[WikiEN-l] The Wikipedia critics' perfect storm

[George Herbert]

On Dec 16, 2007 6:17 AM, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> 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.
>
> --
> == Dan ==


I think it's important to keep perspective in all this.

One, the majority of the recent negative press coverage is due to one
reporter and one Internet-focused news/feature/scandal website.

While it's unfortunate, the stories are not picking up legs in more
traditional media and so forth.

Two, most of even that coverage has been of internal politics.  Many
people just don't care about that.

Three, the story with possible, legs, the Dornan one, so far lacks the
most important part of a true scandal.  Yes, a WMF person now turns
out to have been less law-abiding than believed or assumed.  The part
that would cause true scandal would be a discovery that they then did
something unethical or illegal to or with the WMF, which to date has
not been alleged or suggested by anyone to date as far as I am aware.

All of these things are bad things, but in perspective, they aren't
damaging the project all that much.

Encouraging our halo of critics is merely annoying.  Causing
widespread attention or press coverage or criticism outside our halo
of usual critics is a legitimate issue, but one which has simply not
sunk in that much.

Other than the usual knee-jerk Register/Slashdot readership reaction,
none of this has gone anywhere.

We would more likely fail our institutional and community goals and
integrity by attempting to act in a way to avoid any negative press
and try to make all our critics happy all the time than we are to fail
due to what's happened so far.  We should neither ignore outside
criticism when it points out valid problems nor conform to its myriad
pressures without careful thought and assessment.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com