I don't know whether crossing the line
"musk [...] fixing [...]
Wikipedia" gives me more disgust or fear.
Vito
Il giorno lun 12 dic 2022 alle ore 05:12 reybueno1--- via Wikimedia-l <
wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> ha scritto:
This just up in /r/trueunpopularopinion and
YCombinator:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueUnpopularOpinion/comments/zieyyf/wikipedia_is_…
Quoted below because it was explicitly released under public domain:
You all have heard by now that Elon Musk said that Wikipedia has a "left
wing bias" when the article about Twitter Files had been suggested for
deletion. This has been received with mixed responses from liberals and
conservatives alike; the former dismissing it as "an attack on free
knowledge" and the latter cheering the move as "against censorship" and
vindication of their beliefs that Big Tech is biased against them.
True, Wikipedia is supposedly editable by anyone around the world and I
had been an on and off editor there for years mostly doing small-ish edits
like fixing typos and reverting obvious vandalism. This is done while on IP
as opposed to using accounts because I would rather that some edits (i.e.
sensitive topics like religious and political areas) not tied to my name
and identity. However, reality is far from the preferred sugar-coated
description of Wikipedia, particularly its editing community.
The editing community in overall is best described as a slightly
hierarchical and militaristic "do everything right" structure,
traditionally associated with Dell and recently Foxconn and now-defunct
Theranos. Exceptions apply in quieter and outlier areas such as local
geography and space, usually the top entry points for new users wanting to
try their first hand. There are higher tolerance of good-faith mistakes
such as point-of-view problems and using unreliable resources, which are
usually explained in detail on how to correct by them rather than a mere
warning template or even an abrupt block.
Ultimately those sub-communities which can be said as populated by
exopedians, have relatively little to no power over the wider and core
communities, mostly dominated by metapedians. A third group called
mesopedians often alternates between these inner and outer workings.
Communities can have shared topical interest which are grouped by
WikiProject, an example being WikiProject Science
I spend a lot of time casually browsing through edit wars (can be so
lame at times) like a fly on the wall, along with meta venues of Wikipedia
such as Articles for Deletion, Centralized discussion Neutral Point of View
Noticeboard, Biographical of Living Persons Noticeboard, Conflict of
Interest Noticeboard, Administrator's Noticeboard Incidents, Sockpuppet
investigations, Arbitration Committee noticeboard which is the "supreme
court" in Wikipedia community for serious behavioral and conduct disputes.
Therefore I can sum up how the editing community really functions, although
not really as extensive as you might expect because I am not a
"Wikipedioholic" with respect to inner workings.
Deletionism and inclusionism
This has been very perennial and core reasons for just about any
disputes on Wikipedia ever D Deletionists treat Wikipedia as another
"regular encyclopedia" where information has to be limited once it become
very much to be covered; like cutting out junk, while inclusionists treats
Wikipedia as a comprehensive encyclopedia not bound by papers and thus can
afford to cover as much information as it can take; one man's junk could be
another man's treasure. Personally I support the latter and often the
conflict between two editing ideologies leads to factionalism, where
attempts to understand mutual feelings and perspectives are inadequate or
even none at all.
There are no absolute standards of what defines "encyclopedic knowledge"
and "notability". Inclusionism posits that almost everything could become
valuable and encyclopedic in the future, even if they're aren't today. An
example I can think of is events, figures and stories from World War II.
Deletionism has been closely related to "academic standard kicks" and rely
on the premise that Wikipedia has to be of high standard and concise. There
are people who deem an addition of something as useful, and there are those
who think it's "trivia" or "crufty" something that is nominally
discouraged
if not prohibited by Wikipedia's documentation (see this in particular,
although sometimes exceptions are applied through the spirit of "Ignoring
all rules for sake of improvement", which are frequent at entertainment and
gaming topics).
On pages, notability debates around a person subject and otherwise are
frequently the main point of discussion in Articles for Deletion threads,
where articles deemed not substantial enough (such as very few sources) are
suggested for deletion. Usually they will run for a week but they can be
quickly closed if there are too many votes in favor of "keep",
"delete" and
so on, the AFD nomination is withdrawn by the initiator, or that the
nomination is found to have been done in bad faith (such as to "censor"
articles from public view for questionable motives like ideology, paid
editing or so).
Here I believe that deletionists are seen far more harshly by
inclusionists, than the vice versa. The chief reason is to add something,
you have to navigate through the user experience unfriendly editing
interfaces (although somewhat improved in recent years) all the while
having to scroll through the internet to find sources and references to
add. When you found some you have to go through an extra hoop to assess
whether they are reliable or not, before finally transcribing the
information through your own words which has to stick to the neutral point
of view (NPOV) policy; paraphrasing that are so close are not allowed
because, copyright. Non-English speaking editors would often find the
latter very difficult.
In contrast, as per an old adage, destroying something is easier than
building something, deletions are comparatively easier than addition. This
could be the reason why deletionism currently maintains dominance over the
whole site as I see it, since in order to become an established an esteemed
editor, one has to garner a high amount of edits which are not reverted.
Thus, many editors like to gain these "scores" by deleting "unuseful
information" from passages up to entire articles by interpreting the
documentations and rules strictly, the latter through processes such as
Articles for Deletion and if confident enough, Proposed Deletion that
doesn't require discussion. Simply speaking, it's a feature not a bug and
aren't necessarily beholden to any political ideology; a liberal is as
equally likely as a conservative to become a hated deletionist.
Even though every edit changes are recorded and displayed through page
histories which you can see for any given articles by clicking "View
History" at the top, the bone of contention remains particularly when page
deletions results in the redaction of these histories from public view.
This will be explained further later.
Some historical contexts that can be think of regarding the current
prominence of deletionism are the excessive amount of Pokemon pages during
or before 2007 which had alienated some readers and editors alike because
search engines back then are not quite as adequate as today in terms of
finding precise information. Another is that child predators like Nathan
Larson used to sneak in as inclusionists to warp Wikipedia to fit their
agenda all the time, which are indelibly horrendous to all of us here and
those back then. Think of the poisoning of the well and the fruits from a
poisonous tree. Furthermore there are also large portion of userbases from
tech companies like Intel and those from the academic world (maybe instead
of GLAMs, short for galleries, libraries, archives and museums) that gained
top positions such as administrators, bringing along their work culture and
so-called "academic standards kick" respectively. To be absolutely fair, I
find that there are instances where deletionism is right enough,
specifically the removal of copyright violation and libel materials on
biographical pages of any living persons.
Regardless of whether a page is deleted or not, they remain available in
Wikipedia's servers and accessible to administrators or higher only.
Eventually, what defines as "encyclopedic knowledge" are vulnerable to
systemic biases as well. Different from some Musk's thoughts about it,
users who are white, male, US/UK/CA/EU/AU/NZ, middle or old aged, and
English speaker tend to have the greatest advantage above the rest in the
editing community. With this in mind, a prominent musical artist in Zambia
may be treated as too small-bore enough for a page on Wikipedia by an
editor in Canada. Shopping malls in the US are less likely to be deleted
than those in Vietnam. Such a bias doesn't go one way; the hypothetical
artist in Zambia would be "unimportant" to someone in Peru.
This is the top causes of animosity between editors and also why many
editors chose to quit or rather fell from grace. You will always hate that
kid who like to ruin your LEGO structure every time you have assembled the
blocks.
Neutral point of view
Different from mere deletions and additions, this normally means that
how to present a given information in a way to the readers ideally so that
no disproportionate biases towards or against something are left in their
impressions. You see arguments and conflicts concerning such a lot in
political articles, historical articles and geography topics of areas under
dispute from two or more nations. Say that a political figure is engaged in
activities that are remotely linked to extremism. Side A would argue that
the figure is therefore an extremist and it should be made prominent on
that page and any other linked pages, but Side B wants to tone it down by
writing it something like "Political figure was engaged in activities which
were sometimes reported by some as extremist" and limit it to a mere
mention on a single page. Another is a nation should be said as a
"partially recognized state" because some UN members don't recognize it as
such and instead as part of a bigger country, with others expressing views
that simply having an effective sovereignty for its own and different from
another nations would be enough to be deemed as a state.
It can come into play on cases involving "fringe theories" as well, like
Bigfoots, UFOs and medical treatments, although Wikipedia indeed has a
preference of giving prominence to mainstream views in these cases,
something I don't find a problem with and is quite different from regular
harmful biases.
Venues for resolution in this case are Neutral Point of View
noticeboard, along with Request for Comment. The latter entails a process
where a notice is put up in a centralized noticeboard all the while a pool
of experienced/established editors receive notifications to comment,
provide insights and make suggestions on a given issue. A month is usually
on how these discussions are up and running unless there is a need of
extension because of reasons such as unbroken deadlock.
Along with deletionism and inclusionism, this is a major cause of
editors "going naughty" and getting blocked/banned/kicked out, whether for
right or spurious reasons.
Conduct
The most important part of this post in my honest opinion. I'll start
this section by writing about edit war. Usually when you change something
in Wikipedia and it was undone/reverted by somebody else, then you have
only two tries before you get reported to the edit-war noticeboard if
you're stubborn enough not to go to the article's talk page ("Talk" in
the
top left) for discussion, either by the person undoing your edits or by a
third party. In the meantime you get notifications on your personal talk
pages ("Talk" on the top right) inviting you for such discussion and if
lucky enough, the Wikipedia Teahouse for further help by some kind-hearted
editors, increasingly a rarity these days. In some quieter or outer areas
where as said before are slightly lenient, you may get up to approx. five
chances counting your original edit before getting referred to the admins.
The tries count are reset after 24 hours but can be retained further
just as a guard against "gaming the rules". Clearer cut vandalism (like
putting gibberish such as "LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" at any pages) usually gets
reported to a separate noticeboard for administrators to intervene,
although first time vandals regularly get warnings on their talk pages
beforehand. When a report is there and if found guilty of edit-warring,
administrators would either give ultimatums to the users in question or
block their accounts for a day. They could escalate to multiple days, weeks
and up to indefinite (practically infinite) period should the behavior
continues beyond that. The same goes for vandalism, although they are dealt
more harshly with many prompt indefinite blocks (indeffs) for
"vandalism-only accounts".
Regular editors can be in danger of falling from grace too either by
themselves or by others. Because Wikipedia is commonly seen by so many as
the biggest comprehensive encyclopedia in the world, sometimes equated to
history itself, many vested interests, feelings and sentiments have been
invested on the website.
Those who are nationalists or otherwise fanatics of any imaginable
notions found themselves having incentives to make Wikipedia to support
their narratives both as an end itself or rather just means for other ends
such as "proving that they're great in the long annals of great history".
The same applies to run off the mill "promotional editing" by corporations
and individuals, along with those made by their supporters or fans. On the
opposite many people find it extremely attractive to twist it to denigrate
any ideologies, corporations, people, and just about anything they
personally oppose. For instance, they can make an article and fill it with
disparaging information against them, which is called an "attack page".
I find that there are kernels of truth in the commonly-held viewpoint
that "Wikipedia is a placeholder of information" and that "Wikipedia is
history". A MIT report described how judges' behavior are increasingly
influenced by Wikipedia articles, while there are initiatives by space
missions such as Beresheet and Peregrine to perform civilizational backups
of humanity with all of English Wikipedia (version as of a given date) in
the event of collapse.
After having their way, to keep their changes forever in "annals of
history" or simply the "placeholders of information" in general,
gate-keeping measures are utilized. A simple example would be using
excessively harsh language against editors who made a change challenging a
given status quo. In contrast, if anybody has a reason to radically change
a page and make sure it stays unassailable afterwards, the same set of
actions are used too but arguably these would be "antigatekeeping" measures
instead.
In gatekeeping/antigatekeeping one would resort to different levels of
intepretation regarding PAGs (policies and guidelines) and user essays, the
latter sometimes used as a basis of many editorial and administrative
actions. The documentations can often contradict each other, like how "not
indiscriminate" is to "not a paper encyclopedia", and on top of all, can
be
overruled by ignoring these if anybody sees fit. Hence, whoever has the
"biggest fist" gets to be the most advantageous in Wikipedia community. In
order to have the "biggest fist", they can befriend anyone sharing
interests with their own and form a cabal/gang that look after their own.
To increase their power and when enough time had passed they can nominate
each other for administrator positions giving them extra privileges of
blocking users, deleting pages, protecting an article from editing by
lower-ranked users. You don't get paid for spending your efforts and time
on editing Wikipedia unless perhaps you've listed a Venmo link or a crypto
address on your user profile, and these administrative tools alone are so
addictive and appealing given that you are essentially in control of the
important bits of "writing history" if you have these, apart from usual
human nature. Wikipedia is among the top 10 visited websites in the world
after all.
Even more, there are additional ranks above administrator positions. Two
of those are CheckUsers (CU) and Oversighters. CU has the power to look
through IP address used by an account to see if it was a sockpuppet account
of a person, while Oversighters have super-delete rights to hide contents
or pages, even beyond the reach of administrators.
Those on the other end of the power-tripping, gate-keeping and so on
rarely fares well. One would find them belittled, bullied by those editors.
Should they attempt to properly resolve an issue through established
processes such as talk page discussions, dispute resolution noticeboard,
and up to the infamous Administrator's Noticeboard Incidents (ANI), they
would expect to find obstructions upon obstructions along the way. If the
victim decides to invite other editors to give balanced/impartial opinions
and suggestions on a problem they would find themselves stonewalled on the
grounds that these are "canvassing". It can be quite hypocritical if the
"bully" had their gang friends informed beforehand, which is reasonably
believed to often be the case. Finally, if it escalates into the ANI, this
is where it start to get out of hand.
The reason why I use the term "infamous" is because ANI is the
mother-lode of all kinds of ugly dramas. It is frequently the first place
in getting an editor sanctioned or so on. The bullies (I do not use the
term lightly) would then put all sorts of allegations and aspersions
against other for any types of wrongdoing, whether real or perceived, big
or small, or whether the result is a real harm or just a nothing burger.
Regardless, if they twisted the rules (derisively referred as
"wikilawyering" or otherwise "gaming the system") and played the
victim
good enough, the passing administrators would then close the discussion and
place administrative actions against the "real" victim. Common egregious
example of such an action is the "not here to build an encyclopedia"
indefinite/permanent block that can be arbitrary interpreted from any given
actions. It's ironic given that the bullies are guilty of such as well. A
prime example of twisting the rules to railroad/squeeze out other editors
would start with so-called bad faith negotiation, where they promised a
victim not to remove content at other pages if the victim lets the bully
keep their changes in a page. Soon the bully reneged it and when confronted
by the victim the bully immediately accused them of being "tendentious" or
"POV pusher".
The bullies, which can consist of most editors operating at the inner
workings, aren't necessarily beholden to any ideologies and come in all
stripes. The only attribute that they all share is the addiction to power.
After such permablocks, most would be forced to leave it for good,
further bleeding the editors numbers. Still, because Wikipedia's so
preeminent and no viable competitors are currently available, some would
rather stay behind, disguise their identity and either continue editing or
start over in different areas. For those with knowledge of foreign
languages, they could simply switch to other language Wikipedias to
continue their work far from most perturbances. A smaller number would come
back as vandals to spite editors who had wronged them.
This is where "sockpuppetry investigations" kick in, mostly referred as
SPI. Editors go there to start a new case if they suspect that an account
is an alt/sock account of someone else particularly users who evaded the
blocks/bans. When a user is blocked or banned for good, they are relegated
to a pariah status much akin to "unpersoning", Scientology's suppressive
persons, and the lowest ones in North Korea's Songbun, in the respect that
any and all edits by them under other accounts or IPs are liable to be
reverted/undone pursuant to policy pertaining to block evasion. While the
original goal of not separating the wheat from the chaff is expressedly to
prevent them from gaining further recognition and diminish the spirit of
the block, in practice this means a Monkey's Paw that any further potential
good contributions from them would be lost forever, handicapping the
improvement of encyclopedia as a whole in a way or more. Other editors have
the exception from edit-war policy to revert and undone any changes from
the violators of the blocks, perhaps as well as anybody who helped them. In
effect this is like what the Meatball Wiki said, a "PunishReputation".
During a SPI, there are "clerks" who will look through the user's
contribution history to see if there is a similarity in pattern to warrant
a block for abuse of multiple accounts (sockpuppetry). If that alone is not
enough, the CheckUsers can then be called upon to check and compare the IP
used by the accounts.
If a user is determined to have engaged in sockpuppetry, the userpage of
original and alt accounts used are then replaced with a scarlet letter
notice such as this example boasting that which sock account belongs to who
and therefore blocked. Forget about "denying recognition", this is simply a
punitive name-and-shame.
The SPI case, now listing the accounts and IP used, would then be
archived in a separate page, still publicly viewable. This is despite
recent GDPR regulations and the implication that major privacy-improving
adjustments should've been made for the process while keeping it viable.
Try that in Reddit and you'd be instantly banned for doxxing, I can assure
you.
In there you can effectively cosplay as a CSI although substantive
attention are given to clerks, administrators and CheckUsers. Keep in mind
that the results and outcomes of most if not all sockpuppet investigations
aren't really 100% accurate, given that there are a lot of unforeseen
variables such as the imitation of writing and behavior styles that are
mostly a result of multiple people pushing any particular editorial change
for any reasons i.e. brother helping his sister, along with the use of
software that can mask your IP addresses such as VPNs and TeamViewer. Those
admins in charge of sockpuppetry investigations often aren't privy to the
root cause of a "sockpuppetry" or "block evasion" and as such tend to
for
example, underestimate the amount of users who has the right reasons to
support an edit made in violation of a block.
VPN IP addresses, which are used for obvious privacy reasons, are
blocked in sight by any administrators pursuant to policy against open
proxies. They even have a dedicated WikiProject and a bot specializing in
finding and blocking these proxies, with the result being a great
inconvenience for people wishing to edit from countries such as Russia and
China.
In time, if someone continues a behavior the other editors deemed as
"disruptive" or "vandal" past the initial block, they end up getting
displayed in so-called "Long Term Abuse" caselist. Right there, their
accounts and/or IP addresses, along with a likely-skewed description of
what they've done were listed out. The places they've been and accounts
outside of Wikipedia were frequently exposed there, as if it's an
opposition research and spiteful doxxing. Things that'll get you quickly
banned here are just a normal Tuesday over at Wikipedia, with GDPR out of
the window.
As I see it, there are two categories of LTAs/vandals/whatever you call
it. The first are the inherent vandals who had been problematic and
disruptive for Wikipedia upon their first edit, and the other are those who
had been regular or good standing users in the past until their fall from
grace, normally caused by themselves such as being too overworked over one
thing but could be by others, like the bullying example.
There is a reasonable possibility that some of those LTAs/vandals would
be redeemed and become a good editor once again if enough diplomacy and
mediation were tried. However, those would be a time-consuming process
compared to simply actioning them, and I reasonably suspect that some of
those are intentionally provoked by corrupt admins or their friends into
vandal or disruptive editing in order for them to increase that admin
actions count so as to further their own standing in the community, and to
stay away from losing their cherished tools if their KPI fell low enough in
a given period.
It's fearful that the cycle of toxicities in Wikipedia could eventually
led to real-world harm, though I will not further speculate how that might
transpire for fear of stuffing the beans and giving bad ideas. However,
VICE had reported in 2016 that an editor had nearly driven to suicide after
being subjected to online abuse by the editors despite what the
documentation say about community collegiality. Furthermore, just before
Musk' comment against Wikipedia, the Anonymous group hacked a Chinese
ministry site and a satellite system out of the suspicion that a state
actor has manipulated Wikipedia's system and process to censor information
about their hacking activities against China. It was a hot news in Taiwan
then.
Afterthoughts
Theoretically a deep and comprehensive reform is past due for Wikipedia
in order to (re-)foster collegiality among the members of Wikipedia
community and reduce the amount of synergies that leads to intractable
conflicts, as opposed to sinecures such as blockings and SPI which often
treats the symptoms but not the cause.
Still, it appears that the core editors and/or administrators are so
content enough for the present status quo and thus doom any effort to
change the system. An example would be the temporary ban of an
administrator made in 2019 by the Wikimedia Foundation (ultimately
responsible for maintaining English Wikipedia and any other projects such
as Wikimedia Commons for photos and Wikipedias written in other languages),
nearly causing the split of Wikipedia into two or more. This is not to
mention that presently Wikipedia has a financial cancer and having to beg
for donations despite having sufficient funds so it may be worthwhile to
put your donations for the Internet Archive instead.
A key to a solution may lie in the comparative analogy that Wikipedia is
like the only restaurant in a food desert. It could be a McDonald's, KFC,
BK, Taco Bell, White Castle, or so on, but customers are forced to go there
to dine in every time, even if some does not really like their food. Thus,
they will be really happy if a second restaurant is opened at the location.
If Musk is really serious in fixing whatever problems Wikipedia has
brought as a result of its internal problems, then he would be wise in
angel-investing any alternatives which aims to become a better or
next-level version of Wikipedia.
The hypothetical rival alternatives could come in the form of a more
comprehensive encyclopedia, close to the level of a compendia. It can come
in a format similar to GitHub where anyone can present in their preferred
version of a subject instead of edit-warring at a small point, and if
version is good enough then they can be merged/pushed/vouched by other
users to work upon and goes to the top in ranks.
In fact, every edition of page histories are logged by Wikipedia when a
change is make, but in addition to heuristic placements which make these to
be perceivably obscure, those would get redacted if the page in question is
deleted.
Forking contents from English Wikipedia isn't really a big problem since
all you can do is to go to the Wikimedia dump site and look for enwiki, but
the biggest issues are how to convince editors and readers alike to move
over to the alternative. One possible solution that I can think of in terms
of editors would be a pitch promising that the contents will eventually get
copied into discs that lasts for billions of years and launched to the Moon
and beyond for posterity.
It is entirely possible that if such solution with out-of-the-world
approach had been thought about earlier, the synergies that led to all sort
of intractable conflicts in Wikipedia could be cut by a half or so. Perhaps
inside Wikipedia the environment would not resemble an authoritarian police
state like now. After all, you can find so many real stories echoing the
same theme on Wikipediocracy, Wikipedia Review and Wikipediasucks.co, which
are like how
Xenu.net is to Scientology.
Finally this post is released under Creative Commons CC0, which is a
public domain as the only thing I want is let everyone know how Wikipedia
really works in the inside given the recent attention to Musk's comments
against it and to dispel idealistic notions (as seen in WhitePeopleTwitter
regarding Musk's tweet) that overrated it beyond what should've been, while
hoping for alternatives to spring up to provide greater opportunities for
anyone to preserve histories without corrosive influence from systemic
biases such as those in Wikipedia.
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