As someone who would qualify as a "very active editor"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits
I can honestly say that power and activity are definitely not the same thing on
Wikipedia.
Do I have power? I don't think so. I am not an administrator or other
functionary that has power over anyone else.
As a person who is principally a content writer, I get my time wasted every day
by vandals, by content cited to reliable sources being removed by someone who
simply doesn't agree with it but provides no sources to the contrary buts
simply writes "Fact!" as an edit summary, that I have to explain to yet another
American that we spell things differently in Australia and that is why there is
a {{Use Australian English}} template on the top of that article, that "City of
Brisbane" cannot be changed as "Brisbane City" as they are NOT the same thing
(one is a local government area, the other a suburb, one about 100 times the
area of the other) even if they do happen to "look like the same thing" or
"think it reads better than way". I wish I did have the power to just "whack a
mole" and NOT have to have these *same* conversations over and over and over
again with me being WP:CIVIL and them often being not civil (some even track me
down in real life and send me abusive e-mail off-wiki, including sexual remarks
because I'm a self-identified female contributor). But in Wikipedia, that's OK
because ArbCom decided that calling a female contributor "a cunt" isn't that
bad. It's Wikipedia not Wokepedia! If I share the contents of that email
on-wiki, I'm the one in trouble (their right to privacy), so I just delete
them. If I spot a user name whitewashing a politican's article that just
happens to be very similar indeed to the real life name of their media advisor,
I cannot say that on-wiki, because that's WP:OUTING.
My "community health" is pretty damn poor precisely because we give the same
power to every first time anonymous editor as we do to very active editors and
we give it effectively to the most persistent and the most unpleasant. BRD is
all very well if all involved are seriously trying to get the content right and
well-cited. It fails completely when the other party is not engaging with it,
being unpleasant, or just returning time and time again to re-do a problematic
edit based on "I know this". We have problems with acts of vandalism that get
repeated time and time again by a series of different IP addresses. This is
impossible to block, we have no solution for it. If you want to see the scale
of it, there's series of IP addresses that collectively exhibit similar
patterns of thousands of problematic edits in my topic space going back to at
least 2013 and were still active in 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:IamNotU/History_cleanup
Do we have the power to "whack a mole" the first time we see any of these
behaviour YET AGAIN? No, we don't. We have a lot of tedious process of having
to find the right admin noticeboard, submit a request with the right templates,
provide endless diffs, and then have nothing happen. We make it easy for people
to create problems, but extremely difficult to get them stopped and incredibly
tedious to clean up after them (you often can't "undo" because of intervening
edits etc and these folk can do 100s of edits in a day). Here's one:
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/ec/en.wikipedia.org/Shelati
An editor who did a mass change over every suburb of Sydney over a couple days.
I suspected them immediately as being a sockpuppet (behaviour was
characteristic of "sockpuppet") but unless you can identify the sockmaster,
you can't report it. So, instead the changes being made were discussed on the
appropriate topic noticeboards, disagreed with, but then the editor was blocked
by someone who figured out who the sockmaster was (a sockmaster dating back to
2009). The account was blocked, but the problematic edits have never been
cleaned up.
Most active contributors who retire do so because of the behaviour of other
"contributors" wears them down.
In summary, power in Wikipedia is not where you think it is on the curve. It is
the power we give to the many people to do the same vandalism, the same "meant
well but I'm stupid" edits, the same "I don't know any policies and they don't
apply to me anyway" edits, and the sockpuppets and conflict-of-interest editors
who carefully hide themselves among them.
I wish I had just a little power to exercise in topic spaces where I am
knowledgeable and have a long history of positive contribution. I don't want it
for baseball players or Icelandic musicians or Pokemon characters, just for
Queensland history and geography. That's all I ask.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Jan Dittrich
Sent: Wednesday, 22 January 2020 8:31 PM
To: Wiki Research-l <[email protected]>
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Power law and contributions:
Hello Researchers,
Contribution patterns in online communities follow a power distribution which
is known as the 1% rule [1], as Wikipedia told me.
However, the steepness of the distribution can be more or less strong: 50% of
your edits could be contributed by 2% or by 0.002%, the latter showing a
stronger imbalance.
I wonder if there are any estimates/rules-of-thumb of what imbalance is
problematic when seen from the perspective of community health.
I also wonder if there is research on how technology contributes to such
imbalances and how it might be mitigated – e.g training, user-friendliness,
documentation… (based on my assumption that a steep curve is less desirable,
since the power is more concentrated, the system more fragile and the
redistribution of power more constrained)
Jan
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
--
Jan Dittrich
UX Design/ Research
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Tel. (030)
219 158 26-0 https://wikimedia.de
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