As usual, I recommend not reading this if allergic to Abd Thought.
Some of you are. Consult your physician.
At 08:37 AM 6/3/2010, Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
On Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:18:03 -0400, Abd wrote:
Durova's history is a classic example. She
was hounded by a screaming
mob when she made a mistake, even though she recognized the error and
undid it within an hour.
I might well be counted as part of that "screaming mob" since I was
one of the critics at the time, but my intended target was never
Durova personally (who is now a Facebook friend of mine), but the
entire system and its associated mindsets, in which a group of
"insiders", with closed mailing lists of their own, takes on a
"circling the wagons" mentality against "trolls and harassers",
leading to snap judgments that can get people blocked or banned for
saying politically incorrect things.
Yes. Durova became a stand-in, a poster girl, for that situation. But
she was not the typical stubborn and abusive admin. She was not a
knee-jerk "our faction right or wrong" enforcer. She made a mistake,
admitted it immediately, and took responsibility for it. She has been
very helpful in confronting admin abuse.
JzG, on the other hand, never admitted error, disappeared when it got
hot at RfAr/Abd and JzG, resigned his bit a few months later, and, as
I recall, complained that I was the reason -- even though I was
site-banned at the time and all I'd done was to point out his use of
tools while involved with Cold fusion -- and then, later, asked for
the bit back, and since he'd only been admonished and not actually
desysopped, it was routine.
And then went after his old nemesis, Pcarbonn, who had quietly
returned to editing by making suggestions on the Cold fusion Talk
page. JzG claimed that Pcarbonn was pushing the same POV that had
gotten him banned, and the cabal jumped in to chant "yeah!" Of
course, Pcarbonn had not been banned for his POV, he'd been banned
for allegedly treating Wikipedia like a battleground, and JzG had
successfully framed the issues that way a year before. In fact ....
Pcarbonn's ban was renewed, and GoRight got slapped for pointing out
that there wasn't any evidence of misbehavior, I was blocked for
allegedly violating my MYOB ban because I voted in a related poll (I
was allowed to vote in polls!) and then commenting on the situation
(it had become about me!) on Talk:GoRight; I was blocked for
disagreeing with the administrator who blocked me. If I'd cared
enough, that would have gone before ArbComm. Might still, I suppose,
but ... I do have a real life.
And so it goes, on and on. I really don't care any more, I just have
a habit of saying what I've seen, from time to time. My story is far
from unique, it has been repeated over and over, and until it's
realized that the lack of sane decision-making structure that would
restrain the nutty unpredictability of how Wikipedia operates is the
core problem, and it's addressed, Wikipedia will continue to foul its
nest, building up reservoirs of people who have been burned.
Hipocrite, who stirred up the shit that led to RfAr/Abd-William M.
Connolley, practically wears a blinking neon sign, "I'm a troll."
He's been completely outrageous. But he's not the one who usually
gets blocked. It's his targets, and how in the world does this
happen? It's easy. There are admins who don't like his targets. He
gives them cover to act.
In a sane structure, this kind of behavior would be spotted and
interdicted quickly.
I had some comments on that situation in my essay I
wrote as a
rebuttal to one of JzG's essays:
http://dan.tobias.name/controversies/cyber/wiki2.html
Good essay, Dan. In my view, part of the solution to the Wikipedia
problem would be off-site structure, for if Wikipedia is to fulfill
its mission, it must have the faculty of *independent* judgment. One
of the classic ways that organizations, once an oligarchy develops,
suppress this, is through central control of communication. It's an
error to pin this problem on the "bad guys." Rather, it's a
phenomenon that naturally develops as part of the Iron Law of
Oligarchy. The solution is to decentralize communication, such that,
while there remains central communication, it cannot be dominant
unless it sits reasonably with the consensus of what is
decentralized. So off-site structure, because it cannot be
controlled, bypasses the central. Only if a significant number of
central participants, though, connect with the off-site structures --
and it's obvious that there must be many of them, not just one! --
can this become an effective restraint. Wikipedia Review, however, is
already functioning as a bit of an ombudsman. When really outrageous
behavior is noticed there, there is a tendency for some correction to happen.
But it's not reliable enough. I see the mailing list as the device
that, being push, is most likely to be functional. And, yes, the
cabal used and uses mailing lists. That wasn't the problem, as I
think you realized, Dan. The problem was lack of balance.
The hysteria around that "secret" mailing list became, more or less,
the official position of ArbComm with the EEML case. There, the very
existence of an off-wiki list, private, with some apparent bias and
some coordination of on-wiki activity (Canvassing! An article was
semiprotected by an admin when notified by the list of IP revert
warring! Some people commented in AfDs!) led ArbComm to completely
set aside privacy concerns, using list archive material apparently
obtained and published illegally, to throw the book at list
participants, sanctioning far in excess of what could be justified by
on-wiki behavior. And that should have been the standard, not the
existence or non-existence of "collusion," which, after all, is just
another name for cooperation. If it's okay for the "administrative
cabal," as Jimbo called it, to cooperate, why not any other faction?
I joined the EEML when I saw the flap; I was under my site ban at the
time, and, given my theories about the Wikipedia solution, I wanted
to see, and, as well, to encourage them to work effectively and
*properly*. They welcomed me, and they also started inviting others
to join. The problem had been the secrecy, not what they actually
did, for the most part. One editor had posted his password and
invited others to use it while he was away to, say, effectively sock.
There is no sign that any of the list members actually did this, but
there the offer was, in the list archive. He was properly
trout-slapped for that. My own suspicion was that this was trolling
for others to violate policy, and that he may have been the one to
leak the archive, but list members seemed to think that he'd merely
been foolish. Arbitrators, on the other hand, clearly were attempting
to sanction off-wiki communication with exemplary punishment, as a
message to others to not do the same thing, and that was explicit in
the deliberations.
Of course, nothing was accomplished but to drive away a loyal WP
administrator, Piotrus, an academic, a sociologist, with
peer-reviewed publications about Wikipedia, quite naive, actually. He
believed in the system, which slapped him down when that was found
convenient. And the editors with the most knowledge and, in fact, the
most belief in neutrality, were also banned. (Some were hotheads, to
be sure, there are those in every faction, and this is visible in
list traffic.)
The system eats those who support it. It either literally rejects
them or it burns them out, by failing to build stable structure and
thus stable articles and predictable process. Flagged revisions could
be a step toward fixing this, if accompanied by a review structure
that's designed for reliability. But that is being vigorously resisted.
The paradox is that the crowd-sourced, ad-hoc structure of Wikipedia
is an excellent and efficient device for originally building
articles, if hybridized with a dispute resolution structure that
would be easy to access, facilitated, and reliable. Many early
decisions -- and non-decisions --, however, became locked in place.
It is not that they were necessarily wrong, it is that mechanisms
were never developed for efficiently finding wide consensus; the
ad-hoc system that worked for rough article development is lousy for
building stable policy and behavioral management when the scale
becomes large, as it rapidly did.
There are lots of available solutions, but ... those who know and
understand them and try to implement them are often blocked and
banned. Within months of becoming active on Wikipedia, in 2007, I saw
it happen. While it wasn't surprising -- this is how organizations
work, that had been my study -- it was still disappointing, because
Wikipedia had excellent policies and guidelines, generally, and I had
some hope that they reflected the actual operating consensus. They
didn't and don't. See User:Abd/Rule 0. It's not that actual practice
is the actual consensus, it isn't. It's that the actual consensus is
mostly asleep, and only comes up when there are extraordinarily
striking problems and discussions that bring in massive attention.
Example: Jimbo intervened in Wikiversity, deleting some pages and
blocking a user who, he declared, was globally banned. It caused a
huge flap on Wikiversity, and Jimbo engaged in a bit of bluster,
unfortunately, being technically correct (as a defacto representative
of the WMF Board, he had the right to take action to protect the
entire family of WMF projects) but not necessarily taking the wisest
action; since WMF projects depend on massive volunteer labor, pushing
the fact of central authority in the face of the volunteers that
their consensus is not in charge isn't, shall we say, productive.
It's legally correct, but in organizations like those of the
projects, the legally controlling Board, and thus its representative
or representatives, will normally align itself with the volunteer
consensus, unless it finds it legally necessary to do soemthing else.
So elements within the WV community, and probably representing the
majority opinion there, filed an RfC on meta to remove the founder
bit from Jimbo, that had allowed him to take these actions. It was
running 2:1 opposed. Now, that much anti-Jimbo opinion should have
been a big red flag to the WMF (and to Jimbo). But elements within
the community representing the "cabal," i.e., the
circle-the-wagons-against-trolls faction, were, I'm sure, smugly
confident that the trolls were being crushed, and they thought of the
1/3 as being simply malcontents, and the RfC ridiculous.
And then Jimbo deleted porn on Commons, bypassing community process.
To repeat my summary of this sequence: "You can take away our
academic freedom, but don't touch our porn!"
That, of course, is an oversimplification. The real issue was exactly
the same, but Commons is much more central and much more noticeable.
It got a lot of attention. And what happened then at the RfC on the
Founder Flag probably represents a truer consensus, and this affair
shows exactly how participation bias can create a false impression.
I've seen plenty of examples where particpation bias produced an
impression of a "consensus" in one direction, whereas an aroused
community went overwhelminingly in the other direction. The !vote,
last time I looked, was about 3:1 in favor of removing the flag.
Jimbo caved and gave up the intrusive privileges, they were removed
from the flag set.
The point is not "Jimbo screwed up!" The point is that ad-hoc dispute
resolution doesn't work, except at the lowest levels. I.e., if it
works ad-hoc, if disputes are actually resolved, fine. That's
efficient. But you have never resolved a dispute when you have
blocked a disputant. You have, generally, taken a side in the
dispute, which isn't resolution, it is awarding victory to one side.
Which then encourages that side to again push the same position with
the next victim or opponent. While it's obvious that sometimes blocks
and bans are necessary, they, far too easily, become part of the
problem instead being genuine solutions. The Scibaby ban is still
creating enormous disruption, with ban enforcement having created far
more disruption than the damage an individual POV-pusher could have
done. If actions had been taken to integrate Scibaby into a
cooperating community, he'd probably have gone away, or would have
settled down into occasional contribution. And the community has
never actually gone back and looked at what happened with Scibaby,
only a few have bothered, instead, even though Scibaby was never
banned per WP:BAN, by a consensus of *uninvolved editors*, the
community simply assumes that the ban was legitimate; after all,
hasn't it been enforced for years? Scibaby was screwed over, in
short. And human beings tend to resent that. Don't we?
So then we have two juvenile positions, locking horns: Scibaby: You
can't stop me! The cabal: Yes we can! We're in charge! However, what
Scibaby has successfully shown is: "You can't stop me without harming
yourself more than I'm harmed. I'm having fun! Are you?"
You cannot have a neutral project if one faction is in charge,
excluding others. Obviously, there must be some central authority of
some kind, or a project could not attain the uniformity of
expectation that's needed for reasonable reliability. But it must be
one which simply facilitates genuine consensus. It's been done, I've
pointed to examples, ad nauseum. Until the Wikipedia community wakes
up enough to see that it desperately needs this, it will careen from
crisis to crisis, rolling the boulder up the hill and watching it
roll down again, until the boulder-rollers give up and do something
else, being replaced by new generations of boulder-rollers, not yet
burned out, all the while wondering why it's so difficult.
Actually, my opinion, it's not necessary for "the community" to wake
up, not directly. It would only take a small number of editors who
recognize the nature of the problem and who start to cooperate toward
a solution.
It is more than any one person can accomplish, but I don't know what
the necessary number is. In many contexts, I've been told that it
might be as low as two or three. Now, that might seem easy, but try
to find two! What happens is that groups of two form, but can't
accomplish enough to start the larger ball rolling. So, probably,
three. Good luck. I'll help, if asked. I generally understand the
necessary structures. But I never wanted to *control* it. I leave
that desire to those who imagine they know better than an informed
community consensus, or who imagine that they represent the
consensus, which is the general position of the default oligarchy in
most organizations, whether it's true or not. Usually, it is somewhat
true, but that may be because most who differed were shut out or left
in frustration or didn't join in the first place.