Split from this thread about a school-shooting threat posted on Wikipedia, which led to the school's temporary closure.

There’s a VERY important message in here, that risks being lost in the noise. Let me illustrate by example. Every morning I come to work and nod or say ‘Good morning’ to the uniformed guard who stands in the entrance hall of our building. He’s a nice enough guy, unfailingly polite, and so are the team of people of people he works with. But let’s not forget why he was employed. He will be nice to me, but anyone who comes in off the street who is not allowed to, or who comes in with the threat of violence or whatever, will be dealt with very quickly by this guy. And I don’t want to think to hard about the backgrounds of some of the people in his industry. All I care is that they do their job well, and let me get on with mine.

Now a thought-experiment: what if this guy, who is employed for his strength and the ability to use extreme force if necessary, were doing my job? What if the security team that guards our building were the management team? What if security became the main business of my firm, rather than its real main business? Very scary. I wouldn’t survive long, nor would any of my colleagues. For example, if we had some rather loud argument in one of the meeting rooms, and if the public were allowed in the corridors of our building, and if the guards had to be present in the meeting rooms to stop the public interfering with our discussion, I’m sure we would start getting evicted from our own building very quickly.

It would of course be ludicrous to run a business in that way.

That's a well-reasoned analogy, Peter Damian. Thanks for sharing it!

It looks like the Glen A. Wilson vandals got the attention they wanted.

Greg

Really? Even for an analogy it was pretty stretched, and the last bit didn't make much sense (sorry, Peter).

Let me spell it out.

An awful lot of work in Wikipedia is involved in fighting silly vandalism of one kind or another. This tends to breed a certain kind of Wikipedian – think of the number of user pages where you ‘this user is armed with AntiVandal’ or something like that. This breed of Wikipedian is like the security function of a company. Big strong guys who can beat up people. You respect them and like them because they protect you, you are slightly afraid of them at the same time, and you keep them well away from the main business of the company, whatever that is. The Head of premisses does not tell the Head of Accounts, or Sales, what to do. Also the security people are not paid much by comparison with the main business functions. You respect them a lot because they are strong, in another sense you don’t respect them at all (otherwise they would be paid as much as everyone else).

In Wikipedia the normal order of things is inverted. The security guards have taken over the main business of the company. They are telling the main business functions (writing an encyclopedia) how to do their business. Indeed, they are escorting them off the premisses in large numbers, because they don’t really understand what they do (after all, they are not fighting vandals or anything like that – what are they FOR?).

That explains to me why, when I look at any of the activity on any of the articles I once worked on, I don’t see anything like work. I just see constant silly vandalism, and constant reversion by the vandal fighters. I don’t see any actual work going on.

The basic dynamics is PaintBall. It's just a variety of war game.

The question of whether too much energy on Wikipedia, particularly of the newer editors, is directed to "vandal-fighting" as opposed to content-creation is a legitimate issue of wiki-philosophy which had been discussed extensively from time to time on-wiki and on Kelly Martin's blog, among other places.

I don't think that question has much to do with the handling of this particular situation, however. Threats of a school shooting of identified students fall well outside the realm of casual vandalism.

(For the avoidance of misunderstanding, I'm not referring to vandalism of BLP articles, which everyone agrees needs to be dealt with firmly and expeditiously.)

Newyorkbrad

This particular situation could have been avoided to by a system that ensured one user per email address, and registered accounts only. Allowing ‘anyone to edit’ is rather like having a company’s building (rather like your law firm, say) open to the general public, including your desk and work and everything, with uniformed guards patrolling everywhere to ensure your work is not messed up.

You can imagine how unpleasant such an environment would be. And it would tend to get worse over time. The guard’s work would become very important, as opposed to your legal work, and their status in the firm would become much higher than yours. Perhaps it would stop doing law altogether.

On the question of the balance between content creation and vandal fighting, I return to my example of the ‘Medieval philosophy’ article which I wrote in its entirety. You see the section on Christian philosopy is incomplete. This is because I was ‘escorted from the premisses’ by some guards who have no interest in that subject. All the subsequent work since December (when I was handed the binliner) has been ‘vandal fighting’. With an exception in March when ‘renamed user 5’ returned to do some work, having sneaked into the premisses with some useful paperwork. But the guards quickly spotted this, and escorted him out again.

Brad, Google ‘Medieval philosophy’. This article comes at the top, or near the top. The main competitors, e.g. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, all have COMPLETE articles on medieval philosophy. Wikipedia does not, because of its strange policy of escorting useful contributors from the premisses for what it regards as ‘disrupting the project’.

Ask yourself if this makes sense. I can give you a complete article on Medieval philosophy, and one which Wikipedia could be proud of. But allow me to return to the premisses, and get rid of the uniformed goons, for goodness sake.

[edit] Yes, a Google on 'Medieval philosophy' still gives the oddly incomplete Wikipedia article. 2nd is Stanford, 3rd is Routledge. Both have complete sections on 'Christian philosophy'. All the other ones on that Google page are well-rounded articles. That is because the organisations that produced these articles do not have 'vandal fighters' who evict content creators.

I wonder if the missing section on Christian Philosophy would include mention of St. Augustine, whose ruminations introduced the catch-phrase "Original Sin" into the discourse.

Since I am not a medieval Christian philosopher, I prefer the less catchy phrase, "Human's Original Logic Error" (or sometimes "Hammurabi's Original Logic Error") which examines why the 3750-year old idea to adopt rule-based regulatory systems was a tragic mathematical mistake, based on the popular misconception that rule-driven systems are inherently orderly, stable, and predictable.

Moderators, please split the "security taking control of a business" posts of this thread to a new thread. Maybe entitled "When security trumps content".

I still feel Peter Damian's analogy was lucid, solid, and not a stretch of my imagination at all.

Greg

Hmm obviously you haven't read it. Augustine is mentioned in the section that begins 'Augustine is regarded as the greatest of the Church Fathers ...'. But that whole part needs formatting and tidying and is missing out on John Scotus Eriguena, Anselm and of course Abelard.

One wonders if a thinker as gifted as Augustine would have appreciated a mathematical perspective on the notion which he examined in theological terms.

Moulton, I think we have strayed somewhat from the point of the thread. The point of bringing Medieval philosophy was simply to forestall the objection that we must have the general public on the premisses in order that the business be done, ergo we must have the security guards.

The evidence seems to be that the business is not being done anymore (where is the progress on the medieval philosophy article), ergo the first premiss is false. Ergo the argument is no longer sound.

Kohser, I feel that picture of a drunken thuggish Ryan Postlethwaite belongs in here somewhere.

No problem. Here's your new security guard on his break time:



And another interesting use of Wikimedia Foundation server space can be found here.

Here is the page that categorises all Wikipedians by the anti-Vandal software they use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wiki...ndalism_program

I didn't realise death had undone so many. Select any of these characters at random. Go to 'user contributions', select 'article space' ( the latter tends to reduce somewhat their contributions). Look out for the telltale 'm'. E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=...&year=&month=-1

Although This one, which is not 'm' is quite strange.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=159953110

Some of it is still there

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bend_High_School

When you read that Wikipedia has over 2m articles, remember that most of them are like this. Medieval philosophy is still incomplete. Eh Brad?