And now for the final pillar of my forthcoming rant to the UKCC. Though I'm not sure whether I will include it due to the difficulty of evidencing it. Is Wikipedia a closed shop, impenetrable to outsiders? (And if it is, is that in the general public interest, but I think that is obvious). I'm sure we all agree with this, and Kelly even has a post up about it http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...=0&#entry290112 . But how would we evidence that? To the man/woman in the street, I mean.

Some suggestions:

* The process for becoming an administrator involves an apprenticeship performing a series of repetitive and monotonous tasks for many years, of no obvious value to anyone.

*Upward 'promotion' from there depends on getting to the first rank.

*It also requires buying an ideology that most people would find weird. (But how to evidence this?)

*Elections to other positions (arbitration committee, steward) involve buying all the above.

Thoughts please, and please can we not get sidetracked into the usual Wikipedians are idiots, geeks, mindless cult morons, evil etc. What is the evidence for Wikipedia being closed to outsiders?

While I'm inclined to agree with you on the underlying premise, proving it will be hard. Wikipedia claims to be open to anyone, and superficially it is, but in practice gaining meaningful access requires navigating a complicated and poorly marked maze. But the fact that this maze is poorly marked also makes it hard to prove that it exists at all. Plus for every anecdotal case of someone running into one of the numerous pitfalls that new editors run into, someone will trot out someone who did not run into them (either because they were sheparded in by a friend, were just extremely cautious and patient, or started before things got really bad).

(Also, the thread you linked to is in a nonpublic forum here. Suggest you link to one of the other threads discussing Danny's article instead.)

Agreed, the Signpost with Danny Sullivan is a start. You could do worse.
It's a pretty good summary of the arcane and Byzantine bureaucracy, as an outsider sees it.

Skomorokh has "finally" been raising some good questions about the screwed-up operations.
I expect the Faithful Ones will try to punish him shortly.

Read the comments below Sullivan's blog post.

Give me some time to find a couple more (recent) items. There are plenty of Register articles you could use, but they're
all more than 2 years old, and the WP Nut Squad will just scream "That's OLD, we FIXED that problem".

You could try this.

Don't forget Carl Hewitt. He updated it last year.

From Ann Althouse's blog, 2009.

From Alexander van Loon's blog.

And this.

Bill Beutler put this about Danny Sullivan on his blog.

As I warned you before, the academic world and media have been giving Magicpedia a free ride.
We have to develop the primary sources, and get them published.

* I did not perform any adminly tasks before becoming an admin. I mostly edited content. In fact the only adminly tasks I performed counted against me in the RfA since people thought I had outstepped my boundaries and made some bad non-admin closures.
* I was able to make it through RfA because I had made more people happy or indifferent than I had pissed off.
* I didn't change my ideology of what wikipedia was about. (perhaps I had the correct ideology before becoming an admin, but noone required me to buy it)
* I do think there is a need to be highly "visible" to become arb, FA director or stewed or crat.

Isn't the point of the charitable status that they provide some educational benefit. Whether the authorship is open or not does not seem to be pertinent to whether they provide educational benefit.

Perhaps you could show that certain topics in Wikipedia are virtually un-editable by anyone, especially newbies, who don't adhere to the party line of the editors who control that topic.

Well there are two parts to it.

First is whether they are a 'closed shop' in some sense.

Second, whether being closed is not in the 'general public interest' or 'general public utility'.

Actually the second is more difficult than I thought. Clearly Oxford and Cambridge, and schools generally are closed shops (there are pretty high hurdles around teaching as we know). However - in theory - schools and universities are in principle open to anyone who has the requisite skills to provide the public utility in question. Is that true of Wikipedia? The "skills" required are mostly a blind obedience to the cult, and repetitive grunt work that requires no expertise at all, and are irrelevant to the intended public benefit.

Maunus is somewhat of an exception here, I think. The sort of admins who were around in the mid-2000s were generally appreciative of the quality writing and 'encyclopedic' contributions. The current wave of admins are mostly illiterate thugs, with a small number of exceptions.



Yes, but how?

Well that is straight forward to show but also somewhat pointless - because its not necessarily a problem with wikipedia but with certain editors. Try to put in criticism on the article about Evolutionary Psychology for example. Or try to make any non-trivial edit to either the page about "race (classification of humans)" or "race and intelligence". Or Falun Gong. Or Evolution. Etc.

But the "uneditability" is not a problem in itself. It is only a problem when the proposed edit is an actual improvement that is kept out. The ueditability is both a feature and a bug - the price of consensus.

Can you explain to me how the policy of 'anyone can edit' is consistent with this not being a problem for Wikipedia? In my world you go through an intense selection process in which the ability to do certain things, and the ability to work with others to achieve those things collaboratively are key parts of the process. In my world also you have an editor in chief whose job it is to make judgments about the overall structure and balance of the work. This process actually works, in my experience.

Nor do we tend to have an office that anyone can wander into and write stuff on whatever they feel like, and delete the work of others or arrogantly pontificate on matters that they understand nothing about. We do not blame poor results on 'certain editors', or if we do, the editors do not stay very long.

My advice when dealing with bodies like the CC is to keep it short and simple. Anything over 2 sides of A4 will get the tl;dtr response.

Enumerate the issues; do not go into chapter and verse, except as regards one or two specificities, but make it clear that a fuller explanation is available for the rest. Let them decide whether they are important or not. Do not throw the kitchen sink at them as they're likely to ignore you.

It is only a problem in the same way that the fact that while in theory in a democracy everyone can become President, but in reality not everyone does is a problem for democratic countries. I.e. it is a problem that is inherent in the difference between the actual world and the ideal world.

Your own problem seems to be more with the slogan "everyone can edit" - it seems you feel it should be more restricted, and the slogan should be changed to "the encyclopedia that you can edit if we let you". This is basically sensible, except that doesn't change the fact that everyone can edit the wikipedia - as long as wikipedia lets them. That is basically the way it works now - your version would just be more restricted so that people start out being blocked or topic banned and have to earn their right to edit - instead of as it is now they have the right untill they loose it.

Others see the walledgardens and article owners as the problem - and want to keep the slogan and make wikipedia conform to the slogan - that there should be no restrictions on editing and that noone should be allowed to revert anyone's edit or remove anyone's information. That is pretty much also the way it works now since every ridiculous act of vandalism or malinformed stupidity is kept in the article history. I really don't see why the "everyone can edit" is the problem.

The problem is that we don't get good articles because too few people are restricted form editing, and generally they are restricted too late.

It's actually more insidious than that. On most "hot topics" the articles are un-editable by anyone who isn't willing to start a flame war or generally make the environment intolerable for the editor or group of editors who will inevitably oppose the change. Winning Wikipedia is the only way to effect change in these cases.

Here is an example of what I'm talking about. There are people who believe Intelligent Design to be a science, and therefore should be listed in that category and allow the reader to read the article and make up their own mind. The small group of editors who closely monitor that article, however, have no tolerance at all for this approach, and will censor any attempt to give both sides of the argument that ID may be considered by some to be science. Many articles in Wikipedia are like this, as frequently documented in this forum.

How to keep this simple and short for the CC? Simply state that Wikipedia's current anarchic, chaotic, and administratively mismanaged state allows small groups of editors to take over and control certain topics. Then list some of the most notorious examples such as Intelligent Design and Global Warming.

Are you really arguing that it is a bad thing that wikipedia doesn't support creationists in redefining the meaning of "science"? And that it is a problem that a "small group of editors" keep them from doing so? If I am understanding that right then your idea of what an encyclopedia should be is simply not commensurable with mine, nor I assume with most of wikipedia's editorship. Encyclopedias are based on the principle that there is authoritative and non-authoritative kinds of information and that the prior should be privileged.

Not sure it will be of any help, but there was one academic who was blocked from editing. I did no look in his blocks, they could have been fair, but he was outraged, and he wrote a few blogs about his expierence with editing wikipedia 1 and 2 and so on. I believe in one of the blogs he said he will advise his students against using wikipedia.

It's difficult to argue with the contention that, in spite of protestations to the contrary on their "policy pages", Wikipedia promotes virtual trench warfare as a way to gain editorial control.

However, you're just showing with this "example" that your ideas should be confined to some agenda-based right-wing pseudoscience website like Conservapedia. Sure, there are small groups of people that think all manner of demonstrably incorrect things. Like the creationists and the anti-climate-science nutjobs, they are not a part of the epistemic communities at whose windmills they tilt, and as they exist within cultic circle-jerks they have nothing to add to the conversation about academic topics. Advocating putting their ideas in an encyclopedia is as ludicrous as asking your three-year-old to discuss the implications of calculus.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that it's accommodationist attitudes like yours that make the world suck. On the other hand, maybe you're just a concern troll that has adopted this kind of namby-pamby attitude to critique Wikipedia. If that's the case, I wish you all the best in your attempt to bring that house of cards down.

What is a bad thing is that people like you redefine everything based on whatever your needs are to attack someone you don't like. This has been true of just about every single one of your actions on Wikipedia, and those like you have no legitimate purpose there. I already pointed out how you tried to claim that 66% support to keep a page was not "consensus" to keep it, which is a ridiculous idea. You just play fast and loose with every rule and have been for a long time.

You use policy as a weapon to cause terror, harm, and ruin page after page. That is a really serious problem and one Larry Sanger warned about when leaving.




Mbz



Literally hundreds of academics, many notable and prominent, have been blocked from editing by amateurs with no background, violate their own policies, etc., solely so they can own topics to use them to dominate others. They fit the very definition of a classical troll - taking over a bridge and attacking anyone who may try to use it. Their bridge tends to be the articles and they do not actually contribute anything worth while.

PD: just include a copy of this in your Charity Commission correspondence.

It will do all the talking for you. Very embarrassing to Wikipedia.

All of you should watch it. I'm very serious.