wiki community Options

[questions]

hello all.. i am writing a paper (don't you hate posts that start like that....) about the community + controversy of wikipedia. until this evening, i honestly thought those were sort of mutually exclusive, but now the whole Brandt / Seigenthaler issue is starting to unravel for me, as well as the pedophila + neo nazi accusations.

so what's the synopsis here? when did wikipedia really start to unravel? are all of you on here former or current contributors? have you taken a lot of heat from wiki admin? is wiki a microcosm of the seedy underside of humanity??? (porn connections?)

anyway- i hope this isn't offensive to anyone. i just feel like i had the wool ripped off my eyes, as being an infrequent wiki user i had no idea all of this subculture existed.

thanks-lauren

[Lir]

is wiki a microcosm of the seedy underside of humanity???

Actually yes, Wikipedia is somewhat akin to a 'micronation' -- it is a community, which attempts to derive policies and laws, via various legal and constitutional means. Watching Wikipedia decay into feudalim, from its initial beginnings as a sort of utopian 'consensus' commune, has given me some insight into how totalitarian governments operate. Wiki propaganda, such as Jimbo Wales' rhetoric about 'Our Loving Little Community', is exactly the sort of stuff one hears coming from real-world governments.

[blissyu2]

I think that saying that it has "unravelled" is too simplistic. Wikipedia hasn't decreased in size or popularity - indeed, it continues to increase. What we have, however, is an imperfect community, with imperfect rules and regulations and of course it has humans involved with it and running it, and as we all know humans are imperfect. But perhaps the biggest problem with Wikipedia is a lack of transparency, and this, I think, is our major aim in having this forum. There are holes, and it would be foolish to expect there not to be holes. But it is not transparent with them. For all of the glory of a wiki, which is supposed to make it transparent, Wikipedia, especially on major issues, is far from transparent. Just a quick look at the Arbitration Committee, whose role is to handle disputes and to set down hard punishments, shows the root of the problem. The Arbitration Committee, for all of their seriousness and importance, has no real rules to abide by. While there is a charter for administrators to abide by, its not really mentioned a lot, and adminship is considered to be "no big deal". Yet for regular users, who would ordinarily have the most freedom, they in fact get the least. New users are presumed to be reincarnations of old users, are treated as if they are malicious vandals when in reality they are just new and don't know what they are doing, and so forth.

And beyond all of this, there are secret alliances. Jimbo Wales, who founded Wikipedia, has gone to lengths to push his agenda. Whether it is just because he likes certain things to look in a certain way, or whether it is something more sinister (think of the idea of controlling the world through its media, a la Rupert Murdoch et al), we don't rightly know. But there are some priveleged editors, who are unbannable, who get preferential treatment, and who can do whatever they like - that much we do know. Some people call these priveleged few "the cabal".

Wikipedia, as an effort, has many fatal flaws which can never be remedied. It has several others that cannot be remedied due to the way that it runs, due to the fact that Jimbo is leader by himself, due to the fact that there are a priveleged few, and due to the lack of transparency - 3 things that can be changed.

There are probably 2 key events that changed Wikipedia forever:

1) Firing Larry Sanger, who created Wikipedia (and subsequently Wikipedia pretended that he had nothing to do with it)
2) Closing down Nupedia, which Wikipedia was a less serious spin off of.

If today Larry Sanger was still involved and Nupedia was still in operation, what we see now as Wikipedia would be much stronger and in much better shape. Wikipedia then could continue to be care free while the more serious Nupedia could be feeding off its popularity. And Larry Sanger could have been credited correctly, and the lies about him and so many other aspects of Wikipedia could have stopped.

Those are probably the 2 key turning points in Wikipedia's history.

Edit: I changed "we" to "Wikipedia" in 1) above, I think thats what u meant -- Lir

[questions]

the paper is for a graduate seminar called 'new information environments' *.. the paper is supposed to be about an artifact and examining a series of relationships between the artifact and individual as user to show how "media representation" (online distribution in this case) mediates how a he/she understands their relationship to the artifact. 

i was thinking about learning systems and knowledge sharing, but maybe my artifact should be truth!

thank you all so much for your responses, i really appreciate the time you've spent. i'm at work now (grin) so i'll post back later with a more substantial response.

best-lauren

* i'm actually an undergraduate in graphic design though

[Lir]

to show how "media representation" (online distribution in this case) mediates how a he/she understands their relationship to the artifact.

On Wikipedia, the way a user's relationship is mediated, is essentially by decree of the arbitration committee -- if there is a dispute about the content of an article, one of two things will happen: either one individual will force his view on another, who will withdraw from the debate out of fear of being banned; or, the latter individual will resist, argue fiercely, and be brought before the arbitration committee which will, at that point, pick a side and ban whoever they don't agree with.

Essentially, the Wikipedia has failed in its mission to achieve knowledge through discussion and consensus; and it is has long since "broken down" and resorted to top-down decision-making.