Wiki-Induced Kognitive Insufficiency (WIKI), Enough Symptomatics! What Is The Cause? Options Rating

[Jonny Cache]

Blue-skying may be fine in the early years, but anyone who's been paying any attention at all has seen all the ways that anonymity begets immunity begets irresponsibility, and anything more than a trace amount of those ingredients anywhere in the system will poison the whole culture faster than you can say Jimbonny Quickie.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Wed 5th March 2008, 3:57am

[Moulton]

There is no question that the erratic governance architecture of WP is toxic.

[Kato]

Blue-skying may be fine in the early years, but anyone who's been paying any attention at all has seen all the ways that anonymity begets immunity begets irresponsibility, and anything more than a trace amount of those ingredients anywhere in the system will poison the whole culture faster than you can say Jimbonny Quickie.

Jonny

There's no doubt that is a major contributory factor. But I believe you would soon find problems whether the participants are using names associated with their real life identity or not. The anonymity amplifies deeper problems with online collaboration.

These deeper problems you'd find would be related to Somey's blog post

http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20080117/w...has-not-scaled/

...compromise, power gaming, disillusionment. In the unreal world of online collaboration, the human ties just aren't strong enough. We are presented with Xeroxed versions of real human relationships. Visible, but lacking in essential detail. There is simply not enough to bind the collaborators to the task in hand. And too many distractions. Associations aren't natural online, and they quickly become corrupted it seems. Communication isn't lucid, collaboration is a genuine struggle.

[Jonny Cache]

Blue-skying may be fine in the early years, but anyone who's been paying any attention at all has seen all the ways that anonymity begets immunity begets irresponsibility, and anything more than a trace amount of those ingredients anywhere in the system will poison the whole culture faster than you can say Jimbonny Quickie.

Jonny

There's no doubt that is a major contributory factor. But I believe you would soon find problems whether the participants are using names associated with their real life identity or not. The anonymity amplifies deeper problems with online collaboration.

These deeper problems you'd find would be related to Somey's blog post

http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20080117/w...has-not-scaled/

… compromise, power gaming, disillusionment. In the unreal world of online collaboration, the human ties just aren't strong enough. We are presented with Xeroxed versions of real human relationships. Visible, but lacking in essential detail. There is simply not enough to bind the collaborators to the task in hand. And too many distractions. Associations aren't natural online, and they quickly become corrupted it seems. Communication isn't lucid, collaboration is a genuine struggle.

I am right in the middle of moving this Anonymity-related sideshow to its own thread, as I feel like most of it is very old hat, and I really want to focus on the Causes of a specific Effect on the Human Psyche.

Jonny

[Moulton]

Worrying About Wheel-Warring in Our WikiWoe

Wheel-Warring in WikiDrama, like political give and take everywhere, follows an oft-observed model. The model presented here applies in general to all WikiDrama at any level of intensity, from a simple reversion to clamorous kerfuffle and brouhaha. It has 5 stages.

1. Mimetic Desire for One's Point of View
One editorial clique establishes their Point of View as an editorial objective and other editors react with a countervailing drive for their complementary Point of View.

2. Mimetic Rivalry for More Prominence
Now the editorial cliques begin competing for prominence. Whatever winning strategies emerge, the less experienced editors copy them. To survive in Wikipedia, an editor must become deft at gaming the labyrinthine rules of the system.

3. Skandalon
Skandalon is a Greek word that means "taking the bait." It's the root of "slander" and "scandal." In the rivalry for editorial dominance, if one side can goad the other into committing a foul, the opposing editor can be neutralized or even eliminated from the game. Thus begins a Wiki-War, fought on the editorial battlefield, in which the goal is to demolish and disempower the other side. Skandalon is what makes it so hard not to take the bait, so hard just to walk away. It's so easy to bicker and goad. The give and take escalates.

4. Scapegoating and Alienation
Eventually one editor crosses some arbitrary threshold of civility where another Admin feels compelled to intervene. It's essentially random which side crosses first, but often it's the more disgruntled minority, which uses harsher language to maintain parity. Whichever side goes over the arbitrary line becomes singled out, and the others who kept their trolling below threshold are sorely offended. They rudely chastise the miscreant, sending him or her to the Oblivion of Time Out.

5. Consensual, Irrevocable, and Sanctioned Banishment
To appease the rabble, the ArbCom determines the standards of civility and visits banishment and page-blanking on the outcast. Then everyone issues a sigh of relief. This escalates the polarization to the next higher level of examination in online culture.

The 5-stage pattern repeats at all levels of Wikidrama and for all rivalries and editorial competitions. The most vicious attacks are reserved for people highest up in the power structure. Jimbo Wales, ArbCom, and Wikipedia Review all follow this model. Well, actually, almost everyone follows it.

At every point in a battle of WikiWits, the dynamic is somewhere in the 5-stage model, which repeats endlessly.

The only way to arrest the Wikidrama is to adopt the conscious goal of de-escalation and run the model backwards toward constructive dialogue. Giving up the desire to be dominant, avoiding the temptation of skandalon, avoiding Requests for Comments, avoiding authorized and sanctioned banishment.

A common type of outcast is a person who bears witness and speaks the truth to power.

Wikidrama, left to itself tends to escalate over time.

We need to think our way out of verbal vendettas by mindfully running the model backward, de-escalating editorial power struggles and moving toward open dialogue.

At every stage of the model, we need to be mindful of the dynamic we are caught up in, and consciously elect to run the model in reverse.

With this Systems Theoretic Model of the dynamic structure of argument, debate and dialogue, we can discover the optimal strategy to drive the system in reverse toward better practices and more accurate articles.

It's pure science, pure reason, and pure common sense. These methods of thought all reach the same insightful solution to getting along.

It's time we learned it so that we can discontinue the mindless practice of Wiki-flogging ourselves to death. It's time we learned, reviewed, reflected, and meditated on the Mimetic Reconciliation Model.

[Kato]

Good post Moulton

[Jonny Cache]

Good post Moulton

Yup, it's such a good post that it probably ought to be the anchor of it's own thread.

Maybe someone could explain to Moulton how to use the <New Topic> button?

Jonny

[Moulton]

That 5-stage model is due to Professor Rene Girard, Emeritus of Stanford University.

I've adapted it on several occasions to specific contexts.

[Jonny Cache]

That 5-stage model is due to Professor Rene Girard, Emeritus of Stanford University.

I've adapted it on several occasions to specific contexts.

What you are not doing with your canned re*printings of old blog postings is adapting them to the specific question e-nunciated above. The mission — and nothing says you have to accept it — is to seek out first and debug later specific features of Wikipedia's Social-Technical Architecture that are causally implicated in its debilitating effect on people's desire to learn. As indicated by the subtitle, this demands something more than yet another dramatic description of symptomology — something that we've all been quite capable of doing till we laugh or cry or throw up — it requires plausible hypotheses about which actual features of the system are primarily responsible for the Induced Learning Lesions (ILL's).

I am sorry if I evince a certain urgency about this, but I feel pressed to get down to the brass tacks of identifying root causes, before we end up with too many more Wiki-Crack Babies on our hands.

No one wants to see that …

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Wed 5th March 2008, 7:44pm

[Moulton]

Your call for causes of an effect on the human psyche is what prompted me to pull out Girard's Model, since that's a core feature of his model.

[Jonny Cache]

Your call for causes of an effect on the human psyche is what prompted me to pull out Girard's Model, since that's a core feature of his model.

Fair enough, and maybe my brain is just blurred over today, but the model seems to be describing human universals that would manifest themselves in all climes and seasons. What I'm looking for are differential factors, marks of the social policy + software design that are amplifying the noise at the expense of the signal, so to speak.

Some of us already accept the idea that anonymity is one of those factors. My own experience with Citizendium tells me that you can fix that bug and still not touch many other fundamental flaws of the Sanger-Wales confoundation.

Pointing to the poor excuse for a social contract that Wikipedia trots out on ritual occasions is certainly another good lead. But it debouches on a very wide field of investigation where we have but turned over one or three pebbles here and there.

So I'm just not getting that epiphany yet —

Maybe I'll go watch the Simpsons movie again …

Jonny

[AB]

The mission — and nothing says you have to accept it — is to seek out first and debug later specific features of Wikipedia's Social-Technical Architecture that are causally implicated in its debilitating effect on people's desire to learn.

WP:No original research ?

Learning often involves 'original research'. And then some
WP members have a strange tendency of trying to apply
WP rules such as WP:NOR outside of WP.

And there's the question of how people become so
convinced that that rule is so great.

[Milton Roe]

Some of us already accept the idea that anonymity is one of those factors. My own experience with Citizendium tells me that you can fix that bug and still not touch many other fundamental flaws of the Sanger-Wales confoundation.

Pointing to the poor excuse for a social contract that Wikipedia trots out on ritual occasions is certainly another good lead. But it debouches on a very wide field of investigation where we have but turned over one or three pebbles here and there.

So I'm just not getting that epiphany yet —
Jonny

Maybe there's nothing more to get. We all know the problems of email fora from the monumental fights on Usenet (internet newsgroups). They are indeed brought on by anonymity, the ease of hitting the "enter" key when you'd better off thinking it over for 30 minutes, and finally (and not least) the real problems that enter in, when two people face off in "public" and this causes a situation where neither can lose face by giving ground. This is how murder happens in the ghetto. It's not generally private one-on-one fights without witnesses that are deadly-- it's fights in front of groups where the weaker guy can't just walk away, and so is forced to do something drastic, like pull a deadly weapon.

The only thing Wikipedia adds to all this, that I can see, is to add the power to be Judge Dred. People slurp their way up the brown snowcone until they finally become anon admins, and from that moment on, they have power without accountability, and that corrupts all but the most saintly and old souls. Certainly it totally destroys the character of the average young-male-nerd who typically become an admin. For women with any paranoia at all, it plays into their primal fears of being raped or stalked or something, but you'll notice that their hot-button killing activities as admins, are for totally different reasons. Male admins typically tromp on others for insults, as in a bar. Women for "outing" another editor, which amounts to fears of being followed home in the dark.

Does this theory need to be more complicated?

--- Milt

[Jonny Cache]

Some of us already accept the idea that anonymity is one of those factors. My own experience with Citizendium tells me that you can fix that bug and still not touch many other fundamental flaws of the Sanger-Wales confoundation.

Pointing to the poor excuse for a social contract that Wikipedia trots out on ritual occasions is certainly another good lead. But it debouches on a very wide field of investigation where we have but turned over one or three pebbles here and there.

So I'm just not getting that epiphany yet —

Jonny

Maybe there's nothing more to get. We all know the problems of email fora from the monumental fights on Usenet (internet newsgroups). They are indeed brought on by anonymity, the ease of hitting the "enter" key when you'd better off thinking it over for 30 minutes, and finally (and not least) the real problems that enter in, when two people face off in "public" and this causes a situation where neither can lose face by giving ground. This is how murder happens in the ghetto. It's not generally private one-on-one fights without witnesses that are deadly — it's fights in front of groups where the weaker guy can't just walk away, and so is forced to do something drastic, like pull a deadly weapon.

The only thing Wikipedia adds to all this, that I can see, is to add the power to be Judge Dred. People slurp their way up the brown snowcone until they finally become anon admins, and from that moment on, they have power without accountability, and that corrupts all but the most saintly and old souls. Certainly it totally destroys the character of the average young-male-nerd who typically become an admin. For women with any paranoia at all, it plays into their primal fears of being raped or stalked or something, but you'll notice that their hot-button killing activities as admins, are for totally different reasons. Male admins typically tromp on others for insults, as in a bar. Women for "outing" another editor, which amounts to fears of being followed home in the dark.

Does this theory need to be more complicated?

— Milt

Nah, Boss, works for me …

Jonny "Da Jet" Cache

[AB]

For women with any paranoia at all, it plays into their primal fears of being raped or stalked or something [...] Women for "outing" another editor, which amounts to fears of being followed home in the dark.

Erm - assault, sexual assault, rape, literal
following-behind-from-just-within-sight-stalking -
those things still happen, quite frequently in
some places, and often in broad daylight.

I don't know how often that sort of thing
follows from online activity, but it only takes
one creep to ruin everything.


This post has been edited by AB: Thu 6th March 2008, 12:31am

[The Joy]

I just don't picture WP as a learning community in any way. With WP, everyone considers themselves the experts, and they find anyone disagreeing with them to be a nuisance. Learning means often confronting something new that goes against what you thought you knew. I don't really see Wikipedians going "Wow, I never knew that! I should add that to my memory!" Instead, they conspire against you for challenging their assumptions.

There's just a basic assumption that everyone has an equal voice and everyone is equally right... which is wrong! I think that's one of the deeper neuroses.

[Docknell]

I just don't picture WP as a learning community in any way. With WP, everyone considers themselves the experts, and they find anyone disagreeing with them to be a nuisance. Learning means often confronting something new that goes against what you thought you knew. I don't really see Wikipedians going "Wow, I never knew that! I should add that to my memory!" Instead, they conspire against you for challenging their assumptions.

There's just a basic assumption that everyone has an equal voice and everyone is equally right... which is wrong! I think that's one of the deeper neuroses.

Well, you can learn stuff because it gets added. But yes I see no examples of people deep learning or adapting their learning.

The sort of learning that WP is excellent for is:

Learning to bully

Learning to brown-nose

Learning to distort via trumping conclusion with opinion, hiding facts in a mess, and otherwise NLPing the article for their own gratification.

Learning to insult people within civility regs

Learning to waste the time of any well meaning newcomer


Basically, its super for - sociopath skills training

[Moulton]

Wikipedia is a wonderful place to make the acquaintance of people inhabiting the Axis II section of DSM IV.

[Kato]

This blog posting deals with this topic somewhat

What Motivates Online Social Participation?

http://www.hopperanalytical.com/blog/what-...l-participation

(dammit I really think we need a "crows nest" forum for these kinds of threads. Its becoming more and more and more difficult to locate them on this forum as the scandals pile up)

[Moulton]

The drive to punish transgressors is one of those curious characteristics of our species that defies logical analysis. I suppose there is an emotional satisfaction in Schadenfreude that operates on a different dimension than other (rational) measures of system gain.