I notice that Wikimedia are inviting applications for fellowships on the themes of boosting participation and retention.

One of the facts noted here is that half the editors are under 22. My impression of many of the most vocal Reviewers, especially those of you who have a history of serious quality contributions before being blocked/banned, is that you are well over 22. This has led me to wonder whether Wikipedia's main policies for moderation (i.e. the use of admins who often have little life experience) is better adapted to managing adolescents and youths, who are used to being spoken in a particular way by their elders, than to working with mature adults who get riled by that sort of behaviour. I think a dip in my participation on Wikipedia was certainly associated with posts by the likes of Ironholds and Jimbo ticking me off for using candid language about some jumped up troll and therefore wonder whether this is a common experience among adult contributors.

I'm sure that floating the idea on WR first is not the best way to get an application accepted, but what does the panel of mature adults here think?

Most of the older participants here on WR would likely fail one or more of the Foundation's tests for Fellowship consideration:

Well, Malleus, for example, was already a graduate in May 2007 and Wikipedia is in danger of not retaining him. Also the pattern of contact with PD, for example, might be informative as to what might go wrong with others in the future if Wikipedia continues its current ways.

I can think of a few admins who would fail on that criterion.

Well, duh. Adults don't like being treated like children by children pretending to be adults. No big surprise there.

But really why should Wikipedia want to focus on retaining older users? How does that help them achieve their goals?

On one level I don't have to justify it as it's a given in the background material that Wikimedia has provided which talks about wanting to broaden the variety of its participants. As well as the gender bias and the predominance of editors from the Global North, they mention age as one of the ways in which the profile of Wikipedians does not reflect that of the world overall. They presumably feel that broadening the range of editors will allow them to cover a wider range of topics well than just what falls within the range of Western geek male youth culture.

Widening the age profile of editors on the English Wikipedia might broaden the range of editorial interests to include such things as, just off the top of my head, 18th and 19th century poetry or medieval philosophy. Or if we compared the coverage of top 40 hits in an English-speaking country for the last 20 years with that of the equivalent number of major businesses, then I'm sure that we'll see that the coverage is uneven. An older range of people might include former employees, shareholders customers etc of such businesses.

And, yes, well duh. But it will be interested to see it the Foundation is prepared to look at how the community alienates a lot of their better article writers in particular those over 30, 40 or whatever.

I was a graduate way before 2007, as I believe was PD. The problem Wikipedia is inherently unable to address is that adults generally don't take kindly to being treated like children, therefore it's a project for children, not adults.

It shouldn't, just as it shouldn't obsess over the number of female editors. Unless of course an argument can be made that there is content females are uniquely qualified to provide.

Wait, so does that imply that all adults are rude and insult other people?

It implies that there ought to be more of that all so unusual thing called common sense.

But most of the "adult" people who get blocked are blocked because they were insulting to other people (not counting sockpuppetry and all the other possibilities).

Does that mean that the "adults" are more like children than the "children", I wonder?

Only if you have a very childish idea of what it means to be an adult.

A good number of those adults were blocked because they actually knew something,
and found themselves in a pointless argument with a teenaged boy who thinks he knows something.

True, I suppose adults are often seen as short-tempered, especially in an academic setting. Not really the types to be working on something collaborative. Considering that most of the edit warring topic areas are probably made up of those other half of the editors that are adults.





More often than not, that means that the adults want to insert original research on what they know. Or using sources that only suit what they "know" to be true.

And since when were adults over 22, anyways? Where did that number come from? Might as well choose over 30.

Defending your right to say "fuck" and "cunt" with impunity is not the mark of maturity. But I suppose if you only graduated from kindergarten a little before 2007 I suppose there's an excuse for mistaking a potty-mouth for sophistication.

Considering how much Malleus seems to like words like those, mayhaps it is quite the opposite. Perhaps it's more that adults are so fascinated by how widespread these words have become with the internet that they now think it actually brings some sort of emphasis when they speak.

Hint: It doesn't.

Why shouldn't short temper be consistent with collaborative working?

Quite right--some of the most contentious battles have been academic ones.
(But of course, Seren wouldn't know about that, because he's a young man who thinks he knows things....)

But do those battles ever go anywhere? I mean, dear god, the biologists still can't decide where to classify the lophotrochozoans and they've been arguing about it for 20 years now. Make then argue about something that's actually bigger and it would be hundreds of years before any sort of consensus is made.

All the while, both sides will be trying to push their argument, even if it involves including fallacious information and faulty data.

I was thinking more of the situations where somebody makes patently idiotic remarks and short temper is the only way to resolve it.

That was the best evidence of your age that I could find from your user page archive. Something did make me think that you were older.

And yes childish tellings off like this and sanctimonious claptrap like this and this do rather discourage adults from participating. Jimbo - who, judging by his reaction, must be the only school ma'am to have made money out of hosting pornographic images - models to the kids how things are done on Wikipedia. Behave like a character from Pygmalion whenever someone is a bit rude and whatever you do don't investigate what has got someone so annoyed in the first place. Kids are used to this behaviour from adults and are also prone to black-and-white thinking where something is wrong whatever the reasons. Mature adults normally have more sophisticated ways of looking at things, though absolute monarchs tend to get corrupted. (One good thing about the American system is that it prevents the likes of Thatcher and Blair being able to go on until they are even more convinced that they are right than they were in the first place. Jimbo will be able to carry on as supremo until he becomes every bit as dotty as Ghaddafi.)

Anyway, if I were to put the case to Wikimedia that they need to look at how to retain people who are old enough to be the parents of some of those admins who tell them off, what sort of points should I raise?

21 is given as the median age of Wikipedians. 21 is also probably the age at which most Wikipedians leave full time education. Therefore roughly half of Wikipedians are used to being instructed on what to do and to being surrounded by rules. At 22 someone is only beginning an independent life. Once someone is 30 or 40, they are used to deciding how to live their life and to not having to answer to someone for everything they do.

Wikipedia is set up to manage the behaviour of the young not that of the old.


Because the rules are made by people who haven't worked in a proper workplace where arguments do happen and where people who hate each other's guts for a while do learn to get on later without the manager locking them out of the workplace for 24 hours.

The point that you and your fellow sanctimonious idiots seem to be incapable of understanding is that if it's OK for for Jimbo to target specific editors as "toxic" then it equally ought to be OK for me to make a general comment about some administrators being "dishonest cunts". I really can't believe that anyone could make a credible case otherwise.

Hopefully, if the case is accepted, we may in the future see Jimbo blocked for his own incivilty.

I will freely admit that I have no patience for fools, never have, never will.

I can't now remember where the discussion took place ... that's what happens when you get old, you forget stuff ... now where was I? Oh yes, in the early days of the gender-imbalance wars someone suggested trying to recruit retired ladies, who might have time on their hands and be willing to help out. No idea what became of the idea, nothing probably.

Not sure how many times this has been stated here, Seren, but tortured definitions of 'civility' are frequently used to block, ban and silence editors. This mechanism is applied with different standards to different editors, depending on who's popular at the moment, and is frequently used to 'silence' someone from the debate, not because saying a bad word did any harm. Blocking someone for saying a bad word from a project that celebrates its porn collected under the banner of anti-censorship is simply ridiculous.

For a long time Wikipedia blocking policy made no mention of 'civility' or 'personal attacks'. The blocking policy only mentioned 'disruption'. An admin had to apply judgment. Eventually, most of the admins with solid judgement left the project in disgust and official Wikipedia policy went from a handful of paragraphs to megabytes of horseshit.

Here's a funny quote I found while reading about this policy;

"Megabytes of horseshit" is about right. The thing I continue to find strange though is that Jimbo and his acolytes can be as offensive as they like, and often are, but the rules never seem to apply to them.

On Wikipedia you can be accused of "personal attacks" for attacking unidentified, hypothetical individuals. These people have no concept of what civility is, other than as a weapon to be used in their MMORPG.

I have been, several times. But I really have no understanding at all of what "attack" means in WikiSpeak, so maybe not so surprising.

It is childlike to propose that it isn't acting like an adult to insult someone else.



Sounds like an excellent idea. Then add something like no one can be an administrator unless they are an adult. You will see some amazing changes at Wikipedia with that simple modification.



Neither is it the mark of immaturity.




Hint: Some people use those words off the internet too. :gasp:

So, essentially, you're saying that it is proper for adults to insult one another? I think insulting others is one of those things that everyone should strive not to do.



Nothing would ever get done. There's already not enough administrators dedicated to do the background work that's needed.



Yes, they do, almost always in a situation that expresses their trashy low-class nature.

The duplicity of the term "adult language" is actually pretty interesting. Because things that are labeled adult are always always related to sex or other things of a prurient nature. So, truthfully, being adult has little to do with knowledge or maturity, but it has to do with being overly interested in sex.

Not really. I think you'll find that's a characteristic of basement-dwellers like yourself.

And, thus, the language of an "adult" is fully expressed.

One of the characteristics of adulthood is the ability to evaluate a novel situation and ascertain what appropriate conduct would be without having to resort to a rulebook for advice. Another is the understanding that no rule is universal in application.

Of course, a lot of people never reach adulthood no matter how old they get.

Grasshopper, do not confuse what is for what ought to be.



That would be preferable.



Ah, I see we're bringing class into it now! My, how the low-class are trash! Let's not confuse them for the hoi polloi, though. The truly unwashed tend to be sucking off the teats of parents who failed to teach their offspring how to wash themselves. In other words, a great many Wikipedia editors.



You should read some Freud. You'd have a blast reading him, grasshopper.

I graduated in 1977, so probably one of the oldest members here. I have encountered many different styles of collaboration, and all of them worked in one way or another. What Wikipedians call 'collaboration' is something else, which I have never encountered.

[edit] Deleted references to Cultural Revolution and Khmer Rouge in case of Godwinism.

Though that isn't really true though, is it? You have encountered it probably every day of your life, and when you encounter it in the real world, you recognise it for what it is - bullying and manipulation.

Listen up dipshit! There are times when only strong language is sufficient to convey to some motherfucking moron that their cuntish behaviour is unwelcome. Of course we well know that the total fuckwit will use the language by which the contempt is delivered as some cause célèbre to justify the continuing to fill their head with rotting garbage and puking it up all over the fucking place.

What Wikipedians call collaboration might more properly be called submission.

I deal in politics in addition to academia. In politics, everyone yells, fights, attacks each other etc., until the sides are chosen and then either one side prevails or a compromise is worked out. There is no other way to go about it unless you have overwhelming numbers.

There is no real difference between what I see every day and what goes on at Wikipedia and has gone on since the beginning. That wont ever change, so why do people pretend otherwise?

Certainly books or papers get "burned", i.e. articles by those out of favour are deleted when they shouldn't be.

This is more or less right on the mark.

Wikipedia backstage is a pretty classic example of pure politics in a quasi-anarchist environment.

Some of the rules of the game, such as the prohibition of "canvassing," fly in the face of "normal" politics, which is all about "canvassing" your team to beat their team... It's potentially another mechanism whereby an established minority can defeat a newcomer majority by wielding the rules of the game agains the newcomers as a crushing mechanism.

So-called "canvassing" is a fairly severe party foul which lands the "violator" on the drama boards...

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