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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia demonstrates that an authoritarian governance model is more functional than essentially anarchy. But that does not mean we should settle for it. Wikipedia is known for its restrictive culture. A lot of good information does not make it past the guards. We can probably do better.

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Wikipedia is not really an authoritarian model. You can't be appointed owner of an article or anything.

That's not to say there aren't rules, but rules are decided by collective decisions (or in practise the collective decisions of people from 15 years ago) and are implemented based on argument, debate and evidence. Usually when people say an "authoritarian" governance model, they mean there is a ruler or small class of elites, and whatever they say goes, no discussion, no debate, no appeal. That is very much not what wikipedia is like. It is however what a lot of social media sites are like (good luck appealing a fb moderator decision)

In my experience fighting the Wikipedia bureaucracy to right a wrong decision is like fighting bullshit, you expend 10x the energy you want just to engage in the fight. After being relatively prolific for several years on non-controversial reef fish topics I just gave up after multiple run-ins with the administrative hierarchy. The assumption of good faith was a sham and accountability was zilch. I had no interest in spending time fighting what were essentially capricious and arbitrary decisions by drive-by tin pots. It was hardly surprising when a couple years later one of the figures who had been an annoyance for me was finally booted from the organization of a pattern of similar behaviour across the site that went on for more than a decade. They had repeated warnings and essentially kept reverting to being a jerk. I wonder how many contributors were chased off by this one bad apple. If you want to make significant contributions to wikipedia but don't want to participate in the governance then you can expect occasional small-town crooked cop behaviour from the same kind of bullies who get off on that in the real world.

Typical would be; you make edits to a stub species article to add basic information from fishbase. You don't add much because you have never actually heard of the species. The next day you come back and the article is reverted or proposed for deletion as non-notable. It doesn't matter that the stub had been around for a decade, that there are 10k other stub fish articles. Nope, you tried to make a small contribution and that deserves to be punished for some reason. Eventually people get the message and stop contributing anything. Don't even get me started on trying to correct taxonomic names to the recognized name or fixing the list of species in a genus. These changes were regularly reverted without explanation. Fix 20 articles, 1 or 2 are reverted. Yep, just live with it.

To clarify, i'm not saying Wikipedia is a utopia, just that its not authortarian. I'd probably describe it as a beurocratic-anarchist-doocracy

"The assumption of good faith was a sham and accountability was zilch."

Is there any way to assess editors, how good of job they're doing?

There are ways to engage in dispute resolution. More court system than report card. Actually getting results can be difficult and involves lots of politics (or so people tell me, i haven't actually been involved in major disputes at wikipedia)

Assesing editors implies that someone is an authority above editors, to judge over them. There are of course moderators ("Administrators"), but the general idea is you are supposed to appeal to your peers and convince the group of your position, not convince someone in authority.

No formal process is described but to be accountable actions taken should be defensible or explainable and generally they were not. There was also usually no evidence that the reviewer had any basis for making the assessment which led to their conclusion.

Thank you u/bondolo and u/bawolff.

I'm fascinated by governance, transparency, accountability. For instance, I've been casually researching how to measure effectiveness of state legislators, how the misc rules impact the games they play.

Learning how wikipedia does things, for better or worse, is on my todo list. I'm hoping there's works like Peter Hintjens' Social Architecture for wikis. http://hintjens.com/books

A starting place to see how the sausage is made might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SIGNPOST which is an internal newspaper type thing (although recently its not quite as well regarded as it used to be). Usually it has summaries and links to the big disputes and discussions, especially anything going through arbcom (sort of like an internal court system) Of course big disputes tend to be a bit different than "small" disputes.

Wikipedia has all sorts of internal pages documenting these things, E.g. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_power_structure and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Polling_is_not_a_sub...

Also, much of the complaints/dispute pages are very public and you can read them e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests

Terrific. Thanks for the links, and the edit. :)

After skimming these, and poking around, I haven't found any metrics for participants. Like applying Moneyball notions to wikis. A very effective, popular example is GitHub's contribution visualization.

From the hip, I imagine sparklines for various metrics. The badges are nice, but depicting the timeline is important feedback. Like how many articles an editor helped shepherd to publication over time. So it'd be more obvious if editors are gatekeeping, how many of their decisions are appealed, how many decisions they lose, etc.

Frankly, the wikipedia governance is overwhelming for a noob.

Unsatisfied with most depictions of how bills become laws, I created a graph to represent the tortured path each bill takes. (I really need to stay off HackerNews and work on my projects instead.) Imagine one of those American Gladiator course challenges as a flowchart.

Again, thank you.

While it is know for being a restrictive culture, I suspect most of it is because the people making the decision is visible. If we compare the difficulty of getting an article accepted on Wikipedia with submitting an article here on HN and getting people to discuss it and making it visible on the first page, the later only has an invisible visibility score of upvotes and flags. If an article on HN get killed or buried you don't know why or who the people were that made the collective decision. On wikipedia the people responsible for the decision is right there, and it feel much more personal getting rejected by a person rather than by an invisible score. And yet, I would definitively claim that getting something accept on Wikipedia is much easier than getting something accepted by the HN community.

So I am not sure that the guards of wikipedia is that bad. A lot of information does not make it past the guards, but it is also something which communities desire. If you don't have moderators you have upvote system. If you don't have upvote system you have algorithmic models of suggestions and recommendations. If you don't have that you have a search function that order by some kind of ranking.

Wikipedia is more restrictive than I’d like. It’s also pretty good considering how hard it is to have an audience of everybody. I don’t know how it could do better.

I remember when Wikipedia first started cracking-down on “Trivia” sections. And yet sites like Everything2 still died.

What if Wikipedia allowed articles to have two versions: the normal, policed, articles we have today - and adding a “post anything, as long as you provide citations” version for sticking all the trivia and extra details that would normally not be allowed on a main Wikipedia page.

What would be the benefit of that over just having a different site dedicated to that.

I think there is plenty of room for all types of sites on the internet, but they don't have to all be hosted by the same group.

The talk page functions as the latter for contested issues at least

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