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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/...
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
And because nobody pays attention to the stewards, they're not held accountable.
A better system is one where each has ultimate control over their view into wikipedia. Censorship should be at the client, not the server. Each viewer can customize the view to their heart's desire, without infringing on anyone else's right to free speech. Technology provides us the tools to implement such customization of views (i.e. slashdot comment threshold settings, etc.).
Great, just what an encyclopedia of facts needs: a way for readers to filter it to present the reality they want to see. Why don't they just subscribe to blogs if they only want to view things they agree with?
Saying hierarchies are necessary is saying some people have to be controlled. Why, though?
Because some people are tremendous assholes. See also, laws, prisons.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
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.
>"...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.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The problem with Wikipedia is one we've seen with Communism, repeated over again.
Or as Animal Farm put it, "All animals are equal, just some are more equal than others".
We've seen it happen with Wikipedia - the statement you quoted pretty much says "everyone is equal", and we've seen it deteriorate to "everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others".
Wikipedia's "No original research" policy is second in asininity only to its "let's delete articles because we can" policy.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
The thing I hate most is the "consensus" obsession. It leads to -- and I've seen this even though I rarely contribute -- people just making shit up about Wikipedia policies to support their positions and claiming it's "consensus". A lot of it comes down to who has groupthink on their side and, even more troublingly, who can bluff and bluster the best.
Wikipedia's community is toxic. I'm amazed the results are as good as they are, and it saddens me that the site could probably be so much better if it were better managed.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
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
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Of course, many people who bitch about Wikipedia and how it doesn't work complain that their edits were undone, often because they added information without a reliable source for verification.
The issue I've run into is that sometimes there simply isn't a "reliable source" other than people that are intimately familiar with the topic at hand because the written information is under an NDA or otherwise inaccessible. In my particular case, it dealt with the monorail system at Disney World - I worked there for years, was a trainer on the system, and know a fair bit about the internals of the trains and control/signalling system, as does any other driver with any experience. However, Disney and Bombardier are pretty strict about controlling the availability of any official detailed printed/electronic documentation, so in the end I ended up just giving up and letting the incorrect information that was in the article and the half-assed "citations" stay there because the only authoritative citations were in documentation that was unavailable to the public, and I got to the point where I just didn't care anymore whether Jimmy presented bogus info while claiming it was accurate.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas