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."

Comments

Stewards are usually like janitors*

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Stewards are usually like janitors*

[Trepidity]

In fact they're more or less prohibited from doing anything except janitorial work. For example they have the power to make someone into an administrator, but they are only supposed to do so in response to each Wikipedia's own community process deciding on it. Each wiki has its own process where you can request to become administrator, people can comment on the request, and there is some decision-making process. If the outcome is "yeah, make this person an administrator", then one of the stewards is supposed to make that person an admin. If they decided to just take some other person who hadn't been approved by the German Wikipedia, and turn them into an admin on the German Wikipedia, they'd quickly lose their own "steward" bit.

Re:Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia (Poorly)

[Em Adespoton]

And because nobody pays attention to the stewards, they're not held accountable.

To play devil's advocate: the fact that they're doing their jobs commendably well is possibly the reason nobody pays attention to them. So by that, they ARE held accountable. They just measure up pretty well under that accounting, so nobody complains about them (with the obvious notable exceptions).

It's kind of like saying "and because nobody pays attention to the janitors at my workplace, they're not held accountable." You'd better bet that if things started going missing or the mess started to build up, people would pay attention pretty quickly.

Re:What's wrong with hierarchy?

[Lazere]

I disagree. In order to be accurate you need to "censor" speech. Wikipedia has positioned itself as a reliable source of information. Even with a moderation system similar to slashtot's, the user would have no way to verify what speech on Wikipedia is accurate and it would quickly become useless. It works on slashdot because we realize that the user comments are just that, comments and we don't take them for accurate information. That system breaks completely in an encyclopedia replacement where errors and misinformation needs to be kept to a minimum.

Wiki hype

[Anonymous Coward]

>"...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.

Re:Meet the 36 People Who Run Wikipedia (Poorly)

[DumbSwede]

Held accountable for what? This total free resource I can use with no strings attached, all the while when these guys have to deal with and moderate with various personalities and entities constantly trying to pervert Wikipedia from its mission.

To me Wikipedia is a marvel to behold, a shining bastion of how not-to-be Facebook. I’m constantly amazed at the vitriol they endure when one or two contentious pages gets messed up by some self-aggrandizing a**hole. Nobody seems to stop or look at the literally millions of technical pages which get used on an everyday basis to solve real world problems – but instead focus on whether Justin Beber, Ron Paul, the Koch Brothers, or Monsanto are given a fair shake in their writeups.

Re:So what does not work?

[linuxrocks123]

In theory, yes, that might be a good thing. Still of dubious value in my opinion -- information is information; I don't care whether it's been officially published or is on arXiv as long as it's correct -- but maybe.

In practice, this happens:
Editor: "The dataflow machine concept [1] suffered from several fatal flaws [2][3], including an inability to efficiently broadcast parallel tokens [4]. MIT continued researching dataflow machines [5][6][7] long after most other researchers had stopped."
Asshole (probably an MIT fanboy): "DELETING the last sentence because it's ORIGINAL RESEARCH!!111one."
Editor: "WTF it's a widely known fact that this is true and you can look at the published research and see that the last publications on classical dataflow machines to verify it."
Asshole: "But it's ORIGINAL RESEARCH(!!11ONE!) because YOU HAD TO LOOK IT UP IT WASN'T WRITTEN DOWN SOMEWHERE ELSE."
Editor: "But that's idiotic. It's true; that's all that matters. And it's important to note this, because it could have implications for researchers studying potentially unhealthy research cultures--"
Asshole: "Okay so now you HATE MIT too you're BIASED and should stop editing any articles about MIT!"
Asshole Administrator: "Reverting page to last revision by Asshole. No original research, Editor. Take some time to cool off."

Who's right here? As a society, it's good to know and document that MIT had gotten so inbred in the 90s that it couldn't see that dataflow machines were a fool's errand even after other researchers could see it. And it's completely verifiable that MIT did, in fact, continue researching dataflow machines years after everyone else had realized they were a dead end and stopped. The article shouldn't say MIT had an inbred culture without a source for that -- that's close to an unverifiable opinion. But, MIT DID have an inbred culture in the late 80s, early 90s, and it's good to preserve the evidence of that. And Wikipedia's as good a place to survey dataflow machine literature as anywhere else. We need more well-written literature surveys. My vote is for the Editor. He didn't say anything biased, just stated the facts as they were and could easily be verified by anyone willing to look. He contributed to the article. And Asshole, aided by Asshole Administrator and Wikipedia's asshole NOR policy, scored a political victory to whitewash a rather sorry chapter in MIT's history.

This is a completely hypothetical example, btw. But stuff pretty much EXACTLY LIKE THAT happens on Wikipedia all the time. And it's a damn shame.

---linuxrocks123