Wikipedia's Kim Bruning is normally one of the more sensible of those who have drunk the Wiki-Kool-Aid, so I sat up straight and paid attention when he posted this comment in the otherwise intelligence-free zone of current discussion on "Biographies of Living Persons" (emphasis added):


This comment, though it reaches the wrong conclusion, cuts right to the heart of what I believe the problem is -- Wikipedia's slavish adherence to an underlying model that has not scaled to the problem at hand.

A substantial number of Wikipedia cognoscenti cling, despite all evidence to the contrary, to the notion that they run an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit". They defend the right of anonymous IPs, pseudonymous grade-school students, interest-conflicted partisans, and everyone else you can think of to edit anything, from the facts of the scientific world to .... well, biographies of living people.

This dogma reaches to the origins of Wikipedia, when reducing the barrier to entry -- that is, the barrier to clicking on a red link and typing a sentence or two on a topic on which you had some general knowledge -- needed to be low to flesh out the tens of thousands of topics that rightly should have a place in an "encyclopedia". However, in the manner of a cargo cult building an entire religion around abandoned artifacts, much of the Wikipedia elite insists that this is a central pillar of the place, in the face of abundant evidence in daily practice, and in the face of a vastly different environment.

For the first part, the idea that "anyone can edit" Wikipedia is a cruel joke, as many know. Anyone may be able to insert obscure fancruft into Wikipedia, providing you don't accidentally stumble on some corner of the world of fancruft already WP:OWNed by semi-autistic teenagers, but try adding something to an article on "Animal Rights", many Judaica topics, or Prem Rawat, and you will find otherwise. Begin participating suddenly in any administrative topic, and you are likely to be banned forthwith. And if you happen to edit in a way appearing to agree with certain forebears, then you will also be banned, and labelled as a "sockpuppet".

Even if you don't overly transgress, you're like to be repeatedly and heatedly asked to register an account (cf). Newly-created accounts are usually told to go away from topics by editors of longer standing, and new accounts are now explicitly prohibited from creating articles (indeed, as a result of the Seigenthaler incident).

The truth of the matter is that Wikipedia long along cleaved into several distinct groups, with inherently different rights and privileges. The upper echelon still sometimes denies this, but the evidence is now so overwhelming that it is hard to deny. This de facto class hierarchy and accompanying schisms are the inevitable result of growth beyond the limits of the Wiki model.

Some of the class lines are:
* IP editors vs. logged-in editors
* Editors with many edits vs. those with few edits (n.b. not so much length of tenure per se)
* Admins vs. regular editors
* Project-page gadflies vs. regular editors
* Current & former Arbitrators and their friends vs. everyone else

There also exist well-documented cliques that have amassed sufficient power to operate autonomously within the Wiki structure, without much restraint, including the overlapping SlimVirgin and Jayjg cabals and their minions, and the JzG and MONGO acolytes. Possibly the worst decision, and the one most incompatible with the underlying ethos, is the "Administrator-for-Life" mentality that allows the long-term accumulation of power without meaningful checks and balances. Perversely, the situation has been made worse by ham-handed efforts of the few powerful Wiki-elitists that have arisen, notably Kelly Martin.

It is almost inarguable that a society of tens of thousands of active editors (and hundreds of thousands of sporadic ones) would fragment into chaos in the absence of some structure. A look at any study on human society, from tribal systems to smoothly-functioning web communities, will show the inevitability of Wiki-anarchy.

By denying the facts of its growth, Wikipedia has doomed itself to a broken structure -- the very mechanisms that were effective in growing the encyclopedia are now the weakest aspects of its maintenance. The fact that there is no content structure or hierarchy makes it very difficult to police, and prevent differing levels of scrutiny for different topics. The fact of anonymity and pseudonymity have give direct rise to the cliques and cabals that act with impunity to skew -- subtly and not-so-subtly -- the content supposedly open to all.

The bottom line is that the structurelessness of the Wiki model is the root of most of the problems of Wikipedia. It has simply outgrown itself.

I wonder what he means by wanting an experiment on a smaller wiki. All the obvious choices, such as Wikinfo and Citizendium, already bar IP editors.

He later uses DE as an example.

Yeah, discussing change is difficult when the first principle is "The way we do things now is the right way."

Well you gave the modest proposal of semi-protecting BLPs a good shot Sarcasticidealist, and I bow to that.

The on-wiki discussion is found here. And here is the Wikipedia Review discussion featuring much symbolic banging-my-head-against-a-brick-wall from myself, as the cultists begin to quash a life-saving proposal and all comes to nought. Another thread discussing these problems occurred not long before and the comments by us are much the same.

But in the end, these Wkipedia kids just don't care enough about other people to want to spoil their fun. Their crazy cult-warped obsession can't be halted by common sense. I think it was Milton Roe who discussed how these people are unable or unwilling to put themselves in other people's shoes:



Someone I'd never come across left this interesting comment after a WR blog posting on Wikipedia's defamation. It begins...



Says it all. But then, we've said it all before and the Wikipedians pay no more attention. And the horror stories keep coming...

There is a curious phenomenon in psychological behavior -- building oneself up by tearing others down. Perhaps it begins in school, where the students who get the top grades are resented by the students in the next tier. They would be at the top of the class if those super-bright students simply weren't there. In my philosophy, the best performing students in any learning community have an obligation to help other students learn. Sometimes that strategy keeps the peace. But not always.