On 4 January 2013 00:01, Steven Walling <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Tim Starling <[email protected] > >wrote: > > > It should be obvious that what is missing is discipline. An > > arbitration committee with expanded scope, with full-time members > > funded by the WMF (at arm's length for legal reasons), could go a long > > way towards solving the problem. Some users will be reformed when > > their technical power is threatened (be that editing or admin access), > > others will just leave as soon as their reputation is at stake. > > > > Right! Because we all know the solution to social problems is oligarchy. > > Ironically, Steven, there is a lot to be said in favour of oligarchy; it's how most organized groups survive, provided they ensure the "few" who have authority remain rooted in the larger group. Tim raises many interesting points. It's a difficult problem that has its roots much further back than most us can imagine - remember that early English Wikipedians were largely drawn from either the Usenet, the academic, or the open source/free speech communities, and none of them are particularly noted for their deep-rooted commitment to civil discourse. Newer users learned their "wiki-manners" from the old hands; certainly many of those who were in positions of authority when I joined in 2005 were not exactly paragons of civility. Back then, though, these behaviours were considered "quirky" or "off-beat", and the individuals considered to have "character" and "guts". To give many of them their due, they managed to get this crazy enterprise off the ground and keep it flying despite the many obstacles that existed. At the same time, many of the processes that were established early on depended on genuine good faith and a touching degree of idealism. Requests for comment were intended to draw in users for additional considered opinions, who had little or no history with the topic (or person) involved. For some time, that worked; however, today's requests for comment almost always wind up with the editors whose opinions had already been expressed repeating the same arguments, few additional uninvolved voices, and often as not the same divergence that existed beforehand. We have been, to some extent, the victims of our own success. We grew exponentially and not organically, and given the roots of our community, the usual group structural forms were eschewed. There was also practically no money for anything for a very long time (our fundraisers now raise as much in a day as they did in the entire year when I first joined up), and very few employees who kept the operation together with shoestrings and sealing wax, while everything else was left to the editorial communities (and the volunteer developer communities) to keep things going. This "flattened hierarchy" of leadership worked reasonably well with a smaller editorial community that had barely scratched the surface of content creation, but quickly showed itself to be impractical when editors joined in droves - many of them focusing on hand-to-hand combat with vandals. Those who loathed wasting their time cleaning up after vandals were glad to have this newer cadre join them; however, there was a palpable difference in their reason for becoming part of the community, and when the number of highly active contributors more than doubled over a short period of time, it was impossible to provide an effective process to help them learn the technical, policy, and cultural expectations. Efforts to try to remedy some of these issues have been largely unsuccessful, with an overwhelming proliferation of often-conflicting policies that are nearly incomprehensible to the uninitiated, an overabundance of badly written and poorly descriptive templates, and a dependence on automated tools for social interaction. And Tim is right about interpersonal interactions being one of the largest problems on English Wikipedia, although I think it's important to remember that the vast majority poor editorial behaviour never comes to the attention of the broader community. Only a microscopic portion of it ever manages to get as far as a noticeboard, and if it gets there it will almost always be because an experienced user is filing the complaint (most of the time about another experienced user). No, the problems are on user talk pages, and article talk pages - or they're not even discussed, they're just edits that are reverted with snippy edit summaries or no edit summary at all. New editors don't know what BRD means (Bold, Revert, Discuss). I'm not sure Tim's proposal would be the best solution, but I'm very doubtful that the English Wikipedia community is able to pull itself together enough to establish some of the important structures that it needs to continue its growth. We probably *do* need a group with the authority to settle longterm content disputes, another with the authority to harmonize and simplify the policies, and another to improve the enculturation of new Wikipedians. I do think the community knows that it needs these things. Risker _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
