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Last Stop For Wikipedia's Feuding Editors -- Online High Court (wsj.com)
Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court," which adjudicates disputes, takes appeals, and even issues injunctions [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. The cases it hears are as petty as you'd expect. Fascinating story by WSJ: Wikipedia, the vast online crowdsourced encyclopedia, has a high court. It is a panel called the Arbitration Committee, largely unknown to anyone other than Wiki aficionados, which hears disputes that arise after all other means of conflict resolution have failed. The 15 elected jurists on the English-language Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee -- among them a former staffer for presidential candidate John Kerry, an information-technology consultant in a tiny British village and a retired college librarian -- have clerks, write binding decisions and hear appeals. They even issue preliminary injunctions.
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia operates largely through community consensus. All editors are volunteers, and anyone can write and edit its millions of articles. In online forums, editors debate content, sources and style, and typically manage to broker peace by talking -- or rather, typing -- it out. But every so often, tempers flare, necessitating a more stringent brand of justice. In 2003, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales created the committee, known as ArbCom, as the final stop in the site's dispute-resolution process. "There are things that wouldn't start an argument anywhere else that can still start an argument on Wikipedia," says Ira Matetsky, a Manhattan litigator and the unpaid panel's longest-serving current member. Among them: capitalization rules and whether individual television episodes deserve encyclopedia entries.
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia operates largely through community consensus. All editors are volunteers, and anyone can write and edit its millions of articles. In online forums, editors debate content, sources and style, and typically manage to broker peace by talking -- or rather, typing -- it out. But every so often, tempers flare, necessitating a more stringent brand of justice. In 2003, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales created the committee, known as ArbCom, as the final stop in the site's dispute-resolution process. "There are things that wouldn't start an argument anywhere else that can still start an argument on Wikipedia," says Ira Matetsky, a Manhattan litigator and the unpaid panel's longest-serving current member. Among them: capitalization rules and whether individual television episodes deserve encyclopedia entries.
Visit a 3rd World country sometime. People love to gripe about petty shit wherever you go. This idea that people who have "real" problems aren't concerned with pettiness is something that people in rich countries imagine but it's not true by a longshot.
And why shouldn't they? The whole point of Wikipedia is that the normal rules of hardcopy encyclopedias should not apply. There are no limits to the numbers of pages that can be added. If there is someone out there who is passionate enough to create a wiki page for every single episode of a 30-year-old sitcom, then why not? Wikipedia had more value back in the days before it began pretending to be a "real" encyclopedia. You could lose yourself for hours following one link after another through some obscure aspects of pop culture.
Then suddenly Wikipedia changed, with editors who would arbitrarily decide what was "notable" and what was not, with no consistency whatsoever from one subject to another. Thousands upon thousands of wiki pages were deleted for no other reason than "an encyclopedia shouldn't have an entry on an obscure topic like this". But why not? How does having a separate wiki entry for every manga character ever created damage the wiki entries for heads of state, or historical events?
The people running Wikipedia want everyone to believe that that Wikipedia is a "serious" online reference. Of course, that will never be true as long as anyone with an agenda and an Internet connection can edit any page. Instead, the editors' fruitless efforts to enforce their collective delusion has significantly degraded the overall value of the site.
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