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Wikipedia Is Basically a Corporate Bureaucracy, Says Study (gizmodo.com)
Jennifer Ouellette, reporting for Gizmodo: Wikipedia is a voluntary organization dedicated to the noble goal of decentralized knowledge creation. But as the community has evolved over time, it has wandered further and further from its early egalitarian ideals, according to a new paper published in the journal Future Internet. In fact, such systems usually end up looking a lot like 20th-century bureaucracies. [...] This may seem surprising, since there is no policing authority on Wikipedia -- no established top-down means of control. The community is self-governing, relying primarily on social pressure to enforce the established core norms, according to co-author Simon DeDeo, a complexity scientist at Indiana University. [...] "You start with a decentralized democratic system, but over time you get the emergence of a leadership class with privileged access to information and social networks," DeDeo explained. "Their interests begin to diverge from the rest of the group. They no longer have the same needs and goals. So not only do they come to gain the most power within the system, but they may use it in ways that conflict with the needs of everybody else.""The Iron Law of Oligarchy, demonstrated by Wikipedia," wrote Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist at Caltech. "Rebel all you want, ultimately you become The Establishment."
For all the complaints against bureaucracies, they are often the only way a large organization can run. As organizations grow and mature, they often evolve into bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are often a very efficient way of performing work. The main problem with them is they tend to become static, and inhibit future change. Parts of bureaucracies work to keep themselves in business, and resist change that would eliminate them, even if they become obsolete.
Really? Tell us something that the average person doesn't know, and one of the reasons why if you go to school they will explicitly tell you not to trust wikipedia, not to even use it as a basis for research for furthering your topic. Never mind they've got their own problems, where wikipedia investigates wikipedia and finds no wrongdoing.
Om, nomnomnom...
So fork it. Problem "solved". People like to complain about stuff.
Whether it is Open Source, or "wisdom of the crowd," or whatever: people need to work together, so there must be a power structure and rules. Alternatively, you find some very talented people and give them absolute power, but that upsets people. So, the audience defines the product, and the workers define the organization of the venture, whether it is pro-profit or not. You see the same thing in church groups, rock bands, PTAs and militias that you do in corporate America and Wikipedia.
The first mistake people make is in thinking that bureaucracies have top down control. In a bureaucracy, no one individual (or small group of individuals) have control. Ultimately, bureaucracies come into existence to protect people from being held accountable for their actions. Any organization which does not have a strong leader who takes responsibility for the bad things which happen in the organization (and thus holds those most responsible for those bad things accountable) will turn into a bureaucracy. Even an organization with such a leader will become a bureaucracy if they have to delegate decision making too far down the organization from themselves.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Wikipedia is playing King of the Hill.
The person that spends the most time making edits is the Editor. And there are a lot of self-important busy-bodies that will revert casual edits because they can. Some will attempt to justify it with official-sounding reasons for reversing, others will simply revert without much comment.
This is why I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore, and why I do not browse it as much as I used to. The idea was interesting, but due to the way it was set up, the trolls run the place.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This may seem surprising, since there is no policing authority on Wikipedia
Yes there is.... Haven't you ever heard of "New Page Patrol" ? There are such things as Oversighters (History Suppression); The WP Foundation has Police power through Oversighter, and Control of stewards who assign Administrative permissions to some users, who then act as police, Selective Deletion (Destroying/Hiding historical information about past actions), Banned Users, Requests for Discussion, Votes for Deletion, Speedy Page Deletion (eg BLP), and Banned Content
no established top-down means of control. The community is self-governing, relying primarily on social pressure to enforce the established core norms
There are top-down means of control in regards to certain actions (Oversighting).
"Rebel all you want, ultimately you become The Establishment."
Reminds me of when the Kinks were at the Carnegie and remarked something like "...Rock'n'Roll has become respectable. Bummer."
>> The community is self-governing, relying primarily on social pressure to enforce the established core norms
The real trouble with this approach is not that a few people get control, but that it inevitably leads to a real bias in the Wikipedia entries themselves.
entrenched editors at wikimedia have made content there highly biased.
for example check the article on british empire;
attempts to include the factual cited details about british empire's mass murders and genocides, ethnic cleansings(well in to 1970s) , regime sanctioned slavery and bonded labor, preventable famines that killed millions(in to 1940s), large scale land and resource grabs, destruction and looting of cultural treasures, regular revolts and protests against regime ( both violent and non violent) in almost every colony, and their brutal suppressions, are censored(except for a unavoidable line or two). people who attempt to include any of that are regularly banned from wikipedia .
even comment page for british empire article is censored to prevent discussion of sources.
see the history page of the article and comments page in date sequence and changes to confirm this.
contrast this to inclusion of such details about equally horrible actions by similarly brutish regimes like on ussr, communist china, nazi germany, etc. .
For example, as long as Steve Jobs was alive and running Apple, Apple was not "corporate", because its identity was intrinsically tied to Steve Jobs.
You're getting confused between "corporate" (a separate legal entity) with Steve Job's reality distortion field (whatever you think it was).
But it is sited, and up to date, which is far superior than the encyclopedias I had growing up.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Wisdom of the crowd is an extension of the "invisible hand" ideas of the utilitarians: if enough people think something is good enough idea to vote for it or buy it, the overall decision made will be a good one. I counter this with what I have observed, which is the wisdom of individuals if assembled to common purpose. Someone has always noticed something or has some idea, and so if you give that person the ability to gain wealth or glory from that idea, he or she will implement it to the benefit of all. This is not the wisdom of a crowd, but that by assembling a whole lot of people and presenting the same issue, you enable those individuals to focus and spur them to action. $0.02
However, no one would have used "corporate" to describe Apple while Steve Jobs was alive because the perceived "personality" of Apple while Steve Jobs was alive was the same as the perceived personality of Steve Jobs.
By that argument the following companies are not "corporate" because they had strong CEO personalities: GE with Jack Welch, HP with Carly Fiona, Microsoft with Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, Oracle with Larry Ellison, and eBay with Meg Whiteman, etc.
It's sited, but is It *cited*? It shouldn't be because Wikipedia is a secondary source but I think we can agree wikipedia is cited far too often and possibly not sited enough (since they always ask for more money, presumably to expand the number of sites to deal with all the citations. None of which has anything to do with articles occasionally having of its own citations.
To be clear I'm not mocking you but could not resist the play of words
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Back around 1999 to 2001 when people were all excited about user generated content being able to bypass the gatekeepers, I predicted that sooner or later out of practical considerations a bureaucracy would arise around wikipedia, just like the gatekeeper of say, encyclopaedia britannica, except sans the qualifications.
Guess what, here we are.
Karl Marx could not have written that any better.
You are welcome on my lawn.
. . . to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. It's just human nature.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. -George Orwell
Wikipedia Is Basically a Corporate Bureaucracy, Says Study
Never mind the study. What does the billiard room have to say about it?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Can you please give a specific example?
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
... HP with Carly Fiona
She's so amazing people can't even remember her name.
She's so amazing people can't even remember her name.
Even more so if she becomes a VP pick.
http://www.people.com/article/ted-cruz-campaign-vetting-carly-fiorina-vice-president
Because having a female VP pick worked so well 8 years ago?
Wikipedia is a joke. So is that idea that any organization can function in a "de-centralized, democratic fashion" without every single member of the "democracy" holding the same standards and values as every other person in the group. It's an ideal, but basically, there will always be people willing to spend more time and energy on a given project than others, and they will always emerge as the "leadership class." The problem there is that if those individuals are assholes. And the problem with this planet is that "the masses are asses." So too is the idea of saying that "anybody can edit Wikipedia." Yeah, as long as your concepts and ideas that you're trying to share are in line with the "democracy," otherwise it's just like any other situation where ideas may have truth to them, but if they're unpopular, they don't get any traction and you're back to square one. Wikipedia is simply the repository for what the mass consciousness deems to be true, but it's relationship to truth varies depending on the level of consciousness of the maintainers of that particular subject.
In limited cases - mostly those involving legal issues or to prevent real-world harm - The Wikimedia Foundation steps in and "dictates from on high."
Granted, that's not exactly "external" as the WMF trustees are elected by the community.
The WMF also steps in - whether willingly or not - when a court orders them to do so or, more commonly, when their in-house lawyers tell them they have to step in or they will likely be hauled into court and lose or when it's so obvious that they would lose they don't even need to ask the lawyers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I've seen rules used to push whatever agenda someone has on wikipedia. Couple of my favorites, only internet accessible verification of a published article is allowed as fact. So that time, when an author tries to correct a "theory" someone else has on his own book, he isn't an authority. Even if he has a website of his own with verification. Also excludes the 70's and 80's topical stories, since many aired on TV and only made a few news articles. So we have no historically available news sites to back it up, so it never happened!
My favorite, is the common beliefs override actual facts. A amateur historian investigated common misinformed facts and would update them, only to keep having them removed. One example, Canada had no troops in Vietnam. But they did in fact have medical units and a CA gov website listing service and medals for serving in Vietnam. Proof doesn't over come biased beliefs of many editors.
What keeps wikipedia back is only 1 viewpoint is allowed, and its voted on. Voting doesn't mean something is true, just that its popular.
Looks like a committee member is a guest mod on Slashdot today.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Because having a female VP pick worked so well 8 years ago?
A winning strategy by the looks of it.
Presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) intends to name former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential running mate if he succeeds in winning the GOP nomination, multiple sources reported Wednesday.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ted-cruz-carly-fiorina-vice-president_us_5720e23ce4b0f309baef5657
Up with the proletariat!
VOTE TRUMP 2016
I assume this is satire, because the irony is dripping from those two statements.
True, which is why societies seek unification of the group through either ideology or heritage. The classic statement of this problem is "The Tragedy of the Commons" by Garrett Hardin.
Parent organization of Wikipedia?
What you describe is not vandalism at all. It is simply called "attention to detail" and "being thorough."
Any disputable statement of fact should require a legitimate citation. For example, there is a growing body of research that demonstrates that the statement "the sky is blue" is not always true. According to the Jeppesen Private Pilot Manual, the sky is sometimes filled with water vapor in a way that makes it appear gray. And, according to the same book, the sky can appear pitch black for several hours a day in some places.
So, the categorical statement that "the sky is blue" is demonstrably false. "The sky is sometimes blue" would be more accurate. "The sky sometimes appears blue to persons with unimpaired perception of colors" would be even more accurate.
Actually, can you link me to the article that says the sky is blue? I think I would like to go correct this misinformation.
Yes, that's what I said:
The "benefit of all" part is not contingent upon their mental state. It is the result of a good idea getting done. While I would identify myself as ardently pro-Capitalist mainly because of the horrors of all the alternatives, I would like to point out that, per Hardin, no system can run itself. Smith's invisible hand argument was designed to show that managed economies -- the alternatives to capitalism -- do not work. He is correct, but Hardin updates him: there must be some force encouraging cooperation and preservation of the resources involved, especially one that limits growth so that individual actors are not put into competition with one another. This is where Capitalism by itself is not sufficient; there must be some larger purpose and values system to society, or it collapses from over-exploitation of resources.
> The very term "encyclopedia" means a comprehensive store of information. The default stance to take should be there is a compelling reason to include pretty much everything and everyone.
No, the word encyclopedia is greek for "general education ", much like high school provides a general education. It does not mean "a gargantuan database of every sentence ever uttered, whether useful or not".
Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, includes objective, verifiable facts about noteworthy topics. Let's call that approach A.
You CAN of course have a site with the approach you suggest- any and all random facts about all random people. If someone wants to post what you ate for breakfast, they can. Let's call that approach B.
A site which implements B is Facebook. The web as a whole is approach B. These are useful, but do not serve the same purpose that Wikipedia serves with approach A. Wikipedia has a different kind of value as it is, as it has developed under approach A.
Wikipedia isn't the entire internet, and it isn't supposed to be. It's supposed to be a summary of the most important verifiable information about important topics.
Wikipedia is a real life Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Its organizational structure may be a bit chaotic and perhaps not as democratic as some think it should be, but in a couple thousand years it will probably be pretty difficult to make your way around the galaxy without it.
Regardless, all nonprofit organizations become "corporate bureaucracies" after a while once they start employing people. Once people make a career out of a nonprofit they will do whatever they can to sustain it because they want to stay employed. Mother's Against Drunk Driving is a good example of a nonprofit that persisted even after its original goals were attained because the people who ran the charity needed it to continue out of self interest. At least Wikipedia is a group whose work can never truly be finished.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I hope to not come across as a negative person, but I do not see one -- at least, not for all Americans, which makes the original Confederation (1776-1789) seem like a better system of government than what we have now. America is fragmenting, if not fragmented. I share your concern about religiously-anchored purpose and values systems.
Jimmy just needs to get the community to agree on a policy that administrators have a finite lifetime,like 4 or 5 years, after which time they get effectively blocked from all administration access. They can then contribute a hell of a lot of good but will be prevented from forming an emergent elite class of wiki administrators. Wikipedia can do this like no other community due to the huge number of people who volunteer.