There are failings with Wikipedia that CAN be solved. I think there are people here, many of whom are already Wikipedia editors, who with a little coordination of aims, could make that to happen.

I propose that we (A) highlight those failings (here first), (B.) Prioritize them (C.) detail them with good arguments and evidence, (D) propose solutions. (E) Then we continue on Wikipedia, starting some discussions on policy, and improve them where necessary.

Examples of Wikipedia failings.

1. Non-accountability and non-transparency of CheckUser, and Oversight
   Both of these tools could be used by an unscrupulous Admin (with the necessary permissions), with no way for an editor to find out.
   Solution: Log all uses of Checkuser and Oversight (omitting any sensitive information)
   .
2. Clarification of NPOV
   Many editors believe that the opposite of NPOV is writing about a POV (hence claims of POV-pushers), whereas NPOV tells how to write about POVs.
   Possible solutions: (a) Clarify the definition of NPOV, (b.) perhaps even renaming it so that "POV" is no longer confusing (ie. rename NPOV to "Neutral style", or "Impartial style"
   .
3. Policy infringements policy
   I know some editors who have flouted certain policies with impunity, up to an including several ArbCom cases, and received mild rebukes. And I know other editors who have been banned for alleged policy infringements, where no evidence exists. And I've seen complaining editors threatened with punishment, when reporting "favored" editors for policy infringement.
   Possible solutions: (a) Admins must not be allowed to turn a blind eye when certain editors infringe policy (b.) Editors must received escalating punishments for breaking policy, ie. one warning then a ban; another warning, and then a longer ban. © Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents to feature anonymity of conflicting editors, so that Admin are not biased by the parties concerned.

With respect to your item #3, I'm currently preparing a proposed ArbCom case to examine the propriety of some questionable and perplexing administrative policies and practices that manifest in the course of an RfC leading to blocking/banning.

One of my concerns is that there may be common abuses of practice that corrupts due process, without regard to the merits of the case.

Another concern is that when evidentiary proceedings are inconclusive, admins may on occasion summarily execute a block based on haphazard, unexamined, biased, and erratic theories of mind that purport to present a negative characterization of the person to be blocked, notwithstanding the falsifiability of such gratuitous characterizations and theories of mind.

Dear Cynick,

Welcome.

Please return your Cynic Certification Card to the front desk on your way out.

Jonny

This is an interesting list of reforms, based completely on the perspective of a WP editor. They are valid in that context. They do not address any issues of social responsibility to anyone other than editors. In this sense the list will not address true reform, even if such reform is still possible.

Welcome to WP Cynick.

WP is thataway …

Jonny

Please feel free to add to them, or expand upon them from your own perspective.

Are there typos in that sentence? The problem is that there's a hard-core of WP'ers who believe that the "opposite of NPOV" is "conflict of interest" - in other words, that a person who has a vested interest in something is incapable of impartiality. That's not a logical assumption at all, and even if it were, the assumption punishes only those who are honest enough to admit their vested interest. Those who don't almost always get away with it, given that the efforts of so-called "super-sleuths" to "out" them are basically a joke, and always have been.


Renaming the concept isn't going to change the dysfunctional culture that surrounds it, IMO... There are too many edits taking place during a given day for them to even comprehend the magnitude of the problem, much less deal with it effectively - so naturally they concentrate on the smaller subset of user accounts and IP ranges, trying to match them to an organization or geo-location in order to guess at a possible "POV" or whatever.

It's a natural human reaction to try to distill problems down into "manageable" (i.e., intellectually-controllable) subsets, but it doesn't make the situation any more resolvable. And bear in mind that they only have to "catch" one or two "offenders" a week to have something to crow about, and give themselves the impression that they're doing a swell job of it. And who knows... maybe they are, at that. How would anyone know?

I have made a little over 2,000 posts on this board. Perhaps 15%-20% of these posts directly address social responsibility. They can be found in threads relating to BLP, governance, protection of children, systematic POV distortion and the effects of exposing users to addictive social networking while hidden within a very different type of activities.

My thinking on social responsibility goes something like this: The WP community is not the sole, or even the most important, stakeholder in the encyclopedic project. BLP victims, children's advocates and representative of significant minority points of view should also be recognized as stakeholders. This means that the Board of Trustees should represent these stakeholders. This means dispute resolution should be independent and neutral from the perspective of these outsiders. This means BLP issues should not be resolved by processes that only permit "community" participation.

My ideas about WP and social responsibility did not arrive at this site fully formed. Initially I was interested in primarily one narrow aspect, non-profit governance. Although some of our thought on social responsibility diverge, framing the critique in terms of social responsibility can be attributed largely to Daniel Brandt. They developed from interaction with many of the talented and insight contributors on this site. I hope you contribute and read the ideas of other contributors.

When there is so much to take in when participating on a new forum, it can be easy to miss the odd 2000 posts

Your points are well taken and highlight another important perspective. The only problem I see is that Wikipedia is run by volunteers, and if there is no will from above to implement the kind of mechanisms to oversee such social responsibility, then the are not going to get done.

Either way, whether changes are required to uphold social responsibility, or whether changes are required to implement changes in the way Wikipedia runs, it's going to require a measured and significant representation from a number of people, to start the process rolling.

You're far from addressing the real problems, the major problem with Wikipedia is not some bad interpretation or misunderstanding of some policies. The main problem with the project is the core of Wikipedia itself. Fix the problem and you found a new project.

There will always be abusive Admins, you can do whatever you can, you may reduce their numbers but some will remain. There will always be people who do not interprete well policies, you may reduce their numbers you will not eradicate that. Don't forget that you can't have or do better than what the society does with milleniums of attemps.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that everyone can edit, and is very popular, a very good publicity and cheap publicity, for lobbyiest, organizations, governments, self-promoting individuals etc. It is not only cheap but a very efficient publicity. So, it being an encyclopedia where everyone can edit under those circumstances, you can reform what you raises as a problem, and you are lightyears away from touching the central issue, what makes Wikipedia really fail. The administrative problems, abusive admins etc., are all secondary while WR concentrate on that the main problem is left ignored creating an illusion that what makes Wikipedia fail are mostly abusive admins. Which is not the case.

Conflict of interest is always there, the moment you contribute on an article, it is because you are interested to the subject, this interest must be comming from somewhere. In my case, it was because I was an Armenian contributing in Armenian related articles. Had I not been an Armenian probably I would not have contributed in those articles. So, there was some sort of conflict of interest there. So my opinions, my personal bias and my interest led me to contribute in those articles. The difference is the way you percieve the project and the way you contribute. In my case, I liked the NPOV policy because I thought it will stop conflicts I usually had in forums, because I said to my self, the position I adhere will be there and the price to pay will be to have also the position the other adhere to there as well. Many editors are probably like that, in such a cases, your personal opinion and interest does not oppose the concept of an encyclopedia. I even invited others opposing my views to check over the articles I have created and neutralise them.

The problem happen, when you have editors who rather prefer using the project as a vehicule for their point of view. Because they know Wikipedia is a popular medium of information. And Wikipedia, the structure, the system is done in such a way that it will attract editors, who are actually backed financially to use it for their goal. To think that this is not happening is to be really naive. Wikipedia is done that way and more its popularity will grow more it will be used for that aim. That's the paradox, the project is killing itself more and more it become popular and this is why it will innevitably fail.

The honest editor will always be the one to lose, while the honest editor will try explaining administrators who have not the slightest knowledge of the subject at hand, how other editors are not editing in good faith, they will be left alone without ressources. If they request Arbitration, it will be refused under the pretext of content dispute, while one would believe that the most important thing for an encyclopedia is just that, CONTENT!!!

The editor has two choices, either he/she leave the project or process into attempting to clean by some butt kicking which will possibly end up by the banning of that editor because to preserve the CONTENT! which arbitrators don't give a sh!t about he attacked editors, something which the arbitrators care so much about.

This is my experience, and my version of Wikipedia in a nuttshell.

Define "number"...?

Just think outside the box here: The negative impact of Wikipedia could be alleviated to an enormous degree simply by allowing individual editors to embed a code into an article that prevents search engines from indexing it. So why don't they implement such a feature?

Go a little further, and allow admins to embed a code that makes the article invisible to non-logged-in users (i.e., casual readers/browsers). This could be done as an interim measure in specific cases where the content of an article is deemed to be socially or personally harmful, not to mention disturbing to children. So why don't they implement such a feature?

One little step further: Allow people who feel they're being persecuted by WP, and who don't have published biographies about them anywhere else, to request article take-downs, and honor those requests - unless maybe it's an exceptionally obvious case of someone with a significant negative impact on society trying to avoid scrutiny for their misdeeds. As we've seen with the Brandt situation, the number of articles affected by such a policy is likely to be countable in the dozens, not the hundreds or thousands that irrational WP hyperbole-mongers have claimed in the past. So why don't they implement such a policy?

Seriously, why? Do they think it would be "censorship," when they delete articles about all sorts of subjects all the time? Is it just sheer inertia?

Or is it that they can't bear the idea of anyone outside of their little cliques and cabals having any degree of "control" over "their" website, in such a way that might prevent them from using it as a revenge platform?

That's an excellent post, Somey. Your last sentence is spot on: Too many Wikipedians enjoy the feeling of power!

Take my case, for example. It's only when their power has been trimmed back in a particular situation, and they don't enjoy the feeling that they have power over me, that I was able to get anywhere with getting my bio deleted.

Yesterday I complained about some residual stuff related to my bio. My timing was excellent, because Fred is not feeling so powerful, and Slim is not in a position to start messing with me at this point in time.

What's the result? Doc Glasgow, my hero of the day, addressed most of my concerns in a matter of hours. My User:Daniel_Brandt and User_talk:Daniel_Brandt were deleted and salted. My Daniel_Brandt redirect to Public Information Research was deleted (and presumably salted). That blurb on Banned Users was changed from a long paragraph with a defamatory statement, to one little sentence.

Although it may not have been Doc behind this, the PIR article itself was reduced about 70 percent within the last 24 hours, and returned to a size not much bigger than the little stub it used to be, after taking out the various sections on Wikipedia-Watch, Google-Watch, etc. Last month editor Arkalochori merged all those little articles into PIR and redirected the little articles to PIR. Now he took them out again. I approve — fewer instances of "Daniel Brandt" in Wikipedia overall! Also, the jerk Save_Us_229 who deleted my talk page comments on the PIR article last month was reverted.

Could I have accomplished even half this much last June, after the 14th AfD on my bio? No, I had to wait until events progressed to the point where Wikipediots felt even more punch-drunk than they did in June. I had to wait until such time that Wikipediots could no longer perceive that rush of POWER that once came from pissing me off.

Is this any way to run an encyclopedia? It should be clear by now that Web 2.0 has not found a way to change human nature. (Shhhh — don't tell Jimbo. He doesn't have any idea!)

Save Us 229, the guy who removed your comments, is Moe Epsilon, the guy with an unholy hatred for banned users and a fetish for redirecting user pages.

One of the reasons why us Card Carrying Cynics get so cynical about yet another one of these clueless reform projects, of which we seem to get one every 3 or 4 months or so, is this —

Both the WMF and the self-styled "volunteer community" of Wikipedia have proven themselves time and time again to be constitutionally incapable of living up to any of the representations of policy that they already make. Consequently, it is pointless to discuss reforming Wikipedia in the medium of proposing yet another bale of policy pages.

Any discussion of reform that is not a waste of human breath and life can only be a discussion of how to build a better system on a different foundation.

And it won't happen here.

Jon Awbrey

I have a simple way of improving the internet and not making is "suck as bad is it now is" to
paraphrase the LORD GOD JIMBO himself...

SHUT DOWN WIKIPEIDA, SELL THE DOMAIN... and chak it up to the same thing as the
internet's equivalent to the "CB GOOD BUDDY CRAZE of the 70's".

Wikipida and all of it's foundation members, Arbcon, and admins are corrupt and morally and intellectually bankrupt and have little good to offer mankind.

SHUT IT DOWN, PULL THE PLUG and SELL THE DOMAIN.... AND MOVE ON!!!

The first step to recovery is removing Jimmy Wales. Without that critical first step, anything else will fail. With that critical first step, there are probably a lot of possibilities.

One route would be for Wikipedia, or maybe just the English Wikipedia, to form its own governing organization separate from the WMF. Details again would vary.

It's all pointless to consider though until someone comes up with a reasonable plan of how to take control away from Jimmy Wales.

I have to say I'm with Anthony here. I'm still holding out hope that somehow, some way, someday, Wikipedia could successfully become a stable, reputable encyclopedia (probably not one that "anyone can edit", but...), if and only if Jimmy Wales can be encouraged to leave the scene of the crime.

Greg

Reforming wikidiota is like asking this critter to change its Modus Operation.
"Why can't we be friends"...

For you deep thinkers...the Big critter is Ryulong... the little Critter is a Wikeditor trying to argue a point of wikpolicy...

This is the time of year when Redemption Stories are dusted off and replayed on the Sunday Matinee.

The Wikipedia Story may or may not become a heartwarming Redemption Story. Perhaps it will be a thrilling Disaster Movie instead.

Don't you just love these Liminal Social Dramas?

I was hopeful when the board rejected his resolution making him president and then appointed someone else as chair, but they still let him do whatever he wants with the English Wikipedia, and apparently he has been forgiven by them for his previous behavior. It'll be interesting to see who they get in there as treasurer. And maybe the auditors will catch something they're not willing to ignore.

The concept of "social responsibility" is absurd and totally without rational basis.

Especially for some people.

Jonny

Isn't the definition of a sociopath someone who exhibits no social responsibility?

Spoken like an objectivist. Go exercise your "selfish responsibility."