Whether you are a devoted cabalista where wikipedia and those that run it can do no wrong to the biggest hater that wants the whole thing blown up and erased from existence to all those in between, has WR had any significant impact on the great wikipedia pheonomenon? I ask mainly in curiosity as more of a lurker than major poster. I think one question could be asked if is would WP evolve the same way if WR never existed.

Has WR made things any better or is any quest for improvement futile?

Take for instance flagged revisions. It was popular here but is being implemented at a snail's pace with much resistance. Also, has arbcom been affected? Cool Hand Luke(One on this site) was elected to arbcom but some tried to say that posting here disqualified him from being elected(see BADSITES). In 2007 that would probably would have worked but he still got elected. The thing that could be asked is if CHL is a better arb than, say, if Raul654 was still there or is it just the same ol' same ol'.

Thoughts?

I think that WR played a big role in getting the BLP policy passed. Now, if we could only get it enforced...

What Herschel said. I think WR is very good at raising issues that would otherwise be completely ignored by the kool aid drinkers on Wikipedia. Some of this is "macro" like the BLP policy issue and some of it is "micro" like taking out crap from individual articles or raising awareness about particular AfDs. But even WR-inspired reform runs up against the institutional dysfunction of Wikipedia - and a good part of that is the "cause of the moment" phenomenon. It's like "Free Tibet". Anyone see any college kids protesting that stuff anymore? It's just so yesterday. Same thing happens on Wikipedia. For a week or so the BLP issue - after the commentary and lampooning on WR raises it - is big deal but then everyone forgets about it. Given the likely demographics of Wikipedia that's not surprising. Hopefully the little steps that result are not entirely in vain.

Edit: Why isn't there a choice between "Significantly" and "Perhaps a little"? It's like having a poll on how much I like strawberries and asking me to rate them 1,2, 8, or 10.

Moreover I understand its use has been abandoned since April or May.
Seems like kind a huge waste.


They did so as recently as the previous Summer Olympics.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Free_Tibet_banner.jpg

Well, I consider "significantly" a broad way of saying yes, anything above "a little bit." Perhaps it's too vague but covers enough ground I think. Maybe "somewhat" should have been added, I don't know.

Not sure about the Free Tibet 'fad' analogy (for a number of reasons - and silly hats and funny cigarettes never go out of fashion). But the admin class do feel they can 'sit things out' like politicians, and little on or off WP seems to phase them. They happily allow the WP crazies to run over all attempted debate, knowing that things run out of steam and sometimes even fall in on themselves. Why would they care about the "trolls" and suchlike from WR?

That's why it is so important to come as down heavily as possible on genuine scandal, and this is the only place really that does that (or is the place that takes up the position to do so if you like). Whether this place is good enough at it is another question, but it's certainly had an effect on Wikipedia regarding reputations etc in the past. But does WR effect Wikipedia policy and guidelines, and their various proposals and trials? I thought WR has an 'annex' run by someone called Obesity for 'annoyances' like that.

If you are willing to count the exposure of Ryan "Essjay" Jordan as a fraud as a WR accomplishment (and not just a Daniel Brandt accomplishment) (and I guess we'd have to leave that determination to Brandt), then I think you'd have a hard time minimizing the impact WR has had on public perception of Wikipedia.

The Essjay incident inscribed in stone for much of the media and the general populace that the people who create Wikipedia cannot be trusted to be honest about themselves, and therefore by extension, you can't trust the content of Wikipedia. This has been a painful thorn in the project's side ever since that March 2007 moment of discovery. Even look at the decline in new editors -- the trend dates almost exactly from that moment.

That's right. New-editor action peaked out in early 2007, and immediately plummeted
after the Essjay flap.



And continues to decline. I estimate that Wikipedia will become a "closed" project, with no new
contributors at all, in late 2015. Isn't it possible that, for "the encyclopedia that anybody can edit",
the disappearance of new editors will be a death sentence?

Ah, so the Essjay incident was the direct cause of a mortal implosion of Wikipedia... I had no idea that WR was so influential — or that I was so sarcastic.

Actually, the decline in new editors is related to two things:

1. The increasing complexity of the editing process, with the expansion of the number of rules, guidelines, styles, templates, and demand for proper in-line footnoting, which is not easy for one to drop in and learn.

2. The development of articles themselves, in which the proverbial "low hanging fruit" of easy topics has been largely picked and written. Further development of many pieces requires some degree of specialized knowledge and content growth is going to be slow, incremental, and linear rather than exponential.

The key question isn't how many new "10 edit" editors there are, but whether longtime active content creators can be retained and new ones attracted at a rate which exceeds their attrition. I don't see any indication that Wikipedia is in decline in that regard, although anyone is welcome to take out billboards touting the end of WP late in 2015...

tim

The decline is probably more dramatic if you consider that at least half of those editors are sockpuppets. I think you need another line marking total number of indef blocks and bans versus number of editors!

And I'd make a chart about that....except that Wikipedia's glorious masters do a terrible job of keeping track of indefs.

This list of Arbcom bans is nowhere near complete, and hasn't been updated since last year.
I suspect the "community ban" list below it is also woefully incomplete.

WP:Special:BlockList, with "Hide temporary blocks" and "Hide single IP blocks" turned on. You will still have to sort out permanent range blocks, I guess, if there there are any of those. It goes back to 2004, but I have no idea how many entries there are -- I'd guess tens of thousands, at least. I once downloaded all of SlimVirgin's and Jayjg's blocks into a spreadsheet -- they each had several thousand at the time, several years ago.

Almost useless. I'm looking at the last 5000 entries, with those flags turned on as you suggested---
those 5000 entries only go back one week.......

Oh look, now they've got Procseebot (T-C-L-K-R-D) . A script that auto blocks proxy IP addresses.
It and TorNodeBot (T-C-L-K-R-D) , together, are responsible for about 75% of the blocks.

Let's see. There are 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses. If they block 650 per day (the current rate),
they will block the entire Internet in 18,000 years.

So, it's just a coincidence, tim, that these two things suddenly reversed the trend in EXACTLY the month of March 2007, when Essjay was all over the national news?

Carrite, you are an ass.

Hmm, rangeblocks. That gives me an idea for another nice chart.

Actually, omitting IP blocks and temp blocks, 5000 blocks goes back to July 2, 10,000 blocks goes back to June 6, and 15,000 goes back to May 10. If the rate has stayed steady (I doubt it) since 2004, then 60,000 blocks per year would be a total of 420,000 blocked user names.

Another way of looking at it is that of the perhaps 6500 new users per month, about 5000 of them quickly get blocked.

I'm sure the decline has nothing at all to do with the fact that the typical new user experience looks something like

1. Try to edit an article on the encyclopedia "anyone can edit" and find out you can't because it's semiprotected.

2. Try to create an article instead, and find out you're not allowed to do so without using some complicated Wizard.

3. Make random copyedits until you are autoconfirmed, then try to create an article. It gets speedy deleted within seconds for having "no context" by someone who didn't even bother to wait for you to finish adding said context to the article.

4. Write a complete draft of the article in your userspace, then try to create the article. It gets plastered within seconds with tons of cleanup templates by MOSnazis and drive-by patrollers.

5. Get blocked as a "ripened sock" of someone you've never heard of.


Yes, I'm shocked, shocked I say, that new editors aren't flocking to this highly positive environment in droves.

Long story short, the encyclopedia writers have been pushed aside by the game players.

Yep.

It might have had an impact for a week or two. I think the name recognition of "Essjay" by the public at large in 2011 is some microscopic fraction of 1%. To think that it has had a lasting impact is illogical.


tim




There's truth here despite the bitter phrasing.

tim

Ignore the petty disputes and e-fisticuffs, no matter how much we love them. WR is the uncensored institutional memory of WP. Yeah, some of it is tabloid-esque drama-mongering but it's the only place a newbie can get a straight scoop on what they are walking into, who the players are, what the game is. I'll spare you a long tangent but Foucault's power/knowledge relationship is perfectly illustrated by Wikipedia's internal politics (some of the Wordbomb affair is just perfect). The powers that be shape the acceptable boundaries of player vs. player discourse, ignoring rules when suitable, erasing or branding enemies as they choose and even pushing POVs far past the acceptable limit. This isn't surprising or evil, just humans left to their own devices, but it deserves discussion. That discussion can't take place on Wikipedia but it does here. Hopefully even the most pious of the Wiki-virtuous can see the value of an open forum on a website that, like it or not, has made itself the most popular knowledge source on the English speaking internet.

And yet......

How many people remember the name of the Colorado "balloon boy"? A fraction of 1%.

How many people remember the media being duped by a nutty family in Colorado releasing a silvery Mylar balloon over the range? Probably over 80%.

Tim, you can plug your ears with your fingers all you want, but a sudden spike in news about the Essjay scandal (New York Times, BBC, USA Today, CBC.ca, etc.) would be enough on its own, but additionally, you could read this.

After reading that, dare to tell me things were just hunky dory on the ol' Wikipedia editor satisfaction front.

Have we had Betacommand up for Flavor Aid Robot Boy of the Year, yet? The Award doesn't exist? Okay, I propose it. Award: Small scale model of Robby the Robot holding a big pitcher of purple liquid. Audio memory chip that says:

"Would 60 gallons be sufficient?"

That's all so 2007, daddy-o...

Nobody gives a shit about Essjay Week four years later... It's a big zero on the public's radar, whether you call him "Essjay" or "the dude who misrepresented himself to the New Yorker"...

t

What a Marxist.

........................says the capitalist.


t

I wouldn't say it's a "big zero." It's still remembered by people in the tech business, the tech media, and to some extent, academics, who probably still use it in their justifications for disallowing WP as a source in term papers and such.

What's more, it's probably the best we can hope for. There will probably never be a scandal that causes casual web users (i.e., readers) to turn their backs on something like Wikipedia, all else being as it is now. What these scandals really do is help convince "casual editors" that WP is not worth their time, and when they get fed up and leave, it puts more pressure on the hard-core, committed WP'ers to pick up the slack. That increases internecine conflict within the user-base (because the same smaller group of people are interacting with each other more, and more often), and increases the burnout rate.

Eventually, high levels of user burnout might weaken WP to the point where a competitor could come in and eventually dominate, but it's not the only thing that could do that.

Still, every little bit helps!