8 ms·

Wikipedia internal solidarity politics are just messed up if you approach the inner circle. There is no fixing it. There is a lot of behind the scenes back sc

Wikipedia internal solidarity politics are just messed up if you approach the inner circle. There is no fixing it. There is a lot of behind the scenes back scratching, horse trading, and manipulation via back channels between the members. Just stay away from them and avoid their gaze. It has also been like this, it isn't new nor does it mean there is impending doom for Wikipedia. It is just how it is. It is like the black whole at the center of the galaxy, you want to just stay away from it.

Spooky23 8y ago
This is just how bureaucracies work. In other contexts, it's hidden from public view, and often hidden from internal view as well. Many careers have been knee-capped by bureaucratic factors where the subject never even knows.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
zimablue 8y ago
I guess this is one of those many laws of bureaucracies, any time there's enough power and hierarchy the top is self serving tribal warfare. I guess the question is to what extent that warfare is isolated from the interests of the members. If you look in parallel to the government, I guess you're talking about separation of powers - political leaders vs independent arbitrators, does this exist in wiki? There's no overall elections right more a kind of election at each level for the one above?
- tux3 8y ago
  >There's no overall elections right more a kind of election at each level for the one above? Not at all! The highest positions in terms of the user rights granted would be Admins and Bureaucrats. The elections for those are the RfA and RfB (requests for Adminship and Bureaucratship respectively). And contrary to what you might think, anyone with an account is free to nominate themselves, or to chime in on someone else's nomination (to the point that the process can be really hard to go through, as your history will be combed through relentlessly by overzealous users). Note that those are not traditional elections either, instead of a pure vote, the process is more of a structured discussion to establish a consensus. Like all places on the internet that grant special roles and privileges, you'll find people hungry for power, but Wikipedia fares pretty well in this respect.
  - chris_wot 8y ago
    I disagree. I was quite badly treated by a number of Wikipedia admins and it nearly ended in disaster.
    - tux3 8y ago
      Well, I'm not trying to deny your experience, but that's a different thing, isn't it? The fact is many admins active today were voted in around 2007-2008 when the standards were much more lax, and because the process is so hard to go through fewer admins are elected these days. I'm just a normal user myself, and sadly I don't have any good answer to that, the best one can do is participate and try to change things for the better. At the core of it, these are all just people gathering around a common goal.
      - chris_wot 8y ago
        No, it’s not. I wrote neutrally and sourced my material about a controversial figure and was pursued (wikistalked) by a user who doesn’t make substantial contributions other than page patrol. In fact, my article remains roughly the same, but is only half of what I was trying to make it because of what they did to me. I’m a hugely experienced editor who was researching the topic openly and transparently but was accused of an agenda because I showed my sources in the talk page of the article. I complained on ANI and asked for help, but it was shutdown and nobody has ever reviewed the abuse I suffered from the other parties. Those other parties actively canvased on another board, and didn’t bother communicating with me. Then one of the editors actively changed the archives of the talk page of the article I was working on to auto archive in a few days and once all my talk discussions rapidly expired restored the default archive timeframe. Totally got away with it too! Don’t think for a moment that most admins know what they are doing. They can’t, the topics are too broad and the agendas can often be opaque.
        JdeBP 8y ago
        You didn't complain on AN/I. You complained on the 3-revert-rule violation (now Edit Warring) noticeboard, and failed to even mention the edit warring that the noticeboard is about. Again, it's errors like this, and mis-labelling people as Wikipedia administrators when they are not and never have been, that undermine the credibility of this account of events.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  I think it's often referred to as the "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" - that over time, all organizations for a purpose will be taken over by people who care more about the organization than the purpose. I'm not sure it's actually inevitable, but it's certainly predictable; the more you care about the cause the less time you want to spend on clawing your way to the top, and the more you'll expend your power on achieving things instead of fighting rivals. It's one of the better pitches for representative democracy, - making rulers at least semi-accountable to people who care about the outcomes instead of the infighting. But I think Wikipedia's "nomination and consensus" approach largely destroys that benefit by primarily engaging the people who care most about the internal politics of the system.
  - smolder 8y ago
    Wikipedia in particular is a target for takeover and subversion because they govern a reputable/widely relied-on source of knowledge. If you're some kind of spook, for instance, and you want to rewrite history in some fashion, or spin it, getting the wikipedia version to match your own is a major win.
    - Bartweiss 8y ago
      Very much agreed, although I think spooks are perhaps not the standard case of this problem. Wikipedia has a major problem handling inflammatory subculture issues, because the ratio of highly-invested partisans to casual observers is so high, and the topic is too arcane for most administrators to even decide what constitutes a bare-bones neutral article. At best, you end up with something where every single claim is caveated with "side A says, side B says" and so the broad thrust of the thing is incomprehensible. At worst, you end up with something that looks neutral because it has a 'Controversy' section, and obviously everything outside of that is just a review of facts, except it isn't at all. There are lots of politically charged instances of this, but a fairly tame one is the article for any smallish town or school district. They seem to be written almost exclusively by members of the local Chamber of Commerce or PTA and disaffected high schoolers, because no one else knows or cares about the topic enough to edit, and so the page for every small town I've ever lived in is laughably inconsistent with what any actual resident would recognize. And of course all of that is prior to 'citogenesis'; I'm pretty sure I've found a couple of claims that exist only because someone put them on Wikipedia. If that's not a win for someone trying to spin an issue I don't know what is.
mirimir 8y ago
I suppose. But for me, that means that it's not worth my time to contribute. I've considered it, now and again over the years, but there's just too much evidence of corruption. Edit: OK, "too much evidence of corruption" isn't fair. It's just too politically complicated. I came out of academia. There's pervasive criticism and disputation, and indeed that's fundamental, but everyone gets (ideally) a fair chance to publish their stuff. And then, peers either pay attention or don't. But then, I left academia mainly over pervasive politics, so maybe I'm just too impatient.
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  I stopped editing once I realized what gets onto Wikipedia has absolutely nothing to do with facts and more to do with opinion. I even had edits removing links to malware reverted automatically when logged in because some chucklehead locked down the topic.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    I've dipped my toes in Quora. And ran into a situation where some moderator kept deleting an answer about VPN services. Because they thought that Wireshark is a VPN service, and that I was spamming for it ;)
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    That broad brush of a judgment doesn't work. Wikipedia is so massive, no human will ever have even a tiny clue what's all there. Go look at articles on botany or something and you'll see basically all facts and no opinions. Look at articles on people and politics… well, what would you expect? I'm sure there's some way to create an evaluation of of the network of editors. We'd see that there are sections of Wikipedia where the editors all overlap and sections with near-zero connections, and those different sections are almost different worlds.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      I suspect that there are pitched battles in botany too. And about areas with sane editors, it's arguable that the rot runs all the way to the top.
cm2187 8y ago
Well, some people care about an organisation's internal politics. That's basically what the "delete uber" movement is, otherwise why would the clients care how they treat women internally? But in the case of Uber, the internal company politics don't really affect my ride from point A to point B. The editorial policy within Wikipedia however may have an impact on the content I read. Particular on politically sensitive topics, it is important to keep a critical mind and be aware of the intentions of the authors.
- majormajor 8y ago
  Seems like an awfully big jump. You can have a crapload of internal politics without harassment, sexism, or anything like that. You'll probably also get some of those in any sufficiently large group of people, but it's possible to respond to them well and still be a political minefield in terms of interpersonal relationships and power games.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    Avoiding situations like this has swung me around to the profound organization health effects of regularly shuffling director+ level personnel (e.g. every 2-4 years). What you lose in efficiency (as they refamiliarize themselves) -- you more than gain in healthier politics, cross-organization cooperation and knowledge, and overall following of rule of law / documentation.
    - Gibbon1 8y ago
      Reminds me of chatting with a director level manager at a fortune 500 firm. He was on vacation between assignments. When I asked why he was being reassigned he said the company moves them around every 2-3 years. Another example friend lives in a small rural town. The county sheriffs department rotates deputies every two years. Because the deputy needs to be willing to arrest respected members of the community for drunk driving and not be taking bribes from the local meth dealer.
      - 8y ago

Spooky23 8y ago

This is just how bureaucracies work. In other contexts, it's hidden from public view, and often hidden from internal view as well. Many careers have been knee-capped by bureaucratic factors where the subject never even knows.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

zimablue 8y ago

I guess this is one of those many laws of bureaucracies, any time there's enough power and hierarchy the top is self serving tribal warfare. I guess the question is to what extent that warfare is isolated from the interests of the members. If you look in parallel to the government, I guess you're talking about separation of powers - political leaders vs independent arbitrators, does this exist in wiki? There's no overall elections right more a kind of election at each level for the one above?

tux3 8y ago
>There's no overall elections right more a kind of election at each level for the one above? Not at all! The highest positions in terms of the user rights granted would be Admins and Bureaucrats. The elections for those are the RfA and RfB (requests for Adminship and Bureaucratship respectively). And contrary to what you might think, anyone with an account is free to nominate themselves, or to chime in on someone else's nomination (to the point that the process can be really hard to go through, as your history will be combed through relentlessly by overzealous users). Note that those are not traditional elections either, instead of a pure vote, the process is more of a structured discussion to establish a consensus. Like all places on the internet that grant special roles and privileges, you'll find people hungry for power, but Wikipedia fares pretty well in this respect.
- chris_wot 8y ago
  I disagree. I was quite badly treated by a number of Wikipedia admins and it nearly ended in disaster.
  - tux3 8y ago
    Well, I'm not trying to deny your experience, but that's a different thing, isn't it? The fact is many admins active today were voted in around 2007-2008 when the standards were much more lax, and because the process is so hard to go through fewer admins are elected these days. I'm just a normal user myself, and sadly I don't have any good answer to that, the best one can do is participate and try to change things for the better. At the core of it, these are all just people gathering around a common goal.
    - chris_wot 8y ago
      No, it’s not. I wrote neutrally and sourced my material about a controversial figure and was pursued (wikistalked) by a user who doesn’t make substantial contributions other than page patrol. In fact, my article remains roughly the same, but is only half of what I was trying to make it because of what they did to me. I’m a hugely experienced editor who was researching the topic openly and transparently but was accused of an agenda because I showed my sources in the talk page of the article. I complained on ANI and asked for help, but it was shutdown and nobody has ever reviewed the abuse I suffered from the other parties. Those other parties actively canvased on another board, and didn’t bother communicating with me. Then one of the editors actively changed the archives of the talk page of the article I was working on to auto archive in a few days and once all my talk discussions rapidly expired restored the default archive timeframe. Totally got away with it too! Don’t think for a moment that most admins know what they are doing. They can’t, the topics are too broad and the agendas can often be opaque.
      - JdeBP 8y ago
        You didn't complain on AN/I. You complained on the 3-revert-rule violation (now Edit Warring) noticeboard, and failed to even mention the edit warring that the noticeboard is about. Again, it's errors like this, and mis-labelling people as Wikipedia administrators when they are not and never have been, that undermine the credibility of this account of events.
Bartweiss 8y ago
I think it's often referred to as the "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" - that over time, all organizations for a purpose will be taken over by people who care more about the organization than the purpose. I'm not sure it's actually inevitable, but it's certainly predictable; the more you care about the cause the less time you want to spend on clawing your way to the top, and the more you'll expend your power on achieving things instead of fighting rivals. It's one of the better pitches for representative democracy, - making rulers at least semi-accountable to people who care about the outcomes instead of the infighting. But I think Wikipedia's "nomination and consensus" approach largely destroys that benefit by primarily engaging the people who care most about the internal politics of the system.
- smolder 8y ago
  Wikipedia in particular is a target for takeover and subversion because they govern a reputable/widely relied-on source of knowledge. If you're some kind of spook, for instance, and you want to rewrite history in some fashion, or spin it, getting the wikipedia version to match your own is a major win.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    Very much agreed, although I think spooks are perhaps not the standard case of this problem. Wikipedia has a major problem handling inflammatory subculture issues, because the ratio of highly-invested partisans to casual observers is so high, and the topic is too arcane for most administrators to even decide what constitutes a bare-bones neutral article. At best, you end up with something where every single claim is caveated with "side A says, side B says" and so the broad thrust of the thing is incomprehensible. At worst, you end up with something that looks neutral because it has a 'Controversy' section, and obviously everything outside of that is just a review of facts, except it isn't at all. There are lots of politically charged instances of this, but a fairly tame one is the article for any smallish town or school district. They seem to be written almost exclusively by members of the local Chamber of Commerce or PTA and disaffected high schoolers, because no one else knows or cares about the topic enough to edit, and so the page for every small town I've ever lived in is laughably inconsistent with what any actual resident would recognize. And of course all of that is prior to 'citogenesis'; I'm pretty sure I've found a couple of claims that exist only because someone put them on Wikipedia. If that's not a win for someone trying to spin an issue I don't know what is.

mirimir 8y ago

I suppose. But for me, that means that it's not worth my time to contribute. I've considered it, now and again over the years, but there's just too much evidence of corruption. Edit: OK, "too much evidence of corruption" isn't fair. It's just too politically complicated. I came out of academia. There's pervasive criticism and disputation, and indeed that's fundamental, but everyone gets (ideally) a fair chance to publish their stuff. And then, peers either pay attention or don't. But then, I left academia mainly over pervasive politics, so maybe I'm just too impatient.

cannonedhamster 8y ago
I stopped editing once I realized what gets onto Wikipedia has absolutely nothing to do with facts and more to do with opinion. I even had edits removing links to malware reverted automatically when logged in because some chucklehead locked down the topic.
- mirimir 8y ago
  I've dipped my toes in Quora. And ran into a situation where some moderator kept deleting an answer about VPN services. Because they thought that Wireshark is a VPN service, and that I was spamming for it ;)
- quadrangle 8y ago
  That broad brush of a judgment doesn't work. Wikipedia is so massive, no human will ever have even a tiny clue what's all there. Go look at articles on botany or something and you'll see basically all facts and no opinions. Look at articles on people and politics… well, what would you expect? I'm sure there's some way to create an evaluation of of the network of editors. We'd see that there are sections of Wikipedia where the editors all overlap and sections with near-zero connections, and those different sections are almost different worlds.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    I suspect that there are pitched battles in botany too. And about areas with sane editors, it's arguable that the rot runs all the way to the top.

cm2187 8y ago

Well, some people care about an organisation's internal politics. That's basically what the "delete uber" movement is, otherwise why would the clients care how they treat women internally? But in the case of Uber, the internal company politics don't really affect my ride from point A to point B. The editorial policy within Wikipedia however may have an impact on the content I read. Particular on politically sensitive topics, it is important to keep a critical mind and be aware of the intentions of the authors.

majormajor 8y ago
Seems like an awfully big jump. You can have a crapload of internal politics without harassment, sexism, or anything like that. You'll probably also get some of those in any sufficiently large group of people, but it's possible to respond to them well and still be a political minefield in terms of interpersonal relationships and power games.
- ethbro 8y ago
  Avoiding situations like this has swung me around to the profound organization health effects of regularly shuffling director+ level personnel (e.g. every 2-4 years). What you lose in efficiency (as they refamiliarize themselves) -- you more than gain in healthier politics, cross-organization cooperation and knowledge, and overall following of rule of law / documentation.
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    Reminds me of chatting with a director level manager at a fortune 500 firm. He was on vacation between assignments. When I asked why he was being reassigned he said the company moves them around every 2-3 years. Another example friend lives in a small rural town. The county sheriffs department rotates deputies every two years. Because the deputy needs to be willing to arrest respected members of the community for drunk driving and not be taking bribes from the local meth dealer.
    - 8y ago