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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.'"
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.
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...
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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.
It seems to be that a significant quantity of the people with power over there revel in the power of controlling "what truth is".
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.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Which is what's so odd about that. People regularly flag things as not being noteworthy and as such in need of deletion. Makes me wonder how they find those pages if they're not noteworthy in the first place.