5 ms·

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 questio

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.
        chris_wot 8y ago
        Except that I did, multiple times. You need to stop telling me I'm misremembering things that can be easily verified in the history. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Letsbefiends&namespace=4&tagfilter=&start=&end= https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&title=Special%... And I never claimed that all the people involved are Wikipedia admins. In fact, I specifically didn't say any names. You will also note that I didn't initiate the edit warring notification.
        8y ago
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    Neither of the two main people that you talked to on that talk page were, or are, Wikipedia administrators. If you cannot get that part of the story straight, people are naturally going to ask what else you aren't recounting accurately.
    - chris_wot 8y ago
      It was an Australian Wikipedia admin who banned me indefinitely. [1] It was Wikipedia admins who allowed this all to happen. My story is completely straight. People should be asking what you aren't getting straight, and your agenda. Edit: hold on a tick, I didn't mention the article, my username or the people involved. And yet you know the article and specific edits to an edit to a relatively obscure Wikipedia board from over 3 years ago. Who are you again? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/block&page=Letsbefiends https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/block...
      - JdeBP 8y ago
        No, your story clearly is not. That's one, singular, not "admins", plural. And xe blocked you. Xe did not ban you. An "experienced editor" knows the difference. ("Bans are different from blocks" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy) * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Edit_warring&diff=next&oldid=720686762 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis... All of the mistreatment that you allude to ("actively canvassed on another board", which was in fact the BLP noticeboard) was not by that administrator, and not by anyone who was an administrator. Indeed, one of the people who was a Wikipedia administrator opined somewhat differently. * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Letsbefiends&diff=721086115&oldid=720985780 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Letsbef... The story of chris_wot versus the Wikipedia administrators doesn't stand up upon investigation.
        chris_wot 8y ago
        You really need to have a look at the block log. NickD has an indefinite block on that account. So that's multiple admins who blocked me. Tim Starling blocked my IP address for a year, on my request (to be clear, Tim is a friend). You have no idea what you are talking about. And the board I'm talking about was the Australian Wikipedian's Noticeboard. And believe me, I'm an experienced editor. I created the [citation needed] tag, started the ANI noticeboard and did a thousand and one other things that you don't know about on Wikipedia. This is my last comment, the trauma is too great for me (I nearly killed myself over this) and I don't want any more Wikidrama to spill over onto HN. I have just emailed the HN admins to let them know this.
- zimablue 8y ago
  I know I can look this up but can you expand a little bit on "instead of a pure vote, structure discussion...". What's the actual hard decider? Like for page edits if there's a conflict it basically escalates up the hierarchy right? If there's no consensus what happens in this admin/bureaocrat thing? Who decides what constitutes consensus?
  - tux3 8y ago
    No problem, I'm happy to explain, but this is just my own understanding so you may still want to look it up for the fine details! The main idea is that because it's not a formal vote, there's isn't supposed to be a hard threshold for passing. Now in practice >75% of support almost always shows strong consensus, and will result in the request being a clear-cut accept. Similarly, if you get 65% oppositions, chances are your request can be closed without further considerations. But what's important to keep in mind is that commenters are expected to explain the reason for their position, it's not just a +1/-1 system. If several people raised an important issue or found some serious problem with the way you've contributed recently, that's more important than the raw numbers. When there's no clear consensus, generally your request will be postponed for a couple day until issues are resolved, or eventually fail. (In close cases a public chat with the Bureaucrats — the people responsible for enforcing the decision of the community — sometimes takes place to clear things up, but it's unheard of for crats to go against the opinion of the community) >Like for page edits if there's a conflict it basically escalates up the hierarchy right? It's not supposed to, really. If there's a conflict, we would really like everyone involved to go calmly discuss it in the article's Talk page with the community. No one owns an article, no one who follows the rules has more right to edit it than anyone else. When that fails and people cannot cooperate at all, it sadly has to escalate and can end in bans for the involved users. >Who decides what constitutes consensus? In the end the definition of what constitutes consensus is defined by the community, and that includes anyone that feels like starting a discussion and challenging the status quo. Wikipedia has no firm rules, just guidelines and policies that people have and continue to argue about endlessly. That's the whole problem with Wikipedia, isn't it? It's full of messy, complicated, imperfect people.
    - 8y ago
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.

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.
      - chris_wot 8y ago
        Except that I did, multiple times. You need to stop telling me I'm misremembering things that can be easily verified in the history. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Letsbefiends&namespace=4&tagfilter=&start=&end= https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&title=Special%... And I never claimed that all the people involved are Wikipedia admins. In fact, I specifically didn't say any names. You will also note that I didn't initiate the edit warring notification.
        8y ago
- JdeBP 8y ago
  Neither of the two main people that you talked to on that talk page were, or are, Wikipedia administrators. If you cannot get that part of the story straight, people are naturally going to ask what else you aren't recounting accurately.
  - chris_wot 8y ago
    It was an Australian Wikipedia admin who banned me indefinitely. [1] It was Wikipedia admins who allowed this all to happen. My story is completely straight. People should be asking what you aren't getting straight, and your agenda. Edit: hold on a tick, I didn't mention the article, my username or the people involved. And yet you know the article and specific edits to an edit to a relatively obscure Wikipedia board from over 3 years ago. Who are you again? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/block&page=Letsbefiends https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/block...
    - JdeBP 8y ago
      No, your story clearly is not. That's one, singular, not "admins", plural. And xe blocked you. Xe did not ban you. An "experienced editor" knows the difference. ("Bans are different from blocks" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy) * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Edit_warring&diff=next&oldid=720686762 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis... All of the mistreatment that you allude to ("actively canvassed on another board", which was in fact the BLP noticeboard) was not by that administrator, and not by anyone who was an administrator. Indeed, one of the people who was a Wikipedia administrator opined somewhat differently. * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Letsbefiends&diff=721086115&oldid=720985780 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Letsbef... The story of chris_wot versus the Wikipedia administrators doesn't stand up upon investigation.
      - chris_wot 8y ago
        You really need to have a look at the block log. NickD has an indefinite block on that account. So that's multiple admins who blocked me. Tim Starling blocked my IP address for a year, on my request (to be clear, Tim is a friend). You have no idea what you are talking about. And the board I'm talking about was the Australian Wikipedian's Noticeboard. And believe me, I'm an experienced editor. I created the [citation needed] tag, started the ANI noticeboard and did a thousand and one other things that you don't know about on Wikipedia. This is my last comment, the trauma is too great for me (I nearly killed myself over this) and I don't want any more Wikidrama to spill over onto HN. I have just emailed the HN admins to let them know this.
zimablue 8y ago
I know I can look this up but can you expand a little bit on "instead of a pure vote, structure discussion...". What's the actual hard decider? Like for page edits if there's a conflict it basically escalates up the hierarchy right? If there's no consensus what happens in this admin/bureaocrat thing? Who decides what constitutes consensus?
- tux3 8y ago
  No problem, I'm happy to explain, but this is just my own understanding so you may still want to look it up for the fine details! The main idea is that because it's not a formal vote, there's isn't supposed to be a hard threshold for passing. Now in practice >75% of support almost always shows strong consensus, and will result in the request being a clear-cut accept. Similarly, if you get 65% oppositions, chances are your request can be closed without further considerations. But what's important to keep in mind is that commenters are expected to explain the reason for their position, it's not just a +1/-1 system. If several people raised an important issue or found some serious problem with the way you've contributed recently, that's more important than the raw numbers. When there's no clear consensus, generally your request will be postponed for a couple day until issues are resolved, or eventually fail. (In close cases a public chat with the Bureaucrats — the people responsible for enforcing the decision of the community — sometimes takes place to clear things up, but it's unheard of for crats to go against the opinion of the community) >Like for page edits if there's a conflict it basically escalates up the hierarchy right? It's not supposed to, really. If there's a conflict, we would really like everyone involved to go calmly discuss it in the article's Talk page with the community. No one owns an article, no one who follows the rules has more right to edit it than anyone else. When that fails and people cannot cooperate at all, it sadly has to escalate and can end in bans for the involved users. >Who decides what constitutes consensus? In the end the definition of what constitutes consensus is defined by the community, and that includes anyone that feels like starting a discussion and challenging the status quo. Wikipedia has no firm rules, just guidelines and policies that people have and continue to argue about endlessly. That's the whole problem with Wikipedia, isn't it? It's full of messy, complicated, imperfect people.
  - 8y ago

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.