[WikiEN-l] The Wikipedia critics' perfect storm

[Daniel R. Tobias]

Lately there has been a whole series of controversies, scandals, and 
the like which have led to negative publicity for Wikipedia.  In the 
middle of all that, Google announced a (vaporware so far) project to 
produce a community-authored information resource of some sort, which 
got some press as an alleged "Wikipedia-killer".  From the media 
reaction to all this, it is very clear that Wikipedia's honeymoon is 
long over.  A few years ago, the media, blogosphere, general public, 
and the ranks of Wikipedians themselves were full of people in their 
initial bloom of enthusiasm over how fantastically Wikipedia had 
succeeded in such a short time through a method of collective 
authorship that it seemed in theory couldn't possibly work.  Then, 
the critics were in the minority and were easy to dismiss as people 
who "just don't get new media", or who had conflicts of interest or 
personal grudges of some sort that impaired their objective judgment. 
The pro-Wikipedia crowd had a genuine enthusiasm that was catching, 
and the anti-Wikipedia crowd was just an ugly bunch of party-poopers.

Now, everything is different.  A victim of its own success, Wikipedia 
is now part of the "establishment", a major part of the world's 
information infrastructure rather than a neat little geeky project.  
Just about everybody in and out of it has moved on from their wave of 
enthusiasm to be jaded and cynical.  The insiders circle their wagons 
against "attackers" and try to blame everything on trolls and 
harassers and banned users and attack sites and irresponsible 
reporters and pernicious memes and so on.  The outsiders find it's 
more interesting and newsworthy to find and expose problems with 
Wikipedia than to talk about how great it is.  Even a few Wikipedia-
related bloggers who have previously stayed away from, denounced, or 
downplayed all of the "wikidrama" of previous internal controversies 
are now starting to sound alarms about how things are getting so bad 
that major change is needed:

http://original-research.blogspot.com/
http://wikip.blogspot.com/

Unfortunately, some of the commentary they're drawing is just more of 
the same insider reactions: to kill the messenger by denouncing them 
as irresponsible rumor-mongers (even though these are actually people 
who have largely sided with the establishment before against the 
drama-queens and sensationalists).  This sort of reaction may have 
worked a while back when the critics were a small minority, but it 
won't work now.  Even if some amount of the criticism is still 
overblown and unfounded, it is necessary to constructively engage the 
critics instead of dismissing or attacking them, or else the problems 
will keep getting worse in a never-ending spiral.

-- 
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