3 ms·

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 abo

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.

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.