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Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia
blastboy writes By pretty much any logic, Wikipedia shouldn't work: A vast website, built on the labor of volunteers, with very few tangible rewards and a fairly weird hierarchy. From the article: "The stewards would prefer to go unnoticed. Only one has ever had any real fame—Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales served as a steward from 2006 to 2009. They operate above the fray, giving and taking user privileges and intervening in matters that lower-ranking editors can’t handle. You can summon them for emergencies in the Wikimedia Stewards IRC chat room by typing '!steward.' Their secrecy has a certain irony, given the very public product they manage, but perhaps it’s emblematic of Wikimedia as a whole. When your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge,' hierarchies become a necessary evil."
HI,
While focused on an academic audience of organizational scholars, I have a friend who was a Steward and has written an ethnographic book about Wikipedia:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/searc...
If you are more interested in accessible information he's also written an editorial regarding Wikipedia for Slate:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Wikipedia shows that productive non-market egalitarian collaboration on a very wide scale is possible.
Peace to huts! War to palaces!
At least on the English Wikipedia. There are a few times when actually make decisions, but by and large they are just the "key-holders" and implement decisions made by the community or by higher-up functionaries.
* Yes I know, it's the administrators who are usually considered the janitors on the Wiki.
Citation Needed or GTFO
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
We keep acting like it is a bad thing, but it does have value. Well-organized hierarchies and react quickly. I would fully expect Wikipedia to be run by a well-organized group. Otherwise it wouldn't be as consistent as it is. Frankly, it is a bit of a miracle just how high the quality is across the board.
And because nobody pays attention to the stewards, they're not held accountable.
IRC chat room... Internet Relay Chat chat room... really? Try IRC channel :/
They're called flight attendants now.
Whether it's the inevitability of your contribution being superseded and "overriden" eventually, or your efforts being reverted instantly (on controversial topics where the editor has an existing predisposition), one really should go into it knowing that their addition will likely be discarded one way or another.
For me personally, that means finding other venues in which to attempt to contribute--Slashdot's historical sister site Everything2, regardless of Wikipedia ultimately "winning" in popularity, actually continues to look better and better over time in that respect...
From TFA:
Which Wikimedia/Wikipedia shouldn't exist? The mythical, idealized one - or the actual, real one? The two actually have very little to do with each other.
By all the evidence, it doesn't.
Utter pile of shitcuntitude & buttsnottery.
Such things also tend to work -- it's what our society is built upon.
>"...your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge'"...
Hah. If I could only count the number of factually correct pages that have disappeared over the years for failure to be "relevant" or "sufficiently important" or whatever metric they use, I'd be counting pretty damn high. Care about a regionally famous indie band from the mid 90's to the point that you'll carefully assemble what little information is out there about them? Too bad, gone in a blink, as if archive.org were complete and searchable for that stuff.
I've just never understood why something true should be excluded there.
Time and again people surface to tell us just how unjust Wikipedia's editing is, how unfair their Stewards are, how biased and whatnot it is... While staying deliberately vague and nonsensical. Point to an article that is biased, unjust and wrong and let's see it for ourselves or STFU!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Citations needed.
From Wikipedia's Statement of Principles:
Newcomers are always to be welcomed. There must be no cabal, there must be no elites, there must be no hierarchy or structure which gets in the way of this openness to newcomers.
Personally, I lost interest in contributing to it a few years ago when the sort of constructive, well intended stuff I had always contributed began to get reverted on a regular basis. I still contribute occasionally, but only things that are still unlikely to be reverted, that is, minor cleanups of articles that nobody (else) reads.
There are more than 36 bullies on Wikipedia.
Sounds like the Roman Catholic Church. Possibly without the sex.
Yeah, I tried Wikipedia. Uploaded things like rare book covers. 100% public domain stuff. Had them deleted. Computer storage is infinite and free, but the powers that be at Wikipedia delete anything and everything that anyone contributes.
"When your foundational value is that 'every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge,' hierarchies become a necessary evil."
Same thing happened in Communist states; there always has to be an organizational hierarchy. In theory it will work, but the pitfall is when that hierarchy becomes corrupt; so far Wikipedia has managed to hold corruption in check so it's been able to work well; probably because said hierarchy is so small.
In a codified hierarchy, the people with power are at least publicly accountable. Wikipedia is clear about not being a democracy (a statement that many Wikipedians seem to ignore), but the real mechanisms are deliberately obscured. This is why I've never registered an account at Wikipedia even though I contribute quite often. I don't want to be part of a system that pretends to be open but isn't.
By Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It seems more and more stories on /. are just native advertising. Digging through all the stories to find something interesting is like digging through an email account with no spam filters.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Wikipedia is tolerable for old or static or uncontroversial information. For example, I'm sure that the data on the masses of the 50 nearest stars is reliable.
For anything political or controversial, the Wikipedia "stewards" are hard-left. I would NEVER trust them with anything important.
If I were a teacher, I would inform every student that Wikipedia can NEVER be cited as a reference, and that doing so would be an instant F on any paper.
> I've just never understood why something true should be excluded there.
If anyone can post anything and nothing is excluded, you end up with the internet.
They are trying to build an encyclopedia, not the internet. Most of the comments on this page are true, but they don't belong in an encyclopedia.
http://www.enews.pk/
Can't read that hipsteriffic website.
Fuck sake, too much hyperbole. You might as well claim that including the indie band page would mean you end up rebuilding the WHOLE FUCKING UNIVERSE!!!
waaaahmbulance panic.
Like others say, my fucking phone can easily carry the EN wiki text. It can probably survive a few more MB for a few bands.
Notability is an important criteria, but it is heavily abused at present.
No. Not by any logic. By a gut feeling and 'common' sense, then yes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
36.... 36.... 36....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
now just drop in a tesla 'mysteries of the 3 6 9' and you've got a winner!