On 8/27/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
The other problem is that admins on Wikipedia are powerful figures on an important top-10 website that's regarded as a public resource - and, as such, are somewhat public figures and hence a legitimate subject of critical comment. And this is not to justify insane stalkers, but that's not what I'm talking about. Deciding anyone criticising on such an assumption should be treated as an insane stalker is ... probably not workable.
I'd agree with that strongly, and I'd like to amplify your point.
If you look at the other websites and resources in our class, both the organizations and the leaders take a fair bit of crap from the public. It just comes with the territory. And really, it should. A lot of it is probably unjustified, but the substantial portion that has merit has a lot of value both to society as a whole and to the entities criticized.
However, I think an important difference is that anybody who signs up to be an executive at Yahoo or a senior figure at the Wall Street Journal knows what they're in for. When a lot of us got involved in Wikipedia it was a much smaller thing. And it seems to me that its social prominence lagged a fair bit behind its traffic curve.
But like it or not, we are now playing in the big leagues. The companies that own the rest of the top ten are Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, News Corp, Baidu, and Facebook. Each one is worth billions, and each one endures a firehose of public examination and criticism. And none of them claim our mission of public service.
To my mind, our prominence and our mission means that we should welcome public feedback to a much greater extent than those other organizations. Often we even do. But sometimes our skins are awfully thin.
William
To follow David and William up... I generally agree with both of their statements. I think that the visibility and global interest in Wikipedia come with the price of being visible and having people interested in those of us who are helping keep the gears turning.
That said, I think that however accurate that is, we are not effectively making that part of admin / senior Wikipedian culture.
The current standard is to allow (and socially but not rules-wise encourage) pseudonymity and create a veil of anonymity which we attempt to enforce on-site and many feel entitled to try and enforce offsite, somehow...
Those don't fly so well with the outside world. People will rightly want to know who's doing stuff here, especially in issues which rise to real-world importance somehow.
I have been tilting at the windmill of pseudonymity here for a while. I'll give that a rest for now. However...
The one thing we DO need to do is start to make sure that people are used to the idea that they may become "of public interest" by some of their WP activities. Particularly admins, and more particularly senior / very active admins, members of arbcom, etc. But stretching down to normal users.
I think that most very senior wikipedians have seen enough to be aware of this, but may not have thought about what it means if it happens to them. We probably need to push the point enough that everyone considers the potential consequences.
We also probably need to message this down the chain, to normal editors, and particularly to new admins and prospective admins.
This is probably likely to scare off a few good contributors. That is unfortunate, but I think that suprising people who weren't expecting to have any real-world issues come up from participating in WP is worse.