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

Say what?

[Hatta]

Seems like the general perception of the Wikipedia community is anything but productive and civil. More like insular and deletionist.

Re:Say what?

[hedwards]

You're just mad because somebody deleted your entry for not being notable.

Re:Say what?

[flaming error]

Since when does "general perception" relate in any way to verifiable facts?

Re:Say what?

[dadioflex]

Well yeah, but if you delete anything you don't agree with, things can remain remarkably civil, wherever you control the edits.

Re:Say what?

[toastar]

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.

Re:Say what?

[Hatta]

If it's notable enough that someone would search for it on Wikipedia, it's notable enough to have an entry in Wikipedia. The entire concept of notability for an electronic encyclopedia is bogus, and representative of the culture of Wikipedia these days.

Re:Say what?

[hedwards]

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.

Re:Say what?

[SomeKDEUser]

Random page. Just go through at random, and you will find the articles which should not be there.

And you know they should not be there, because they contain no information, or are a terrible idea in themselves. For example: "Superiority of the Western Culture" is a terrible idea for an article. "My Widget Which I Am Trying To Sell" is another terrible example. "My Webcomic" (three entries and I am working towards a fourth) is yet another article which should not be there.

Re:Say what?

[Moryath]

As anyone knows who's ever actually interacted with Wikipedia, the supposed rules mean about as much there as a turd sandwich. Reagle is pie-in-the-sky clueless, and it's easy to see why. Wikipedia's not set up to "assume good faith." Quite the contrary, the following trends are very much evidence that it is anything but:

- the number of "patrollers" of unblock requests who are anything-but-civil and who do nothing but slap each other on the back about how rude they can get away with being until they provoke someone into crossing a "ban line." You know, kind of like stuff like this where they keep poking and prodding merely because they can.

- 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.

- The way that certain entrenched personalities get away with abuses at will, especially playing "scarlet letter" games and falsely accusing people of being sockpuppets. Even worse, the way that many of these have - since they play to the political or racist sympathies of other entrenches - have climbed the ladder and are now administrators or worse. "Orangemike" and "Dreamguy" are two nasties, Dreamguy particularly being one who shows major ownership issues on any article related to fantasy or mythology and who is not above accusing people - without any evidence or proof or even editspace collision - of being "Enviroknot", or any one of another dozen names that are instant, without question or proof, ban words.

- The fact that corruption got to the point where the Checkuser tool is now an "orf wiv 'is 'ead" guilty-only attack. Get accused of being a "sockpuppet", and you're done, no matter what. There IS no proving your innocence of this charge, and the only administrators who will ever even touch an unblock request are the totally corrupt ones like Fisherqueen, Bwilkins, Tnxman, Smashville...

- Then there's the fact that the corrupt admin sector of Wikipedia organizes secretly to keep their hit-list up to date, as do the various entrenched POV-groups that maintain control on many articles.

Re:Say what?

[Hope Thelps]

I posted on a page where I'm sort of an expert in the field

There's the problem right there. Already I can sense violations of:

WP:OR
WP:COI
WP:RANDY
WP:WTF

Enough for an indefinite block and a talk page full of patronising comments. In future please stick to editing articles you know nothing about.

Would you post to Slashdot if you'd read the article? No, of course not. So please show a similar respect for Wikipedia and avoid editing subjects you know anything about.

Re:Say what?

[clarkkent09]

"Superiority of the Western Culture" is a terrible idea for an article.
 
Why? This is just an example of what is wrong with Wikipedia: I disagree with something, therefore it should be deleted. It is certainly a notable concept with plenty of references, and not just in neo-Nazi literature. Not so long ago such beliefs were considered perfectly acceptable and mainstream in many Western societies. Other civilizations, Islamic, Chinese, Japanese often considered themselves superior to others and there are plenty of references for that too. Would you also like to delete the articles on White Supremacy, Black Supremacy, Holocaust Denial etc because those concepts are not politically correct enough for you?

Re:Say what?

[wierd_w]

So, by what criteria does one determine what piece of trivia is important enough to include, and what piece of trivia is "Stupid"?

Seems to me that there is no really hard-set criteria for this distinction, and as such is left up to a collective decision process, which has an un-restrained "populist" bias, which is totally arbitrary (based on which group of editors happen to be deliberating at any given time.)

Some people might claim that Leonardo DiVinci being a homosexual is stupid trivia. Others might claim it has modern cultural significance in light of modern trends toward embracing alternative sexualities. Who is right? How does Wikipedia decide which is which, and do so in a neutral, productive, and riggorous way?

Last time I checked, I saw what went on with the "Malamanteu" article, and saw LOTS of ego, LOTS of dick waving, and VERY VERY little true compromise or consideration. (It basically boiled down to a hard-line of "No, We wont include it, We dont care about your "supposed" justifications, our decision is final, stop questioning it; any attempt to re-create the article will be met with instant deletion." It wasn't that the article was deleted, it was the mentality as to WHY it was deleted-- A mentaltity that refuses to compromise, and assumes itself correct by default, and unquestionable.)

As such, I find Wikipedia's claims of being unbiased, et al, as being just so much hot air, hubris, and puffery. I might as well take a politician at face value as take such a claim, since it has been repeatedly demonstrated that these claims are false, if you would just pay attention.

Re:Say what?

[Hatta]

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:Say what?

[flaming error]

perception is initially created by witnessing facts

Far more likely by hearing/reading somebody else passing it along.

Regardless, people don't so much witness facts as perceive them through the filters of beliefs, biases, and expectations they've accumulated over their lifetime.

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:Say what?

[misexistentialist]

Maybe you just want a redirection to Eurocentrism (and related links in the article)? Academic titles for articles might seem "politically correct," but they are also an attempt at neutrality.

Re:Say what?

[guruevi]

It's the guys PhD dissertation. Nobody important (in his or your life) will ever read it and all it is going to do is sit pretty on his CV for a couple of years. When somebody is hiring him, they will see 'The history and culture of Wikipedia', if they have any interest at all they will read the synopsis and whether or not they agree with it doesn't matter.

That's how it goes with most research papers though. Nobody ever reads it, the synopsis or only some graphs are used to prove or disprove a point in their own research papers. Only when it is or becomes really important or if they're being investigated for fraud in their research projects will somebody actually read it but that's maybe 0.1% of the papers that ever make it that far.

kindergarten etiquette

[MozeeToby]

Think what a different place the world would be if you could convince everyone to follow 'kindergarten etiquette', why is it stated so dismissively in the summary? As if getting everyone to show basic respect to everyone else is an easy thing to do.

Re:kindergarten etiquette

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Perhaps your kindergarten experience differed from mine, but I have explicit kindergarten memories involving:

Kids eating glue.
Kids eating sand.
Kids throwing sand in each other's eyes.
Kids hitting each other with sticks.
Kids walking up to one another, and forcefully stealing their favorite toy from someone else.
Kids screaming, crying, and positively shrieking for attention.
Kids vocally calling each other out on one another's bodily functions (okay, I'll admit, that is actually pretty funny).
Kids pushing each other off the swingset.
Kids talking each other into trying positively stupid stuff just for the fun of it.
....
And the list goes on.

It's fun to sit around and fantasize about how easy life used to be as a kid (and in many ways it was). But I think we often forget about all of the things that weren't quite so positive when being a kid. We lacked the practice and development of social skills that came from years worth of peer-peer interaction. Young kids tend to have no problem acting as if there is absolutely no such thing as etiquette at all. Of course, that never stops teachers from trying to enforce simple common courtesy rules on children. But what those rules have in simplicity, they lack in applicability to more complex social interactions that form as a consequence of more developed social skills building on top of one another (flattery, imitation, anticipation, reaction, empathy, logical reasoning vs. emotional reasoning, etc.).

As we grow as social animals in age, so, too, do our social interactions and, thus, the complexity of the social situations we find ourselves in. We meet more people. We gain more freedom. We learn more basic laws about the nature of reality. As a result, social interactions involve more players, more observers, more factors to consider, and have further reaching consequences (a kindergartner doesn't need to consider whether or not eating sand will ruin their ability to support their family or not). Therefore, the etiquette we choose to follow, and the rationalizations we make to justify our actions to ourselves, grow ever more complex and nuanced. This is the natural progression of the human mind dynamically adapting as a structure evolved to ensure the survival of a very social species.

It's fun to trot out lines and ideals like, "Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten..." and what not. But when childhood is observed from a non-romanticized perspective, it is easy to see why we do not remain as children in our actions, thoughts, or abilities. This is as true for social skills as it is for anything else. If everyone followed kindergarten etiquette, large social entities like national governments, guilds, international clubs, unions, cities, and even, probably, advanced schools would not be possible.

Re:kindergarten etiquette

[dadioflex]

Kindergarten Etiquette falls down when you're arguing against assholes who refuse to accept your carefully reasoned refutation of their insane ideas. That's why "Kindergarten Etiquette" doesn't work, in general. If everyone is polite and open to new ideas, an asshole with a crazy scheme will own you. No matter how politely you argue the counter-point, they will win because they have no boundaries on the tools they will use to break what you say. So, "Kindergarten Etiquette" actually leads to less civility, because it encourages sinful behaviour, like greed and anger. Obviously, and classically, Kindergarten Etiquette has been involved in the majority of the most egregious sex crimes committed in the twentieth century. When it's wrong to disagree with an adult, what isn't wrong?

Re:kindergarten etiquette

[sznupi]

So, is chatroulette the next thing that can teach us all how to just get along? ;)

(actually, could be interesting to check what seeing on Wiki the "other person" would bring...even if in gross way)

FTFY

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Wikipedia has been able to retain a generally productive and civil culture.

Unless the page being worked on is about some particularly controversial topic which is at the forefront of the public mindset....at which point civility and productivity go out the window in lieu of the typical pseudo-anonymous dick waving that happens everywhere else on the internet.

And that doesn't even begin to address those many instances of a Wiki moderator (or whatever the hell they are called) falling in love with some pet page and refusing to let legitimate edits be made to it....

Re:FTFY

[Pharmboy]

It also doesn't count those of us who LEFT Wikipedia because of the authoritarian admin issue. Sure everyone will get along if you run everyone with a different opinion off or ban them. They haven't found a way to get along, they just had twice as many people than they needed and ran off the half that wouldn't agree with them in exchange for being allowed to belong to the admin club.

Don't get me wrong, you have lots of good admins on Wikipedia, but they simply tolerate the bad ones who have the loudest voices and a bullying attitude. Not everyone rolls over so easy.

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.

Deletionist, Inclusionists, and the Goal

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Not "self-correcting"

[Anonymous Coward]

Politics won't self-correct, just as Wikipedia doesn't self-correct. Whenever vandalism or POV hackery is removed from Wikipedia, it's because someone went to an effort to do so. If politics is to become civil or collaborative, it will require some effort from the people involved to make it that way. It's not going to happen all by itself.

Re:Not "self-correcting"

[HungryHobo]

The difference- wikipedia actively makes it as easy as possible for people to make that effort and correct things in minutes.
In politics it is set up exactly opposite.
No individual no matter how much effort they're willing to put in can correct even the most obvious fuckup without investing months, years or ,most likely, decades to get into a position from which they can, and even then it's a long shot.

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

[hedwards]

Can't get enough of that Derry air?

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..."

How I get along

[Dyinobal]

I mostly get along by not contributing.

Re:How I get along

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

No, just no..

[molo]

Wikipedia is full of people with agendas, and they have different camps.. inclusionists, deletionists, plus all the real-world politics on top of that.. And there is really not much recourse when admins have taken actions that you disagree with. Procedure is followed haphazardly. Many admins are undisciplined (in several senses of the word). Wikipedia doesn't seem to be self-correcting.

There are few ways politics self-correct, and very few of them don't involve bloodshed. I don't see how wikipedia is at all relevant to that.

-molo

Re:No, just no..

[fiannaFailMan]

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:No, just no..

[ACS Solver]

I've had some similar experiences here (and a fun occasion when I cited my own site and that was fine), but to play the devil's advocate, how are the mods supposed to know if you really know your stuff or are full of shit? So you know about video games, but mods can't tell that. They also can't tell if you really have a Computer Science degree or not (besides, it's not like the degree automatically makes you an authority - I also have a CS degree and there's plenty of CS stuff I don't know).

Then again, there definitely are people who know enough and should be able to edit accordingly. Maybe Wikipedia could use a system where editors can (privately) provide proof of being an expert in an area, and then they get tagged as such by the moderators, provided they also have a positive history of contributions.

Re:Yes

[toastar]

No. And your post is OR.

the neutrality of this post is disputed

Not civil at all behind the scenes

[drsmack1]

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.

Re:Not civil at all behind the scenes

[Raenex]

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.

Wikipedia can live and let live

[Rix]

Where as the world often can't. Abortion is either legal, or it's not. Taxes are either at one rate or another. We either provide universal health care or we do not.

Wikipedia can present all valid views. The world can't implement all possible policies.

Re:Wikipedia can live and let live

[DaveV1.0]

On Wikipedia, the person or people who determine what is valid is the one who has the most time and is most invested in the content of the article, regardless of cold, hard logic.
 
Your analogy fails to support your contention because it actually describes how Wikipedia operates: Anyone can make edits, but the edits will only stay if the support the opinion of the Wikipedia cliques and admins.

Yah! RIIIIGHT!

[Chas]

So long as you conform to the opinions of the moderators there, right, wrong, or otherwise, you can get along.

Re:No

[Archangel Michael]

[citation needed]

Bollocks.

[vague disclaimer]

Any appearance of civility is caused by the inherent wiki problem: arguments are won by those who just won't give up. Those with better things to do, give up, go and never look back.

Re:Yes

[Stargoat]

Article is locked.

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

Not a chance

[damn_registrars]

People will continue to argue, yell, insult, and generally be rude to each other. Besides half of the people believe that wikipedia is itself a tool for the other side to spread their message (that first half then sponsored conservapedia, naturally). So no, wikipedia won't teach us how to get along.

Oh, wait, are we talking about the slashdot sense of "us", or a greater collection of people?

Re:Not a chance

[takowl]

But for all that, I believe it's doing us a service by forcing us to have the arguments. We have to confront the views we don't like. Because there's only one 'current' version of any page, conflicting factions cannot produce their own versions* and simply ignore each other. And, most of the time, that results in some form of compromise. People aren't always nice to each other (although that's encouraged), but by and large, it works.

* Yes, I know, Conservapedia, Citizendium, and so on do have their own versions. But a) it's much easier to edit Wikipedia than it is to set up your own version, and b) almost nobody uses any of the alternatives.

Re:Yah! RIIIIGHT!

[Meshach]

So long as you conform to the opinions of the moderators there, right, wrong, or otherwise, you can get along.

Except that Wikipedia does not have moderation.

Wikipedia is not like that

[br00tus]

A case in point is the article Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. She is a woman in Iran who had the death penalty charged against her. The opening paragraph mentions nothing about her dead husband. The next paragraph at one point says - 'she has since recanted the "confession" made under duress'. Note the scare quotes around the word confession, the mention it was made under duress - as if confessions in American murder cases are not made to police "under duress", whatever that is supposed to mean.

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:Yah! RIIIIGHT!

[DaveV1.0]

No, Wikipedia has cliques and admins.

Re:Yes

[tepples]

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:Really? I think this is the obligatory answer.

[cinderellamanson]

In common usage there is no difference.

Slashdot, though is different, because it is filled pedantic fucking comedians who often go without sleep, survive on caffeine, live in a basement or garage where they are plugged into the internet 24 fucking hours a fucking day, so the probability of some dickwad inventing a difference and some fuckwad using it on someone approaches certitude the way Captain Kirk approaches FTL or green babes.

Now, back to the article, which i did not fucking read, in which case I would be a dickwad (a fuckwad having read the article), which is about wikipedia. Fuck wikipedia.

here's the heirarchy of social media as I understand it.

We'll start with wikipedia.

wikipedia

This is proof of wiki software as a longterm content management system.

wikipedia
myspace

here we see that wiki software is very good for managing consensus software and myspace is good for managing music, blogs and people.

wikipedia
myspace
twitter
facebook

Phone support and real names. I think I'll label them for now.

wikipedia - ivory tower
myspace - rock concert
twitter - text messages
facebook - phonebook? - with pictures.
youtube - videos

You know what I think would be cool?

nasa - control your very own little robots on mars.

Anyways. Where were we? Oh yea.

slashdot - ???

hmm.

slashdot - basement dweller
slashdot - virgin
slashdot - geek
slashdot - nerd
slashdot - dickwad
slashdot - fuckwad
slashdot - *nix user
slashdot - wait that's it.

Slashdot is basically a Unix user's social networking site.

Wikipedia is a Unix run system.

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.

LOL

[Tom]

I'm not into chat-lingo, but "LOL" seems the only appropriate answer to the question asked in the summary.

If Wikipedia were the model for a society, it would be a strict oligarchy covered in a thin layer of pseudo-democracy. And I mean even thinner than our current so-called democracies where you actually can become a part of the in-group through nothing more than popular support.

It would also be a society hostile to science, dominated by porn on every street corner, and one in which a lot of people and sometimes even places "disappear" suddenly with only a note left behind saying "he wasn't notable" or, in some cases, just "WP:SD". If his wife complains to the authorities, she will find herself tagged "citation needed" and will have to supply several relatives who can vouch that she exists, or she will follow. Strangely, producing a birth certificate will be rejected as "original research".

Also, the official language of the administration, that you need to speak if you want anything from the authorities, will not be the language of the land but a derivative full of strange acrynoms and grammar traps so any bureaucrat who doesn't like you can always find some flaw in whatever you said and reject your request based on formalities.

No, thanks. Even though in many respects our current pseudo-democracies aren't too different, I still prefer them.