Are the "marks" the volunteer editors who aspire to ascend the ladder of power and status at Wikipedia?

Sure, otherwise known as the "target demographic".

Jonny

Then the occasional academic, who visits Wikipedia to tidy up an article or two related to one's academic specialty, would probably not fit that profile, and hence would not be part of the "target demographic" as you put it.

Is that a fair continuation of your hypothesis?

I'm not sure.

There are people whose underlying wish is something like "Doing Good" or "Being A Good Samaritan". Further analysis may detect an element of narcissism in that, especially if it's more important to "Seem Like A Good Guy Without Hardly Trying" than it is to do the work of actually being one, but let's not be too cynical just yet.

At any rate, people with any degree of training in just about any field will usually start asking questions about what the devil is going on when they start see some devil in the goings on — and people who start to ask too many questions will naturally be shown the door.

Jon Awbrey

No, Jonny. That's not a con. That's normal business practice.

Wikipedia is about getting volunteers to contribute content. Full stop. No smoke, no mirrors.

That Jimbo Wales and whoever else hopes to profit through their reputation or otherwise through Wikipedia does not dissuade people from thinking that their volunteer contributions will garner them some sort of reward is not a con. Your car insurance salesman is also not likely to tell you that you you'd do better to buy a cheaper policy.

In order for it to be a confidence game, there has to be some sort of planned act of betrayal.

One can certainly feel betrayed when one's (perhaps naive) expectations are not met, but for an encounter to be a con game, there has to be an express promise that those making the promise have no intention of ever delivering on.

I think it's fair to say that for a lot of people, Wikipedia has turned out to be a disappointment. That's true of a lot of new ventures, with or without unwarranted hype at the welcome mat.

To say it's a con game implies that the barkers at the gate know full well that they are fixing to fleece whoever comes through the front gates.

I have found that most often I get what I pay for.

The carrot at WP has always been "power" and admin. status and getting the bit, etc.

The problems started when it became known that the average person of power at Wikipedia has only about 14 years of life on earth.

I ask myself, would I hire a 14 year old to operate on my shoulder? Would I trust the 14 year old to do my living trust or be the trustee of my estate? Does a college student have any real wisdom?

Most people that have the time to spend at Wikipedia "for free" are either students, under-employed, or unemployed.

Go "Knol" !

Do you have a reliable source for the statistic that the mean age of WP admins is 14 years?

Now you're just being silly.

Not to mention insulting to anyone who considers personal integrity to be inseparable from "normal business practice".

The distinction between fraud or grift and legitimate business is comprehended by common sense and even by the law.

Of course, advertizers try to exploit the collateral desires of their target market to sell everything from automobiles to beer to cigarettes to deodorant.

But all civilized societies draw the line at unfair practices, however shifting those lines may be over time. And common sense recognizes the features of the confidence game that put it outside the pale of "normal business practice" — the acquisition of goods under false pretences, the breach of promise that consummates the confidence game, and the outrageous disproportion in the real values of the goods exchanged.

No, there is nothing "normal" about that, thank goodness.

Jon Awbrey

If there is an over-riding con at Wikipedia, I would say it would have to be in that volunteer editors, I think, might reasonably believe that their opinions, when they disagree with others, will be respected, and that there will be a process for resolving content disputes that has some grounding in objectivity, as in for example the powers-that-be caring that the process has become highly prejudicial and biased. This is clearly not the case with Wikipedia.

What is the express promise that is intentionally breached with malice aforethought?

Yes, indeed. Your reasoning is sound and wise. It also explains why the project is beginning to disintegrate at it's core. The University of Minnesota study was quite accurate in the assessment that without the creators and the contributors of key articles, the "flies" would take over.

The normal expectation of a player entering a game where statements are set forth as "rules" is that other players will play by those rules and that some authority recognized by all concerned will umpire those rules.

I have stated this expectation in terms of games and players and rules but analogous forms apply to any norms of conduct in any normed activity.

This is clearly not the case with Wikipedia.

Jon Awbrey

Jonny, you're an academic, yes? You've never really worked in the normal business world. I have, and I have in fact sacrificed a couple potential careers over matters where I thought my employer or its representatives had crossed an ethical boundary.

But letting, and even lightly encouraging, people to believe that they are getting more out of their participation in something than common sense and a little bit of thought would clearly indicate does not generally cross such a boundary. I am myself someone who will always tell someone if they would probably do better stepping away from something that benefits me, and I think that's a better way to live and, in the long run better for me as well. I would say that people who do not do this are not as good as they might be, but I would not say that they are not as good as everyone else has the right to expect them to be.

If there is an outright lie - if Jimbo Wales claimed that someone got tenured based on stuff they'd done in Wikipedia - that's a different matter. But to just nod and grin as someone explains how he expects his Wikipedia contributions will get him tenure, while kind of creepy, is not a con.

I agree that these are reasonable expectations, and they are undeniably breached at Wikipedia.

What remains to be shown is that those who are routinely breaching those expectations are doing so knowingly, intentionally, and with malice aforethought.

It seems to me probable that the intended result may have been quite different.

Many or most academic enterprises have substantial elements of volunteerism. You don't get paid directly for publishing, for example; it just adds (so you hope) to your reputation. Nor do you expect to get paid when someone uses your work, just cited.

Were the project more reputable, more people would be proud of their contributions, including on their resumes, applications to doctoral programs, etc.

The other problem is the way the project attacks its own volunteer contributors. This is partly due to the tendencies of the web to produce flame wars, but is greatly exacerbated as an unexamined consequence of the fact that dispute resolution procedures are (formally) content-neutral: the only way to break content deadlocks is to tear one another down. Every meaningful process, from the noticeboards, to RfC's to Arbitration, pits volunteers against one another's reputations by design.

So you have a whole culture where people gather and horde diffs of people of breaking various rules as leverage against them. Opponents greet misconduct, then, not with disappointment, but with glee. 3RR, incivility, etc. are just opportunities to be exploited according to this psychology which is the very essence of edit "warring" and incivility.

What is the chance, then, that contributing to Wikipedia will improve one's reputation, instead of sullying it? The unsatisfying answer to this question drives the trend towards anonymity/pseudonymity, which, as anonymous contributors are more likely to attack others, increases the flame war element in a feedback mechanism.

If we could solve these two problems, it might not be such a rip-off after all. It's not unrealistic to imagine a world only slightly different from our own, where contributing to Wikipedia is something most volunteers could point to with pride. It's a shame that this goal, so obvious from an external standpoint, is absent from the radar screens of the leadership.

I am fighting down the urge to launch a Wodin Boast here. The fact is that I've worked in more different venues than you are likely to guess.

Lucky for everyone it's past my bedtime.

But something to think about for tomorrow is this —

Yes, I have seen academic papers that describe Civilization and its Discontents in terms analogous to One Big Confidence Game. And I suppose there is some sense in that. But common sense has to say what is fair and what is not. It is not fair to use the natural human susceptibility to various types of addiction in order to enslave people. It is not fair to exploit child labor. It is not fair to acquire tax-free educational status while miseducating the uneducated about the kinds of conduct that are expected of responsible citizens in real world societies.

Jonny

Let me add to my comments that while some of Wikipedia's powers - certainly SlimVirgin and Jayjg, among others - are guilty in my mind of malfeasance in that they knowingly and willingly violate the reasonable expectations and abuse the trust of normal editors and readers, from my own personal experience I can only accuse Jimbo Wales of gross negligence in that he allows this to happen. Sins of commission versus sins of omission.

This is a thoughtful and well-written analysis, full of insight.

It makes a lot of sense to me.

If you expect Macy's to tell Gimbel's, I would expect either that you find yourself a place in an ivory tower or that you change working venues about three times a year.



No. Societal norms have to say that.

I'd probably turn to a Theory of Equity and Justice or something like that.

But then I'm just a hopeless academic.

Rawls is extremely helpful here.

Jonny

Yes, that's where my colleague who teaches Ethics in Journalism starts -- with Rawls' Veil of Ignorance.

I don't think Rawls gets you very far with regard to Wikipedia. The big question with Wikipedia is, who enforces the rules? Rawls might direct you to a fair set of rules, but if Linda Mack is the one enforcing them, you're screwed.

And then if you try to throw the Veil of Ignorance on whether or not you are among those making the rules or not, you don't get a very satisfactory answer. If I knew that Linda Mack might be the one enforcing the rules, I'd be strongly inclined to have very limited means of enforcement.

What you should sort of want is rules for deciding who should enforce the rules that are pre-disposed toward selecting "good" people. The problem with that is that almost everyone considers himself good, so even through the Veil of Ignorance people will want to have rules that will promote people like themselves to authority.

I have seen different explanations for the use of the word "confidence" in the term "confidence game".

The confidence game proper begins when the conman takes the mark into his confidence. Confidence — "faith or belief that one will act in a right, proper, or effective way" (Webster's) — may depend on the native and even naive expectation of the mark that the conman will "keep the faith" in return for the mark's "good faith" investments, priming of the pot, and other forms of stake-holding in the enterprise afoot.

What the con artist confides, expressly or impressly, is typically a secret, er, confidential path to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, that is, the actualization of the mark's unbounded expectation.

For all sorts of reasons that I'm sure are obvious, the game works best that relies on the unbidden tendency of people to trust in others who have trusted in them — as their confiding the big secret seems to prove — but there may come a point when shows of "good faith" on the part of the mark are not just taken as freely given but expressly demanded in no uncertain terms.

But I don't suppose you know of any games like that …

Jon Awbrey

One of the ways to avoid shattered expectations is to organize around an express Social Contract. That's not a very popular approach, although it's been used in some notable Linux open source projects. Google also has a Social Contract with its employees.

Wikipedia has expressly rebuffed the idea of a Social Contract model.

????

Jon, what did you expect to get out of your participation in Wikipedia? From what I can see, you tried to write high-quality, rigorous articles on matters within your expertise, which is great, except that you contributed them to the encyclopedia that ANYONE CAN EDIT. How can it be a surprise to you that people who once read a Reader's Digest article on Charles Peirce would crap all over everything you did? You went pearl diving in a cesspool - what exactly is the confidence that was betrayed?

I do not know how you took them, but I read Wikipedia's mass of policy and guideline pages as an implicit social contract. I held up my end of the bargain — those who arrogated to themselves the name of "community" did not.

Jon Awbrey

I take a Rules and Sanctions Model as no better than Stage 4 on the Kohlberg-Gilligan Ladder. I take a Social Contract Model as Stage 5.

Wikipedia doesn't even rise to Stage 4, because there is no due process.

Back when I was reading more ærie-færie theory about the relation between democracy and inquiry, instead of wasting my joules on all possible ways they get out of joint in hard-knocks practice, there was a line of thought that I traced back in time from Rawls to Polanyi to Peirce to Riemann to Kant.

Those Were The Days, My Friend …

Jon Awbrey

One can trace Rawls' Veil of Ignorance all the way back to Hillel.

Maybe some people literally have a pen shoved in their tiny fists when they exit the womb, but most social contracts I ever signed onto were rather implicit and incrementally ratified.

Jon Awbrey

I dunno how to put my signature to a document that has never been put in writing.

I expected editors to follow the guidelines, from the Five Pillars on to the rest of the WikiPantheon. I expected the Espoused Leaders to be the most exemplary models of those principles, not the most craven WP:IDNNSR (I Don't Need No Stinkin' Rules) bunch in the crew.

Had they done that, it would have afforded a path for those who had the knowledge and who were capable of demonstrating that knowledge to get that knowledge under the ∑.

That is what they would do if they really cared about the advertized goals.

But nooooooo …

It being now clear that they do not do that, that they have no intention of doing that, modus tollens dictates the conclusion that that they do not really care about the advertized goals.

QED.

Jon Awbrey

You do understand that the concept of a social contract was a metaphorical construct, right?

Jon Awbrey

Not where I come from.

Where I come from, a Social Contract is a set of written promises that the signatories pledge to adhere to.

Excusez-moi, je suis de la France.

Jonny

Jon, from where did you think a qualified volunteer referee would come to mediate between your contributions and those of Billy the Exceptionally Bright Fourteen Year Old? Isn't it only under the most extremely contrived situations that truth reliably prevails over falsehood? Why would you ever have expected that the encyclopedia that any dumb-ass can edit would provide that?

I cannot imagine what you think a Socio-Technical Architecture (STA) is, if not an extremely contrived situation.

My expectations that the STA of Wikipedia would have certain properties were not contrived by me, however, they were contrived by dint of the pretences and representations that anyone who looks can still find being pretended and represented on that website.

Do some of us now know that Wikipedia's pretences are false pretences, that Wikipedia's representations are misrepresentations?

Yes, indeed, we do.

The fact remains that the general public does not yet know what some of us now know, and our mission, if we choose to accept it, is simply to inform them of what we know.

Jon Awbrey

Wikipedia is an adolescent and quirky wine. I think you will be amused by its presumption.

It's all SlimyVinegar to me.

Jonny

Stimulus —

Michel Bauwens, "What McLuhan Could Not Foresee", Peer-To-Peer Foundation Blog, 15 Jan 2008.

Response —

perennial perturbounce

jon