Can Wikipedia Teach Us All How To Just Get Along?

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.'"

Comments

I agree

[fiannaFailMan]

I edit a lot of Northern Ireland-related articles on Wiki. A long-standing dispute is the name of one city and county. Catholics call it Derry, Protestants call it Londonderry. Politicians have raged for years on what to call it and never reached a compromise, it's a never-ending dispute. Wikipedians on the other hand have agreed to call the county Londonderry and the city Derry. That kind of compromise is a long way off among the politicians. In fact I sometimes think that Northern Ireland's politicians could do well to spend a few months editing on Wiki and learning how to get along with other editors. They'd be a lot more civil to each other if they did.

Re:I agree

[jgtg32a]

You should have been a little more descriptive of what was actually done because I wrote a long rant about "who the hell is wiki to decide that city is called Derry and the county is called Londonderry.

What actually happened is there was a compromise on the "Article Names" and both articles start the same. The city article Derry "Derry or Londonderry is the second-biggest city in Northern Ireland..." and the county article starts "County Londonderry or County Derry is one of six counties that form Northern Ireland..."

Re:FTFY

[hairyfeet]

Hell it don't even have to be a controversial page, it can be just the fact that someone is phobic or just a prick. The first time I heard of wiki I thought it was a great idea, basically use crowdsourcing to find errors, since everyone know a little bit about everything, as long as they cited their sources everything would be golden. Or at least I thought that until I found a page with an error. it wasn't a big error, it just said a writer's intention on a show was x when it was y. I knew it was y because I had the box set where the writer specifically said it was y, and he even wrote about it on his blog. so i corrected the error, cited the sources, and got banned. Apparently an admin is a fanboi of the show but has a problem with characters that aren't what HE wants, so anything that doesn't fit his worldview gets changed.

So now I simply treat wiki like a gossip column, completely worthless for any sort of information except for the most basic of facts like what voltage PCI runs on or what wires are which on an Ethernet cable. Anything else and the data simply can't be trusted, as they've allowed too many admins with agendas to own pages and morph them to their liking. Sorry wiki, but if even little errors properly cited equal bans if you don't kiss some admin ass your site is broken.

Re:Say what?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

- the way that organized gangs play the "kill them one at a time" and "get our pet admin to declare them sockpuppets or meatpuppets" games. Look at the Wikipedia articles on Felafel and Za'atar; a group of deranged, racist muslims got together and decided they wanted to strip any reference to "evil jews" about the food. And, since they had a couple of racist administrators on their side, their will was done. These days, even the two FOOD articles look like slanted attack articles.

It gets worse than this. You see, most people are aware that certain articles will inevitably be biased and most will even be dimly aware that one group or another controls them. Admittedly the food articles are far out there, but once you've heard of which groups are vying for control, you at least tend to understand why.

What's worse is the articles which are controlled by groups or persons for reasons unknown. People must understand that any crackpot, fool, or pedantic can control just about any Wikipedia article they feel like with enough effort. And they do, even for articles you'd least expect. (Terrible) Mathematical articles on things like the exponential function are essentially editorially controlled by people who are manifestly unqualified for the post. I once suggested that the article should start with the Taylor Series definition of exp(x), and I was promptly labelled as holding a point of view (POV), and was lumped in with holocaust deniers and ufo conspiracy theorists as someone unfit to edit the article further. I am not making a word of this up.

Wikipedia is controlled by petty bureaucrats, for petty bureaucrats. It wouldn't matter as much if it weren't the first thing returned by every second Google search. Mercifully however, I suspect that Wikipedia is beginning to collapsing in on itself. The legion of incompetent, self-important, Wikicrats are slowly mulching half good articles into meaningless pulp. For example, someone removed all chemical equations from the smelting article. I dare someone to put them back and see how long they last.

Re:Wikipedia is not like that

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice example you pulled up. She was initially sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, not for the murder of her husband. Stoning...adultery. Maybe that has something to do with the Western world, errr, countries where the legal system isn't based on some interpretation of Sharia, finding things in Iran to be more than a bit unsavory. We all know about America's historic blunders and wrongs in Iran but that hardly makes medieval treatment of women acceptable, nor does it mean that we have no right to criticize their hardline judiciary.

Re:Yes

[budgenator]

Article is locked.

(translation - Only the admin's whose pet project / particular ideological belief is this article can edit)

I know it seems that way but there are signs of change coming.

In a vote of 7-0, The most prolific climate revisionist editor ever at Wikipedia, with over 5400 article revisions has been banned from making any edits about climate related articles for six months.William Connolley, now “climate topic banned” at Wikipedia

So what was he banned for?

William M. Connolley has been uncivil and antagonistic
This uncivil and antagonistic behaviour has included refactoring of talk page comments by other users,(examples: [18], [19], [20]) to the point that he was formally prohibited from doing so. In the notice advising him that a consensus of 7 administrators had prohibited his refactoring of talk page posts, he inserted commentary within the post of the administrator leaving the notice on his talk page.
User:William M. Connolley has shown an unreasonable degree of Ownership over climate-related articles and unwillingness to work in a consensus environment.
William M. Connolley has shown Ownership
William M. Connolley is acknowledged to have expertise on the topic of climate change significantly beyond that of most Wikipedians; however, this also holds true for several other editors who regularly edit in this topic area. In this setting, User:William M. Connolley has shown an unreasonable degree of Ownership over climate-related articles and unwillingness to work in a consensus environment.
William M. Connolley BLP violations
William M. Connolley has repeatedly violated the biography of living persons policy. Violations have included inserting personal information irrelevant to the subject's notability, use of blogs as sources, inserting original research and opinion into articles, and removing reliably sourced positive comments about subjects. He has edited biographical articles of persons with whom he has off-wiki professional or personal disagreements.
William M. Connolley's edits to biographies of living persons
William M. Connolley has focused a substantial portion of his editing in the Climate change topic area on biographical articles about living persons who hold views opposed to his own with respect to the reality and significance of anthropogenic global warming, in a fashion suggesting that he does not always approach such articles with an appropriately neutral and disinterested point of view.
William M. Connolley topic-banned
William M. Connolley is topic-banned from Climate change, per Remedy 3.
Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Climate change/Proposed decision

Basically he doesn't play well with others, is rude to people who disagrees with him and most of the stuff that most of us have learned to not do by the time we got to kindergarten. So many people seem to be Narcissistic now and social media and wikipedia just gives them a new venues to bully others around.