At 10:27 AM 3/16/2010, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:
Title: "Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source"
Begins with:
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"Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will
immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative
online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and
altered by absolutely anyone at any moment."
But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the
plethora of blogs and other online news sources?"
Better than a blog, probably, unless it's an expert blog or edited,
some blogs are subject to editorial supervision.
Wikipedia is pretty good for non-controversial information, but,
then, it can become deadly boring, as articles accumulate facts
without discrimination. My sense is that Wikipedia is collapsing
under its own weight, I see signs that the community process, which
never worked truly well, is breaking down. The Wikipedia model was
quite interesting, much better than many imagine, but it was missing
certain elements and thus was ultimately way too inefficient, it
shouldn't take any work at all to maintain a good article! New work
on the same article should be channeled through procedures that make
it harder for an article to slide back, but which allow the article
to remain open to true improvement.
It's known how to do it, but the Wikipedia community structure froze
into a highly dysfunctional one, attached to the status quo, for
reasons I won't explain here, but it's generic, it could have been
expected. And anyone who sees the problem and tries to fix it,
working within the system, is "disruptive" and is at continual risk
of ejection, it's happened over and over. Part of the problem is that
the community does not know how to deal with "disruption" other than
by trying to exclude it! Which very process guarantees more
disruption, it's like a repressive government that tries to stomp out
dissent, the effort creates more dissent.
Meanwhile, the "winners," those who ejected the others, end up burned
out from the continual effort, not realizing that they created the
very problem that burned them out.... they blame it on the others,
the "disruptive" editors that they are tired of dealing with. There
is one editor, originally called Scibaby, who has created many
hundreds of sock puppets (600 by now), because, some three years ago
or so, he was abusively treated by the Global Warming cabal (he's a
skeptic.) He was blocked by cabal administrators ("cabal" here just
means an informal group who work together in pursuit of some point of
view or content or content-philosophical position), in decisions that
would no longer be allowed today. Scibaby fought back, he realized
that it was actually impossible to completely block editors, so he
continually registers new accounts, it's become a game. He's
routinely identified and detected, but the process takes up
administrator time, and there is no end to it in sight. All because
of a few relatively harmless edits. Actual Scibaby edits are
generally harmless. Mostly, they aren't appropriate, and they are
quickly reverted. Far more effort goes into keeping him out than
would be involved in simply watching a known account! It's a really
good example of how inefficient exclusion is at control of a community.
Cold fusion? All the experts have been blocked or are severely
constrained. And the blocks were all out-of-process, technically
improper, but Wikipedia doesn't actually recognize rule of law,
decisions are ad-hoc, and precedent is explicitly denied. It's quite
a trap. The latest issued ban was of Pcarbonn, once again, this time
"by the community." I.e., JzG, who is no longer an administrator, but
who was an old enemy of Pcarbonn and who was behing Pcarbonn's
original ban by a poisonous framing of a very good article on
Wikipedia process published by New Energy Times in 2008, I think it
was, when Pcarbonn came off his ArbComm ban, and was thus allowed to
edit Cold fusion, went to the Administrator's Noticeboard and
requested a ban of Pcarbonn for "pushing the same point of view as
before." Problem was, Pcarbonn wasn't banned for "pushing a point of
view," that was JzG's opinion, not the actual ArbComm decision.
Pcarbonn had become employed in the field, and was now a Conflict of
Interest editor, thus obligated to stay away from contentious edits
to the article, but allowed to make suggestions in Talk, which is the
proper role of experts, actually. JzG didn't mention that there were
no contentious edits to the article. And it's very easy for ignorant
editors to look at a suggestion for a source on cold fusion, which is
what Pcarbonn was doing, and assume that, since cold fusion is a
rejected fringe science, there can't be any sources, this must be
bogus for some reason, hence Pcarbonn is "pushing a point of view,"
hence he should be banned.
Shallow thinking and the making of decisions in a mob without careful
process is typical of the Wikipedia problem. The editor GoRight tried
to defend Pcarbonn and was roundly attacked. I voted in a poll on a
process trying to restrict GoRight and was blocked. I couldn't defend
Pcarbonn directly because of the cold fusion topic ban of my own. (I
was abusively banned by William M. Connolley, ArbComm found that the
ban was abusive, but ... in one of its more brilliant moves, it
decided that I was "tendentious," which means that I actually
discussed edits and presented arguments, instead of edit warring or
going away, and topic banned me for a year. That happens all the
time. Editor is abused, complains, and gets banned for making a fuss.
Even if the editor was clearly abused. I've seen this in
dysfunctional communities for many years.)
I'd say that Wikipedia is going under, because there used to be more
of a core who would defend the basic values. They are almost all
gone, and the voices of those who are left are increasingly voices
crying in a wilderness. I could be blocked any day, for any of many
excuses, but the real one will be a violation of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Abd/Rule_0 . If I cared, I could
obviously prevent it, but I have no opinion that I'm better off
unblocked. I'd then not be tempted to do any work on the project. As
it is, I do know how to fix stuff, I've become expert. But I also
have plenty of other stuff to do....
I get the feeling the same mechanisms didn't work as well in regards
to the WIKI Cold Fusion article. Apples versus oranges? ...Or are they
really the same thing??? But if both really are apples, why did it not
work for CF but apparently did work for reporting on the Mumbai Terror
Attacks?
If you look at the earlier versions of the cold fusion article,
you'll see it was in some ways better and in some ways worse.
Fast-breaking news doesn't give time for long-term processes to
operate. Big news will bring a lot of attention, and vandalism will
be immediately reverted, and blatant point-of-view pushing will be
kept out. What happened with cold fusion was that it became a target
of the same cabal behind the global warming mess, plus a few
specialist editors like Enric Naval (who has now branched out because
the cold fusion article is basically dead in the water, in spite of
huge and blatant deficiencies). Enric Naval didn't know an atom from
a molecule, I found this out when trying to work with him on
Oppenheimer-Phillips process. Basically clueless on the physics.
ScienceApologist is apparently a physicist, very skeptical, but it
was possible to work with him. He was, by the way, also banned! If
he'd not been banned, we'd probably have a better article today, I
suspect. Banning is a Bad Idea. Restriction to Talk can be
appropriate, forcing editors to educate others instead of just edit
warring. When I was banned by WMC, it was from both the article and
Talk, and I offered to accept the article ban, but not the Talk ban.
That would not satisfy his agenda, which was actually to maximally
restrict me, it had nothing to do with cold fusion, it had to do with
earlier conflict, I'd pointed out his violation of administrative
recusal policy. So I confronted his ban, and not only did ArbComm
confirm my position on that, and removed his tools, the community
also considered the whole issue of an individual administrator
issuing a ban like that. It rejected it. But it still happens,
because there is no effective and efficient restraint on
administrative bullying.
There was a request for comment on a proposal to set up a community
de-adminship process. The proposed process was so cumbersome and
narrow that the biggest problem was that it still wouldn't fix the
problem. It was rejected, last I looked, by a majority (I think it's
still open). But if you look at the votes and who voted, and this has
been done, non-administrators voted to approve the process, and
administrators voted against it. Supposedly, the votes of those who
are involved in an issue should be deprecated, that's standard
procedure, not that it's actually followed. Don't hold your breath.
Wikipedia is unreliable because the process is unreliable. Wikipedia
is very useful, but never trust anything just because you read it on
Wikipedia. The shame is that a project that would be reliable would
actually be not very much different from the one that exists. It just
needs a little structure, primarily structure to make it more
efficient. But "Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy" will be trotted out
whenever structure is proposed. The Iron Law of Oligarchy took over,
as it will, and is preventing any change that would threaten the
personal power of those who imagine they are in control. But, of
course, the lack of structure means that they are each personally,
then, required to stem the tide of point-of-view pushing and
vandalism and spam and general idiocy and bad writing. So they
deserve what they get.
Odd how it's that way, eh?
As always, there is a comments section at the end of the article where
you can add your two cents.
Mr. Lomax, try to keep your comments down to a page length! ;-)
Nah. None at all, there. Topic is boring, usually, but among friends.....
