[WikiEN-l] Koch brothers articles doctored says Think Progress

[George Herbert]

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 1:22 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Mar 2011, Will Beback wrote:
>> The article doesn't say that a conspiracy within Wikipedia tried to bias
>> articles. It says that a prominent industrialist and political contributor
>> paid professional writers to alter Wikipedia articles to change the
>> descriptions of his involvement in a political movement.
>>
>> It's a situation where organized professionals are working against
>> unorganized amateurs.
>
> Getting rid of bias is not an action movie.  You don't try to give the other
> side a fighting chance.  Professionals versus amateurs is perfectly legitimate
> if they really are trying to stop the amateurs from introducing bias.  And of
> course the assumption "they may say they're getting rid of bias but they
> really want to add bias and they're lying about it" is just an assumption.
>
> We went over the same thing with CAMERA.  A target of the left wing decided
> to try removing bias against their side from Wikipedia and was treated like
> they were trying to introduce it instead, with the main reasoning being
> "they couldn't possibly really want to remove bias, after all, they're
> too organized, and anyone who likes the cause that they like must be biased
> anyway.  Besides, Wikipedia has no bias, so nobody could really want to
> remove it".  CAMERA did make a few missteps (trying to become admins, for
> instance), but that's far from all they were blamed for.

I disagree with this.

Our key problem here isn't bias - we all know there's bias, we all
know we're all biased.  It's unfair advantages.

Someone sockpuppeting and stacking on consensus and !votes is an
unfair advantage for their viewpoint and biases.

Someone organizing an off-wiki organized group intended to push
on-wiki bias one way or the other is an unfair advantage for their
viewpoint and biases.

A corporation paying someone to spend time pushing on-wiki bias is an
unfair advantage for their viewpoint and biases.


I believe that our organizational core value here is balanced
eventualism - If we are able to keep the playing field level,
individual biases will over time even out and articles will on the
average more closely approach neutral coverage.

As far as I know, there wasn't an off-wiki organized Palestinian
campaign before, during, or after CAMERA's run.  Maybe I'm just
missing something, but I didn't see one.  There are a lot of on-wiki
partisans.  They largely balanced out before.

I know why CAMERA thought there was a problem.  And I have some
sympathy for their objections.  But they sought to clandestinely gain
unfair advantage.  Ultimately, that's nothing short of an assault on
the community and its method of random walk gently closer to
perfection.  We can't have that.


What we have instead is functionally an oligarchy of the active and
interested and politically (in the social interactions and online
communications sophistication sense) capable.  That is certainly not
an even slice of society writ large, but the slice lines up reasonably
well with western common values (less Republicans, more liberal, more
libertarian than "average", and much (!) more male).  Everyone knows
these things.  Generally we're able to balance around them.  What
CAMERA was doing wasn't working around one of those community
participation biases.  It's not defensible that way.


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