Can Wikipedia Teach Us All How To Just Get Along? 191
Ponca City writes "Alexis Madrigal writes in the Atlantic that for all its warts, Wikipedia has been able to retain a generally productive and civil culture. According to Joseph Reagle, who wrote his PhD dissertation on the history and culture of Wikipedia, members of Wikipedia actively work to maintain neutrality, even if that's sometimes nearly impossible. The community has a specific approach to people designed to promote basic civility and consensus decision-making. The number one rule is 'assume good faith,' and the rest of the site's rules are largely extensions of kindergarten etiquette. The idea is that to find consensus, you must see your opponents as people like yourself. Keeping an open perspective on both knowledge claims and other contributors creates an extraordinary collaborative potential, Reagle says. The features of the software help, too. It's easier to be relaxed about newcomers' editing or changes being made when you can hit the revert button and restore what came before. 'Like Wikipedia itself, which seems to tap our natural urge to correct things that we think are wrong, maybe our politics will self-correct,' writes Madrigal. 'Maybe this period of extra nasty divisiveness in politics will push us out of the USENET phase and into a productive period of Wikipedian civility.'"
Deletionist, Inclusionists, and the Goal (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago, no one imagined that we'd have accomplished what we did here on Wikipedia. Compared to the entrenched encyclopedia companies, we were far behind, and we always knew the climb would be steep. But in record numbers of entries, we came out and wrote so many articles. And with these articles and discussions, it was made clear that at this moment - in this fight for intellectual freedom - there is something happening on the Web.
There is something happening when men and men pretending to be women in Des Moines and Davenport; in Lebanon and Concord come out of their basements to write and rewrite and edit and correct because they believe in what this medium can be. We can be the new majority who can lead this world out of a long intellectual property darkness - Communists, Free-marketeers, and Furries who are tired of the high prices of Britannica and the inadequacy of Funk and Wagnalls; who know that we can disagree without being disagreeable; who understand that if we mobilize our voices to challenge the money and influence that's stood in our way to knowledge and challenge ourselves to reach for something better, there's no obscure minutia we can't illuminate - no minor character we cannot flesh out.
Our new Web encyclopedia can end the outrage of unaffordable, unavailable encyclopedias in our time. We can bring doctors and patients; workers and businesses, Democrats and Republicans together for discussion and consultation; and we can tell the big name encyclopedia players that while they'll get a seat at the table, they don't get to buy every chair. Not this time. Not now.
All of the inclusionists and the deletists on this site share these goals. All have good ideas. And all are valuable contributors who serve this website honorably. But the reason Wikipedia has always been different is because it's not just about what I or they will do, it's also about what you, the people who love knowledge, can do to increase it.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the years to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of the world false hope and bad information. But in the unlikely story that is Wikipedia, there has never been anything false about participation. For when we have faced down increasing attacks on our credibility; when we've been told that we're not a valid source, or that we shouldn't even try to be the be all and end all, or that we can't, thousands upon thousands of Wikipedia authors have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a free and liberated people.
Yes we can.
Re:No, just no.. (Score:5, Interesting)
But the great thing about Wiki is the sheer amount of guidelines. No matter what agenda you're trying to push, there's a guideline somewhere that you can cite in support of your edit. Discussions often become a battle to see who can cite the most compelling WP guidelines. In fact I often find the discussion pages more interesting than the actual articles themselves. Ever seen the EV1 discussion? It's as if someone from GM is doing battle with a load of people who watched Who Killed the Electric Car?
Please remember to be WP:CIVIL when replying...
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Interesting)
having your edits reverted oftentimes feels a bit like being beaten like Rodney King
I concur, I posted on a page where I'm sort of an expert in the field and it got reverted.... I even had references, even though it wasn't that linked up, it could of easily been wiki-ified. After that I haven't made an edit to Wikipedia since, It isn't worth my time to provide that useful info if no one will ever see it.
Not civil at all behind the scenes (Score:5, Interesting)
The is wildly inconsistent application of rules relating to context and verifiability.
Many articles on even non-controversial subjects are watched by editors who seem to have a hardened POV agenda and will revert well-sourced edits that don't fit their world-view.
I found articles that were very thin and fleshed them out considerably, only to have them completely reverted by such individuals for a single missing reference. One that would have taken them all of a minute to source themselves.
This is in direct violation of the rules involving non-controversial subjects.
This same guy then went through every edit I made on other articles with a fine-toothed comb and reverted many of them for officious reasons.
Omarcheeseboro was the guy that particular time. Pointing out the literally *thousands* of articles that had problems many times worse than what I supposedly introduced was a complete waste of time. The arbitration process is hopelessly broken.
Basically the net affect of all this is that you have to be a Wikipedia etiquette expert to hope to make any changes of substance - or you can expect hours of work to be thoughtlessly reverted as part of petty jealousies and personal POV dominions.
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a chance (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, wait, are we talking about the slashdot sense of "us", or a greater collection of people?
Re:How I get along (Score:2, Interesting)
I know there's loads of controversy about the system itself, and whether it's really as nice as it sounds. I'm not even going to address that, because most of this /. discussion will be about that anyway.
I mostly get along by not contributing.
That's exactly the key -- Wikipedia works because people who don't fit the system (whether it's good or bad doesn't matter) can get bored/frustrated/mad and leave the editing side. They can still get the benefits of other people's work within the system (or not if they choose), but there are no demands on them.
So you wind up with all the people who like/tolerate the system working within it, being happy and getting along, and people who don't being utterly uninterfered with by it, and getting along. And trolls, of course, but that's a cosmic background phenomenon.
Politics, on the other hand, is an aspect of government, and government fundamentally works by taking shit from people and spending it to benefit people. If you get along with the system, bully for you, but if not, there's no easy opt-out. You can disregard politics, sure, but this is a losing proposition since the government that is steered by politics will now take your taxes and spend them as others choose. So if you don't like how the government is run, you more-or-less have to fight it.
To make government run like Wikipedia, you'd need at the very least some form of voluntary outlaw status, where in exchange for paying no taxes, you forgo all government services. Some services can be excluded that way, but people won't because it's believed to hurt everyone, not just the ones you deny the services to (e.g. schooling); others simply can't be excluded (police patrolling a beat, national defense), and still others can be (and in some cases are) excluded, with no harm to others, and a lot of people still get superpissed about it (that firefighters-watch-house-burn story from a couple weeks back). Of course, some level of this is generally what libertarians want, and they believe it practical, but anyone short of anarchism agrees there is some core of government services that must be provided for (i.e. forced on) all.
Re:Not civil at all behind the scenes (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, you named the person who reverted your edits, but you didn't say what page or link to the revert. For all we know this person was doing the right thing.
Re:Not civil at all behind the scenes (Score:2, Interesting)
Predictably enough, /. commenters line up to hate on Wikipedia. And yet, somehow, despite this apparent culture of obstructionism which will send it down the drain in short order, Wikipedia seems to still be going strong. Thinking back for a moment, I first heard of this free online encyclopaedia in around 2005. That's just five years ago, and Wikipedia is now the de facto starting point for finding information on almost anything. It's come a long way, and doesn't seem to be grinding to a halt any time soon.
Why do so many people here seem to have had bad experiences with Wikipedia? I've spent a fair bit of time editing articles, and even started a few, and while I sometimes disagree with people, almost everyone I've interacted with has been perfectly mature, and ready to reach an agreement. Obviously stories of frustration and anger get told more often, and read more (people are strange like that), but even accounting for that, it seems that a lot of /.ers run into problems with Wikipedia. Maybe 'geeky' topics (computers, sci-fi, trains, etc.) attract editors with less social skills, or who're more convinced they're right, so they block other editors' changes. Just a theory.
I also find signing comments with my real name helps. I hope it reminds other people that I'm a real person, but I know it makes me more civil to them ("Do I want a future employer to be able to find me calling him a *****?").
Wikipedia is not like that (Score:3, Interesting)
It also says "court was prosecuting one of the two men for involvement in the death of Mohammadi Ashtiani's husband". Yes "involved in the death", another way of saying murder.
The slanting of this article is incredible. If a woman in Texas had an affair with a man, a man who then murdered her husband, and months later she had been convicted under a death sentence for conspiring to murder her husband with her lover, do you think there would be anything like this in the article? Do you think maybe you wouldn't have to piece together that she was thought to be a co-conspirator in those who murdered, I mean were "involved in the death", of her husband? A cursory read of this would make one thing this woman was getting the death penalty for having an affair.
Then there's the canard - "Well, just edit it". Well, look through the history and discussion pages - people have, but their edits are reverted by the usual Wikipedia cabal. Their control of articles like this are backed up by the Arbitration Committee, and ultimately Jimbo Wales himself, whose devotion to Ayn Rand and the like are well known. Anyone with little involvement with Wikipedia might easily believe it is free and open. Even those heavily involved in uncontroversial editing of articles on science, math and the like might not see it. But a long-time observance of things is obvious. Just look at the enormously controversial and biased JayJG failing in the 2006 vote to make the Arbitration Committee - but Jimbo Wales appointing him to it anyhow. I pick that as JayJG is heavily biased against Iran. I am not Iranian, but I do find it laughable how the Americans who overthrew Mossadegh and the democratic government of Iran in the 1950s and installed a brutal dictator now whine about the Iranian government, and turn their eyes from their bloody Texan death rows to some far-off village in Iran and make some woman who conspired with her lover to murder her husband into some cause celebre.
Re:Say what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Fair enough. But then we need something that is. Documenting every stupid piece of trivia that exists is a useful goal. The problem for Wikipedia is that the set of all facts is a superset of the set of notable facts. So if we got some other group together to create an electronic encyclopedia without the concept of notability, it would completely supersede Wikipedia.
In short, the notability policy will ensure Wikipedia's obsolescence if its not changed.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Article is locked.
(translation - Only the admin's whose pet project / particular ideological belief is this article can edit)
A protected page on Wikipedia only means you need to bring up the change on the talk page first. (Wikipedia usually doesn't protect articles' talk pages, and the policy is to unprotect a talk page of a protected article.) Once users (not necessarily admins) build a consensus on the talk page that the change is constructive, use {{editprotected}} to get a different admin to make the change.
Re:Say what? (Score:3, Interesting)