I think that Durova brought up an important issue in her blog, though as usual, she reverse engineering it, turned it on it's head, tried to use it as a lame excuse (in this case, for why she's been lambasted as a bully, of course) rendering the main point moot and incomprehensible.

Unfortunately, that issue is terribly important. Too important to allow Durova to obscure it. So I ask it now:

WHY DOES WIKIPEDIA HOUSE AND TOLERATE SUCH BULLYING?

So very much bullying happens on Wikipedia. What's the trigger? We all know that the framework is flawed, and the goalposts move, and there's no safeguards in check. But what is the attractant for it. It can't be a simple answer such as Milgram's experiment. There's too many other chat boards and group projects out there, all of them, most of them self-governing. Most don't do anywhere near such damage. Anyone got any ideas?

Comments welcome. Even from Durova. Just that I'd like to know what is her stake in being a bully. Really.

What's so hard to figger?

Wikipedia is a fundamentally juvenile environment, founded on a fundamentally infantile worldview. Bully beehivior simply goes with the territory. Beesides which, as every good fascist fascilitator knows, an army of bullies, carefully taught to twitch to the tune of a bully amplifying bull-horn like Wikipedia, is so easy to order into any battle the man beehind the screen might choose.

So watch out for that …

Jon

Read the article about the great "Cultural Revolution" in China, set in motion by Mao, but run by wisdomless, bullying students. They actually killed people. And they more or less dismantled a society, by show-trials and toadying to a bunch of maxims from the Chairman's Little Red Book (which I believe starts with the Five Pillars of how to contribute to a great socialist revolution).

Why? As we've been saying: Lord of the Flies. Clan warfare and witch-hunting. This is the basic nature of H. sap., just as it is for all social animals from ants to meerkats. And (if you must) from baboons to chimps (which raid other troops and kill and eat them). There are good evolutionary reasons for it to exist, in all social animals. The real question of interest is how the HELL we humans have managed to build any societies reasonably FREE of clan-bullying, in the last parts of recorded history. And the answer is: probably via the amazingly existential mechanism of changing ourselves by changing our own software (culture). Which is finally possible, now that enough of it is recorded in "print," and is there "on the table" to be operated upon, in a Larmarkian evolutionary fashion. As in: "You have due process and a bill of rights, in your country? Well, shit, WE want one, too! Show us yours and we'll copy and improve it." That's it.

It hasn't penetrated yet, at Wikipedia. But it hasn't yet completely penetrated even China! It will. These things take time. The base-state of the baboon troop, is always what you get first if you're not totally on guard. It's reproduced in every schoolground full of kids, and in every prison yard of older humans who are physically adults, but still mentally children, with all the narcissism and loss of impulse control and ability to see the future, of children. Why is there so much bullying in the prison yard? Duh.

During the Attica riots they asked the warden why there was so much trouble in his institution. He said, without irony, "It's the class of prisoners we get here." Well, in a way.

Bullying? You aint seen nothing yet. Read the countless articles more-or-less praising the IRA, almost all under the control of a small clique who will not just bully you if you protest but will eventually ban you. Some fool has just stumbled across some of this propaganda. See Third Opinion here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Domer48#Third_opinion
Quite naturally he has been instantly pounced upon by Irish-American Alison for "personal attacks" (he's only asked in ordinary language whats going on!) and given a formal warning. Why does Wikipedia permit itself to become a vehicle for every groupie with an axe to grind?

Actually, no permit is required.

Not even a waiting period.

Jon

I'm afraid that the said Irish-American admin was quite correct in that particular instance. Crieff wanted to put his own POV into the article, and then accused other editors of being pro-IRA. Very wisely nipped in the bud. No bullying here, except from Crieff.

But.. but... what about the Bonobo? They don't kill each other, raid other troops, or eat their young. They're egalitarian, and the females play the dominant role in social life. They seem to be all about "peace, love, and rock n' roll"...erm... not the music kind though . Perhaps evolution does not mean that we become smarter or even better, if we look at the bonobo society for a clue.

BTW, Militon, how often have you gotten off your butt and moved this weekend?

Get real - and don't pull the ethnic card with me I don't like getting involved in Troubles issues - everyone knows that - but when I do, I don't play sides. So quit trying to tar me with that brush.

"everyone knows that" - apparently not.

What you ask here is analogous to the following question:

• Why does the bishop permit itself to be moved in that diagonal fashion?

The bishop does not permit itself to be moved in a diagonal fashion — the design of the game of chess permits the bishop to be moved in a diagonal fashion.

Likewise, the design of The Wikipedia Action Game (TWAG)â„¢ permits Wikipedia to be used in the fashion you describe.

Jon

Ah, the bonobos. They've had their Margaret Meade hype, but methinks these things take time and other eyes to sort out, de Waal vs. Hohmann. Perhaps they really swing as advertised; perhaps they have a dark side. Or both.

And I too, given bonobo incentive, would run, crawl, and possibly even brachiate. As counterpoise to Trogdor the Burniator, we need a corresponding creature of peace and way too much indulgence: Bonobo the Brachiator. Not entirely tame.

No, the design of the game of chess requires the bishop to be moved in a diagonal fashion and in no other way. If you don't like bishops, become a Methodist.

But you do indeed play the nationality (who mentioned race?) card and there is a sheer mountain of evidence to prove it, not least whats just been mentioned here. 'The Troubles' was a truly disgraceful IRA terrorist supporters effort to get rid of several users (some have already been banned as a result of the campaigns which commenced here). Anyone with half a brain can see that. And you assisted and continue to assist.

As a general rule in games like these, what is not permitted is forbidden.

Jon

Hmmmm. Sorry for your "troubles".

Peter, you have been beating this drum for a while, and it would all solve itself if David Lauder got back to editing. Well, I supported his return, as many other editors do.

No offense, but why do you people still go on about this? What's the point of this conflict anymore?

People here tend to harp on old cases because most of them were never correctly addressed. And because the same things happen over and over again.

It's not an inability to let go. It's irritation that nothing changes. Prospero. (ps:see Miranda warning)

O Brave Nøøb World …

Just So.

For those of you whose attention span does stretch back as far as the topic opener, there is a clear and persistent danger of bullying that is built into the design of TWAG, and that is the subject of the present discussion, of which the various and sundry examples adduced are but illustrious illustrations.

Jon

Considering the brutal Anglocerntric bias of en.Wikipedia in all issues, including naming of towns, etc. I am even surprised that there is a more-or-less supposedly "pro-IRA" article (have you ever heard of WP:NPOV, btw - I bet you are one of those who wants to add the, luckily forbidden, word "terrorist" to every single line in that article - or some other kind of POV emotional bias).

Wikipedia may not be a democracy but numbers do matter anyhow and the more number of English-speaking internauts any ethnicity has, the greater the cultural bias in favor of that ethnic group in en.wikipedia. Certainly US-Americans are in great advantage but the English are not few anyhow.

I prefer GIFT myself. Seems to fit my online experience, which started out on a TI Silent 700 with 600 baud acoustic coupler modem.

I started with an Apple II and a 300 baud modem (but it was an internal direct-connect one), and accessed various bulletin board systems some of which were on FidoNet. Later I became a FidoNet sysop myself (with a considerably faster modem).

Ahhh, I started with an 029 keypunch.

At my first job there was a peripheral computer that I could play with during lunch hour. Had 4K of memory meaning 16 banks of 256 bytes of which 4 were addressable at any given point. Had a tty with paper tape punch/reader. You wrote your program by setting bit switches on the front. Some were for the data, some were for the address, The cool thing was, when you hit the thunk switch to commit your byte to memory, the address would auto-increment.

That's when I learned you did <cr><lf> on the tty. If you did the reverse then the next character would type somewhere in the middle of the page while the carriage was returning.

The good old days. 'Course I'm on the right side of 50

From what I have seen, bullying happens automatically and is basically encouraged by the organization/rules.

It happens because it is not discouraged sufficiently my almost all admins. Thats another WP hierarchy negligence. Its almost as if most admins will wait until a COI admin turns up to support the bullies.

It happens because it is also actively encouraged by some administrators.

Some editors will bully whenever they get worried about a particular view getting presented properly, or when their POV pushing is scrutinized under threat and so on.

The bullies know already, or soon find out, that the bullying is absolutely fine because administrators simply don't give a toss. Some administrators join in the bullying. Therefore, overall, bullying is ACTIVELY encouraged by admins as a whole.

If you can bully, then bullying works. Then bullying continues. Some obvious bullies get made admins, because those admins voting them in are either clueless dorks, or they de-prioritize the problem. In fact, judging by some voting farces, some admins seem to get voted in by admins who bully and who like other bullies.

I would go as far as to say if you are going to be an admin, you will be involved in bullying other people one way or another.

As is the situation now, as admins and other editors are being allowed to systematically bully, slur, and push others around, they will generally be ridiculed by people on this forum, news articles, and so on. I doubt that the bullying will stop. Its more likely to increase. Its going to increase because admins deny, ignore or encourage.

Admins on this forum can ignore, deny, and de-prioritize this problem as much as they like. They're still grossly negligent.

This is just another flag to warn people of the minefield

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely (Acton).

Admins really have very little accountability and a lot of power over mere editors. So it's bound to happen.

As we've said here many a time, WP admin is like a bunch of cops without internal review, and without any accountability to public election after they're hired. Even indirectly.

Imagine if the local police officer could NOT be gotten rid of, no matter what they'd done to deserve it, except by vote of some high court who themselves basically have life-tenure, like the Supreme Court. Uuuuuugly

Yes one solution would be to make things more transparent or to get some internal affairs people to sort them out.

One other solution would be to have accountable expert editors on articles who will stand up when any admin who is not in the know about the subject (most) starts bullying editors who are only improving articles.

Now that is definitely not going to happen!

Admin: (Attack Drone, or Motivated for Ignorance and Neglect).

Doc

Argh, pedantry. Chess neither "requires" the bishop to be moved, nor "permits" it. It allows the bishop to be moved in a diagonal fashion, should you choose to move it at all.