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Wikipedia The Internet

Last Stop For Wikipedia's Feuding Editors -- Online High Court (wsj.com) 57

Posted by msmash from the war-and-peace dept.
Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court," which adjudicates disputes, takes appeals, and even issues injunctions [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. The cases it hears are as petty as you'd expect. Fascinating story by WSJ: Wikipedia, the vast online crowdsourced encyclopedia, has a high court. It is a panel called the Arbitration Committee, largely unknown to anyone other than Wiki aficionados, which hears disputes that arise after all other means of conflict resolution have failed. The 15 elected jurists on the English-language Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee -- among them a former staffer for presidential candidate John Kerry, an information-technology consultant in a tiny British village and a retired college librarian -- have clerks, write binding decisions and hear appeals. They even issue preliminary injunctions.

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia operates largely through community consensus. All editors are volunteers, and anyone can write and edit its millions of articles. In online forums, editors debate content, sources and style, and typically manage to broker peace by talking -- or rather, typing -- it out. But every so often, tempers flare, necessitating a more stringent brand of justice. In 2003, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales created the committee, known as ArbCom, as the final stop in the site's dispute-resolution process. "There are things that wouldn't start an argument anywhere else that can still start an argument on Wikipedia," says Ira Matetsky, a Manhattan litigator and the unpaid panel's longest-serving current member. Among them: capitalization rules and whether individual television episodes deserve encyclopedia entries.
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Last Stop For Wikipedia's Feuding Editors -- Online High Court More

Last Stop For Wikipedia's Feuding Editors -- Online High Court

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  • So totally fascinating... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ... that I'm not gonna read it.

    Wikipedia is a go-to for quick overviews and starting points to find out more, but it takes itself entirely too seriously. Certainly for the quality content it produces.

  • The 15 elected jurists on the English-language Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee -- among them a former staffer for presidential candidate John Kerry, an information-technology consultant in a tiny British village and a retired college librarian -- have clerks, write binding decisions and hear appeals. They even issue preliminary injunctions.

    If ever we develop a Ministry of Truth [wikipedia.org] (pun intended) — or, in the case of US, a Department of same — it will begin with the similar seemingly benign composition.

    • The way we're combining a new McCarthyism with the War on Fake News I'm sure there is already a ministry of truth out there.
      Wikileaks has joined the War on Fake News btw. Jimmy Wales said so.

    • Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court,"

      s/Supreme/Kangaroo/g

      This is Wikipedia we're talking about here, not an actual functioning system.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Obligatory (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Or a 3-line summary at the bottom:

    >Well stated. Wikipedia Editors have been foolish, arrogant, and elitist for several years now. Thus my reason for no longer contributing to Wikipedia content -- it's not worth the hassle...

    >Whilst you're entitled to your opinions, please don't insult other editors. We've put a massive amount of effort into making sure we keep the article in line with both reality, and the MoS.

    >That it took a massive amount of effort to decide whether to capitalize an "I" pretty much confirms what Alchemistmatt said. This is a good illustration of why I don't edit Wikipedia anymore either...

  • Wikipedia takes itself too seriously (Score:5, Interesting)

    by timholman ( 71886 ) on Sunday May 13, 2018 @01:51PM (#56604202)

    ... and whether individual television episodes deserve encyclopedia entries.

    And why shouldn't they? The whole point of Wikipedia is that the normal rules of hardcopy encyclopedias should not apply. There are no limits to the numbers of pages that can be added. If there is someone out there who is passionate enough to create a wiki page for every single episode of a 30-year-old sitcom, then why not? Wikipedia had more value back in the days before it began pretending to be a "real" encyclopedia. You could lose yourself for hours following one link after another through some obscure aspects of pop culture.

    Then suddenly Wikipedia changed, with editors who would arbitrarily decide what was "notable" and what was not, with no consistency whatsoever from one subject to another. Thousands upon thousands of wiki pages were deleted for no other reason than "an encyclopedia shouldn't have an entry on an obscure topic like this". But why not? How does having a separate wiki entry for every manga character ever created damage the wiki entries for heads of state, or historical events?

    The people running Wikipedia want everyone to believe that that Wikipedia is a "serious" online reference. Of course, that will never be true as long as anyone with an agenda and an Internet connection can edit any page. Instead, the editors' fruitless efforts to enforce their collective delusion has significantly degraded the overall value of the site.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: Wikipedia takes itself too seriously (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I would have been one of those volunteers with a patch to oversight under the old wikipedia. But then the new regime deleted some of my poorly expressed yet factually adequate edits with no feedback (so I couldn't learn the problem to fix it) , an entry on a noteworthy but not famous friend was deleted, and the Imelda Marcos entry became untouchable, such a goddess as never before bestrode the planet. All minor matters but combined they told me that if I had time to give, I would be better off volunteering

        • Re: Wikipedia takes itself too seriously (Score:4, Interesting)

          by doom ( 14564 ) <doom@kzsu.stanford.edu> on Sunday May 13, 2018 @08:04PM (#56605736) Homepage Journal

          There are a hell of a lot of us who gave up on writing for wikipedia for reasons like that.] Working on wikipedia pages is like being locked in a room with madmen who you are supposed to pretend can be reasoned with. If you do get the attention of a moderator, they're guaranteed to do the most shallow reading of the situation possible (e.g. ban the flamer, but the not the flame-baiter). Jimmy Wales used to like to say that working on wikipedia should be fun but you need a phenomenally weird idea of "fun" to think that it is.

          But this doesn't even scratch the surface of the real problem with things like wikipedia-- with freely available, unverified accounts you have only two choices (1) be so trivial no one cares about you (2) get gamed by armies of well-funded sock-puppet brigades.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        For navigation, yes, it matters whether a TV show has individual articles on its episodes, or they are all merged into one article. For a viewer who comes in seeking this information, either it is all laid out in front of him, or he makes 22 clicks through each episode article to find it - very unwieldy. It's not simply about disk space, but also the administration of those separate articles.

        Depends on the length. If it's 22 1-paragraph articles, yes, you have a point. When it's 22 articles of detailed epis

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by doom ( 14564 )

      And why shouldn't they?

      Speaking for myself, I'd rather have a page for the series as a whole, and occasional articles for particularly note-worthy episodes-- that way the pages themselves would be more interesting to read than they would be if you let anal-retentive competists add (probably automatically generated) pages for each individual episode.

      But on the other-hand, i can't say that I really care, either.

      • Speaking for myself, I'd rather have a page for the series as a whole, and occasional articles for particularly note-worthy episodes-- that way the pages themselves would be more interesting to read than they would be if you let anal-retentive competists add (probably automatically generated) pages for each individual episode.

        Having a series overview page and an individual page for each episode is not a mutually exclusive arrangement. Look at the Wikipedia entries for any of the Star Trek series as an exam

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Some people enjoy destroying other people's work. They get great pleasure from denigrating and tearing it down. It's one of Wikipedia's oldest trolls.

  • Wikipedia used to be an anything goes encyclopedia, where anyone could jump in and create an article. My first articles were almost 16 years ago where there were no notability rules and Ip addresses could create articles. In fact I almost became an admin but their rapidly increasingly “standards” prevented me because I wasn’t enough of an “obsessive”. I left the site after that and became a vandal. Yes I’m proud to be one of the sites “long term abuse”rs. As y

  • Definitively don't cite wikipedia as an authority on how their own politics work.

  • ArbCom is Infamous (Score:3)

    by MSTCrow5429 ( 642744 ) on Sunday May 13, 2018 @03:22PM (#56604634)

    I think anyone that has ever encountered Wikipedia knows what the kangaroo court known as "ArbCom" is. It's like the online version of the Fliegendes Sonder-Standgericht or Tax Court.

  • Obligatory... (Score:3)

    by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Sunday May 13, 2018 @03:32PM (#56604668)
    ...xkcd quote [xkcd.com]

  • It's not working well... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I have a habit of correcting grammar errors -- in Portuguese (my native language, that is).

    Sometimes I get some phrases in Wikipedia which look like Google's automatic translation with an structure which is impossible to understand.

    Most of the times sense can be grasped from context, but there are times when I check the English version, which may provide clearer ideas (or rather, less distorted). There are other aspects we must respect -- for instance, subtleties related to differences between Brazil and Po

  • Wikipedia: source of all oftenaccurate information (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Wikipedia: the source of all often accurate information"
    I came up with that quip years ago. Feel free to spread it around.
    I use wikipedia way to much. One of the major reasons I use wikipedia is that, compared to many other sites, it is easy to read, comprehend, navigate, does not load up a lot ads, cookies, etc. It wins on the 'mental ergonomics.'
    In the area of hard science, I trust that if I am looking up the atomic weight of an element or something from basic physics it will be accurate. That is because

    • I'm pretty critical of wikipedia, but where they win is that even though any given article is likely to be written by hired-guns promoting their masters opinions, the very fact that they have to pretend to sound kind-of sort-of neutral forces them to tone down their act somewhat to the point where what they're saying has to be at least comprehensible.

      Compare tech industry advertising copy to wikipedia pages about corporate products... there's something to be said for comprehensible bullshit.

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