profile pages, but those edits aren’t content. They’re minor changes to syntax, grammar, phrasing, and most importantly, curt reversions of the work of others.
One does not succeed at Wikipedia by adding content. One succeeds by reverting un-sourced edits, and nominating pages for deletion. They even have a group for this, the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians, who, in their utter lack of logic, seem convinced that adding content to Wikipedia dilutes it. This is despite the fact that the other side has realized that Wikipedia is not paper and thus is not constrained to the limits of a paper encyclopedia. Of course, the Association of Deletionist Imbeciles have their little size breakdown, which implies it’s difficult to find what you want when more content exists. Clearly, these people have not heard of search algorithms.
The key is this: Adding content is hard. To comply with Wikipedia’s bevy of policies, a new article must initially have some substance, else it may fall into the thirty or forty criteria for speedy deletion. To avoid being nominated for a traditional deletion, it must also cite a number of reliable, verifiable sources, else the Wikipedia deletionists will slap their favourite tags on it, which proudly state at the top of the article that it may not be suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia and may later be deleted. On one side of the fence, you have the content creators.They must be passionate enough to write about something, spend time searching for sources, and do all this in a timely manner, else the deletionists will nominate the articles for deletion. The deletionists have it easy. They have an encyclopedic knowledge of Wikipedia’s many policies (Fitting, isn’t it?) and largely exist to slap notability tags on articles and later nominate them for deletion, repeatedly quoting policy so that it’s unnecessary for them to actually engage their brains at any point.
One of Wikipedia’s favourite guidelines is the one on canvassing. You see, if an article you’re interested comes up for deletion, it’s not permissible to contact outside sources that may know more about the topic, because they are likely biased. Canvassing will often get you a severe warning, or banned. Linus’s law states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” On the other hand, Wikipedia’s collective belief is that bringing new people with new perspective to something is a heinous offence… After all, it might upset their precious status quo.
In fact, their canvassing guidelines were instrumental in derailing a discussion about perhaps improving Wikipedia policies.
The catalyst for this article was the furor generated when dwm was placed up for deletion. People got mad, it hit Reddit and snowballed from there. Of course, Wikipedia does not like outside influence. It could influence the status quo, so they banned the user responsible for much of the canvassing. They also banned many of the people who came to dwm’s defense and then closed the deletion “debate” and restarted it because they felt it had been unduly influenced by outsiders. The horror! The closure, of course, did not quell the anti-deletionist sentiments, so in the second quasi-debate, the pseudo-intellectuals again made their case for deleting a prominent window manager, throwing various policies at any who opposed them. Finally, it was closed as “No consensus”. A day after that, it was listed in deletion review, hoping to overturn the closure so the article can be deleted. The deletionists almost always win. Wikipedia’s policies make it far easier to exclude something than to include it, and the deletionists are established users. When they come out in droves? That’s a typical deletion “debate”. When supporters of the article come out, they are branded “meat puppets” or “sock puppets” and banned.
This is what happens when you try to combat deletionism.
The dwm controversy is dying down. Users have been banned so they cannot argue against the deletionists, and by prolonging the process it has faded from the spotlight. Their end goal of deletion grows closer as public awareness dies, but this should not be allowed to be swept under the rug.
This is where the hammer falls. I’m a free software advocate and the attack on free software by deletionists appears to be far from over. Wikipedia’s precious source reliability flies in the face of common sense, and they’re bent on maintaining the status quo. It’s worth noting that common sense is relegated to a section of an informal essay at Wikipedia, and is swiftly followed by a paragraph titled “There is no common sense”.
To quote one particularly brazen imbecile:
If you keep closing and restarting the discussion, the canvassing will never stop. Let it run its seven days, let them complain because they refuse to actually provide a secondary source, close based on actual policy not votes, let the slightly more sophisticated complain to WP:DRV and lose there, and then finally, let the craziest whiners start vandalizing and get blocked. Then some blogs will be out ranting about the horrors of wikipedia because their random obscure thing isn’t kept here. It’s the normal pattern and what can be expected.
There you have it. Combined with many of the comments here, it’s obvious there’s continued bad faith. Ubuntard is, of course, the blog ranting about the horrors of Wikipedia. Also critical is the following quote:
I’ve closed Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dwm (2nd nomination) as a temporary measure because of renewed off-site discussion about it, this time on reddit, Y Combinator, FriendFeed (and probably a few more places). Everything that could be said about that topic has been said. If an admin wants to make a different decision, he can do so based on that AfD and the previous one, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dwm, which was closed under similar circumstances just before the 2nd one opened. Together these have about 125Kb already. There’s no point in having another insanely long repetitive discussion like Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/JWASM (175Kb).
Yet again, it’s very clear that Wikipedia’s deletionists are not interested in actually determining the notability of something up for deletion, they simply want it to be uncontroversially removed so that their corrupted vision of Wikipedia is brought to fruition.
Sadly, dwm is not the only one suffering here. It’s fairly prominent and may well survive this final deletion review. QVWM and Evilwm were not so lucky. Another example of the continued bad faith on the part of Wikipedia’s deletionists is this discussion about Habrahabr.ru. The justification for bringing this up was that it is used numerous times as a source on free software articles. In order to erode their already-questionable Wikipedia notability, it was necessary to remove this source. So it was done, and now there’s arguably one less source that can be used against the deletionists.
It may not be that all deletionists strive to be pseudo-intellectual bureaucrats. They may simply lack the will or the ability to use common sense, and instead rely purely on their precious policies. The ability to use policy to ban swaths of passionate users who attempt to support software with logically-valid yet Wikipedia-policy-violating arguments should not exist. Nor should the ability to instantly declare a source unreliable because it’s not a professional publication. If you were to write an article about a lesser-known Linux kernel subsystem and cite the personal blog of one of its developers, it would be deleted. You see, the blog is self-published, which casts strong doubt on it. The only way to save it is to have the author be a “recognized expert”. It would appear that our friend the developer is just one of the hundreds of relatively-unknown kernel hackers, and has not authored any scientific papers. So he’s unreliable. Now the article is left with no reliable sources, so it’s not notable or verifiable. Deleted.
The fact that such a situation can occur even hypothetically is terrible. It’s an obvious flaw in the sourcing and notability policies, but the deletionists love it. They’re lazy. They don’t want to actually think. They want to simply slap a “Delete: Fails WP:V, WP:N” on and be done with it.
Wikipedia’s policies are archaic and ill-conceived. Commercial video games, other software, books, movies, albums? They’re all notable, most of the time. All of those categories have many professional publications catering solely to them. Outside of sycophantic journalists who flip-flop between declaring it to be the year of Linux on the desktop and parroting Microsoft FUD, the free software community has little professional coverage. You’ve got lwn.net, Heise Online, Linux Journal and a handful of others. There’s always the well-known O’Reilly books, as well. Most of these primarily cover things that are already prominent, because no advertiser will pay for ad space in a magazine that deals solely in niche window managers and Vim scripts.
The free software community is fairly self-contained. Outside of it, people think free software means freeware, and question whether something that’s free of cost can ever be as good as something they paid $100 for. Thus, the majority of good coverage comes from within, from the enthusiastic developers of software like Jono Bacon. Of course, no matter how active your blog, forum, mailing list or IRC channel is, that doesn’t confer notability. Indeed, even when there’s a large outpouring of community support when a Wikipedia article is up for deletion, the most they do is attempt to disqualify all those people by repeating the words, not the purpose, of their precious policies and guidelines. If that fails, they opt to restart the debate multiple times until they’ve finally shaken loose, demoralized, beaten down and/or banned all those who oppose their will.
The entire reliability premise is flawed. Even in the good old days of print journalism where magazines employed large editorial and fact-checking departments, false information was routinely printed. This is because journalists aren’t experts. By their very definition they are generalists in the extreme, and this is why the vast majority of scientific coverage in the mainstream media is garbage. They can’t understand the papers, they misinterpret the abstracts and in the process of dumbing things down further for their readers, get every detail wrong.
I’ll take an amateur blogging about his passion any day over a journalist dumbing down content for mass consumption. What has been brought up many, many times is that even if print journalism once was reliable, it is no longer. The advent of the Internet has killed many print publications, forced nearly all others to downsize substantially, and since many purely online publications rely solely on ad impressions and clicks, they’re really no better. The end result is that the average quality of amateur and professional journalism is converging. The latter lacks its past fact-checking and the former is ever growing to supplement the shortcomings of supposed professionals.
As I mentioned earlier, deletionists are lazy. Moving to a sane model of sourcing, wherein any source may be used provided it’s demonstrably accurate? That’s far more work than “Delete: Sources are hosted on blogspot.com, thus are unreliable.” You’d have to vet sources individually, and that requires using your brain. It’s easier to just disregard thousands of sources because of their domain name or because they lack corporate backing.
It’s worth noting that one of Wikipedia’s many informal suggestions regarding deletion nominations is that you should avoid commenting if “A nomination involves a topic with which you are unfamiliar.” Good luck finding that one exercised in practice.
Unless archaic policies are changed, Wikipedia will end up circling the drain. Utterly devoid of “non-mainstream” coverage, with topics solely consisting of what dying news empires opt to cover. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will have moved on to getting their news and information from social news aggregators like Reddit and Digg. It’s laughable that a site dedicated to sourcing does so in a substantially inferior manner to social news aggregators. On Wikipedia, you need only mention that a source is self-published to disqualify it in nearly all circumstances. On the other hand, if a false story shows up at a social news aggregator, what happens? People vote on it. The type of source does not matter. It can be the New York Times or something hosted on Freewebs. Regardless, the content will be vetted by the community, and given the large size of said community, there will be an expert there to provide insight.
As a side note, as with nearly all web properties, both Digg and Reddit have been nominated for deletion in past. Reddit was even tagged for speedy deletion for a short time in 2009.
The fact is that Wikipedia’s broken, and a substantial portion of its community doesn’t want it fixed.
The catalyst for this article was the furor generated when dwm was placed up for deletion. People got mad, it hit Reddit and snowballed from there. Of course, Wikipedia does not like outside influence. It could influence the status quo, so they banned the user responsible for much of the canvassing. They also banned many of the people who came to dwm’s defense and then closed the deletion “debate” and restarted it because they felt it had been unduly influenced by outsiders. The horror! The closure, of course, did not quell the anti-deletionist sentiments, so in the second quasi-debate, the pseudo-intellectuals again made their case for deleting a prominent window manager, throwing various policies at any who opposed them. Finally, it was closed as “No consensus”. A day after that, it was listed in deletion review, hoping to overturn the closure so the article can be deleted. The deletionists almost always win. Wikipedia’s policies make it far easier to exclude something than to include it, and the deletionists are established users. When they come out in droves? That’s a typical deletion “debate”. When supporters of the article come out, they are branded “meat puppets” or “sock puppets” and banned.
This is what happens when you try to combat deletionism.
The dwm controversy is dying down. Users have been banned so they cannot argue against the deletionists, and by prolonging the process it has faded from the spotlight. Their end goal of deletion grows closer as public awareness dies, but this should not be allowed to be swept under the rug.
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I’ve stopped contributing to wikipedia some time ago due to similar circumstances. notices (source) on false statements keep getting reverted based on the whims of a few with NO explanation provided as to why such action is taken is what finally drove me away.
publishing on my own site proved more efficient and far less stressful. and people actully get accurate information too.
Wikipedia makes me really sad with their attitude.
After all – what stops this encyclopedia of amassing articles on every and all topics known to mankind?
Bandwidth and HDD Space are plentiful and with the amount of money they get donated it shouldn’t really be a problem.
It’s really simple actually – if i don’t care about software X i most likely won’t see its Wikipedia article and therefore couldn’t really care less if 1 million or 100 million know software X or not.
So, may i ask, where’s the problem if something is notable or not?
You forgot about Awesome, it got deleted too.
Wikipedia is a JOKE. Its run by fascist pigs who make it up as they go along regardless of fact.
Jess
http://www.anon-vpn.net.tc
I agree that there should definitely be an article in Wikipedia about dwm, and I think the editors who participated in this review showed poor judgment, but I think it is unfair to malign deletionists just because you have had a bad brush with a few of them. I certainly understand why you would have a bad taste in your mouth after an experience with the lawyering twerps who appeared on that AfD, but I feel that this is the worst of Wikipedia and not necessarily typical of the project as a whole.
The deletion of bad articles is vital to keeping Wikipedia healthy; this is because Wikipedia’s insane Google juice makes it an attractive target for abuse by people with personal axes to grind. I have nominated several articles for deletion, mostly vanity articles, advertisements, and the original research of nutjobs who believe that AIDS is not caused by HIV. It’s not that Wikipedia doesn’t have the bandwidth and disk space to store all the articles it needs to; it’s that if the ratio of bad articles to good ones becomes sufficiently large, the project as a whole will lose a great deal of credibility. While I do not defend the bunker mentality displayed by Psychonaut, Pcap, and the others leading the proceedings, I do think a tendency towards skepticism is understandable given our experience with coordinated efforts by outside groups seeking to change the content of articles they find objectionable.
It’s clear that common sense gave way to procedure in this case, as unfortunately happens from time to time. But as you will surely admit, being a computer scientist, it is impossible to devise a workable procedure that will arrive at the right result in all cases. The reliable sources policy is an admittedly fallible attempt, but it has served the encyclopedia well. You write:
“As I mentioned earlier, deletionists are lazy. Moving to a sane model of sourcing, wherein any source may be used provided it’s demonstrably accurate?”
This is circular logic. If we could easily determine whether a source is “demonstrably accurate,” our sourcing policy would be very simple. But when opinions on a subject differ, and “accurate” is in the mind of the beholder, what does “demonstrably accurate” mean, if not that the information can be vouched for by a reliable source? There is absolutely a (critical) role for experts to play, but clearly there must be some restraint on the ability of the opinions of individual editors to influence content.
Perhaps you’re right that the current RS policy is getting long in the tooth, with the transformational change the media have undergone over the last few years. But to replace it would not be nearly so trivial as you suggest, nor the case half so clearcut.
Although everything “Mentifex” is automatically banned and deleted from the NewSpeak of Wikipedia elitists, I use http://code.google.com/p/mindforth/wiki/WikiPedia at the enlargement of the self-published AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence.
“The deletion of bad articles is vital to keeping Wikipedia healthy”
Maybe so, but the argument, as I understood it is that the deletionists have defined “bad” as “not unarguably good” and are proceeding on that basis. If wikipedia plays host to *any* group of extremists it will wither and die – yet it appears to have created conditions which favour a particular group of extremists above all others. I’m sure that they arrive at the party with the best of intentions – as you say, Wikipedia is vulnerable to spam attacks – but if that was their remit, they appear to be overreaching it. Their obsession with “the enemy” seems to have led them to *become* the enemy.
And it would be nice if Wikipedia’s community at large did something about it before its size is reduced to two dozen very short articles…
“Although everything “Mentifex” is automatically banned and deleted”
…yes, sweetie, that’s because you’ve been kooktrolling every forum, public space and discussion venue you could get your computer anywhere near for the last three decades.
Including, apparently, this one.
“The deletion of bad articles is vital to keeping Wikipedia healthy”
This is badly wrong and shows how deletionist dogma has skewed the debate.
The *improvement* of bad articles is vital to making Wikipedia healthier. Deletion should be for non-encyclopaedic articles. And certainly not for fun
Wikipedia almost had $200.00 of mine to continue wikipedia but due to their deletionist policies, even notable documents that I had once researched were deleted.
I figured why fund something that REMOVES things that are useful to me.
They also deleted open source Tomato Firmware long ago because none of them have ever heard of it, despite having articles for very obscure or outdated custom router firmwares. It was later added again though.
Interesting discussion. Whilst not a deletionist myself, I’m not convinced that dwm meets the WP criteria for notability. If you think that the WP criteria for notability is thus flawed, then you should be working on *that* first. Let the dwm article be deleted. Fix the notability guidelines, and if you are right, it can just be recreated.
The argument about ‘no paper limits’ is not a counter-argument to the deletionist’s perspective, which is bad or unsourced articles cause damage to WP’s reputation, which is already quite poor for quality, and their argument is that this is due to pages that are citation or reference free.
If being deleted from Wikipedia makes a topic much more notable, then it suggests that topic didn’t have much notability to begin with.
Wikipedia is an outside observer. It can’t make it’s own topics more notable.
The problem is that people want wikipedia to be a perfect unbiased source of fact that people can lazily read without questioning anything.
One of the consequences of deletionism is that other wikis are going to emerge that are more focused on particular topics or open to things that aren’t in Wikipedia: wikicars, aboutus, etc.
Jon’s comment above is a perfect illustration of the problem that the OP describes: Wikipedia is controlled by people whose primary recreational activity is arguing about Wikipedia policies. It’s a Nomic game with a five-million-dollar annual budget. If you have expertise on some aspect of the world outside Wikipedia and want to contribute, but you don’t want to play the game, the players don’t feel like they owe you anything.
haven’t heard of search algorithms.
As someone who had to vehemently oppose the use of a wiki as the core of (an attempt at a) knowledgebase at my last job, let me say that “wiki” and “search” should never meet in a sentence. Unless that sentence is “Searching a wiki, any wiki, no matter which wikicode is being used, sucks so many balls so hard that it almost has to be on purpose.”
The thing is, even though everyone knows searching wikis sucks, and even though you can prove it by trying to search any wiki, wiki fanatics scoff, deny, and bluster if you bring it up. I’ve become convinced that wiki code, the love of it or things produced with it, warps minds. It makes people try to utilize it where it’s clearly deficient. It makes them rabidly pedantic. It makes them insufferable pricks. If you worked in the dot-com boom and before, then you’ll get this: they’re like MSCEs from that era.
In the end, the few things wikis do really well and the cases where Wikipedia provides notable and unique value are outweighed by all the other crap that’s part and parcel. F’ em. You won’t change them, and you’ll just infriate yourself.
I refuse to feel bad if people stop using Wikipedia because of its own inept policies. I think free information for all is a noble goal, and I support Wikipedia in this endeavor. However, I refuse to be bullied by a minority because of their views on a topic. They are playing politics by refusing to publish certain topics. This is an unacceptable behavior for an organization that touts their impartiality on topics. The web is a place of explosive growth, Wikipedia needs to grow with the web or die from its contributor’s dogma.
A classic example of Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
Before you get around to declaring the “deletionists” the winners, you should note that the Deletion Review is so far strongly for endorsing the decision of no consensus to delete (meaning the article will be kept).
“Outside of sycophantic journalists who flip-flop between declaring it to be the year of Linux on the desktop and parroting Microsoft FUD, the free software community has little professional coverage. You’ve got lwn.net, Heise Online, Linux Journal and a handful of others. There’s always the well-known O’Reilly books, as well. Most of these primarily cover things that are already prominent, because no advertiser will pay for ad space in a magazine …”
You clearly don’t read SD Times (www.sdtimes.com), which regularly covers free software in detail.
@Jon “Whilst not a deletionist myself, I’m not convinced that dwm meets the WP criteria for notability.” Oh yes, you are. ANYBODY who ever says word “notability” with relation to wikipedia with its almost unlimited resources (relatively speaking) is either dull or under undue influence of others.
I can understand arguments provided by @Eicos … ads, lunatics etc. really should be removed from wikipedia, but why http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road_Again_(Hannah_Montana_episode) satisfies criteria for “notability” (one mark of idiotic Newspeak is that it sounds ugly) more than almost all XMPP/Jabber clients (with hundreds of thousands users) which were recently all almost removed from wikipedia?
And even if the program would be really obscure, what harm happens to wikipedia if it has article about http://www.gnu.org/software/freetalk/ (which IS very obscure program; and which some idiot with high level of deletionistis removed)? It might be even less notable than that Hanna Montana episode, who knows, but who cares. There was some guy who was excited about the program that he wrote an article about. And? What’s actually wrong with it?
I have one more example to what I wrote … I would argue that ii (http://man.suckless.org/tools/1/ii) is actually VERY notable project (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/notable, which is “worthy of note or notice; noteworthy”) although there is probably no sane user of it. However, it represents one of the extreme intelligent ideas on the theme of “everything is a file”.
The point I make is that by cutting Wikipedia to the level of dull and boring Hanna Montana stuff, you are eliminating anything interesting which might inspire to do something really innovative and new.
And the second point is that obviously no number of twelve year old students can actually understand what is notable, because that requires expertise and understanding of the area which relate to the article they want to edit. I would expect that no editor of Wikipedia at least understands what is ii about, and even less why it actually is notable although it is pure lunacy.
I actually fought against a deletion a few months ago, that was a trying process. In our case reason prevailed but I guess we were lucky that the AfD poster had already discredited himself publicly.
For more details see my blog post on “The totalitarian Wikipedia regime”: http://www.talend.com/blog/2009/12/21/the-totalitarian-wikipedia-regime/
Just as an inside notice from the discussion: I joined the first deletion discussion when I got note of it (I don’t know anymore through which channel) and when it got closed, I joined the second one and got heavily frustrated when people tried to turn “he sent the developer a bratwurst” into “the magazine which published his article is a first source”.
In that discussion I was mostly alone, and I could only talk there, because I’ve been a wikipedia user since 2004, and I casually corrected smaller errors in articles whenever I happened to see them while looking something up. I was one of the many small contributors who might not write largescale articles all the time, but who do their share to improve the quality of the articles.
Most others couldn’t join up, because the discussion was marked as “semi-closed”, so only longtime users could contribute. And the major contributor to the previous discussion was blocked for meatpuppetry, along with the developer of dwm who didn’t even cast a vote but only provided sources (reason: “mass ban the meatpuppets” – the dwm developer was unblocked afterwards by others).
After spending hours on refuting their claims, I got frustrated enough that I stopped discussing — and I posted that to identi.ca -> http://identi.ca/arnebab/tag/dwm
Subseqently I got blocked from editing on wikipedia “indefinitely” (except on my talk page) for “canvassing” (since when is ‘they want to delete dwm’ equal to ‘come all here and vote for keeping dwm for the following reasons…’?) and for quoting policy which says that you shouldn’t contribute to a deletion discussion if you don’t know much about the topic – and that I think that Psychonaut isn’t in a position to judge free wm’s.
-> Threat of blocking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:ArneBab#Civility_and_assuming_good_faith
-> Blocked and my reply: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:ArneBab#ani_notice
In my view the policy that you must not speak about the deletion attempt outside wikipedia or risk a ban is even worse than nondisclosure agreements: “You must not speak about this *public* discussion, or you get banned for meatpuppetry and canvassing.”
I am now pissed off bad enough, that I won’t go appealing for an unblock. If the powers-that-be in wikipedia don’t see themselves that the block is unjustified, then the power structures in there are such that any contribution I do is on the mercy of moderators who abuse policy for harassing free software since they are not stopped by the ones who don’t agree with their doing.
Every public resource run by volunteers faces the danger of falling into the hands of dedicated abusers, and wikipedia is no exception. But it is exceptionally vulnerable, since the ones who contribute content are normally not interested in the necessary day-to-day maintenance, so writers and maintainers are strongly seperated, but the maintainers get most of the power, because they are the ones who get informed of actions which concern articles they are interested in — and because they have the connections inside wikipedia.
But as if that wasn’t bad enough, I think there’s a third and easily overlooked group: Those who don’t write full articles, but do fact checking when they come upon an article on a topic they are knowledgeable about and that way improve the general quality of wikipedia a lot (unstructured peer review). These don’t take part in discussions, but mostly use wikipedia as a source, and so they don’t want to spend hours on reading some new policy. Instead they generally trust that Wikipedia lives up to it’s goal of collecting the sum of human knowledge in encyclopedic articles – and they do their share to help achieve that goal.
They aren’t seen as huge contributors, since every one only does some few changes each year, but together they make a huge difference.
I’m mostly a member of the last group (and to some degree article author) — I’m almost sure you expected that
And I think that anti-canvassing rules (“don’t tell people that the project they feel strongly about is in problems on wikipedia”) and overboarding deletions chase away a major part of these casual editors (don’t ask for a citation – this is gut feeling and my own thoughts: “Why should I spend 5 minutes on correcting a few errors in an article on a topic I know much about, when the article could be gone in 5 months time?”).
The article authors might come regardless of the rules and try to add the topic they know much about. But the casual editors will likely be gone for good (and won’t ever become authors).
And that would create a major change in the community, cutting wikipedia off from the normal people on the web. And you can imagine how that would affect the value of wikipedia to these people (the vast majority) and its resistance against being misused by some few people to further personal goals.
Besides: Many thanks for the link to “who writes wikipedia”! It shows that even the major authors are casual users, and the followups are quite interesting, too.
I say we get together and shut Wikipedia down.
I just happened to read a Spanish translation of this post at Rebelión, including the very interesting review on “who writes Wikipedia” and, well, while I’m essentially uninterested in DWM, I couldn’t but recognize that there is a lot of truth in what you say: Wikipedia is broken.
I imagine that in due time (sooner than later) other “wikipedias” will arise and that will be good because in my opinion, there is too much power (information power) concentrated in a single place not to be a magnet for all kind of secret agents, lobbyists and other manipulators. These understand each other (somehow, we are not likely to know, because we are not “insiders” – meh, I don’t even use IRC!) and manage to control the institution. The result is that it decays. And with the mad deletionist tards around it should decay pretty fast, as soon there will be no more content to delete.
In my humble opinion, the only way to save Wikipedia is to fragment it: making it 13 or 27 different projects, even if they might copy content from each other (at will), so the information and power over it is not so easily concentrated in a single place. But not a single bureaucrat would ever accept that possibility: their power comes from the size of the Wikipedia rather than from the quality of the information in it or the feelings of the sparse community of contributors.
I recently decided that they had crossed the last red line when an administrator decided that “conspiracy theories” (even if well documented) could not even be mentioned in the 9/11 article, not even a link to the article on them (that does exist). This goes against WP:NPOV (“Wikipedia Policy: Neutral Point Of View”, one of the holy pillars of Wikipedianism). I didn’t even bother arguing. I could maybe had got that administrator resigning if I had the energies… but I’m too old and have too little faith in Wikipedia to bother anymore.
There’s only one solution: clonation and diversification. A wiki for Zionists and one for Anti-Zionists, a wiki for deletionists and one for inclusionists, a wiki for those who think that “a spade is a spade” and a wiki for those who think that spades are rude, a wiki that “ignores all rules” and a wiki with a million rules… and each one can chose the pseudo-clone that he/she likes best.
My two cents anyhow.
Update: I just got unblocked by henrik who also sent me an excuse for the way the whole process was handled: “…The block was partly an individual misjudgment, but also a result of the systemic culture and some poorly thought out policies. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to discuss it in more detail…”. And that restores a lot of my faith in the wikipedia community — thank you very much for your excuse, henrik!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:ArneBab#March_2010
Also they are currently discussing on the incidents board how to avoid similarly overboarding blocking like that in the future.
“But it’s true” isn’t sufficient to keep an article on Wikipedia – even if it is.
The truth (and the importance of the facts concerned) has to be recognized by being published in a source that has established a reputation for reliability, which is not directly connected with the subject at hand.
Sources don’t have to be in print, but they should be separate from the topic, and should involve input from more than one person unless the opinion of that person is, of itself, a topic worth mentioning in the article.
Expertise is not the most important factor; the developer may be an expert, but they are probably not the most reliable source on the topic.
After all, you wouldn’t trust the CEO of a company to give entirely reliable information on their company, would you? Nor would you trust a blog post by a random customer of that company. But you might trust a newspaper article that interviewed several customers and tried ordering something themselves. They’d probably only bother if the company was worth talking about, too.
That’s just how Wikipedia does things. Their system is designed to externalize expertise, so that reviewing editors don’t have to be experts themselves, but only have to know enough about what sources to trust. But it does mean that topics not covered by these sources can’t be included.
As Paul Houle says, if you don’t like how they do it, you can make your own wiki for your specific topic with different rules. I did this with WikiFur almost five years ago, and it has over 12,000 articles vs. ~130 in the same topic area on Wikipedia.
I also contribute to Wikipedia, but only on topics which satisfy their criteria. dwm might, but it’s up to you to prove it. This is only fair, since they’ve been enforcing these requirements on other topic areas for the last half-decade.