As someone who would qualify as a "very active editor"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_ed…
I can honestly say that power and activity are definitely not the same thing on Wikipedia.
Do I have power? I don't think so. I am not an administrator or other functionary that
has power over anyone else.
As a person who is principally a content writer, I get my time wasted every day by
vandals, by content cited to reliable sources being removed by someone who simply
doesn't agree with it but provides no sources to the contrary buts simply writes
"Fact!" as an edit summary, that I have to explain to yet another American that
we spell things differently in Australia and that is why there is a {{Use Australian
English}} template on the top of that article, that "City of Brisbane" cannot be
changed as "Brisbane City" as they are NOT the same thing (one is a local
government area, the other a suburb, one about 100 times the area of the other) even if
they do happen to "look like the same thing" or "think it reads better than
way". I wish I did have the power to just "whack a mole" and NOT have to
have these *same* conversations over and over and over again with me being WP:CIVIL and
them often being not civil (some even track me down in real life and send me abusive
e-mail off-wiki, including sexual remarks because I'm a self-identified female
contributor). But in Wikipedia, that's OK because ArbCom decided that calling a female
contributor "a cunt" isn't that bad. It's Wikipedia not Wokepedia! If I
share the contents of that email on-wiki, I'm the one in trouble (their right to
privacy), so I just delete them. If I spot a user name whitewashing a politican's
article that just happens to be very similar indeed to the real life name of their media
advisor, I cannot say that on-wiki, because that's WP:OUTING.
My "community health" is pretty damn poor precisely because we give the same
power to every first time anonymous editor as we do to very active editors and we give it
effectively to the most persistent and the most unpleasant. BRD is all very well if all
involved are seriously trying to get the content right and well-cited. It fails completely
when the other party is not engaging with it, being unpleasant, or just returning time and
time again to re-do a problematic edit based on "I know this". We have problems
with acts of vandalism that get repeated time and time again by a series of different IP
addresses. This is impossible to block, we have no solution for it. If you want to see the
scale of it, there's series of IP addresses that collectively exhibit similar patterns
of thousands of problematic edits in my topic space going back to at least 2013 and were
still active in 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:IamNotU/History_cleanup
Do we have the power to "whack a mole" the first time we see any of these
behaviour YET AGAIN? No, we don't. We have a lot of tedious process of having to find
the right admin noticeboard, submit a request with the right templates, provide endless
diffs, and then have nothing happen. We make it easy for people to create problems, but
extremely difficult to get them stopped and incredibly tedious to clean up after them (you
often can't "undo" because of intervening edits etc and these folk can do
100s of edits in a day). Here's one:
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec/en.wikipedia.org/Shelati
An editor who did a mass change over every suburb of Sydney over a couple days. I
suspected them immediately as being a sockpuppet (behaviour was characteristic of
"sockpuppet") but unless you can identify the sockmaster, you can't report
it. So, instead the changes being made were discussed on the appropriate topic
noticeboards, disagreed with, but then the editor was blocked by someone who figured out
who the sockmaster was (a sockmaster dating back to 2009). The account was blocked, but
the problematic edits have never been cleaned up.
Most active contributors who retire do so because of the behaviour of other
"contributors" wears them down.
In summary, power in Wikipedia is not where you think it is on the curve. It is the power
we give to the many people to do the same vandalism, the same "meant well but I'm
stupid" edits, the same "I don't know any policies and they don't apply
to me anyway" edits, and the sockpuppets and conflict-of-interest editors who
carefully hide themselves among them.
I wish I had just a little power to exercise in topic spaces where I am knowledgeable and
have a long history of positive contribution. I don't want it for baseball players or
Icelandic musicians or Pokemon characters, just for Queensland history and geography.
That's all I ask.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
Jan Dittrich
Sent: Wednesday, 22 January 2020 8:31 PM
To: Wiki Research-l <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Power law and contributions:
Hello Researchers,
Contribution patterns in online communities follow a power distribution which is known as
the 1% rule [1], as Wikipedia told me.
However, the steepness of the distribution can be more or less strong: 50% of your edits
could be contributed by 2% or by 0.002%, the latter showing a stronger imbalance.
I wonder if there are any estimates/rules-of-thumb of what imbalance is problematic when
seen from the perspective of community health.
I also wonder if there is research on how technology contributes to such imbalances and
how it might be mitigated – e.g training, user-friendliness, documentation… (based on my
assumption that a steep curve is less desirable, since the power is more concentrated,
the system more fragile and the redistribution of power more constrained)
Jan
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
--
Jan Dittrich
UX Design/ Research
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Tel. (030) 219 158
26-0
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