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Wikipedia demonstrates that an authoritarian governance model is more functional than essentially anarchy. But that does not mean we should settle for it. Wik

by swalsh 6y ago

Wikipedia demonstrates that an authoritarian governance model is more functional than essentially anarchy. But that does not mean we should settle for it. Wikipedia is known for its restrictive culture. A lot of good information does not make it past the guards. We can probably do better.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
I remember when Wikipedia first started cracking-down on “Trivia” sections. And yet sites like Everything2 still died. What if Wikipedia allowed articles to have two versions: the normal, policed, articles we have today - and adding a “post anything, as long as you provide citations” version for sticking all the trivia and extra details that would normally not be allowed on a main Wikipedia page.
- dtech 6y ago
  The talk page functions as the latter for contested issues at least
- bawolff 6y ago
  What would be the benefit of that over just having a different site dedicated to that. I think there is plenty of room for all types of sites on the internet, but they don't have to all be hosted by the same group.
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
Wikipedia is more restrictive than I’d like. It’s also pretty good considering how hard it is to have an audience of everybody. I don’t know how it could do better.
bawolff 6y ago
Wikipedia is not really an authoritarian model. You can't be appointed owner of an article or anything. That's not to say there aren't rules, but rules are decided by collective decisions (or in practise the collective decisions of people from 15 years ago) and are implemented based on argument, debate and evidence. Usually when people say an "authoritarian" governance model, they mean there is a ruler or small class of elites, and whatever they say goes, no discussion, no debate, no appeal. That is very much not what wikipedia is like. It is however what a lot of social media sites are like (good luck appealing a fb moderator decision)
- bondolo 6y ago
  In my experience fighting the Wikipedia bureaucracy to right a wrong decision is like fighting bullshit, you expend 10x the energy you want just to engage in the fight. After being relatively prolific for several years on non-controversial reef fish topics I just gave up after multiple run-ins with the administrative hierarchy. The assumption of good faith was a sham and accountability was zilch. I had no interest in spending time fighting what were essentially capricious and arbitrary decisions by drive-by tin pots. It was hardly surprising when a couple years later one of the figures who had been an annoyance for me was finally booted from the organization of a pattern of similar behaviour across the site that went on for more than a decade. They had repeated warnings and essentially kept reverting to being a jerk. I wonder how many contributors were chased off by this one bad apple. If you want to make significant contributions to wikipedia but don't want to participate in the governance then you can expect occasional small-town crooked cop behaviour from the same kind of bullies who get off on that in the real world. Typical would be; you make edits to a stub species article to add basic information from fishbase. You don't add much because you have never actually heard of the species. The next day you come back and the article is reverted or proposed for deletion as non-notable. It doesn't matter that the stub had been around for a decade, that there are 10k other stub fish articles. Nope, you tried to make a small contribution and that deserves to be punished for some reason. Eventually people get the message and stop contributing anything. Don't even get me started on trying to correct taxonomic names to the recognized name or fixing the list of species in a genus. These changes were regularly reverted without explanation. Fix 20 articles, 1 or 2 are reverted. Yep, just live with it.
  - specialist 6y ago
    "The assumption of good faith was a sham and accountability was zilch." Is there any way to assess editors, how good of job they're doing?
    - bawolff 6y ago
      There are ways to engage in dispute resolution. More court system than report card. Actually getting results can be difficult and involves lots of politics (or so people tell me, i haven't actually been involved in major disputes at wikipedia) Assesing editors implies that someone is an authority above editors, to judge over them. There are of course moderators ("Administrators"), but the general idea is you are supposed to appeal to your peers and convince the group of your position, not convince someone in authority.
belorn 6y ago
While it is know for being a restrictive culture, I suspect most of it is because the people making the decision is visible. If we compare the difficulty of getting an article accepted on Wikipedia with submitting an article here on HN and getting people to discuss it and making it visible on the first page, the later only has an invisible visibility score of upvotes and flags. If an article on HN get killed or buried you don't know why or who the people were that made the collective decision. On wikipedia the people responsible for the decision is right there, and it feel much more personal getting rejected by a person rather than by an invisible score. And yet, I would definitively claim that getting something accept on Wikipedia is much easier than getting something accepted by the HN community. So I am not sure that the guards of wikipedia is that bad. A lot of information does not make it past the guards, but it is also something which communities desire. If you don't have moderators you have upvote system. If you don't have upvote system you have algorithmic models of suggestions and recommendations. If you don't have that you have a search function that order by some kind of ranking.

by swalsh 6y ago

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago

I remember when Wikipedia first started cracking-down on “Trivia” sections. And yet sites like Everything2 still died. What if Wikipedia allowed articles to have two versions: the normal, policed, articles we have today - and adding a “post anything, as long as you provide citations” version for sticking all the trivia and extra details that would normally not be allowed on a main Wikipedia page.

dtech 6y ago
The talk page functions as the latter for contested issues at least
bawolff 6y ago
What would be the benefit of that over just having a different site dedicated to that. I think there is plenty of room for all types of sites on the internet, but they don't have to all be hosted by the same group.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

Wikipedia is more restrictive than I’d like. It’s also pretty good considering how hard it is to have an audience of everybody. I don’t know how it could do better.

bawolff 6y ago

Wikipedia is not really an authoritarian model. You can't be appointed owner of an article or anything. That's not to say there aren't rules, but rules are decided by collective decisions (or in practise the collective decisions of people from 15 years ago) and are implemented based on argument, debate and evidence. Usually when people say an "authoritarian" governance model, they mean there is a ruler or small class of elites, and whatever they say goes, no discussion, no debate, no appeal. That is very much not what wikipedia is like. It is however what a lot of social media sites are like (good luck appealing a fb moderator decision)

bondolo 6y ago
In my experience fighting the Wikipedia bureaucracy to right a wrong decision is like fighting bullshit, you expend 10x the energy you want just to engage in the fight. After being relatively prolific for several years on non-controversial reef fish topics I just gave up after multiple run-ins with the administrative hierarchy. The assumption of good faith was a sham and accountability was zilch. I had no interest in spending time fighting what were essentially capricious and arbitrary decisions by drive-by tin pots. It was hardly surprising when a couple years later one of the figures who had been an annoyance for me was finally booted from the organization of a pattern of similar behaviour across the site that went on for more than a decade. They had repeated warnings and essentially kept reverting to being a jerk. I wonder how many contributors were chased off by this one bad apple. If you want to make significant contributions to wikipedia but don't want to participate in the governance then you can expect occasional small-town crooked cop behaviour from the same kind of bullies who get off on that in the real world. Typical would be; you make edits to a stub species article to add basic information from fishbase. You don't add much because you have never actually heard of the species. The next day you come back and the article is reverted or proposed for deletion as non-notable. It doesn't matter that the stub had been around for a decade, that there are 10k other stub fish articles. Nope, you tried to make a small contribution and that deserves to be punished for some reason. Eventually people get the message and stop contributing anything. Don't even get me started on trying to correct taxonomic names to the recognized name or fixing the list of species in a genus. These changes were regularly reverted without explanation. Fix 20 articles, 1 or 2 are reverted. Yep, just live with it.
- specialist 6y ago
  "The assumption of good faith was a sham and accountability was zilch." Is there any way to assess editors, how good of job they're doing?
  - bawolff 6y ago
    There are ways to engage in dispute resolution. More court system than report card. Actually getting results can be difficult and involves lots of politics (or so people tell me, i haven't actually been involved in major disputes at wikipedia) Assesing editors implies that someone is an authority above editors, to judge over them. There are of course moderators ("Administrators"), but the general idea is you are supposed to appeal to your peers and convince the group of your position, not convince someone in authority.

belorn 6y ago

While it is know for being a restrictive culture, I suspect most of it is because the people making the decision is visible. If we compare the difficulty of getting an article accepted on Wikipedia with submitting an article here on HN and getting people to discuss it and making it visible on the first page, the later only has an invisible visibility score of upvotes and flags. If an article on HN get killed or buried you don't know why or who the people were that made the collective decision. On wikipedia the people responsible for the decision is right there, and it feel much more personal getting rejected by a person rather than by an invisible score. And yet, I would definitively claim that getting something accept on Wikipedia is much easier than getting something accepted by the HN community. So I am not sure that the guards of wikipedia is that bad. A lot of information does not make it past the guards, but it is also something which communities desire. If you don't have moderators you have upvote system. If you don't have upvote system you have algorithmic models of suggestions and recommendations. If you don't have that you have a search function that order by some kind of ranking.