4 ms·

I'm not sure you even need that. I think all that is required are a few rules like "no personal attacks". Wikipedia and HN work very well due to having a few ba

I'm not sure you even need that. I think all that is required are a few rules like "no personal attacks". Wikipedia and HN work very well due to having a few basic rules like that which everyone follows. They would obviously need to have some kind of reporting mechanism which is followed up on. That could also be done by volunteers.

WalterSear 11y ago
>Wikipedia and HN work very well due to having a few basic rules like that which everyone follows. Wikipedia is notorious for entrenched and highly partisan volunteer edit staff.
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  >Wikipedia is notorious for entrenched and highly partisan volunteer edit staff. That's not really my experience. The main problem is newbies coming in and not understanding MEDRS and other policies. In fact, there should never be an issue with partisan editors because you can always get outside assistance (from admins, or from other editors outside the page in question). Anyway, that is a separate issue to the civility of discussion.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    I was an active WP editor for a couple of years before I gave up on it. If you're editing highly technical or boring stuff, it's going to be mostly fine. Anything that a normal person has an opinion on is a nightmare. WP is a giant turf war. Whoever has the most time to piss down the hole of uselessness wins, which means that minority viewpoints (meaning viewpoints that are held by a minority of WP's editors and admins, not necessarily viewpoints that are held by a minority of WP's readers) are not fairly represented, despite WP's obsession with "NPOV", and anyone who can afford a PR company has their page professionally managed to keep it as on-message as possible.
    - cpncrunch 11y ago
      I think you might be misunderstanding how wikipedia works. It most certainly should NOT fairly represent minority viewpoints of editors. There are quite a lot of editors who believe in weird conspiracy theories, but that doesn't mean they should be given prominence in the article. The policies are designed to fairly represent significant minority viewpoints of scientists. (Talking about medical/science articles here, which is what I mostly edit). When there is a significant controversy (e.g. chronic lyme), that is covered. I've never seen any kind of PR company on wikipedia, although I don't tend to edit company articles.
      - cookiecaper 11y ago
        >I think you might be misunderstanding how wikipedia works. I don't think so. >It most certainly should NOT fairly represent minority viewpoints of editors. There are quite a lot of editors who believe in weird conspiracy theories, but that doesn't mean they should be given prominence in the article. The problem with only accepting "reliable sources" is that that leads, essentially, to only parroting what is frequently heard in the mainstream media. The articles are thus only "fair" if you consider the conventional treatment of the topic at hand "fair". If you believe this, most likely you are just terrible at detecting bias and should avoid editing WP anyway because you can't spot NPOV violations to save your life. I think it's a mistake to claim mainstream publications are de-facto sources of truth and/or that they should always be favored over other sources. Perhaps the most egregious demonstrations of the absurdity of WP's source policies are that Wikipedia will often reject primary sources because a) they aren't published by a mainstream outlet or b) they believe the primary source is "too biased" to comment on an issue involving itself. The reality, however, is that no matter how right you may be, even if you have prominent mainstream sources to overcome the site's contrived reliability test, which is in fact often the case, it really comes down to which camp has more time to edit war (admins included here). This is how we get badly biased articles on even slightly controversial subjects; WP is not really self-policing, it's just mob territory. Of course, if we believe that the relevant mob's opinion always comports with reality, there is no problem. I believe that believing this, about almost anything, is naive. >I've never seen any kind of PR company on wikipedia, although I don't tend to edit company articles. A single Google search will bring you face-to-face with the evidence. While a lot of people seem to state that it's important to "not edit the article directly" but rather suggest changes on the Talk pages, it's safe to say that even among the people who repeat this mantra, it's frequently ignored. Like SEO, no matter what you say about how you use it, you have no option here but to compete or die. You'll also find results in Google's Top 10 that ignore this rule and offer to either help you edit your WP page yourself or take money for editing and monitoring it for you. WP is a staple of online "reputation management", which is something every company does, whether they acknowledge it or not.
  - WalterSear 11y ago
    http://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-is-basically-a-corporate-bureaucracy-accordi-1746955234 http://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-is-basically-a-corporate-bureau...
DanBC 11y ago
Wikipedia is the posterchild for sites that have toxic environments - that's why wikimedia foundation spends so much time and money researching ways to stop the editor decline. The fact that wikipedia is good is a miracle when you see the awful behaviour of many editors / admins.
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  >the awful behaviour of many editors / admins Do you have any recent examples of this?
  - cpncrunch 11y ago
    Looking through your comments, the only prior example you give is of lengthy discussions of punctuation at the village pump. That isn't exactly my definition of "awful behaviour". You also mention about male editors replace "rape scene" with "sex scene" in articles, but I can't find where that actually happened (and it seems like a pretty clear case of seeing what the sources say).

WalterSear 11y ago

>Wikipedia and HN work very well due to having a few basic rules like that which everyone follows. Wikipedia is notorious for entrenched and highly partisan volunteer edit staff.

cpncrunch 11y ago
>Wikipedia is notorious for entrenched and highly partisan volunteer edit staff. That's not really my experience. The main problem is newbies coming in and not understanding MEDRS and other policies. In fact, there should never be an issue with partisan editors because you can always get outside assistance (from admins, or from other editors outside the page in question). Anyway, that is a separate issue to the civility of discussion.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  I was an active WP editor for a couple of years before I gave up on it. If you're editing highly technical or boring stuff, it's going to be mostly fine. Anything that a normal person has an opinion on is a nightmare. WP is a giant turf war. Whoever has the most time to piss down the hole of uselessness wins, which means that minority viewpoints (meaning viewpoints that are held by a minority of WP's editors and admins, not necessarily viewpoints that are held by a minority of WP's readers) are not fairly represented, despite WP's obsession with "NPOV", and anyone who can afford a PR company has their page professionally managed to keep it as on-message as possible.
  - cpncrunch 11y ago
    I think you might be misunderstanding how wikipedia works. It most certainly should NOT fairly represent minority viewpoints of editors. There are quite a lot of editors who believe in weird conspiracy theories, but that doesn't mean they should be given prominence in the article. The policies are designed to fairly represent significant minority viewpoints of scientists. (Talking about medical/science articles here, which is what I mostly edit). When there is a significant controversy (e.g. chronic lyme), that is covered. I've never seen any kind of PR company on wikipedia, although I don't tend to edit company articles.
    - cookiecaper 11y ago
      >I think you might be misunderstanding how wikipedia works. I don't think so. >It most certainly should NOT fairly represent minority viewpoints of editors. There are quite a lot of editors who believe in weird conspiracy theories, but that doesn't mean they should be given prominence in the article. The problem with only accepting "reliable sources" is that that leads, essentially, to only parroting what is frequently heard in the mainstream media. The articles are thus only "fair" if you consider the conventional treatment of the topic at hand "fair". If you believe this, most likely you are just terrible at detecting bias and should avoid editing WP anyway because you can't spot NPOV violations to save your life. I think it's a mistake to claim mainstream publications are de-facto sources of truth and/or that they should always be favored over other sources. Perhaps the most egregious demonstrations of the absurdity of WP's source policies are that Wikipedia will often reject primary sources because a) they aren't published by a mainstream outlet or b) they believe the primary source is "too biased" to comment on an issue involving itself. The reality, however, is that no matter how right you may be, even if you have prominent mainstream sources to overcome the site's contrived reliability test, which is in fact often the case, it really comes down to which camp has more time to edit war (admins included here). This is how we get badly biased articles on even slightly controversial subjects; WP is not really self-policing, it's just mob territory. Of course, if we believe that the relevant mob's opinion always comports with reality, there is no problem. I believe that believing this, about almost anything, is naive. >I've never seen any kind of PR company on wikipedia, although I don't tend to edit company articles. A single Google search will bring you face-to-face with the evidence. While a lot of people seem to state that it's important to "not edit the article directly" but rather suggest changes on the Talk pages, it's safe to say that even among the people who repeat this mantra, it's frequently ignored. Like SEO, no matter what you say about how you use it, you have no option here but to compete or die. You'll also find results in Google's Top 10 that ignore this rule and offer to either help you edit your WP page yourself or take money for editing and monitoring it for you. WP is a staple of online "reputation management", which is something every company does, whether they acknowledge it or not.
- WalterSear 11y ago
  http://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-is-basically-a-corporate-bureaucracy-accordi-1746955234 http://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-is-basically-a-corporate-bureau...

DanBC 11y ago

Wikipedia is the posterchild for sites that have toxic environments - that's why wikimedia foundation spends so much time and money researching ways to stop the editor decline. The fact that wikipedia is good is a miracle when you see the awful behaviour of many editors / admins.

cpncrunch 11y ago
>the awful behaviour of many editors / admins Do you have any recent examples of this?
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  Looking through your comments, the only prior example you give is of lengthy discussions of punctuation at the village pump. That isn't exactly my definition of "awful behaviour". You also mention about male editors replace "rape scene" with "sex scene" in articles, but I can't find where that actually happened (and it seems like a pretty clear case of seeing what the sources say).