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: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.