In my role as a tenured professor of religion at a private university, I respectfully disagree with your opinion of Wikipedia.

Drat. I can't top that.

Toodles, Wikipedia. You were fun while it lasted.

You lasted far longer than I. I spent about a year on wp and gave up on it a long time ago. The lunatics run that asylum.

It's maddening because I still go to wikipedia whenever I need to read up on some unfamiliar topic, but I do so with the filter in the back of my head that says "This may, at most, only give me a list of places to start reading about the topic. This should not be read for learning about the topic itself, at least not without some external checks."

I'm amazed how the most trivial things have been blown up into massive edit wars, still. Their rules were sufficiently vague to be gamed by anyone. And some of the worst offenders were administrators.

I eventually decided it was best for my health to let the lunatics mow the grass with a paint brush and take everything I read on WP with a huge grain of salt.

Azer Red added that tag. As far as I can see, sie is no more official or empowered than I am, or you are.

Yeah? Just try and post "No, the article is fine the way it is," and see what happens.

I know it has it's flaws, but I've been impressed with most of the things I've looked up on Wikipedia.
I suppose my son's (high school) teachers are right when they tell them not to use that site for their research, but for a few topics I know it's the best site around. I personally encourage my students (at the alternative school) to use it, with caveats of course! What every person must learn is that NO source is 100% reliable and that we must always have some filters in place to help us separate truth from fiction. I still know many folks who think if something is in print (hardcopy) it must be true.

As for the lunatics on the site... They are just a lot more visible. I think you can gain a lot by reading the background information. How many other sites allow you a glimse of where they found their "truth".

I gave up on Wikipedia except for quick overviews after I started reading the puppetry sections (I'm a professional puppeteer by day) and they were so wildly inaccurate that it made me doubt everything else on there. What was really crazy making was when I would make a correction only to have someone change it back.

Todd@4: Technically, no. Practically? Your edits and opinions will be judged by your standing in the community, and rarely by the quality of your work, at least when it comes to contentious issues.

Generally: Most of the webcomics community has known Wikipedia was next to worthless (at least as far as pop-/internet-culture goes) for a while, now, ever since a small band of WP editors took it upon themselves to delete as many webcomic articles as they could, claiming that none of them were "notable". Their "notability" standards tend to revolve around published works - "published" as in "dead trees" - and completely ignore the possibility of reliable sources being found in an electronic format.

Without a good policy to handle Internet media and culture, Wikipedia is as antiquated as dead-tree encyclopedias. And that's not even getting into the notability cancer - the idea that, in an encyclopedia of infinite capacity, there are reasons to outright exclude vast swaths of subject matter from any consideration.

And that's not even getting into the notability cancer - the idea that, in an encyclopedia of infinite capacity, there are reasons to outright exclude vast swaths of subject matter from any consideration.

Amen. I love the concept of Wikipedia, and I still use it for when I want to grab some quick information on a topic, but the "prune it if possible" mentality is infuriating and seems to completely contradict the original intent of the project. I've had friends who have been published, and been reviewed in multiple newspapers (actual dead-trees print, plus online), and still get deleted for "notability".

Wikipedia remains a good idea in principle, but needs a SERIOUS refresh and reset. Sadly, I'm not sure if it can really be saved... the mentality is too entrenched.

That tag has been there for more than three months and seems to have been cordially ignored by one and all. But, yeah, Wiki culture is the one of the oddest damn combinations of idealism, nerdery, and crank enthusiasm I've come across outside of actual cults or political parties. (And for a hanger-on in science fiction fandom for nearly 40 years and a long-time computer dweeb, that's saying something.) What drives me nuts is that Wiki now seems to be a first-stop site for student research (even before Cliff Notes and the Encyclopedia Americana. I'm glad I'm not still teaching the term paper (though tracing plagiarism would be a bit easier with Google).

Anticorium: I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it. [*]

Wikipedia's main problem - even more serious than the "quantum encyclopedia" problem, as Penny Arcade called it - is that: "All editors are equal, but some are more equal than others." Criteria for more equal would include hanging around making an ass of themselves for ages, or being a friend of Jimbo Wales - but of course it would not include being a recognized authority on something. That would be elitist.

Darth@8: Oddly enough, in some SF-related articles many of the editors seem to know *only* what's on-line--it's like pulling teeth to get anybody to look up anything in a book (though Clute & Nicholls does get some respect). My favorite Web "sources" are Amazon reader reviews and on-line bookstore blurbs.

Yeah, wikipedia seems to be running full tilt away from the very thing that made it such a great resource in the past. The stuff I needed wikipedia for were things I couldn't get in a normal encyclopedia; cutting edge pop culture information, quirky trivia about old 80's saturday morning cartoons, plot summaries of doorstop fantasy novels so that I don't have to reread 3000 pages before I can start the latest book.

Wikipedia used to be the place for that. But when I went yesterday to look up what happened in Erikson's "Memories of Ice" 'cause I can't remember who the heck Fanderay and Togg are and why I should care, I saw they had deleted 90% of the plot summary because wikipedia is now supposed to " contextualise the fictional nature of the work" instead of do something, you know, useful.

The great quirky stuff is exactly the sort of thing that the idiots at wikipedia are trying to get rid of. Why would they try to be just like a print encyclopedia? If I want a print encyclopedia I can look on my bookshelf.

What, does the self-proclaimed arbiter want people to write in one of those lethal to comprehensibility (assumed one hasn't gone to sleep from sheer tedium within three sentences) turgid academic prose styles? I have a piece of information for that person, turgid academic prose is bad writing! That's the dirty secret, all those articles written in the passive voice, are in the passive voice because the writers can't write well or are getting forced into writing abominable prose, and either the editors are lousy at grammar and editing to make something readable, or have inflated inane views regarding what appropriate writing styles are!

During the 1970s and some of the 1980s there were pushes in the US Government to get people to use clear, comprehensible language in their writing, and stop the mis- and overuse of the passive voice. The Schmuck and his associates and his Daddy's asociates, however, are the types to be/have been much more interested in obfuscation and diversions and distraction, including using the technique of writing documents that need the secret decoder roing to begin to try to figure out what the documents say and what the letter of the law has become.

As a Wiki fan, I've always taken their links with a grain of salt. If I spot anything in a listing that looks even a little suspect, I am immediately cross referencing it through other sources.

On the balance, I'd say Wiki gets it right about 75% of the time, and they do try as best as they can to correct errors and not let bad information get in, or stay in.

#5 et al: Okay, I've removed the tag and added a comment to that effect to the talk page. We'll see what happens.

Maybe I'm just being overly optimistic because I've been immersed in Conservapedia for the past few months, and in comparison at least WP is a haven of rationality and due process.

Greg @ #3: "This may, at most, only give me a list of places to start reading about the topic. This should not be read for learning about the topic itself, at least not without some external checks."

Umm, that's basically true of any tertiary source of information. ie. all encyclopedias.

My favorite snarky Wikipedia quote of the day, courtesy of my girlfriend: "This isn't from Wikipedia; it's from something even less reliable." Try learning their editorial standards from their "help", sometime--big on general principles, short on specifics, which made life really interesting when I wondered if middle initials in biographical article titles got periods. Their citation macros are equally wonderful--my favorite, so far, is "cite journal", which doesn't allow for a publisher, let alone a location. And then there's the Theosophical Society... Hey, Anticorium! What's the history of the term "theosophy"? Aside from the Theosophical Society, about which I can find entirely too much on Wikipedia. (Well, I looked up "mahatma" and--ack! phhht! aaaaagh!)

(And if you are wondering about that middle initial, the answer is that customary practice is to use a period, but the general rule is no punctuation in article titles. Good luck finding the period in the help.)

Hey, Anticorium! What's the history of the term "theosophy"?

It is, of course, derived from theosoft, the philosophical study of the universe as the product of a computer program.

And while we're sharing moments, I'd have to say that my favorite Wikipedia moment was when they started lecturing danah boyd that she didn't know how to spell her own name.

Anticorum, #19. Phfffbt! LOL! (Really. And my girlfriend, too.) Danah Boyd--oh, dear.

The core problem that Wikipedia has or will have with "notability" is searching. Hard drive space is getting cheaper (though not as cheap for 24/7 terabyte reliability), but organising the data is non-trivial.

Wikipedia-tech, done well, gets around a lot of the search problem by cross-referencing. But I find it easier to start my search on Google.

And if you can avoid the Whackopediaists, requests for clarification do get answered. But, like any other open internet resource, the loonies tend to take over.

rec.arts.sf.fandom is nothing like as good as it once was. There are painfully few people posting worthwhile stuff. You know, things like actually engaguing in conversation. And there are long-established regulars, such as David Friedman and Mark Atwood, whose postings have become politicised to the point of tedium.

And maybe American politics is part of the problem. We've talked about astroturfing and the other tricks of media manipulation that appear to be the dominant mode of action of one political faction in the USA. I can't believe that it's just a coincidence that the politicisation of these people's posting habits has nothing to do with the bugfuck crazy, devil-take-the-hindmost, fundamentally un-Christ-like, thinking of those who control the Republican Party.

Of course, I'm biased too. Under their apparent model of society, I and the rest of my immediate family would be dead and bankrupt, several times over.

Which is getting a long way from Wikipedia, but it all seems part of the who shouts loudest pattern of decision making, and somebody keeps re-wring the connections between amplifiers and loudspeakers.

Teresa, I really think you're wrong to give up on wikipedia. I don't know how to persuade you. the formal tone edit is obviously not the product of an anonymous "drive-by" editor, because you have to know the coding to produce the tag.

Nevertheless, part of the wiki "ethic", such as it is, is if you see something wrong, instead of griping, take responsibility and fix it.(the tag has since been removed, though not by me. It was already gone when I got there.)It's easy to cast aspersions and insist on a fairly rigid wall between the authority and the audience.

I remember Billmon's last post(Dec 2006) at the much-missed Whiskey Bar in which he referenced various posts of his 2002-2006 regarding the Iraq war and insisted the reason he was far more right about the likely outcome of the war and the occupation than the experts were was not because he was necessarily smarter but because of his diligence in making the effort to educate himself and his willing to follow his paths of inquiry to where they led. Obviously I paraphrase.

But I think you know my point. Wikipedia has been slammed a lot, mainly by respectable op-ed types who are threatened by the ramifications of the wiki idea, that a collective call to the commons, and the belief that most people will act with good will when given an opportunity to contribute to the common good, just might produce something more valuable, or comprably valuable when compared to the traditional wares offered with arguments by authority. (If anything, I think the formal tone tag has come to be precisely because of wiki's critics.)

And as far as the noteability tag goes, the moment you suspend this, managing an already massive database (and bandwidth bill) will become exponentially harder, and wikipedia could well morph into a wikipedia-myspace hybrid prone to "wikibombing" that will make searches incredibly problematic.

One of the reasons for the formal tone tag, obviously, is there are some atrocious articles out there in wiki land. (Browse the articles on pop stars, especially younger ones, for a concentration of these.) The formal tone tag allows experienced editors to search specifially for tagged articles quickly, and correct them (or detag them.)

Wikipedia has lots of problems, but it's still an incredibly valuable resource, and far more readily searchable than a print encyclopedia. Take Gigirose's point about the relative transperancy of wikipedia, letting you know where they got their info(well,in the better, properly written articles.)

Then there's Paula LIeberman's point that academic prose is often bad writing. Absolutely-- but I don't think the best articles on wiki are like that. David Bilek says that if he wants a print encyclopedia he'll go to his bookshelf. Well, wikipedia also empowers poor people who don't have access to a public library, if they have web access. Regular encyclopedias are expensive, and you don't need me to tell you about how relentless the drive is in this country to defund public libraries.

Your point about writing "the article is fine the way it is" is undoubtedly valid. But some people are just jerks.

(Incidentally, there's also a new development by some ex-wikipedians called Citizendium. For my part I wish them both well.)

And yes, if this were a wiki article, someone would immediately criticize its length. Guess I got carried away-- sorry.

I feel a filk coming on:

Grep that spool
Perl will be your tool
Find your name
Binaries and flames

When your name comes along
You must post there
ROT-13'd or reversed
You must post there
...

I'll stop now.

The thing about wikipedia is not so much that it's wrong, though it often is, it's that it's wrong with such confidence. I was willing to deal with that when there was a sense of fun to the thing; now, it's lost the humor, but retained the flaws.

I think part of why wikipedia gets that tone of unjustified confidence is the way that stupid articles get numerous layers of cosmetic edits, which make them look less stupid, without actually improving the content. Wikipedia's insistance on print sources magnifies that effect -- people might be willing to track down online sources when cleaning up an article, but aren't going to have the time or energy to track down books, many of which might be hard to find or non-existant.

I realize that I'm blathering at great length on an only tangentially related subject, but it's something that's been on my mind, and hey -- tangentially related is the best kind of related.

To continue blathering:

Before I started this, I thought to myself, "hey, wikipedia isn't very good on archaeology; let's see if I can find a bad article or two as an example." The first thing I looked for -- Blanche Garde -- doesn't actually have a page on wikipedia. The second -- Terra Sigillata -- has an article flawed in exactly the way I described earlier.

It's reasonable to redirect Terra Sigillata to Samian Ware, as it does tend to get called that in English.

A cursory google with the term "Eastern terra sigillata" will demonstrate that the idea that Terra Sigillata was first made in the first century AD is profoundly stupid. It also didn't originate in Arrezio -- terra sigillata probably first appeared in Pergamon some time before 180 BCE. The timeline given for terra sigillata in the article is a lot closer to that of African red slip ware, though that continues on until around the seventh century, if I'm not mistaken. And it doesn't appear outside of Africa in any great quantities until the second or third centuries.

It's interesting to watch the history of the article. In some cases, the flagrantly wrong assertions tend to be introduced in edits with poor grammar and ideosyncratic word choices, but those get smoothed away, leaving only the wrong information behind. In other cases, there's a bunch of reasonably correct information included with the stupidity.

In short, when you're trying to do serious research, you're much better served starting with google. There'll be clues in the sites you find that tell you how seriously you should take assertions made. On the other hand, if you want episode capsules of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon from the 1970s, wikipedia is the place to go. At least for now; the current climate in wikipedia indicates that they'll be taking that stuff out sooner or later.

8 and 9: yeah, that's what I've heard, too. Rampant deletion of articles has made wikipedia ridiculous. I heard they got rid of the "In ur base killing ur doodz" article... If they can't cover an internet phenomenon as consequential as that, they're a pretty piss-poor online encyclopedia. And I hear that anything female/feminist-associated has to be constantly defended from deletion.

Convinces me to skip learning the syntax and not bother adding stuff. What a waste of potential to worry more about wikipedia becoming a "facebook" site than about it becoming an inbred backbiting backwater. Using the technical problem of "potentially troubled search" to cover for the social problem of "pompous blinder-wearing jerks"... Sheesh.

Darth Paradox at (8) wrote -
And that's not even getting into the notability cancer - the idea that, in an encyclopedia of infinite capacity, there are reasons to outright exclude vast swaths of subject matter from any consideration.

So say we all.

This appears to be a somewhat more recent thing - there have been a great number of AFD (Article For Deletion) requests in various topics recently (Webcomics, various non-canon/semi-canon aspects of fandom, pornography...) based on "notability" that seem spurious at best.

A good chunk of this seems to be axe-grinding, and/or some midguided sense of seeking respectability. But... if I want respectability, I'll go grab an encyclopedia off the wall. Wikipedia is where I go, most often, to either double-check some fact I already know, get an idea of where to go for more information, or look up something that won't be easy to find elsewhere, especially in print media.*

So I want Wikipedia to reference not just Megatokyo and Girl Genius, but The Whiteboard and Erfworld as well.

Yes, I understand that you run into scalability issues with Very Large Databases - but wikipedia is going to run into that anyways with any sort of reasonable amount of information - and the same with bandwidth. Reaching the limits of the technology is going to be inevitable anyways (especially given wikipedia's dislike for larger articles, preferring to split pages off into sub-topics - the anime fate/stay has generated a couple of dozen pages all on its own, between character pages, series pages, etc.).

Like Google, wikipedia is going to be a constantly growing thing, and I think the administrators need to acknowledge and plan for this, rather than trying to delete articles that aren't "notable" (except when they are an obvious case of googlebombing, etc. - but "in ur base, killin ur doodz"" may be silly - even stupid (most 4chan/SA memes are, at their base, a little silly and/or stupid) - but it's also culturally significant, at least onlline - and therefore should have a page on wikipedia.) - mainly because what's "notable" is so incredibly subjective (and so prone to bias - of course pages about porn stars aren't notable - to someone who dislikes or hates pornography).

*try finding out more about some porn starlet someone references, without ending up in a maze of porn redirector sites, all alike (it's dark in there - you could get eaten by a malware) - yes, IAFD exists, but the information there is strictly facts-and-numbers - height, weight, a photo, a website, and a list of titles.

#24: "The thing about wikipedia is not so much that it's wrong, though it often is, it's that it's wrong with such confidence."

This, I assert, is a problem with many sources, particularly computer-generated ones. I discovered it when following a set of driving directions generated by, oh, MapQuest, MapBlast, one of those. It created for me a set of driving directions, which when I was driving down the road diverged from reality in a way that had not been apparent when I was sitting at my computer printing them.

Subsequently I've seen the phenomenon several times in widely divergent places on the internet, including in MSDN: inherent clues that you could use to estimate the accuracy of the material are absent or are different to the point of being unrecognisable to the casual user.

#7 mentions the experience of correcting an article only to have those corrections reverted, and this is not the first time I have heard this complaint. Wikipedia is a clever idea in that it allows rapid creation of content by a large number of people, but it's so different from more traditional editing processes that it has bugs they don't: there is no mechanism to give preference to the input of people who know what they are talking about. Citizendium is an attempt to fix this problem -- I don't think it will be a successful fix, but I'm glad that there are people out there continuing to experiment with a concept that I think fundamentally has value.

This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article.

Aha, I recognise that one! It's straight out of the 'Cargo Cultists Corporate Management Handbook'.

- Real (Important, serious, big!) Organisations do X.
- Therefore we must do X, firmly disregarding whether its actually useful or helpful, or even relevant to us.
- Thus proving we (irrelevant, small, amateurs) are TOO a Real Organisation!

I joined my current employer very near the beginning, and that sort of thing was pretty much the epitome of the company culture back in the day. I suspect it might be a known hazard of startups where the founders are drawn from a big companies middle-management and their higher ranked engineering or technical people. It took years for that sort of thing to die down to the general background level of occasional stupid, rather than being an elephant in the room of an unstated guiding principle of operation.

From #22: Nevertheless, part of the wiki "ethic", such as it is, is if you see something wrong, instead of griping, take responsibility and fix it.

I've heard this argument before, and I have to say, in the case of Wikipedia, I find that argument facile.

Here's a particular situation I ran into. There's a biography of a great-uncle of mine on Wikipedia. Nobody seems to have raised any questions re: notability, so that wasn't my problem. My problem was the three mysterious sisters the article mentioned -- sisters who would be my great-aunts. I don't have any great-aunts.

The Wikipedian ethos for biographies seems to be that people close to a biographical subject are suspect. Do I have a print source for my lack of great-aunts? No. Can I link somewhere? No. I can tell people I'm his great-niece, but that'd just lead to people telling me I'm unqualified to edit the article, because I'm too close to the subject.

Similarly, the article about what I do for a living is a joke -- anyone who actually works in the field would choke if I showed it to them. (Come to think of it, it may turn into my new Don't Trust Wikipedia example for trainings.) And when I look in the discussion, I see people arguing over why the bullshit, inaccurate information needs to be included.

Why not take responsibility for editing a Wikipedia article?

Because people will edit it back, and put in all the errors you took out.

Because taking the time to edit the errors out of one deeply-flawed article written about my field won't fix the other thousand. Or the hundreds of thousands of flawed articles about other fields.

Because there's no way for me to say "No, really, I do this for a living." and get taken seriously.

Because life is too fckng short to spend locked in endless Wikipedia edit wars.

On the one hand, I wish for a proper bibliography article on Wikipedia. On the other hand, I fear getting an incorrect one that I'm not allowed to edit.

In the end, it's a safer bet not to be on Wikipedia at all. :-(

Eh, I enjoy Wikipedia. It's quick and semi-accurate information about the world that gives me a good place to start if I want to seriously learn about something, or which can be interesting if I'm just noodling about.

I knew Wikipedia was broken when I found people deleting hundreds of articles a day.

It's a great idea, and it's useful, but there aren't enough hours in the day to both know something and convince Wikipedia to include it.

Composer (and former Village Voice music critic) Kyle Gann has had similar problems and came to the same conclusion as TNH.

G. Jules's #29 pretty much encompasses what I would say to Jonathan Versen's #22.

I do in fact believe that, on balance, "most people will act with good will when given an opportunity to contribute to the common good". The problem with Wikipedia isn't this is incorrect, it's that its creators and managers have made a bunch of bad social engineering decisions which actively discourage "most people" who might be interested in helping to build Wikipedia from doing so. If I had a nickel for every intelligent person I know who's tried to contribute to Wikipedia and been brushed away by Wikipedia's toxic culture of hall monitors and parking-lot lawyers, I'd have a jar of nickels.

Telling us "no, please stay" doesn't cut it. G. Jules is exactly right: for most people, life is too short to waste it in these sorts of arguments. The design of Wikipedia relies far too much on the sort of lengthily-repeated iterative processes that work fine for software but which wear human beings out. Wikipedia's tag line is "The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit." To be truthful, it should read "The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit if they're willing to engage in unending trial by combat against a cadre of creepy, unblinking ideologues who all seem to know and support one another."

Robin Z's #32 sums it up perfectly: "There aren't enough hours in the day to both know something and convince Wikipedia to include it." This is a fundamental design flaw which cannot be fixed with tweaks. The moral isn't that we need to revert to a knowledge aristocracy of "experts" and plebes. The moral is that Wikipedia's specific design choices resulted in the creation of an empowered class of unpleasant and energetic ignoramuses who actively drive most other people away. Now those of us who care about "open culture" need to learn from that.

There's a lot of sausage-making in Wikipedia, sure, but I still find it the most useful site on the web for looking up information, easily beating out the increasingly-worthless Google.

If Wikipedia is doomed because there are a bunch of officious assholes involved in it, then every open-source software project ever is also doomed. Also just about every other product of human endeavor, if we account for the officious assholes being invisible to the public.

(And if the latest twist of Wikipedia culture really is going to be the elimination of broad swathes of pop culture and internet-meme stuff on grounds of "notability," that really will be the end of its usefulness for me and a lot of other people. Because that stuff is the one thing we do use it, and praise it, for.)

I don't do Wikipedia edits, partly for the same reasons others have cited - not wanting to face edit wars or a lack of community status - and partly because I only ever go there when I'm looking something up, and I can't shift out of 'researcher' mode and into 'presenter' mode. Well, not and keep the flow of what I was doing.

If I go to look something up in an encyclopaedia, I want to find it, have a reasonable idea of its accuracy or lack thereof (and the fact that something's included in Wikipedia, or indeed isn't, is usually a good piece of metadata), and take it away with me. I don't want to be told that being interested in that piece of information makes me responsible for it.

Fundamentally, I'm not interested in Wikipedia as a project, a community, a tool, or indeed anything else except metadata for the information in it. For that matter, I'm not interested in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in those ways, either, but at least they aren't trying to tell me that I've bought into their project by opening the shrinkwrap.

Mike Kozlowski, with all due respect, I think the specific way your analogy is flawed illustrates exactly how the smart people who set up Wikipedia wound up making their particular set of dumb decisions.

Open-source software projects suffer from a certain amount of wear and tear on the humans involved because so many people in open-source software have defective social skills. This is a known and widely-discussed problem in the open-source world. But at the end of the day, most software design and implementation decisions can be shown to either work or not. There's a level of practical reality that can be appealed to. (Yes there is. I know all the caveats to this generalization. Stop snickering. Okay, snicker.)

This isn't the case with Wikipedia. For many of these disputes, there can literally be no end. Inevitably, the result is that people with anything else to do with their lives depart, leaving Wikipedia in the hands of the people who know and care about nothing except the perfect, autistic fulfillment of Wikipedia procedure. We're not even talking about the famous "edit wars" over topics that are controversial in the non-Wikipedia world--Israel vs. Palestine, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the military service of George W. Bush. We're talking about the sort of thing covered in that brilliant Kyle Gann post linked from #33.

How did Wikipedia get there? It got there because its implementers thought like Mike Kozlowski is thinking: this sort of iterative back-and-forth works in software development, so it ought to work in refining publicly-generated Wiki-based encyclopedia content into something strong and true. And sometimes it does. But more and more often, instead of refined steel, you get exhausted human beings and a toxic waste dump full of clumps of low-grade iron ore. Because sufficiently lengthy iterative back-and-forths with no appeal to practical functionality, no point at which something can be demonstrated to "work well enough," wear human beings out.

I just noticed that "formal tone" tag this morning on a different article and it gave me the creeps. It seems like Wikipedia's success has gone to its collective head, and it wants to be a real, corporate encyclopedia. Except without pesky academic creds.

I like corporate encyclopedias...I've got Encarta on my PC and I may get a Britannica subscription. I grew up with the World Book on a shelf outside the family bathroom (handy!). But Wikipedia was supposed to be an alternative to all that. Sigh.

#35 Mike Kozlowski

Open Source software has to compile. This is a tolerably effective bullshit check. (As is the question of whether or not someone will, of their own free will, use the stuff...)

Google and Wikipedia have the same fundamental problem -- distributed mechanisms intended to label information quality function as mechanisms of apportioning social status, at which point the incentive to hack them is functionally infinite.

I stopped taking Wikipedia's view of "notability" seriously when Fandom Wank was declared "not notable" largely on the impetus of a person known at as "she who must not be wanked."

Patrick: I'm not saying it's necessarily a great social model, and I suspect that there's a lot they could do to make it better from a contributor's perspective. But from the perspective of someone who types "wp whatever" in their URL bar, it's an amazingly helpful and invaluable tool, and you don't have to get involved as a contributor, so can ignore all the contentious politics.

The open source software comparison is in that if you just download Firefox or Ubuntu or whatever, it'll seem like a relatively smooth and useful piece of software -- but if you hang around the parts where people are actually writing it, you'll see tons of controversies and bitchfests and whatever else.

Yeah, Wikipedia would be better off if they could get more (good) people to contribute (good) edits; but as it stands now, it's still useful, so I guess they have enough good people making enough good edits.

Apologies for the long, rambling post that follows, but a lot of people have said things that I think need expanding on or explaining in-depth. I'm not a Wikipedia apologist. But I do think people might see it in a different light when they understand the issues in more depth.

--

As a regular Wikipedia editor, I see a lot of the comments here and recognise the truth in them. Yes, there are a lot of editors that have peculiar ideas about how to produce an encyclopedia article. This is the big problem with Wikipedia -- people who think they know better than anyone else how the project ought to work.

I've seen people come to the conclusion that an expert on a subject should never edit an article on that subject, and cite this as if it were a wikipedia policy (it isn't, and probably never will be -- Jimbo Wales regularly edits the article on himself, for instance).

Regarding G. Jules's problem, the official answer to this is that (according to policy) you don't need a citation to remove information from the page, only to add it in. If the incorrect information is unreferenced (which is usually the case with incorrect information), remove it as unreferenced. If it is referenced, then you have somewhat more of a problem. Trying to get the publisher of the original source to issue an erratum may be the best way of fixing it. Of course most people don't have time for this, so in cases where wikipedia has copied incorrect information from elsewhere, it tends not to be fixed.

I think the key to editing wikipedia without being brushed off by existing editors is, as always, to learn the ground rules before trying to take part. Part of wikipedia's mission is that it's open for anyone to edit, but it really does fail there: you have to understand it before you edit it. I've seen this happen time and time again: an editor who knows about a topic comes in, posts information about it, and the information is deleted because the editor hasn't followed the correct process: discuss changes first, then change while providing a reference to a published source that says essentially the same thing, stick around afterwards to make sure the changes are understood and answer any objections.

Unfortunately, Patrick's right about the bias against popular culture, and particularly internet memes, at least that portion of it that's outside of "mainstream". And the reason for that is that they will delete anything that doesn't have mainstream sources. Understanding the reasoning behind this requires you to stop thinking about Wikipedia as a monolithic block and start thinking about it as what it is: an anarchy, with different parts controlled by different people, but all referring back to each others ideas as if they were gospel.

Essentially, the problem is that there are three groups.

Group #1 is concerned with the quality of information in the articles they edit. These are articles in traditional academic disciplines that have large numbers of high quality sources, so when they set up the rules for what kind of source is acceptable, they make them strict. Specifically, they rule out anything self-published.

Group #2 is trying to keep stuff that people have made up themselves out of the project. In order to do so, they decide on a test: if information about a subject has been published somewhere else, and that publication is a reliable one (i.e., one that's not going to publish something unimportant that somebody made up), then we can consider the subject important.

Group #3 considers process and consistency important, and they see that group #1 and group #2 are both making decisions based on the reliability of some publisher, so decide that the same rules must apply to both groups.

Group #1 is right for the articles that they're working on. Group #2 is right as long as they are open minded about what a reliable publisher is. Group #3 would be right if group #1 had considered all article types when setting up the rules.

The problem we have now is that Group #2 are getting stricter and more and more literalist with interpreting their own rules over time, while group #1's rules have become more and more ingrained, and there is now huge resistance to even the slightest changes to them.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what (if anything) can be done about this. I don't think it dooms the project to the point of worthlessness, but it does restrict it in unnecessary ways.

Patrick, what would good design decisions for Wikipedia look like?

PNH # 34 refers to: unending trial by combat against a cadre of creepy, unblinking ideologues who all seem to know and support one another and an empowered class of unpleasant and energetic ignoramuses who actively drive most other people away.

I'm having a Usenet flashback.

Just passing on a link to The Wikipedia Review for anyone who might find it useful.

Jules, there's another problem, by way of being the converse of the Fandom Wank one: what gets included in Wikipedia is rarely reflective of the actual real-world significance of anything.

Thirty years ago, I was in the habit of hanging out at the Anthropology Table at the Compton Union Building in Pullman. The rotating population included a few undergrads, many graduate students (mainlining coffee and scribbling furiously), and several Professors, notably Grover Krantz, Bill Lipe, and Fekri Hassan.

Grover, who was a fantastic teacher but whose academic reputation was damaged by his mischeivous attachment to Cryptozoology, has an extensive Wikipedia Article. Bill Lipe, one of the most important modern southwesternists, past president of the Society of American Anthropologists (and the guy who pressed copies of The Dispossessed on students during office visits) is listed as "Archaeologist" with no article. And the last time I checked, Fekri Hassan isn't listed at all. He shows up on the Discovery Channel with some regularity, and is the Petri Professor of Archaeology at UCL, which is like unto being the pope of Old-World Archaeologists.

People say "write the articles yourself" but I haven't seen these people for thirty years. The people who write Wikipedia biographies seem to be the fannish and grudge holders, and unless one is in a pop-culture fandom (which is how Cryptozoology functions) or too fair or too powerful (or, like my examples, pretty much both) to incite trollish grudges, one has no wikipedia footprint.

#43: "I've seen people come to the conclusion that an expert on a subject should never edit an article on that subject, and cite this as if it were a wikipedia policy (it isn't, and probably never will be--Jimbo Wales regularly edits the article on himself, for instance)."

Whereas those of us who aren't Jimmy Wales regularly get called down if we do so much as correct a bibliographical detail in entries about us.

I've been repeatedly informed by respected Wikipedia mavens--not random cranks, but people of obvious high standing in the world of Wikipedia editors--that contributors are "strongly discouraged from editing articles about themselves, their organizations, and other topics in which they may be assumed to have a conflict." This basically means I shouldn't correct or amend articles about myself, Tor Books, Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, and any SF author published by Tor. In other words, a pretty significant chunk of the modern SF and fantasy world.

The news that Wales regularly gets away with something I'm prevented from doing does not encourage me to go back and re-read the "ground rules." (Which I did read, back when I started.) What it does is suggest to me that Wikipedia isn't just broken, it's hopelessly broken. The only solution you and other defenders ever seem to offer is "work harder to master the rules in more detail." But the rules change constantly, and the ways in which they get interpreted and implemented by the Wikipedia mob change as well. I can't keep up and also do anything other than Wikipedia. Hearing on top of this that Jimmy Wales edits his own Wikipedia biography with impunity doesn't exactly incline me to see all this in a "different light."

Yes, I know there are reasons the situation got to where it is. None of that changes the fact that Wikipedia is now an actively hostile place for knowledgeable people who simply want to add useful information to Wikipedia without comitting to emotionally-draining trial by combat. As an exemplar of "open culture," it's about as "open" as the Curia.

People wear out. I keep saying that. People wear out.

An example of internet memes and how decisions to keep or delete them is made: the "lolcat" article was considered for deletion last week. The only thing that saved this article was the existence of the languagelog article discussing them that's currently teetering near the bottom of "sidelights". Reading the deletion discussion, I think if only Anil Dash's post on them had been mentioned, the article would have been deleted -- Dash isn't a "professional researcher" and therefore doesn't come under the only remaining exception to the "no self-published sources" rule. And this is fundamentally wrong, because in many ways, Anil Dash is actually more qualified to discuss the subject of internet memes than Mark Liberman is. But it was Liberman's post that saved the article.

Personal story. For my sins, I am listed in Wikipedia. The entry contains my date of birth. Since my understanding of Wikipedia rules is that I am way too close to the subject of the entry to edit it -- and also, there are many things I wish to learn in my remaining years, but how to edit Wikipedia is not one of them -- I e-mailed the Powers-That-Be, politely requesting that they delete this particular piece of information. Several years ago I was a victim of identity theft. Date of birth is one of those bits of information that identity thieves find very useful.

It seems a very reasonable request to me. Let's see what happens.

#24 Alter S. Reiss: "The thing about wikipedia is not so much that it's wrong, though it often is, it's that it's wrong with such confidence."

Really? That's my biggest problem with conventional encyclopedias: the presentation of knowledge as though it were a settled thing, not subject to debate. That's fine if you're talking about the atomic mass of lead, less fine when you're talking about the Nanjing massacre. I feel like Wikipedia's state of constant debate, if nothing else, serves as a kind of warning to the consumer: don't believe everything you read. Wikipedia has plenty of problems above and beyond other encyclopedias when it comes to inaccuracy, but at least, with its recognition of the importance of debate, it doesn't pretend to have a monopoly on the truth.

#51 sums up what I find very attractive about Wikipedia.

The main question I find myself using Wikipedia to answer is "Is this topic (about which I know only a little, and that from one perspective only) as simple as it looks, or does it contain unexpected controversies and other traps for the unwary?" If I go to Wikipedia and discover that the article on the topic in question is festooned with tags and warnings and "see talk pages" notes, then I can say to myself, "Okay, here there be landmines," and back quietly away.

(22) [...] poor people who don't have access to a public library, if they have web access.

Poor people (in the US) are much more likely to have access to a public library than to have web access. Or to be precise, if they do have web access, it's likely to be at their public library. Which is also where the encyclopedias are, in print or online.

-----------
Library Journal, in its column on online information sources, has a regular feature comparing Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica on a particular topic. So far, Wikipedia is winning 4-1.

It may be worth mentioning, here, that Larry Sanger (Wikipedia co-founder) is trying to make a more sane version with the unfortunately hard-to-remember name "Citizendium".

It requires participants to use their real names, and claims to respect expertise. I just sent in an email to join it, and plan to try using it instead of Wikipedia. Here's hoping it succeeds.

Speaking of webcomics and Wikipedia: Cat and Girl present Those Who Forget History Are Doomed to Repeat That Joke About Repeating History.

I'm a huge Wikipedia fan, but I agree that the deletist cult and the cult of boring are things that often tend to make it worse rather than better.

As for giving up on it, that's obviously something anyone is entitled to do. I'm very much of the "If you don't like it, fix it" strain of thought, but you're not under any kind of obligation to do so, and obviously one person can't hope to turn back the tide of a more widespread change in style.

Of course, one less person doesn't help either, but that's life.

Anyway, obviously a lot of deleting and, um, bold editing has to take place for Wikipedia to remain something other than a giant vanity site, geocities with wiki tags. But unfortunately there are groups of people who've put themselves on a mission to delete everything they can get away with deleting within the current set of rules.

Last time I encountered this was in relation to the "Sadly, No" article. SN is just another 2nd or 3rd tier blog, but it's regularly linked to by Atrios and there's no real question that it exists, is notable, has some longstanding characteristics that could be described, and so on. But some self-righteous crusader had made it a mission to delete all articles related to "vanity blogs". Obviously this is something that needs doing too: the mere ability to set up a page at Blogspot doesn't mean it's worth writing an article about you (although I think the dangers of this are vastly overrated). And it's true that beyond a broad and fairly subjective description of the site there's not much to say. But there's also no question, to me, that it was a reasonably worthwhile article. But of course it was deleted.

Those rules - notability, verifiability, style, no original research - work better as guidelines than as the letter of the law. Unfortunately but perhaps inevitably, they've been taken as The Word of God and used not just to settle disputes or to improve articles, but as justification for vandalism by an odd set of eccentrics. And it is vandalism to delete information about subjects you know nothing about that nonetheless is maintained and appears accurate. At the very least, you should find a domain expert to tell you whether or not the basic information is any good.

The "watch" function is a mixed blessing too. On the one hand, in those periods when I'm active on Wikipedia (not right now, too busy) the watchlist is an excellent way to help garden some of your favourite articles. You keep an eye out for vandalism or really crazy people, you integrate new information that people have added into a standard page structure, you edit for grammar and so on. Now on the other hand, some people tend to decide that they own various articles and goddammit they will NOT brook any interference! And if your edits don't meet their liking, it's not just that you'll have an edit war; it's that unless you have an edit war every day for the rest of eternity, if they don't like your edit, it's not going to make it in. This tends to mark the end of any gains from wiki collaboration on that article.

Anyway, that kind of vandalism is deeply annoying to me and I'm right there with all the people who wish they wouldn't delete, say, detailed plot summaries of series novels and so on. I mean, who are the Demarchists again? What happened to Dan Sylveste earlier on? I like not having to re-read someone's entire output just to try to recap a character's background.

Now on some pages, especially those on subjects that are mainstream and well-verified and have plenty of interested editors - those that you might find in a paper encyclopedia, pretty much - the sourcing and verification rules have made some excellent articles with nearly everything in them sourced. So don't get me wrong, there's a lot to be said for sourcing. But the groups that insist on deleting even useful, reliable, uncontroversial information that fails to meet all the guidelines are precluding any possibility that those articles will get improved to the desired standard. (Bear in mind that all the mainstream articles started off as poorly-sourced, poorly-written junk too.) If you're a knowledgeable fan of SuperTrout Nine but you can't find any STN articles on Wikipedia, and any that are created get deleted, and so no other STN fans are around, there'll never be the critical mass of STN fans to make good articles on the subject.

Anyway, finally, one thing in particular that I find really really annoying is the proliferation of in-article editing-critique tags of the kind that started this discussion. It's one thing, maybe, to warn someone that a controversial statement of fact in a page lacks sourcing. It's another to think that the first thing everyone reading an article on Kibo needs to know is that you think the style stinks. If you want to express that opinion and help gather people for rewrites, a much less visible tag or category would be appropriate. Sadly there are plenty of people who think their editorial opinion on a given page is vastly more important than the actual content. All you can do is delete when you see it - um, if you want to, that is.

Jules posted #43 while I was composing, which makes some of the same points in a better way.

So has anyone tried deleting the troublesome notice? It may or may not stick, but you or I are as entitled to edit wikipedia as anyone else.

I actually do think it's a good--if perhaps overapplied--policy not to let folks edit pages about themselves. Presumably that policy is there to keep folks who see their wikipedia articles as merely one more piece of personal pr from editing and re-editing said articles in an effort to show themselves in the best light possible.

Patrick nailed it. The root cause of WP's problem is an amazing consistency to make horribly bad social engineering choices.

There are plenty of "Commons" projects where people contribute. Wikipedia just set up a whole bunch of rules that reward bad behaviour. The basis for a lot of their problems is their rules reward mob behaviour. Almost every conflict resolution phase is based on popular vote. So, the way to survive in wikipedia is to accumulate a ever increasing band of allies who will vote your way when you call upon them.

Because of wikipedia's choice of rules for conflict resolution, wikipedia looks like some mutant form of Survivor Island/Soap Opera rather than any sort of reasonable community project.

You want to fix the fundamental problem with wikipedia?

Change the whole rulebase so that "Administrators" are rules enforcers only. And make it so administrators cannot edit any article on wikipedia. Anywhere. Even anonymously.

Otherwise, wikipedia admins are encouraged and rewarded to build allies. Admin Alice edits an article shes interested in about dental floss. Her buddy, Admin Bob, edits an article he is interested in about pipe wrenches. When Alice gets into a dispute with another editor on the dental floss article, she'll call in Bob to "resolve" the dispute and "enforce the rules", which means Bob will favor Alice and come to that "neutral" conclusion.

Alice will then return the favor for Bob when he gets in a dispute with some editor on the pipewrench article.

The rule is you can't admin the article you edit. But any idiot can see that it simply means you form allies, edit your article, and admin theirs.

Make admins be rules enforcers only, prohibit them from editing any articles (except obvious vandalism perhaps) and the social engineering would stop the rules from encouraging people from forming gangs to game the system.

Of course, all the admins with all the allies are the most adamant that there are no allies and there are no gangs and will likely fight such a suggestion tooth and nail. Having accumulated an army of allies to enforce whatever viewpoint they want on an article, they certainly won't want to give that up.

Those who have the largest cabal in wikipedia are the loudest to shout "there is no cabal".

Oh, and anyone who simply suggests "if you don't like it, edit it", please read my post at #60 again.

The problem is not the content. The problem is the rules reward the mob.

Nevertheless, part of the wiki "ethic", such as it is, is if you see something wrong, instead of griping, take responsibility and fix it.

You often can't. It may appear that you can, but you actually can't, because somebody will say that you're an interested party, or that your edit is original research or inadequately sourced, and revert the edit with enough authority to make it stick. Or, somebody will simply be more crazy-obsessive about the topic than you are, and revert the edit with sufficient persistence to make it stick. Editing the page is not the end of the problem--if you've got any significant opposition, you have to be willing to defend your changes in an edit war, and most experts don't have the time or the inclination for this kind of pissing match.

I recall that for a while there was some outright crackpot material on the "Big Bang" page (don't know if it's still there) that I entirely avoided fixing, though I had the knowledge to do so and William Connolley was trying to persuade me to get involved, simply because it looked like the guy responsible was a passionate crank who would be able to outlast and outfight me in any conflict over it. I might well have been able to whip up a consensus to protect my changes with sufficient persistence, but I had other things going on in my life.

People talk a lot about the importance of building online communities, but I increasingly think that the problem with Wikipedia is the community. It might be better off with less of one. The most and best content on Wikipedia tends to be added not by longtime contributors but by drive-by editors, often experts or semi-experts who don't even get accounts on the site, or people who have some knowledge in a given subject and dump it all in there in a burst of early enthusiasm. The community does wikification and syntactic cleanup, but it also includes pedants who delete, dilute or deprecate useful material and occasional persistent cranks who poison the content. Drive-by editors can't be bothered to fight these people, and they really shouldn't have to.

One can take this too far. The kind of deconversion experience people go through when they get disillusioned with a community often involves extreme flips in attitude--people go instantly from thinking Wikipedia is a great idea to thinking that Wikipedia must be destroyed and everyone who contributes is a sad sick person. I have friends who still edit Wikipedia a lot--I go back there occasionally myself and poke around in uncontroversial corners--and I'm not about to say that these people are doing something bad. But the site does have a lot of pathologies and doesn't seem to always learn from past efforts at dealing with the same pathologies.

I'm another who's gotten disenchanted with Wikipedia, mostly via researching the history of asylums for a project at the end of last year.

The thing that's really hard to keep intact in any community is the active awareness that any set of rules is only a means to other ends. No sane community makes rules merely because it can, not for anything apart from game playing. But once they're there, it's so easy to take the rules as ends.

The no-self-citation rule, for instance: I would probably make it myself, because I've seen talk.origins and such. But then there are experts who can and should be writing entries, like Our Hosts, many of the folks who hang out at Crooked Timber, heck, maybe even me when it comes to some parts of the hobby games industry. And I don't think you can construct any rule at all that will with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy separate me from the Time Cube guy without collateral damage. It takes some refereeing. And then you have to get referees you trust...

This comes down to social stuff, sooner or later, and being willing to say "You're a nut, and he's not." (Or vice versa.) But without other constraints, the guys (almost all guys) doing the refereeing will be the sort of monomaniacs Patrick refers to.

It's not that all of Wikipedia is a howling wasteland. It's that when it starts howling, there exist no reliable ways of quieting it down and getting it back on track, and the emphasis on rules as solutions in themselves is part of the problem rather than part fo the solution.

I started out letting students cite Wikipedia, but starting last autumn I banned its use.

I have three reasons for this:

(1) Wikipedia is not always a reliable source, both because anyone can edit it and because the neutral point of view is frequently a problem (this requires, for example, that the views of a Holocaust denier be given the same weight as that of a serious historian, or that of a survivor of the death camps).

(2)Given the volatility of Wikipedia, information that's there one day can vanish the next.

(3) Too many students are using Wikipedia instead of doing actual research and reading (even on material where they have an assigned text, and it is inexpensive).

To my surprise, I still have students who cite Wikipedia, and who get upset when I mark them down for it.

Heresiarch @51: The problem I have is that the format of wikipedia gives articles that haven't had much in the way of input borrow the authority of better articles. They're on the same page, they're in the same format, they've often been cleaned up by the same copy-editors.

It's that format that gives them an undeserved confidence, or at least, that gives them the appearence of confidence. And, at least in the field of archaeology, there's an awful lot of absolute gibberish borrowing what authority that wikipedia has; I challenge anyone with a working knowledge of the field to spot fewer than three hilarious, glaring errors in the Bronze Age entry -- hell, there are at least two whoppers in the sentence, "The precious copper was also imported by sea routes to the great kingdom of Mesopotamia."

Personal story update (see post #50): I got a very pleasant e-mail within three hours of my original request. They have removed the item I asked them to remove. They warn me, however, that it may be put back in.

While I was composing, others (particularly Patrick) have sung pretty much the same tune, but here it is in a related key. Wiki is subject to a kind of Gresham's-Law degradation of sense and civility: a small proportion of cranks, loonies, and the merely stubbornly uninformed (suffering from what the Church called "invincible ignorance" when I was a sprat) can drive out the moderate, well-informed, and diligent. Go look at the Science Fiction talk page for an example of one oddball's success at soaking up the energies of the majority. And I know that spillover feuds from real and virtual elsewheres (involving more participants) chased some people away from the Jack Vance article.

Ken MacLeod@45: "Usenet flashback," oh aye. And "back" isn't all that far, either. EZBoard and other forum-hosting operations suffer from the same pathologies.

I've participated in two Wikipedia cleanups -- both just cleaning up typoes, basically.

Todd Larson @16, it's now 14 hours later, and the tag is still gone. No complaints on the discussion page either.

I must be confused as to what it means to "give up on Wikipedia," whether it means not use the site at all, or just not treat it as an authoritative encyclopedia. Because it sounds like Greg London perfectly summed it up way back in comment 3:

"It's maddening because I still go to wikipedia whenever I need to read up on some unfamiliar topic, but I do so with the filter in the back of my head that says 'This may, at most, only give me a list of places to start reading about the topic. This should not be read for learning about the topic itself, at least not without some external checks.'"

Which is good advice for any general reference work, right? I don't know how things are in academia today, but at least when I was in high school over 15 years ago, we were forbidden from citing encyclopedias as a research source.

So what are people expecting from an online version, that casts the net even wider and takes pride in the fact that anybody can edit it? Is anyone other than lazy high school students really expecting it to be an authoritative compendium of all human knowledge? If so, they should be put in charge of the entry on unfounded optimism.

Once I stopped getting frustrated at the sloppy writing and the depressingly exhaustive entries on completely non-notable topics, I was able to appreciate wikipedia for what it is: Google + context. So when Russell Letson in #67 mentions Gresham's Law, I can look it up and then nod as if I understood what he's talking about. And if I needed more, authoritative information, I'd go back to Google, but now with enough context to be able to interpret the sites that Google is giving me.

If you're expecting more than that, you're going to be disappointed. But just having that context is pretty useful.

Chuck J at #70:

I must be confused as to what it means to "give up on Wikipedia," whether it means not use the site at all, or just not treat it as an authoritative encyclopedia.

I think it means to stop editing it/contributing to it/trying to fix it.

Aw, it's bugging me so I gotta ask, what does "grep that spool" mean? I know what grep is and and what a spool is, but not how to parse this phrase in relation to wikipedia.

Oh, wait, now I get it...it's a reference to the Kibo article thingy. Whew. Brain can rest now. Sorry for the density.

Mary Dell @ #71
I think it means to stop editing it/contributing to it/trying to fix it.
Ah. Hence all the comments about the futility of making edits that I seem to have completely overlooked. Well.

Comment 70 is under dispute because it does not meet Making Light's standards for relevance.

I think that Jules@43 and Jacob@57 have done a really good job of explaining why this problem -- as deep, troubling, and frustrating as it is -- isn't the whole story, and isn't fatal.

My view is that Wikipedia -- and much of the world -- succeeds to the extent that you Don't Let Assholes Rent Space In Your Head.

By which I mean that Wikipedia threw away all of NuPedia's strictures on editing -- intended to stop bad people from doing bad things -- and replaced them with a set of systems designed to reward good people who do good things. The outcome was, to my mind, unalloyed good -- the first giant rush of Wikipedia articles was like watching entropy run backwards -- almost spooky.

Wikipedia's main defensive mechanism against bad people doing bad things seems to me to be not having a set of rules, but rather having a group of people who have a common goal and a stake in the project who work to further their common goal. They use large amounts of transparency to make it easy to migrate from "user" to "participant," depending on your commitment and interest.

One strategy of this "soft security" is to co-opt trolls and bad actors, to coax from them their best behaviors and make them part of the project. This is a good strategy, but it means that people who aren't very good at making peace and cooperating end up with some social authority that they can use to become pseudo-official Parking Lot Nazis.

I think that the recent crackdown on pop-culture material and the emphasis on citation come under the category of letting assholes rent space in your head. The people who poo-pooed Wikipedia as unserious, un-encylcopedic, and doomed to failure have gotten under the skin of some Wikipedians, so much so that they are attacking the thing that makes Wikipedia greatest -- its expansiveness and its ability to solve debates by finding common ground. It's like an allergic reaction, the immune system attacking the body.

But I don't think it's surprising or fatal that some defensive mechanisms will overshoot their mark. Wikipedia culture has changed a lot since its inception, moving towards and away from institutionalism and authoritarianism, creating new technological solutions to fights (for example, semi-locking pages as a way of creating a more free version of the locked pages), and forming and abandoning new procedures for resolving conflicts.

An example is the smoothing away Alter@24 references. The finely honed, efficient means by which Wikipedia assimilates and professionalizes content by casual contributors was an evolutionary innovation that made it easier for people to contribute to Wikipedia. This mechanism makes it unnecessary to steep yourself in Wikipedia formatting conventions before adding some text -- you can just drop it in there and a Wikipedian of more depth will come by shortly and fix it.

And as Alter notes, this, too, requires a defensive mechanism, because it means that it will often mindlessly make silk purses from sow's ears. The current mania for citations and deletions is, IMO, an attempt to correct for this problem. It's not a good strategy, but I also think it won't be the last strategy that Wikipedia emerges to cope with this.

Complaining about Wikipedia can help. As the current backlash against pop culture topics demonstrates, Wikipedians are sensitive to criticism about the project. But complaining is slow and indirect.

A more direct way of making change is to participate in the less-visible negotiations about Wikipedia. We tend to think of the main action in Wikipedia editorial as being on the article pages, or possibly on the talk pages. But the meaty stuff is deeper in the smoffy bowels where people have the long, sometimes dull, very time-consuming debates about what's going on up there on the surface. These are public, or semi-public, but participating in them requires a lot more participation than most of us can afford to get into (myself included).

But Wikipedia doesn't require that we *all* participate in order for all of us to reap its benefits. Some brave and reasonable people will carry the torch for this inside Wikipedia, and they will find Wikipedia filled with other brave and reasonable people who just haven't made these issues their priorities. But these people can be counted upon to make common cause, because they're not the co-opted trolls, they're the people who co-opted the trolls.

You can see this for yourself in microcosm. When some officious prick on Wikipedia reverts your entry and cites some regulation, thrash it out in the Discuss page. A lot of the Elder Gods have tripwires that go off when Discuss pages have sustained thrashes. My own experience was that when they show up and make peace, it works -- it arrives at an equitable solution that we can all agree is reasonable, even if it's not ideal.

I know that this requires effort that isn't within the scope of the energy that many casual Wikipedia contributors have to donate to the project, and I'm not suggesting that everyone should have to do it always. I'm just saying that this is a good way to see the Wikipedia conflict resolution system -- the one that produced astonishingly great entries on controversial subjects like Israel/Palestine -- in full swing.

Three other things I want to mention:

1. Editing your own bio. Jimmy Wales edits his bio. So do I. We both get shit from Wikipedians for it, and we both argue about it with them. Two widely adopted creeds for Wikipedia are "don't be a dick" and "there are no rules" -- which means, basically, "we, the community members of good will, don't have a codifiable code of conduct, but we are willing to work together to resolve conduct that disrupts the project we've all roughly agreed we want to do together." So Jimmy doesn't "get away with" editing his bio, he just does it. The biggest advantage he has over Patrick in doing this isn't that he can abuse his position to overrule dissenters, but rather that he has devoted his life to forming rough consensus with these people, while Patrick (reasonably) only wants to fix a mistake, not join a commune.

2. While the inclusion of the "tone" notice on the Kibo post is ridiculous and qualifies (to my mind) as vandalism, the notices themselves are incredibly powerful. Doyle@53 is on the mark here. These same bodies are buried in every single reference work, but you never see a NYT article that says, "Three people in the newsroom thought that this was a really biased presentation of the facts." I'd read the NYT a *lot* more if it did include those notices. The point of a reference work should be to tell you enough to make up your own mind, and pointing out the landmines is a great help in accomplishing this.

3. I'm not sure what I would do about the printed citation problem. I understand its reasoning: if someone comes along and says, "Uri Geller designed the logo for *NSYNC:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uri_Geller&diff=128657252&oldid=128268950

(to pick a deliberately trivial example)

it's hard to know what to do. It's the kind of outlandish claim that just might be a quirky truth, like Hedy Lamarr inventing the core technology in cellular telephony. OTOH, it might just be garbage.

So it's reasonable to want some confirmation of this. "I was NSYNC's manager" has the same problem as "Uri Geller designed NSYNC's logo." How do you know it's true?

And even if it *is* true that the information was added by NSYNC's manager, how do we know he's not bitter and trying to screw NSYNC, or Geller, or both? I know -- this is letting assholes rent space in your head. It's letting the bad guys set an agenda that scares off the good guys.

It can lead to some pretty weird outcomes. Say someone wrote on my Wikipedia page that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom didn't sell well and that proves that Creative Commons licensing doesn't work (this actually was written on my entry). Discussion breaks the assertion -- the fate of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom doesn't prove or disprove Creative Commons licensing.

But this leaves the canard about D&OITMK's sales figures hanging out there. We can all agree that selling 300 copies would be bad, and selling 2,000,000 copies would be good. But what's the threshold for "selling badly?" I think it sold well -- Tor keeps going back to the presses for more copies, always a good sign, and I get royalty checks twice a year.

So say Patrick goes to Wikipedia and changes it to "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has sold very well and pleased Doctorow's publisher, Tor Books, a great deal."

It's likely that this would be deleted in the current climate. However, if Patrick were to blog the exact same statement right here, then add the same sentence to my entry, citing his blog post, it would probably stand. It would be cited to the Tor senior editor's blog, after all -- a credible source for the assertion.

I've had this explained to me as a future-proofing mechanism. Today, in the heat of the argument, we might say, "if the senior editor at Tor says the book sold well, it's true enough for the encyclopedia." But in five years -- as Wikipedia expands and expands -- this might come into contention, and figuring out who PNH is, whether he made that edit, whether the real PNH had that account, etc, will be a major forensics exercise. But a cite to Making Light will be preserved forever (at least if the Internet Archive has anything to say about it). The forensics task is much simpler.

This makes a kind of sense to me -- but it also makes my head hurt.

In any event, I think that whatever merit this policy has, it's about to go up in a puff of smoke. Print sources are now starting to cite Wikipedia. Wikipedia can't have a policy that says that things are only true enough to appear in Wikipedia if a newspaper reporter copied them from Wikipedia and published them in the newspaper so that they can be included in Wikipedia.

"The problem with Wikipedia, you see," he began importantly...

...sorry...

...is that no matter how broken and awful it is, it's still valuable. I was going to write "indispensible" there, in fact. I don't think it's indispensable for everybody, but it's indispensible for me. I orient myself with Wikipedia a dozen times a day. I'm working on a project, and I've spent hours looking up historical details. Then I spend more hours verifying what I find with other sources -- but without Wikipedia, I wouldn't know what there was to verify.

I remember learning not to cite encyclopedias in school essays. But nobody ever taught me that the encyclopedia *might be wrong*, or why. If Wikipedia manages to hammer that lesson into the collective conscious -- even by magnifying the problems into torrential streams of chaos -- I think we'll be ahead of the game, overall.

the first giant rush of Wikipedia articles was like watching entropy run backwards

I do think that one of the social rules that works a bit counter-productively in Wikipedia is that status tends to come from the number of edits made and to a lesser extent the number of articles edited, rather than from the amount and quality actually contributed (see Wikipedia and Aaron Swartz. It encourages the kind of trivial, meaningless edit Teresa noted on the Kibo article.

If the community were set up so that meaningful participation in a high-quality article were more prestigious than the number of edits, then a lot of the problems described would probably start healing themselves. The front-page featured articles could probably get that started by naming key contributors in the citation. But if there's a systematic problem occurring, then it's the system that has to be fixed.

Ken @45, Russell @67,

For a recent example, just a couple of months ago Greg Egan showed up on rasfw to note a FAQ he'd written. As he doesn't participate as much as other writers do in online discussions*, I'd have wanted his appearance to be the seed of a nifty discussion.

No. As I recall, one argumentative person drove him off within a day.

People like me** didn't even have the chance to resurrect their dusty old usenet posting accounts in order to say "hi."

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* from what I've seen***, for that bell curve he's on a plain with a hill hinted at off in the distance****.

** who've stopped reading usenet regularly, but who still drop by to check- from habit and irrational hope- if the magic of Old Usenet has returned. (Like early 3rd-age sailors checking to see if Numinor is back on the ocean.)

*** and as a fan I do watch for it, in a OMG!That's Him! sort of way. Darn that Usenet thread. Be like seeing him at a con, not sure what to say due to fansquee-speechlessness, and then a