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Last Stop For Wikipedia's Feuding Editors -- Online High Court (wsj.com)

Posted by msmash on from the war-and-peace dept.

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.

5 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Paywall by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You're on Slashdot and you don't know how to bypass a paywall, so I guess the joke is on you.

    Irrelevant. You're editor on a site that receives millions of visitors per month, and you post on the front page a paywalled link as the story to read?

    FAIL.

    I don't like bashing /. editors, but unfortunately it's too often called for. Sending readers to look for ways around a paywall, is not a good thing. From ethical nor editorial p.o.v.

  2. Wikipedia takes itself too seriously by timholman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... and whether individual television episodes deserve encyclopedia entries.

    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.

    1. Re: Wikipedia takes itself too seriously by doom · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There are a hell of a lot of us who gave up on writing for wikipedia for reasons like that.] Working on wikipedia pages is like being locked in a room with madmen who you are supposed to pretend can be reasoned with. If you do get the attention of a moderator, they're guaranteed to do the most shallow reading of the situation possible (e.g. ban the flamer, but the not the flame-baiter). Jimmy Wales used to like to say that working on wikipedia should be fun but you need a phenomenally weird idea of "fun" to think that it is.

      But this doesn't even scratch the surface of the real problem with things like wikipedia-- with freely available, unverified accounts you have only two choices (1) be so trivial no one cares about you (2) get gamed by armies of well-funded sock-puppet brigades.

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Re:Wikipedia: source of all oftenaccurate informat by doom · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm pretty critical of wikipedia, but where they win is that even though any given article is likely to be written by hired-guns promoting their masters opinions, the very fact that they have to pretend to sound kind-of sort-of neutral forces them to tone down their act somewhat to the point where what they're saying has to be at least comprehensible.

    Compare tech industry advertising copy to wikipedia pages about corporate products... there's something to be said for comprehensible bullshit.