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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).
>> 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.
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
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.
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.
Wikipedia pages represent the range of views of the British Empire that exists in the world, from a force for order and civilization on the globe to an evil empire. The main article leans towards the traditional historical views, but pages on genocides, war crimes, etc. are also there. I'm sorry if that doesn't satisfy you, but it doesn't make it "highly biased". What would be highly biased is if Wikipedia presented the British Empire in the one-sided view you hold of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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.
> 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.