Ah, Wikipedia, land of a thousand fuckups.

Talk about a good idea spoiled...lately all I hear about Wikipedia is the complete and total failure to live up to its ideal. From friends randomly getting pages deleted (such as anything webcomics-related; apparently there are certain editors who think the entire genre should be one article) to everything at Wikitruth...it's disappointing.

Disappointing, but a bit unsurprising, I'm sorry to say.

Speaking dispassionately -- I have no interest in ever editing anything on Wikipedia, ever -- Sir Swatjester needs to get a life...

Have you seen the followup on Kathyrn's talk page?

SwatJester offers an apology that includes the statement: "some of your edits were not civil either"

My guess is that this is another case of admincandonowrongitus, wherin the suffering admin confuses someone pointing out their mistake with uncivil behaviour.

I'd love to see some supporting diffs for this accusation or a retraction from swatjester.

It could be worse. Ever take a look at Conservapedia?

I wonder if our kids will have the same level of stereotyping and disdain for net-moderators as we do for civil servants?

Disclaimer: I'm speaking in cultural generalities here, not commenting on any one individual's abilities or profession. If I were, I'd point out that TNH is that exact opposite of the stereotypical bad net-moderator!

LazyComment Request:

Could someone put together a list of the several Making Light threads about Wikipedia? They're an important and useful background to this current thread.

To paraphrase myself from a different corner of Making Light:
Wikipedia and Tragedy of the Commons go together well, don't you think? Enabled by the concept of "equality" expressed by Vonnegut in Harrison Bergeron, except that the Vonnegut story is a cautionary tale.

Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for learning about topics that are widely considered important, and rarely considered controversial - i.e. the kind of stuff you tend to find in encyclopedias. At least if you catch a popular page between vandalisms.

But the Wikipedia userbase is filled with this sort of self-important jackass, and the Wikipedia administrators disproportionately so. There's no process to protest or appeal the unilateral decisions made by these admins, apart from reverting their edits and hoping (invariably in vain) that they have less time and attention to spend on the issue than you.

The SwatJesters of Wikipedia turned me off the project not long after I started contributing. If there's something I can speak on with some degree of authority (not that there are many subjects where I could), I'd rather post it to my blog and get critiqued or corrected in the comments than deal with mindless edit/ego wars.

Wonderful. This guy sounds like an idiot with an agenda.

I saw this when it was just a particle, and didn't realise the target.

John@7: I'd say it's the Tragedy of the lowest Common demonominator. Wikipedia rules gives the most power to people who have nothing else to do. Last edit wins. Most allies wins. The more edits you have, the more important you are. Actual knowledge has no measurable value in the system. edit counts, time since started editing, and such, do. Adminship is a popularity contest.

Yes, Teresa put up this post before she noticed that I'd particled it already. Some precisely-coordinated, fine-tuned global conspiracy we are.

Anticredentialism is a good and healthy thing in any society, not because it's a bad thing to have credential-issuing bodies, but rather because those bodies are always imperfect, and an excessive reliance on them means that a great deal of skill and knowledge go unused because they happen to reside inside of uncredentialed people. Which leads to a hidebound and excessively stratified society.

But saying that nobody needs any special knowledge in order to write in an encyclopedia, or that it's unacceptable for critics to demand that authors demonstrate that they know something about the subject they're encyclopedising about, isn't anticredentialism, it's insanity. When Swatjester writes "Nobody needs any special knowledge, or special position, any qualifications to edit. It’s not helpful to demand that other editors present their credentials or show their knowledge", he's jumping off a cliff. While, I might add, wearing a bulbous rubber nose and big floppy clown shoes. It's not a blow against the empire, it's slapstick. The non-insane people who've invested time and work in Wikipedia really deserve better than this.

It's a quagmire.

And it interests me to know that since I did some work with Greenpeace back in the day, I am therefore a terrorist. Little did I realize the nefarious agenda hidden behind those nonviolence training sessions.

The wikiwienies strike again.

Ignorance, arrogance, and bias are certainly not the traits one wants in an editor. I'm curious as to how this fellow got--and how he retains--his position of authority.

jmniman #4: It sounds to me like this guy wants to turn Wikipedia into Conservapedia...

16: precisely. Just looked through half a dozen definitions of terrorism Greenpeace wouldn't qualify for any of them. That's including the US DOD definition.

"The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological. See also antiterrorism; combating terrorism; counterterrorism; force protection condition; terrorist; terrorist groups. "

This just drips of a noxious mixture of self-pity and arrogance:
Treat the admins with deference and respect. Through the RFA process, they basically pass a peer-review of their knowledge on policy. That means they likely understand it better than you do. So give them a bit of deference.

Are WikiPedia admins the last kids picked for kickball/you name the game, from all over the internets?

um. er.

I like to edit military, law enforcement, and firearms related articles. To a large degree, they are free from the nationalism and polemic vitriol that plague other articles.

*snortle* Once upon a time, I contributed to many a Wikipedia article. Larry Sanger was still there then, and there was some semblance of sanity. I can think of another couple of bloggers who moved from the 'pedia to blogging as our procrastinatory vice of choice. One gets tired of dealing with idiots/ If you're ever in need of a laugh, check out any of the old discussions about people and cities in current Poland that were once part of any incarnation of Prussia. The best discussion was the one on Copernicus (Pole or German?), much of which is missing now.

#15. He passed through the peer review process, rigorous as I am sure that must be.

In all seriousness, does anyone oversee how Wikipedians conduct themselves? This one admin is a first class jackass, but I suspect there are a few other poorly socialized peers of his over there.

Perhaps it's more fitting to call it "Anarchipedia." Last edit wins boils down to "edit submitted by person more committed to winning the argument wins" and I'm not sure that's how an authoritative information source should be managed. Not that this shakes my faith in Wikipedia, as I never use it for depth, merely to locate sources, but I know school kids (mine included) use it as if it were edited by people who care about the facts.

And how does one file a grievance or complaint about the actions of knuckleheads like this?

paul@18: Are WikiPedia admins the last kids picked for kickball/you name the game, from all over the internets?

That would seem to sum it up nicely.

swatjester: they basically pass a peer-review of their knowledge on policy. That means they likely understand it better than you do.

Or, more likely, they have more weiner friends than you that helped them stuff the ballot and get elected.

So give them a bit of deference.

Good lord.

Swatjester has completely mixed up authority with knowledge. Since he's a military man, I'll put it into a metaphor he might particularly understand: He's like one of the military's most dangerous weapons: a lieutenant with a compass.

Hm, with the advent of GPS, that doesn't quite translate as it once might have. Oh well.

paul@21: In all seriousness, does anyone oversee how Wikipedians conduct themselves?

Oh, sure. It is peer-reviewed, as he said. All the admins make certain that all the other admins don't abuse their powers and priviledges.

I should get bonus points for being able to type that with a straight face.

And how does one file a grievance or complaint about the actions of knuckleheads like this?

You, uh, haven't spent much time on wikipedia, have you? For your sanity, you might want to keep it that way. Admins are not people you grieve against. Your grievance will be reviewed by other admins, who, like swatjester said, give other admins "a bit of deference."

Greg @ 22

Well, a lieutenant with GPS who doesn't realize that altitude matters too. Marching them straight over a cliff, I'd think, because GPS doesn't show that difference, and of course he knows where he is.

#18: Actually, they're the kids who think that, because they were picked first for kickball, they are entitled to get As in the advanced science and math classes - without doing any of the work.

@22,23: OK, I'll take your advice and stay well away from all of that. And to amplify this "completely mixed up authority with knowledge" I would add that some admins, specifically the heavily-armed one who ignited this thread, have confused knowledge of policy with knowledge, full stop. Knowing how to run a printing press doesn't mean you can write the books that come off of it.

I just spent some time at WikiTruth (funny stuff, there, if a little bitter) and it's just disappointing that in spite of all the high-sounding talk (like this guy's page), it's all as ego-driven as the print encyclopedias (or anything, come to that). You just can't read the bitching about who got picked to write or edit a given article between the lines.

It's just so sad when people lack the self-awareness to recognize when they're boring or annoying.

Wow, seems to be a full-time nasty. I wonder if this guy is a paid propagandist.

For those with the patience for it, the info on filing a grievance against an administrator is here.

I suspect, however, that the process is stacked against anyone filing a complaint (if only because admins aren't likely to turn on their own).

The Becoming an admin page provides much (unintentional) amusement, with lines like From early on, it has been pointed out that administrators should never develop into a special subgroup of the community but should be a part of the community like anyone else and Although standards for administrator appointment have risen over time, several administrators are created every week.

Conservapedia, like the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, is at least up-front about its bias, even if the authors consider their bias to be The Only Truth.

And to call Wikipedia "Anarchipedia" is an insult to anarchists.

Wikipedia--the Weekly World News for the 21st Century! (Sometimes.)

Thank goodness there's someone to carry on the stories about Bat Boy and the B52 that was found on the moon and then became missing again. ;)

Jon Meltzer @25: Thank you. I was itching to protest that I was the last kid picked for kickball/whatever. I felt kind of uncomfortable with the implication that we should join in the ridicule of the last-kid-picked when goodness knows the last-kid-picked always had it pretty bad.

No, no. These are as you have stated, or else they are the kids picked just before the last kids. They're the middle-managers of abuse, not the final receivers of it.

So, when is an honorary WikiAdmin going to show up and tell us how we're all wrong to diss the light and wonder of the world that is WP? Come on, all the other Wikithreads had one! (Some of them had two!)

#29: how about 'Wankerpedia'?

#33, no, wait, Wiki World News!

Help me out here... which member of the Communications Committee is this user claiming to be? And why is it that some of the members of the committee do not appear to be using their real names?

Randolph Fritz: The WWN was a wonderous thing because it knew that it was ridiculous and went for it. It was a sort of Cyrano de Bergerac of newspapers. The lifeless asshats at Wikipedia are the ones going "your nose, sir... is rather large."

In the grand scheme of things, is this Swatjester clown Danton, Robespierre, or Marat? The circle jerk that is Wikipedia reminds me of no period in history so much as the Terror. It's way too disorganized to be the Show Trial of the Old Bolsheviks, and insufficiently scary to be the Spanish Inquistion. Oh, wait, I know, the Kilkenny Cats.

For me, the problem isn't the cause ("Wikipedia's culture is f'ed up"), it's the effect ("Wikipedia's content sucks").

I know the former argument is a more sophisticated line of attack, and the latter argument leads down a road where Wikipedians feel much more comfortable. ("Well, stop complaining and improve the content then!" "Hmmm, maybe *you're* the wrong one here." "Oh yeah, Britannica is just as wrong. Worse even!" "Be patient, Wikipedia is constantly evolving and improving.")

But seriously. Just pick one topic where you feel you have significant expertise: your job, your hometown, your area of research. Visit the relevant Wikipedia article. I defy anyone to come back and report that the article ranks as "pretty good." I just visited the article about Technical Writing and ye gods, it is awful. Did any technical writer contribute to this thing? I sure hope not.

#37 ::: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

In the grand scheme of things, is this Swatjester clown Danton, Robespierre, or Marat? The circle jerk that is Wikipedia reminds me of no period in history so much as the Terror. It's way too disorganized to be the Show Trial of the Old Bolsheviks, and insufficiently scary to be the Spanish Inquistion. Oh, wait, I know, the Kilkenny Cats.

I have a couple of Art/Literary Historical suggestions:

1. Pickleherring
2. Pantaloon

The sad thing is that Wikipedia has had a decent reputation for accurate information.... where should one go now for reasonable accurate info...

===

Regarding credentialism... I've known some people who were acknowledged by their peers to be among THE world experts in their fields.... those folks tended to a) have a sense of humor, and b) said flat out they didn't know everything/could be wrong about things/were open-minded about taking additional looks at most things.

It's the third raters who have a much stronger likelihood of spout dogma, having senses of humor that don't include poking fun at themselves, and getting huffy-defensive when challenged....

[Someone I worked with years ago at MITRE, is an IEEE fellow. I see him in the local supermarket on occasion. Last week, he told me that he'd made an error in his calculations regarding retirement income, and realized that he had the funds he needed for retirement and buying a quite nice condo in either Boston or New York City. "You, an IEEE Fellow, making a math error?! I said, my voice dripping with gratuitous sarcasm. He took no umbrage at my teasing.

When I was first introduced to Wikipedia, I promptly looked up the article on the province of Ecuador where I grew up. It was full of amazingly glaring errors. I checked the article again a few months ago, and it's now full of completely different errors, some of them much more subtle than the original set. I suppose that's like improvement.

Why bother editing when someone can just change it to another type of error? Especially since I don't have citations in print to wave around, or the patience to keep coming back and checking the article again. I go to wikipedia when I want information about pop culture--because you can always find someone obsessive enough about scifi shows to jealously guard those articles and keep them accurate--or an overview of something where I don't care much about the accuracy.

I mean, if I want a quick reference on a minor Farscape character, Wikipedia's definitely the fastest place to get it. But I can't imagine using it as a reference for anything important where I wanted something approaching accuracy.

My recent favorite Wisdom of the Crowds moment on Wikipedia was finding out that the article for Wild Wild West, a song by the '80's band Escape Club, has been proposed for deletion despite the fact that Wild Wild West was a Billboard #1 and the deletion would break the template that links Billboard #1s to each other. Once the link is broken, Wikipedia will redirect to a page asking for a new article to be written, which, I suppose, will result in cycle beginning anew.

I think Patrick summed it up perfectly in Comment #13:

"It's not a blow against the empire, it's slapstick."

Wherefore, let it be decreed to Seekers of Knowledge, it shall henceforth be known to all as 'Slapstikipedia.'

Top this!

So where's the bottom the top's looking for? [Considering all the telecom and computers, byting the bag or bagging the byte, nibbles everywhere, bit buy bit, and through the looking glass, it's wicketpedia en flamingo... ]

I, for one, am not impressed by our new wiki overlords.

#38 -- how right you are. I looked up "Harmony", and it's pretty pathetic. The discussion of "tensions" is especially lame, but the stuff that comes before the quality disclaimer is no great shakes either.

Part of the problem here is that of composing a short article as a first point of reference to a deep and complex topic. Not easy for a single competent author, and evidently even less so for a tag-team of dabblers.

"I mean, if I want a quick reference on a minor Farscape character, Wikipedia's definitely the fastest place to get it. But I can't imagine using it as a reference for anything important where I wanted something approaching accuracy."

That's just it. I would like for Wikipedia to at *least* be useful for looking up Ultimate Galactus. That would be super. But given how poorly Wikipedia performs in subjects where I do have real expertise, I can't trust it even for that. Not even for trivial stuff. Not even as a starting point.

Here's my 200 cents, as someone who spent an embarrassing amount of time on Wikipedia till 2 years ago & isn't particularly partisan about it (I think).

The way I remember it, the process for complaining formally about someone like that is the same as any other dispute: you start nicely with a Request for Comment, see if anyone bites, carry on editing the disputed material in as level-headed a manner as possible, and if he persists in being an ass, file a Request for Arbitration. If others have been paying attention to the disputed material, they will probably comment on this. Eventually the arbitration committee makes some kind of ruling. In a case like this it probably wouldn't go further than telling the guy to refrain from making edits on that particular subject and telling everyone to play nice; you'd only strip someone of admin powers if they were using the actual powers badly (rather than just abusing their cred).

Anyway, I used to read lots and lots of RFA's (eventually this took over from actual editing as my timewaster of choice) and it's true that admins are treated less skeptically than non-admins. BUT...

1) There are tons of admins - the bar is not set very high for that, as there's a whole lot of basic janitorial work to be done - thus you end up with many duds, and this is common knowledge. But ArbCom is a very small subset of admins who are (in theory) nominated for demonstrable conflict resolution skills, and it's not a Judge Judy kind of power trip, it's a rather tedious job of proposing little bits of rulings.

2) I really didn't see admins treated with the kind of deference people are assuming here. Sometimes someone who seemed like a jerk was given a pass, and the plaintiff raised hell about the Wiki cabal etc., but I could usually see where the Arbcom was coming from... the complaint started out at such a fever pitch and had already gotten so personal that the plaintiff came across, justly or not, as just another crank editor, whereas the admin could point to tons of uncontroversial useful work that he'd been doing.

I think that for every pure idiot on WP - admin or not - there are 100 people who do useful work on subject A, ditz around in an uninformed but harmless way on subjects B/C/D, and go rapidly insane if anyone argues with them on subject E.

Vance @ 45 -- that reminds me, someone else had a similarly unpleasant experience with the Minimalism article. (I think that article was posted on Making Light a couple months back, but I can't remember for sure.) To be fair, music-related subjects are probably tougher than most.

Good grief. I just looked at a page that I edited about a year and a half ago to correct several errors. My changes were well-referenced to the primary literature. Now all such changes are gone, replaced by a hodgepodge of error and omission. Most galling of all: the most serious errors utterly misrepresent my own (peer-reviewed, published, frequently-cited, made-it-into-the-intro-level-textbooks) work. It's like a community of malevolent retarded hamsters. And, yes, that's an insult to malevolent retarded hamsters.

Sorry to disappoint you, Nicole, since I'm not a Wikipedia admin, but I'll come along anyway and say...

Well, no, I won't, because hey, I said it last time and there's no reason why anyone who may not have agreed with me then would agree with me now. Also because you guys as a collective are as intimidating when discussing Wikipedia as intelligent when discussing anything else.

So I'll just say that my best work on Wikipedia has been on subjects that I had no special knowledge about. What I had, and included in the articles, were references to reliable sources. And I've never lost a dispute I could cite reliable sources for.

The problem might stem from the fact that Most Time To Devote To An Article is rarely, if ever the same as Most Knowledgeable About the Subject.

To test this hypothesis, I posit that AD&D ruleset article is sparklingly beautiful, cogent, and correct to a level that would reduce an entire random encounter of level 4 Orcs to tears. If Orcs cried.

When I encountered this through the Particle, I didn't realise just how stupid SWATJester was. After all, there is a point when self-puffery through qualifications is a nuisance, while there's a whole fuzzy area on the fringes of No Original Research which seems to get variable handling.

I mean, I can go outside when it stops raining and check the manufacturer's plate on my Land Rover. I can measure it. But it's verifiable because there are a lot of Land Rovers out there.

Mind you, just because you're an old soldier isn't sufficient reason to think you know anything special about some military topic. I recall wastching a documentary on the AK47 in which a Russian DI stated the AK47 bullet was so lethal because it tumbled in flight.

Maybe mistranslation: lots of modern miklitary bullets seem to tumble on impact.

I don't have any pieces of paper, but do you need any to wonder how two tumbling bullets can even hit the same barn door? It sounds like one of those teaching stories for children, or new recruits.

Anyway, he claims to have been on a sniper team, usually a spotter. Why should that give him any special status on counter=terrorism? He's just too low down. And besides, being a sniper in Iraq is a very narrow viewpoint,

I'm rather more inclined to doubt his claim to be a legal intern. If he's doing that, how does he find the time to edit Wikipedia? More to the point, has that claim got him into the special-status admin positions, and has it been checked by Wikipedia?

And I wonder a little why he's been let out of the army.

Zeborah (50):
I don't think that anyone is really saying that you must have great knowledge of the subject to be able to do good, useful, edits to a WikiArticle. Teresa starts this by commenting about someone who apparently thinks lack-of-knowledge trumps experts-in-the-field, and games the system to their personal ego advantage. Yeah, we can be intimidating, and we're (collectively) being a bit snarkey, but we had high hopes for Wikipedia only to see it degrade as people rise to their Peter Principle ultimate position of incompetence. Unfortunately, what a lot us us are seeing is the effort of contributing to Wikipedia (with reversion and deletion and fugheaded edits to contend with) exceeding the value that we get for the effort. Gresham's law comes into play as well, with cheap bad edits driving out expensive knowledgeable edits.
Note also that the occasional Wiki thread ends up as a collecting pot for all of our WikiFrustration. If we didn't care about it, we wouldn't be paying attention.

Teresa:

The link at the very top of the article, to Kathryn Cramer's blog, is set to go to: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/www.kathryncramer.com. Which page, alas, does not exist.

Not to be contrarian, but I like/use Wikipedia.

I’ve never bothered with an account, but I’ve added the odd ISBN number where needed, contributed a section on transportation in my town, and casually fixed typos and other such minor errors when I’ve come across ‘em.

I’ve done these as a result of my using Wikipedia. No, I’d not consider it definitive on anything, but it is good for getting a gloss and springboarding on to source materials.

As others have noted it does have strengths and failings. Controversial subjects or ones dealing with abstract or subjective material (eg arts) are typically problematic. But a quick glance at an article’s Talk page usually gives an good idea about it’s potential weaknesses.

Again though, for a a quick primer on ‘nearly anything’ who-is-that/what-is-that it’s often quite good.

That Wikipedia has officious little monsters building even smaller kingdoms of egoboo is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected. There does seem to be an increasing need for a “civility administrator” with the ability to swiftly correct innapropriate attitudes.

But they, or the occasional mindlessly misguided application of an inappropriate policy, hardly seems sufficient cause for discounting or disparaging the entire body of work.

It’s more accurate then Paul Harvey, and broader then the dead-tree encyclopedias mouldering on my shelves. That’s enough for me to appreciate it.

@26: It's David Gerard's continuing presence on Wikipedia that convinces me that it's not wholly without hope. He's a genuinely nice guy, and he contributes to Uncyclopedia as well, so he can definitely laugh at himself.

I used to do some small edits on WP, but it started feeling like trying to swim up the stream of cluelessness, so I left.

(My personal favorite of the edit idiocy so far has been the Death of Fred Saberhagen)

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/www.kathryncramer.com. Which page, alas, does not exist.

#37: Show Trial of the Old Bolsheviks ... the Spanish Inquistion ... the Kilkenny Cats

Uh, the Kilkenny Bratz.

#26:It's just so sad when people lack the self-awareness to recognize when they're boring or annoying.

To be fair, this isn't unique to Wikipedia. (e.g., I have this terrible fear that I'm unaware of my own lack of self-awareness and I've never edited at Wikipedia.) However, Wikipedia doesn't seem to have done anything to address this.

#38:I just visited the article about Technical Writing and ye gods, it is awful. Did any technical writer contribute to this thing? I sure hope not.

It's not impossible that some technical writers did contribute, then had their edits reverted because they didn't cite what some admin considered a relevant source. (If the incident with John Scalzi is any indication, at least one editor seems to be rather arbitrary and capricious with when a fact needs citation and when it doesn't.)

This is the point in the comment thread where someone points out that the goal of Wikipedia is not accuracy, but verifiability.

Personally, I wonder what Wikipedia would be like if their goal actually was accuracy. I understand why Wikipedia doesn't want original research on their web pages. However, the verifiabilty criteria reads to me like they're more interested in ass-covering than useful information. Now, I don't think this is the intent, but I think this is some times how it's practiced. (During the Scalzi incident, the editor actually he said that he didn't care if the datum was true or not, he just wanted to be able to point to something which claimed it was true.)

If you think about it, this is exactly the sort of thing we (or, at least, I) revile in journalism. i.e, the "he said, she said" story. Maybe the standards for editing an encyclopedia and writing a newspaper article aren't the same. (I haven't thought about it until now, and what I know about editing could fill an iguana.) But they're both supposedly interested in the dissemination of facts. (Newspapers, however, should be interested in original research. I can see why Wikipedia should not be.)

As for credentialism, my experience has been that the people who really know what they're doing, or what they're talking about never resort to it. More often than not, it's the people straining to give the impression of being more than they are who resort to it. The best microprocessor designer I'd never known didn't point to all of his advanced degrees. (Actually, he didn't have any to point to anyways.) He just kept coming up with designs which were utterly right in every respect.

It's sort of like how anyone who ostenatiously pushes the notion that he's a tough guy probably isn't that tough. The toughest guys I know are also the nicest. It's almost like they don't want you to know how tough they are.

#56: It was David, more or less, who convinced me to give Wikipedia-editing another try, and reminded me that most Wikipedians are

i) Genuinely well-intentioned
ii) Not aggravatingly incompetent
and iii) Mostly invisible.

It's just the people who bring themselves to our attention who, er, deserve that attention.

Making Light: improving Wikipedia, one idiot at a time.

Sniper, my arse. I bet he's a walt.

Alex #62: What's a walt? A wannabe?

He has a blog in which he claims to have been getting drunk a lot lately. He also attracted favorable notice from a NYT reporter a little while back. He's 24.

These three things taken together explain a lot, I think.

JC @ 60: As for credentialism, my experience has been that the people who really know what they're doing, or what they're talking about never resort to it. More often than not, it's the people straining to give the impression of being more than they are who resort to it.

That's been my experience as well. It's not that real experts won't mention their credentials (usually when someone asks them something like, "Oh yeah? And how do you know that?"); it's that they don't pound people over the head with how expert they are because of X, Y, and Z.

I don't have enough experience with a wide enough range of credentialists (and please, may I never have that much experience with them) to determine whether they all know, at heart, that they're not really experts, and are trying to compensate for insecurity, or whether one set of them is basically insecure and the other is genuinely clueless about just how much in-depth knowledge makes someone an expert.

George @ 49: Whenever I look at Wikipedia entries on subjects I know something about and see errors, I remember stories like yours and move my mouse away from the edit button.

Michael @ 55 Not to be contrarian, but I like/use Wikipedia.

A lot of people--including a lot of people here--do, and a lot don't but would like to, if these kinds of screwups and fundamental problems could be corrected. Pointing out serious problems with a thing (such as a design flaw in a product, a group dynamic problem in an organization, or a logistical problem in a process, for example) doesn't mean you don't like the thing. Sometimes it means you care enough to want to see those problems corrected, because you believe the thing has potential.

If you read the other Making Light threads about Wikipedia, you'll see that other people point out that if the posters didn't like or care about Wikipedia, they wouldn't bother to point out the problems. It wouldn't be worth the headache.

#64: I suppose he's just throwing some D's.

If anything is well documented, it's the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor that opened WWII for the US. The US Navy has extensive resources available on-line. The first of several congressional investigations into Pearl Harbor was launched before the smoke had cleared; the reports of those investigations are available on-line.

The Wikipedia page on the Pearl Harbor attack lists the US vessels that were damaged or destroyed at Pearl Harbor.

That list is objectively, factually, and documentably, wrong. Errors include, but are not limited to, counting the same ships more than once.

Kathryn #6: The one I bookmarked as the best resource on Wikipedia's brokenness was # 8953, Grep that spool from May 5 - I must say the discussion there was rather more informative from here. That was the latest one, I think; I'm not aware of other ones, some googling should help, but I don't have the time to lose myself in them now :-)

I lasted about 3 months on Wikipedia. In my time there I got into about a dozen fights with administrators, mostly about the exercise of administrator fiat in inappropriate contexts (where rule by consensus was formulating, or not formulating, but where that should have been left well enough alone). I eventually left because I found that Wikipedians' ideas of what consensus is (as in consensus rule) were unsalvageably misconstrued to be equivalent to supermajority. Being a child of the Society of Friends, I know in my bones that this is not the case, and repeatedly running up against that misunderstanding was really ruining my year.

So I left. I don't know if there's a good way to fix the problem. I suspect not, since most folks are kind of uncomfortable with consensus decision-making and even though they give a lot of lip service to the goal of egalitarian consensus-based rule, they're really more comfortable with a hierarchical system where folks who want and have power make binding unilateral decisions instead.

I don't think that basic social issue will really ever be fixed there. Besides, the internet is an uncommonly difficult place to achieve consensus in gigantic organizations anyway.

Me #71: Oops. I see: that post was actually the first, and more came when I wasn't following Making Light. Also, this has a wiki-like quality of evolving under one's hands (comment #59 was last when I loaded the page), only without the editconflict warning...

Just makes me wish citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org) will eventually blossom again. Does anyone know how they're actually doing right now? I mean, of course THEY'LL say they're doing fine, thank you, but to me it seems like not a whole lot is happening over there yet.

Gaming Wikipedia was the other recent WP post - after that, google displays mostly comments on those threads, or 'comments by' pages.

#3 ::: Greg London I'd love to see some supporting diffs for this accusation or a retraction from swatjester.

He thinks I was uncivil for inquiring whether he had any base of knoweldge about Hugo rules or hypertext history. He also thinks I was uncivil for addressing him as "Denny," which I thought was his first name (since Denny Crane trails from his user name in small blue type).

I have no idea whatsoever why he took an interest in my entry or in me. SF editors seem to be a subject a bit off the beaten track for him. He seems to have arrived at Eastgate's entry via mine.

He seems to have a high rate of banning people. The experience of dealing with him was rather like having a cop tailgate you on the highway with highbeams on. He's a Wikilayer so he knows all the rules. My feeling is that he was pushing on me (and on Mark and on a guy in the Eastgate deletion discussion) to get us to do something he could ban us for. He was scalp-hunting, or at least trying to drum up something he could post to the Wikipedia Incident Noticeboard, which he is on a lot.

Paula Lieberman @ 43

"The 'facts' come and go so quickly here!"

The followup to Kathryn from Swatjester that Greg quotes in #3 goes on to say, "As for the citizendium remark it wasn't intended as "go there, leave here", it was intended as "If you're looking for an editorially peer-reviewed encyclopedia, that might be more what you're looking for." Judging from the sources I've seen provided today, you'd certainly qualify as an editor in the SF genre there."

Am I reading it wrong, or does that come to a grudging, "Well, OK, some Other People might call you an editor, I guess," statement?

There's a really fascinating set of questions here, related to how a Wikipedia like operation could do better. I am not sure, but it's something we (the net) need to work out. Maybe Wikipedia will evolve some good mechanisms to improve, maybe not.

I checked some of the cryptography pages, and they ranged from a bit wrong to not too bad, with a lot of not done yet. A lot of the errors I caught (in one pass) were pretty simple things.

I ought to spend some time fixing them. One issue I have with this is time, since I could be spending that time doing other stuff, like playing with my kids or working on a paper for which I'll actually get recognition. The cryptography section has a fair number of articles that still need to be written, and I don't feel like I have time to write a lot of them. A lot of times, the best way to fix the presentation of the information in one article is to write two or three linked articles. (The differential cryptanalysis entry, for example, never mentions product ciphers, which strikes me as really odd. The product cipher article could be expanded to cover enough to really support the discussion of differential attacks, and that would also help with writing the linear cryptanalysis article.)

Another issue is that I saw that some of my previous edits to one of the pages have disappeared, and I think (but I am not 100% sure) that errors were introduced in their places.

One thing that would be nice, is if there were expert consultants along with editors. You'd like something like a note at the bottom of a page saying that this was checked and okayed by an expert consultant, or checked against a neutral respected reference work, or whatever.

#58: You probably put in kathyrncramer.com without the www. My site seems to be functioning perfectly well.

)www.kathryncramer.com aliases into a Typepad account)

Dave Bell @ 52

And I wonder a little why he's been let out of the army.

I wonder why he was let in.

IIRC the US Army had a special load for the M-16 involving 2 bullets in tandem which tumbled on impact and ripped large holes in targets. I think it was specifically for going through barn doors.

Am I reading it wrong, or does that come to a grudging, "Well, OK, some Other People might call you an editor, I guess," statement?

My impression is that the "apology" was very hastily written after someone handed him his behind. He had posted a very hostile remark in an edit description 12 minutes earlier. Look at this edit history:

20:59, 13 August 2007 (hist) (diff) User talk:Pleasantville (apology) (top)
20:51, 13 August 2007 (hist) (diff) Talk:Kathryn Cramer (→Hugo Rules?)
20:42, 13 August 2007 (hist) (diff) Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Eastgate Systems (→Eastgate Systems - please stop calling me denny. It's been made overwhelmingly obvious to you that is not my name.)

. . . is he bipolar? Or did someone bigger than him tell him to apologize? I think it's the latter.

Actually, I should have let that list run a little longer. This is what he did right after "apologizing." He found someone else to block:

I've reset your block, and extended the length for 1 week, due to your blatant incivility, and obscene personal attacks written above. I'm also removing your access to edit your talk page for that length of time to prevent further incivility. If you want to remain an editor here, you will change your ways. If not, you can take your insults elsewhere. They are not welcome here. ⇒ SWATJester Denny Crane. 22:54, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliments! Even though I'm actually an arrogant arsehole and as genuinely nice as castor oil. t's ls nc t s PNH rfrnng frm tlkng lk bckt f ccks nd cllng ppl psychpths fr drng nt t knw wh h s s wll,even as he is in the class of expert who can actually shut idiots up on Wikipedia just by saying something, and even as he has been around Wikipedia long enough to damn well know better.

Wikipedia is on the Internet and shares its characteristics. Last count (Sep 2006) there were 43,000 editors with over 5 edits in that month, and 4300 with over 100 edits in that month. Given that, if you didn't have people getting up your nose I'd be wondering just what sort of malign influence they were working.

I'd love to know if those whining about Wikipedia actually create something else. Write for Citizendium. Or write something else that's freely reusable content if that's too odious either.

Alex #62: What's a walt? A wannabe?

A Walt is a military phony.

David Gerard (83): "I'd love to know if those whining about Wikipedia actually create something else."

Plug a few names into Google and see.

Hi David. I really do need to get across to you WP admins how annoying it is when you suggest that we take ourselves over to Citizendium if we a re dissatifated with the behavior of obnoxios admins on WP. I got it from Jossi. I got it from SwatJester, but I would have thought you would have more sensitivity than that.

It translates to Wikipedia: Love it or leave it! And it is used that way.

I was thinking about requesting that a discussion of this point be added to WP civity rules.

Also, can you do me the favor of posting this sentiment to the Wikipedia discussion list? Admins need to understand what such a remark really conveys. (I unsubscribed from the WP list this morning and took back my own comment which was taking its sweet time getting through the moderation. I kept getting messages from at least one person who is stark raving batshit crazy, who talks about stuff like how not being able to edit WIkipedia is forcing him/her to OD on painkillers. I couldn't stand getting that stuff via email anymore.)

Also, given that a large number of the contributors to Making Light are professional writers and editors, don't you think that maybe we do occupy ourselves writing and publishing?

Kathryn #84: From Walter Mitty?

David Gerard #83: To quote one of your rules from your user page referenced above: "Don't be a dick.' Oh, and as has been pointed out on these threads multiple times, criticism does not mean that we don't think WP's goals are admirable. Equally, just because we do not spend our every waking hour on WP does not mean we have no right to comment on its manifest flaws.

Kathryn@64: speaking of credentialing: I'm a 24 year old law student at American University Washington College of Law, one of the top law schools in the nation.

sheesh

Kathryn@75: He thinks I was uncivil for inquiring whether he had any base of knoweldge about Hugo rules or hypertext history. He also thinks I was uncivil for addressing him as "Denny," which I thought was his first name

Yeah, that's standard admincandonowrongitus alright. It's a common illness affecting a great many admins. The pattern goes something like this:

editor: Did you know that your pants are on fire?

admin1: Please keep your comments on the topic of the article and avoid making personal attacks.

editor: No, really, there are flames coming out of your pant legs.

admin1: Uncivility will not be tolerated on wikipedia. If you do not desist, you will be blocked.

editor: it looks like you have third degree burns.

admin1: You have been blocked for 24 hours for violation of NPA.

editor: (on appeals page): I just got blocked by an admin for telling him that his clothing had burst into flames.

admin2: well, he's an admin. I'm sure he had a perfectly good reason for blocking you. you do realize that we admins defer to other admins, right?

admin1: I blocked you for violations of wikipedia policy. If you continue causing further trouble then your block will be extended for wikistalking me onto this appeals page.

editor: but I came here before you did.

admin1: That's it. Your block has been extended for a week. When your block expires, I hope you will find a way to contribute positively to wikipedia.

Jon Meltzer @ 59

The Kilkenny cats as reflected in the Mirror of Wikipedia

@83: I mean writing about it ... that's free content per the definition. I am unaware of examples, but if you have some I'll happily further them.

@86: Said person is now on mod. Have they been sending them privately? If so, I can't stop them ... more than one person who's exhausted wikien-l's remarkable patience has progressed to this. I've been getting their messages privately and ignoring them.

It's not "love it or leave it," it's that I see a lot of people complaining of the evils of Wikipedia and ... complaining. More "we write, you do so too, it's not like there's a barrier to entry." e.g. @78 - he's basically asking for Citizendium. If pointing this out is offensive arrogance, I'm not clear on what a productive response would be.

@83: I mean writing about it ... that's free content per the definition. I am unaware of examples, but if you have some I'll happily further them.
Given WP's deep contempt for anything related to blogs, I don't suppose I should mention I'd ever provided free content to the world about New Orleans or the Pakistan Earthquake, or private military contractors. Or that your hostess has saved countless newbie writers from unscrupulous "publishers" and "literary agents," an expertise Mr. Beback will neither acknowledge nor forgive her for.

Simply put, that argument doesn't work here. We are a highly productive bunch and do give things away for free.

Bruce @89: Yes, I know. My comment was alluding to the way said "cats" are acting as they eat each other: like teenage social-status-obsessed airheads.

David Gerard (90): "I am unaware of examples, but if you have some I'll happily further them."

Nice try, slacker. You made a comment for which you had no justification, and you got called on it. That leaves you the one with a deficit of credibility to be made up. In short: you did the sneering, you do the research.

David@90: You're completely uninformed and yet you continue to attempt to exert authority.

If it's free content you want, I've got a book on copyright that's cc-by and a perl programming book that is GFDL. I've been programming perl for years, I've been interested in fair copyright law for maybe a decade.

Jim just posted a whole bunch of first aid and emergency prepardness information under a CC license. he's an EMT.

You have no clue what you're talking about or who you are talking to, and yet you waltz in here with the typical confidence of the cocksure wikiadmins that we were just discussing. You have completely demonstrated our point.

Regarding Citizendium, see SwatJester's remark here:

If you dislike Wikipedia's "anyone can edit" policies, you need not stay here. Citizendium is that way. ⇒ SWATJester Denny Crane. 03:53, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

I did look into getting a membership in Citizendium, but they have this long paragraph you must agree to, which read to me a bit like a loyalty oath. I didn't read it in detail, but decided I didn't want to get into deciding whether I agreed with it all at just that moment. I may eventually end up there. But last time I checked, it had about the same traffic level of this blog.

Greg (95), just take it as a measure of the company in which he normally finds himself.

I guess I should add that in the wake of the BADSITES controversey involving this blog, I had some private correspondence with Mr. Beback & Mr. Wales at the invitation of Mr. Wales.

One thing I tried to outline for them was that SF and WIkipedia have a major culture conflict. Wikipedia regards itself as having long traditions established by consensus, but SF has a much longer history and also has traditions established by consensus.
Initially, I had hoped to resolve this by getting the most crucial sf materials housed elsewhere. But that won't work.

So Wikipedia is stuck with us sf people, and in sf authority is built as much on knowing what you are talking about as on credentials as such. We are willing to put up with assertions by people without credentials. We are much less willing to put up with self-satisfied ignorance, especially when combined with coersive authority.

This culture conflict isn't going away. And the collective we aren't going away either.

(One thing I can say in SwatJester's favor is at least he isn't trying be anonymous.)

#60: "It's not impossible that some technical writers did contribute, then had their edits reverted because they didn't cite what some admin considered a relevant source. (If the incident with John Scalzi is any indication, at least one editor seems to be rather arbitrary and capricious with when a fact needs citation and when it doesn't.)"

That's a fair point, JC. Actually, I could pick nits with the accuracy of the piece and its sourcing, but I'm really much more concerned about the quality of the prose. The whole Technical Writing article is a textbook example of anti-tech writing. Disorganized, pompous, wordy, passive blather. The first two sentences alone -- you could just nuke those and move on. Ugh.

Er, fine. I was invited here; if you were trying to convince me of something or seeking help in any way, these probably aren't suitable approaches to either. I'm sure that won't stop you doing it again and again. Good luck with it all, then.

I don't think he's talking our point about self-satsified ignorance on the part of admins.

David @ 100

That sounds, to me, remarkably like 'I'll just be leaving now before the door hits me on my rear end'. I'm still at a loss to understand your hostility to the people here, since nothing I saw before your first comment seems to have justified it.

"Walt"; a British slang term for one who claims undeserved military glory. It is indeed derived from Walter Mitty.

I started to put this in my earlier post, thought better of it, slept on it and decided to go ahead.

Wikipedia can be a great (micro) social engineering tool for herding the lazy, ignorant, irrational masses of middle managers, bureaucrats, zealots and other authority worshiping sheep in the direction you need them to go.

Where facts and rational argument fail, there's nothing a couple of critical assertions backed up by links to (carefully edited) corroborating articles to lend your powerpoint, memo, email a lot of weight with the kind of people who prefer to let authority do their thinking for them.

[Shuffles back onsite in time to catch Mr. Gerard's departing taillights]

[Removes lovingly-tended meerschaum from mouth]

Son, if you're going to to try that sort of thing around here, you really need to bring your best game. Some of these people have been whacking trolls and flamers since the Age of Myth.

[Replaces pipe, shuffles back offsite]

xkcd distills our entire discussion into one great panel.

Evan @ 99: The whole Technical Writing article is a textbook example of anti-tech writing. Disorganized, pompous, wordy, passive blather. The first two sentences alone -- you could just nuke those and move on. Ugh.

Absolutely. It's horrible. The sad thing is, the earliest version of the article that I can find is much better. It could still do with some improvement, but it seems that all the edits were in the direction of making it worse.

This is where the difference between Wikipedia and the scientific process becomes manifest. A process of continual revision will produce a progressively better result - if there is a metric for determining whether a new version is better than the existing version (and hence should be kept), or not (in which case it should