
Observations on Wikipedia Behavior (2008) - salutonmundo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Antandrus/observations_on_Wikipedia_behavior
======
brigandish
This list strikes me as a long and not particularly well reasoned way of
justifying (to the writer themself, probably, but also to others) questionable
past and future behaviour that maintains the status quo and the keeps the
"cabal" intact while waving away criticism.

Some choice quotes that come with no acknowledgement there are valid
criticisms, and no solution to those criticisms other than "keep doing what
you're doing":

\- “attack sites are the whining of the incompetent, who failed to succeed at
editing Wikipedia”

\- "There IS a cabal. It's a core group of editors united by the belief that
the encyclopedia must protect itself against jerks, and against people who
write junk."

\- "When someone complains loudly about censorship, you may be certain they
are up to no good."

\- "The only bias it has arises from the self-selection of its members"

Could've written "You have a problem with the way we do things? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯"
and saved some time.

~~~
ben509
That's how organizations get stuck with a status quo.

The key is to understand they're quite sincere; when they think it through,
they have this massively successful encyclopedia as evidence that solidly
justifies their conviction that their current way of doing business works.

And people who don't like it tend to leave and their voice goes unheard; as
the piece correctly indicates, this is pretty normal.

This is a common problem. For an institution or organization to work, the
members of it have to build up and disseminate institutional knowledge, often
by trial and error, and much of it can't be fully explained. That then leads
to inertia: you can't formulate a convicing challenge to the way things are
done unless you understand them, but at that point you're selected by the
other members of the institution to accept their way of doing things.

Generally, for a given organization, it takes an outside shock to really force
them to reevaluate how they operate. If Wikipedia started losing patrons or
saw their readership decline, they'd probably reconsider, but it's hard to
imagine how much they'd collectively have to screw up for that to happen.

~~~
jaggederest
Groupthink is the term of art. Makes it very easy for otherwise reasonable
people to ignore all the evidence.

------
jchw
People here seem a bit skeptical, but after reading every single point I have
to say, I agree with nearly all of them; but not in relation to Wikipedia.
With relation to the internet as a whole.

The one that stings the most:

>70\. It is impossible to love again anything you have truly ceased to
love.[14] Editors who return after retirement, or after a wearied or bitter
departure, may edit again, but never with the same passion they once brought
to the project. Each successive return will be with diminished dedication and
shorter duration.

 _Wow._ It actually hurts to read this, because it perfectly explains why I’ve
left most social media and forums I’ve been a part of, and failed to ever
return for more than a month or two at a time.

My love of the internet has largely faded, and is relegated to being a tool
and a way to waste time when bored. It’s not exciting. I can’t reattach to it.

>Many people leaving the project blame either the project or the people
working on it for their departure, rather than recognize that it is normal in
life for one's enthusiasm to wane. It does with all things that we once found
exciting.

Indeed, but also, ouch.

~~~
mortb
I started using the Internet some 25 years ago. Maybe things then were more
idealist? I was younger then of course and perhaps more idealist by nature?
Nowadays I'm afraid that the overall idealism may fade and that other more
primitive forces will increase its drive of the net e.g. capitalism,
criminality and autocracy.

------
Tomte
I believe the main problem is ownership. Editors feel they own "their"
article, don't want other people outside their friend group in the history,
and revert clear improvements by newcomers.

That happened to me, and after I re-added it once with expanded sources and
explanation, a friend of the reverter swooped in, said it amounts to
"vandalism", and... I will never contribute anything again.

Wikipedia doesn't care. Sure, there are "processes" to appeal. Which are so
convoluted and inscrutable that they seem designed to protect incumbents and
people with too much time.

Edit: oh, and when you're using "just an IP" as an insult, you should re-
examine your life choices.

~~~
rocqua
Was your edit on something politically sensitive? I ask because this could
e.g. be an edit about TCP congestion control in the wild; or an edit about the
link between autism and vaccines.

I don't at all want to accuse you of the second type of edit, but that type
would not be universally seen as an improvement, no matter how well sourced
and explained.

~~~
DanBC
I agree that some topics are hot-button topics whether that's on-wiki or AFK.

But on Wikipedia anything can become a hot button topic. Look at, for example,
the amount of discussion about whether to use en dash, em dash, or minus in
article titles.

Approx 20,000 words (no consensus):
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(poli...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_\(policy\)/Archive_101#Hyphens_and_endashs)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&prefix=Wikipedia+talk%3AManual+of+Style%2F&fulltext=Search+archives&fulltext=Search&ns0=1)

Here's how it plays out in one article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_War/Archive_3#Requested_move_\(February_2011\))

The Arbcom discussion is useful, because it links to some of the Ani threads:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case&oldid=429209333#Hyphens_and_dashes)

There's about 500,000 words about –,— or -.

There's no way of knowing in advance if you're going to fall into one of these
tarpits.

~~~
colanderman
> 500,000 words … about whether to use en dash, em dash, or minus

Pfft, amateurs. 500,000 words and no mention of the distinction between a true
hyphen (‐), a true minus sign (−), and the vulgar ASCII hyphen‐minus (-).

~~~
DanBC
I bet that's in there somewhere.

------
BlackFly
A bit of a mixed bag, and overly long. Could benefit from some distillation
and less back patting.

Given point 3, they seem to spend an inordinate amount of time complaining
about vandalism, even going so far as to call out sockpuppets and anonymous
IPs as a special type of "despicable cowardice" when they are basically the
internet equivalent of wearing a hoodie while you spray paint a tag. Don't
call out this behavior as particularly egregious, it is just ordinary
vandalism and doesn't deserve special outrage.

Also, point 21: "There are no fools more troublesome than those with wit,"
should I find this ironic? That's the mixed bag bit. What is this doing in
there? It is hardly an observation on wikipedia behavior but is obviously the
author trying to feel superior to clever people they disagreed with. Then
again, I'm probably guilty of point 31 and seeing my own arrogance.

It started getting samey and I stopped reading further.

~~~
dangerface
> it is just ordinary vandalism

It's not even that bad ordinary vandalism is a lot harder to revert. They
should just fix the UI and let the end user pick the version like most api
documentation.

If op wrote an autobiography it would be 31, to be fair I could do the same.

------
mirimir
> When someone complains loudly about censorship, you may be certain they are
> up to no good.

That attitude is part of the problem. Or at least, it's why I've never wanted
to contribute.

~~~
rathel
I participated in similar communities and would kindly disagree with you.

The ones who raise this point 99% of the time _are_ up to no good.

It's the Occam's razor, again: there's no censorship conspiracy and if
anything of such user's comments got deleted, it probably insulted everybody
under the sun.

Reasonable people argue on the relevant points they disagree with, and can
understand when to stop if their idea simply doesn't get traction.

~~~
raxxorrax
There are bad opinions if you allow everyone to speak.

relevant link:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship)

~~~
mirimir
Sure, but everyone can comment on them. And one can imagine, for example,
having alternative versions of contentious articles. The existing
disambiguation setup could easily handle that. Agreeing on tags might be
nontrivial, but I'm sure that it's doable.

------
metasonix
Having co-authored a book about Wikipedia's early history, I can tell you more
about Wiki administrators and "insiders" then you could possibly absorb. (A
book that will apparently never see the light of day, because publishers are
terrified of being sued by Jimmy Wales for "libel". We prepared 2 million
words of notes to justify everything, plus thousands of weblinks showing what
really happened; to no avail.)

Antandrus, the middle-aged California music teacher who wrote this prime
example of Wikipedia insider lies, is a complete nobody. On Wikipedia or
anywhere else. But they like him and he sticks around, because he pushes the
status quo and the party line like a good little Soviet apparatchik. We only
know his first name, because he went to deeply insane amounts of effort to
hide his real identity.

~~~
baud147258
You could just publish the book for free on internet

~~~
admax88q
Doesn't even have to be free, you could sell it on the internet. Self
publishing is easier than it has ever been. Sounds more like an excuse than a
reason.

~~~
metasonix
My co-author wants it to be thru a major publisher or an academic house. Self-
publishing means the WMF can just call it a "crank job on a website" and claim
it wasn't checked for accuracy.

------
twic
Everyone always has terrible stories about contributing to wikipedia, and will
_never_ give us a link. I don't doubt that the stories are substantially true,
but it's a really inappropriate way to criticise a project which values
citations so highly.

So anyway, here's my story: i added a paragraph about huge earthworms to the
page about the Isle of Rum, and it's still there:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B9m#Other_fauna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B9m#Other_fauna)

------
nisuni
> When someone complains loudly about censorship, you may be certain they are
> up to no good.

This one has a weird USSR vibe to it.

------
lifthrasiir
I had been a Wikipedia administrator in a similar timeframe (--2007), albeit
in a different language edition. While some items show the "community" norm
that is not necessarily backed by concrete evidences (that's why some got
annoyed by the first statement), the entire list is generally an excellent
description for any kind of community moderation and matches my personal
experience. The problem here is, of course, that most people is not an
administrator and it would be difficult to justify the very difficulty of
moderation to them. And it cannot be eliminated at all; I've seen the
namuwiki, the biggest Korean encyclopedic wiki [1] besides from Wikipedia,
falling into this trap and turning itself into a slew of toxic contents.

I had been long against a single big wiki model like Wikipedia. It
unbelievably works, and it seems that it will thrive even with the
insurmountable amount of cracks, but we need alternatives (plural)---fully
accountable, easy-to-fork and community-free. And we don't yet have a single
alternative taking off (for example I really wanted Infinithree/Thunkpedia to
thrive [2]). Every time I ponder about this, I come back to the circle and
find myself searching for the Shii's great piece [3]. I don't exactly agree to
the suggestion to simply make a personal "wiki", for the lack of forking
mechanism, but the entire essay is still surpringly true, and possibly the
only viable alternative to Wikipedia because it clearly lacks the community.
I'm still waiting for others.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namuwiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namuwiki)
(I reluctantly describe it as encyclopedic, but it only became encyclopedic
after it became popular and has tons of issues as a true encyclopedia.)

[2] [http://en.thunkpedia.org/](http://en.thunkpedia.org/) (HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597881))

[3]
[http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Shii%27s_Solution_to_...](http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Shii%27s_Solution_to_the_Problem_of_Wikipedia.html)

~~~
dorusr
I understand the benefits of having multiple independent encyclopedias, but
one downside would be it going overboard and turning into a virtual library of
babel.

~~~
lifthrasiir
No single person can compile a comprehensive encyclopedia, nor should one.
Rather it has to be a network of loosely interconnected websites where anyone
can add their opinion to others' to the extent that the opinion can grow into
an independent website but shouldn't be able to misrepresent existing opinions
by the full accountability. The comprehensiveness would then be achieved with
a search engine, as much as the older web did (and that's why Shii claimed
that the personal wiki is a way to go).

------
hokus
I didn't read the text but have a special approach for this type of writing:

You click on user contributions, if/since there are to many talk page entries
filter down to article space.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contribut...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=&limit=500&contribs=user&target=Antandrus&namespace=0&tagfilter=&start=&end=)

Years and years of arguing without any article writing.

------
Kopilotus
Wikipedia destroyed the encyclopedia market and now is the most popular
encyclopedic platform for political information.

In Germany, a huge admin cabal at Wikipedia has been revealed that influences
political topics:
[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://wikihausen.de/)

They white-wash politician’s profiles and controversial topics such as 9/11 or
Israel-Palestinia conflict, etc. It seems to be a very well-equipped
propaganda outlet.

Some of the admins are said to post 50,000 and more article edits, literally
night and day including Christmas.

The admins have a sophisticated method of badmouthing critics (including those
who revealed the cabal) on both, Wikipedia and a side-project with heavy
backlinks from Wikipedia. It’s called www.psiram.com - They invest a lot of
efforts to maintain total anonymity by registering companies and domain in
several countries.

It is suspected, that this ecosphere (it’s huge) is financed by a secret
service. (Not) surprisingly, no main-stream media is covering this topic of
amazing importance, or they play it down by looking at irrelevant side aspects
of it.

I would wonder if something similar does exist on the English Wikipedia.

------
mekane8
Point #2 is some deep wisdom. I am better for having read it.

"Many people leaving the project blame either the project or the people
working on it for their departure, rather than recognize that it is normal in
life for one's enthusiasm to wane. It does with all things that we once found
exciting. This is neither pessimistic nor tragic: one needs always to find new
exciting things to do. All things in life change and end, and this includes
one's involvement with Wikipedia. "He who kisses the joy as it flies / lives
in eternity's sunrise."[1] Enjoy it while you are here, and enjoy what you do
after you have gone."

