h/t Democratic Society My experience was probably worse than most, but Wikipedia remains daunting to a newcomer. Unlike pretty much every other website of note, Wikipedia really is an experiment in controlled anarchy, and its strengths and weaknesses stem largely from the fact that there is no central authority with its hand on the tiller. Every editor is in theory on a par with every other one, with only about 1,400 “administrators” with the power to sanction and block editors and an overbooked Arbitration Committee for extreme cases of discord. The current governance of Wikipedia is a legalistic anarchy, in which complicated rules, frequently invoked only through arcane acronyms like BLP, AGF, NOR, and even IAR (ignore all rules), are selectively deployed by experienced editors in order to prevail in debates. I am not exaggerating when I say it is the closest thing to Kafka’s The Trial I have ever witnessed, with editors and administrators giving conflicting and confusing advice, complaints getting “boomeranged” onto complainants who then face disciplinary action for complaining, and very little consistency in the standards applied. In my short time there, I repeatedly observed editors lawyering an issue with acronyms, only to turn around and declare “Ignore all rules!” when faced with the same rules used against them. slate/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_disputes_the_crowdsourced_encyclopedia_has_become_a_rancorous.html
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 17:01:14 +0000
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