User:Tankred/What I learned from my Wikicrisis
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[edit] Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
During my Wikicrisis on December 4, 2006, I decided to quit the project altogether. Finally, I returned, but my Wikibreak offered me enough time to think about the broader context of what we are doing in Wikipedia. It is always inspiring to leave a small closed community for a while:-) In this (hopefully) short essay, I will try to clarify three of the biggest problems that undermine our common effort to "make the Internet not suck".
Instead of Jimmy Wales' famous phrase, Wikipedia should use rather Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité as its motto. What can be more revolutionary than a project giving ordinary people not only a free access to an online encyclopedia, but also an opportunity to actually write it? Nevertheless, as all the revolutions before, Wikipedia also suffers from the constant tension between the original utopian vision and the nasty quotidian reality. Nothing against the powerful French slogan, but there is perhaps too much liberty, equality, and brotherhood in our virtual community - or, at least, the application of these three ideals is a bit problematic.
[edit] Fraternité
Let us start with the Fraternité part. Unfortunately, Wikipedia does not endorse Gandhi's universalistic belief that "all men are brothers" (sorry, girls, the French gave the civic right only to men in 1789:-). Instead, Wikipedia has developed its own tradition of "fraternities", which seem to be as exclusionary as the fraternities at American universities. Parochial groups ("we Hungarians, we Slovaks, we Greeks, we Turks...") determine the usual patterns of cooperation in many areas (especially history, and geography). What is much less benign, the members are often explicitly mobilized to protect their nation (religion, political affiliation...) against a perceived threat. Unfortunately, the interests of Wikipedia as a whole very often clash with the interests of these parochial groups. I believe an encyclopedia should reflect the present state of human knowledge regardless of the feelings of Wikipedia's editors. But this is not always the case. My personal Wikicrisis was triggered by a dispute about a datum, which is completely uncontroversial in the real world, but obviously hurt the feelings of an ethnically defined group of Wikipedia's editors. On the talk page of the concerned article, academic references were ridiculed and even the definitions of the basic concepts were simply ignored. So were my requests for evidence and citations. My view, informed by the general consensus in the real world, was countered by a harangue about the "symbolic meaning in the national psyche". The outcome of the dispute contradicts the present state of human knowledge, but is satisfactory to one of the virtual clans living in the secluded world of Wikipedia.
[edit] Égalité
A related problem concerns the equality of all the users. All right, there is a certain hierarchy here and an admin has slightly more power than an ordinary user, for instance. But people with a user account or just an IP can basically use all the tools, which are not explicitly restricted to the admins. As a result, I have recently gotten an undue vandalism warning template. If you do not do it en masse, you can safely use such templates as a weapon in your disputes with other editors. No one cares. Apparently, there is no "appellate body", which could decide whether a template was used in compliance with the actual policies. Similarly, if you are a vandal, you can erase the warning templates from your talk page (or to "archive" them elsewhere) because there is no consensus about this issue either. You will buy time before receiving another full sequence of warning templates from the editors who cannot see your previous warnings in their VandalProof. The cycle can be endless if you are smart. If you are not and your user account gets banned, you can always create another, "clean" user account or just edit from a dynamic IP. Frankly, I do not know how to resolve this problem if we do not want to contribute under our real names like in Citizendium. But there should be at least some clearer and more enforceable policies concerning the use of warning templates in particular, and the fight against vandalism in general.
The overemphasis of the equality is even more disturbing when editing is concerned. Not every editor comes with the equal knowledge. For example, I have no idea whether the articles about the Pokémons or the Pakistani cricket players are correct. That is why I do not edit the articles about Pokémon and cricket. However, many users do not stick with the field of their expertise. Perhaps you have just read an interesting book about a historical event and you see that the article about that event does not mentions what you have read. Unfortunately you are not aware that the author's thesis has already been rebutted by new discoveries or a more careful analysis. Your edit was made in good faith, but it lowered the quality of the encyclopedia. The real problem emerges when you insist on "your" version. In that case, there are basically two possible outcomes. Sometimes, the final version of the article will simply include both "POVs", though one of them may be totally disregarded in the outside world. As a result, Wikipedia devotes excessively large space to minority views and some articles present crazy ideas as legitimate scientific theories. If you try to delete such non sense, you are not "NPOV" enough. The second strategy is to organize a group of committed editors (or one editor with several user accounts) to protect "your" version. Since experts usually have to work and so do not have as much time and intention as people with extreme political views usually have, it is fairly easy to hijack an article. Clearly, it would be more difficult to push the creationists' cause in Evolution, but who gives a damn about the Hungarian prehistory? If you are a member of a strong parochial group, you can even initiate a poll, which will institutionalize the "truth" in an article. If the moderate majority of users is not interested in that particular area, the content of Wikipedia will reflect the group interests instead of the real knowledge.
A possible solution would be to have a pool of experts willing to disclose their credentials and to serve as arbitrators in case of a content dispute. Let us assume you have just found an article stating that the sky is green. You would say: Gee, the sky is blue! Everyone knows that. But a group of Wikipedians from the "Green nation" would organize among themselves to defeat you in the poll. Or, if they were really nice, they would change the sentence into an NPOV formulation "the sky is green, but some people say it is blue". In such a case, it would be handy to have a couple of meteorologists around, with the right to authoritatively change the factually incorrect sentence into "the sky is blue". Unfortunately, there is little room for expertise in Wikipedia right now. The originally devised consensual democracy is restricted to the most popular articles and the rest is practically subject to mob rule of the most vociferous editors. And, as we know from political science, the most committed people also tend to hold extreme views. If I can be a bit personal, I decided to take a Wikibreak after a several times blocked vandal wrote me these nice words: "This is really ridicuolus, that I've to deal with yr ignorance and unknowing time to time, wich you also mix with a huge amount of personal feelings and nonsense and an annoyingly huge and hard bull-head. Since by profession I'm an expert of this field, and many similar and semi-similar fields not like you, Tankred, who does this only as a hobby, sometimes in a very neglective way, as seen above, and may times before." Well, he challenged me in the very area of my professional specialty, but I failed to convince him that he was wrong. What could I do except disengage? I still believe that it should be possible for everyone to contribute to Wikipedia. But this freedom should not drive off the professionals.
[edit] Liberté
My essay got longer than I planned, so I will end by few words about the Liberté in Wikipedia. Even if we institutionalize better policies, their effective enforcement will probably remain questionable. "Everyone can edit Wikipedia" is the cornerstone of the project. The problem is that this right also allows persistent vandals to return and vandalize again. They have just to create a new, "clean" user account. Only in few cases, this tactics could not be employed because there were too many people with the finger on the trigger of CheckUser. But even in these few cases, banned users can easily return thanks to our inability to deal with the dynamic IPs. From my experience, temporal blocks discourage most vandals. Random vandals simply lose interest when they cannot edit Wikipedia for one or two days. But the most persistent vandals cannot be discouraged so easily. I wonder if it is worth going through the same fights again and again. But, unfortunately, it seems very unlikely that the system will stop favoring the absolute liberty over the liberty coupled with responsibility and virtue.
