http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242098183.shtml

Ira requests:

Not bad, but Mr. Brad should know by now that high search engine rankings, and the impact they have on both content and on article subjects, are only part of the overall objection to Wikipedia. The negative impact on the publishing industry and academia are another, and on traditional culture in general. It's also helping to destroy the diversity of the web, foster an unaccountable anonymity subculture that's potentially dangerous to democracy, and cheapen intellectualism, among other things. Then there's the whole cultishness thing, WRT the actual users...

Still, I don't suppose it's worth complaining about - at least he's trying to be fair about the whole thing.

I can't count the number of times I've seen Greg K., Barry Kort or Jon Ambrey make a perfectly logical and well-thought-out comment on a blog only to have them be swamped with Wikipediots making ad hominem attacks and Pro-WP rhetoric attacks ad naseum. If Brad could keep the WP troops in order, none of this would happen. Since he's made this statement, this would seem to confirm this as fact.

One of the joys of Web 2.0, Brad, is that (like Wikipedia) any idiot can participate even if they're completely wrong. The only solution is to 1. moderate the comments or 2. turn them off.

If only WP would do this for BLP articles and ban those Wikipediots who place BLP violations on other sites as revenge, maybe the rest of the World would follow suit?

Also please bear in mind that I couldn't really address every possible critique or criticism of Wikipedia in a 1500-word introduction, or even in a week's worth of posts, which is what I have to work with. As previously promised, in one of my posts I will link to some criticism sites, including this one. I really am trying to be as balanced as I can, although I obviously don't share the entirely negative view of Wikipedia that you express.

NYB's preemptively chastising, discounting and discouraging replies from WR on another forum is disrespectful to this site. I won't be troubling you over there, Mr. Brad.

I fear I've been unclear there and/or misconstrued here. Replies on VC about the general issues I raise there are most welcome. What I was trying to head off was more along the lines of a long debate in a comment thread, which would be incomprehensible to the general readership over there, about whether User:X deserved to be desysopped, why User:Y shouldn't have been blocked, whether User:Z is government agent, etc. That remark was equally directed at Wikipedians as Reviewers, by the way.

That's just it, Brad: Somey's view of all of this isn't entirely negative, but centered in the "balanced criticism" mode that both Akahele and you seem to be striving for. He's just not wearing those nice "rose-colored glasses" that the Wikipediots seem to favor...

NYBrad's second installment is posted: Wikipedia, the Internet, and Diminished Privacy.

My third post on Volokh is now up, for those interested. It's more about the BLP issue (and I will continue on that tomorrow as well). Most of the content will be old hat to Wikipedia Reviewers, but my goal is to raise the issues with and get comments from a wider audience.

Judging from the number of comments, it appears that that forum has a fairly large number of readers, so your message is reaching a lot of people.

Providing the link generally helps, Brad.

I finally brought myself to comment on the second installment. My rant will be familiar to those here at WR, but my goal is to raise the issues with and get comments from a wider audience. So far, not a single click-through to the study results page that I provided in my comment.

Skew You Too : The Styxie Wixie —

Ah, the never-ending Drek of Wikipediots —

To baldly go where none have met their lines before …

Jon

When you speak of "balanced criticism" and Wikipediots in the same paragraph, it causes a cognitive dissonance.

As I've said before, you can be a critic without the pejorative/mocking appellations. In fact, you can be a **better** critic without them.

To some WR types, "balanced criticism" means to give fair coverage to everything from the criticisms that say "Wikipedia is evil and must be destroyed!" to the criticisms that say that Wikipedia is harmful and must be radically restructured, but might possibly be saved if most people associated with it are removed and its policies and practices changed beyond recognition. The "beyond-the-pale" viewpoints that actually mostly like Wikipedia have no place at this table, however.

It's probably the most popular and influential law blog.[1] Widely known among legal academics, students, and professionals with spare time. I guess it will have to get along without certain butthurt reviewers.

Aside from a couple of cogent posts by Brandt and Kohs, the commentary on the VC Blog makes Fark and Slashdot look almost intelligent.

Jon Awbrey

You're being a troll, Lar.

This is funny.

I think that people who spend a great deal of time writing Sailor Moon FAQs and anime fan fiction are a little kooky.

Dies Iræ?

The first e-stallment I tried to read looked like the room filled up with Conserva-Mosquitoes, and it got way too hard reading while rotflaffing — all that Bee-Looney about Wikipedia being a hotbed of Liberalism —

Last time I sampled it, Brandt and Kohs had posted a lot of hard-knocks analysis and data that everyone else just ignored — big surprise that.

Jon

As previously promised, before I finish my guest blogging stint in a few days, I'll post links to here (both the board and the blog) and to Akihele, just so none can suggest that the purpose of my blogging there is to sugar-coat anything. I can't promise how many Volokh Conspiracy readers will follow the links, though: you can lead a horse to water, but .......

Apropos of nothing ... In one of the comment threads there, Mr. Brandt criticized the fact that I still haven't posted my real name on Wikipedia yet. Obviously, at this point I've decided to go ahead and make public that IBM=NYB, so at some point I'll probably post my name on my userpage, along with a couple of sentences of real-world bio (I'm a litigation attorney in New York, I'm the Werowance of the Wolfe Pack, etc.). I wonder exactly how long it will take before someone objects that I'm using Wikipedia for self-promotion.

You're using Wikipedia for self-promotion.

do I get a prize?

Only Dead In The Head Wikipediots would suggest that a Standard Author Bio amounts to Self-Promotion, but never mind that now …

I tried to work up an offering for the VC Blog to share my initially parallel but increasingly divergent experiences with Wikipedia — I think most folks there would find it amusing that one of the events that led to my x-communication from Wikipedia was my objection to the use of "Wiki-Lawyer" as a pejorative term on the grounds that it defamed the legal profession, but never mind that now — still, it looks like that blog, however grounded it may be in one domain of experience, is like so many other Acadimmerungs of Νεφελοκοκκυγία that I have tried to educate in the past, that is, totally oblivious to the realities of Wikiputia, and where folks have their heads so full of gas about the way it's posed to be that they can't really see how it is.

And I don't see you adding much to the mix but ever more gas.

Jon Awbrey

Arromdee is actually smarter than he looks. Or at least with a better picture he looks smarter than he used to look. In fact, the résumé he deleted says that he has a PhD in computer science. So we know that he's smart enough to tell the difference between a one and a zero.

(About that PhD, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt, since we can no longer ask Essjay to check it out for us.)

But his comment was certainly stupid. With five minutes of research, he might have figured out that the reason I read NYB on VC is because NYB announced it, more than once, on that "kook" site Wikipedia Review. And believe it or not, some of the "kooks" here are actually a hell of a lot smarter than Arromdee. I can't write C-language code as well as Arromdee (but I get by), and I don't read comic books and don't follow anime, but at least I'm smart enough to know that I am, generally speaking, smarter than he is in a lot of other areas.

Not if he worked on Peachtree Accounting from 2000 to 2004, he isn't. Yikes, what a mess! It's gotten a little better since then, though.

Still very difficult to integrate with...

One of the questions that always comes to mind when discussing ArbComics, stand-up or otherwise, is this —

How could any Wikipedian, much less a high ranking one, be sooooo clueless about the realities in the trenches of Wikipedia?

WikiChecker Data : Newyorkbrad

• 21,835 — Total Edits （25 Feb 2006 – 15 May 2009)
• 11,516 — Project, Help, MediaWiki, Portal
•  6,599 — User Talk
•  2,584 — Article Page
•    466 — Article Talk
•    428 — User Page
•    242 — Category, Image, Template

O I C …

Jon Awbrey

Well you forgot to mention potent potables.

Oh damn, it's been deleted.

Where the People all have Pyorrhea from eating too many Pomegranites …

Ja Ja

Well, yeah. When I started I contributed to mainspace, including having created more than 75 pages, but lately I've been focused primarily on arbitration and related activities.

Although I'm not denying the trend you see there, do bear in mind more generally that the pure edit-number data can be misleading. If I create a page in mainspace, that's one edit. If I then vote paragraph-by-paragraph through an arb decision, that can be 20 edits....

I am determined to get back to more article work once the current round of ArbCom cases is wrapped up and my guest-blogging stint on Volokh is completed. And I'm sure Mr. Awbrey will remind me if I forget, because making sure that there are lots of good contributions to Wikipedia mainspace is very important to him.

Well, few if any articles are created at the size of this opus. I ran out of cigarettes about halfway through it.

Do what you like. I am simply stepping through the steps of the inquiry process, that begins by "abducing" an explanation for a surprising observation.

The surprising observation is that a presumably intelligent person could continue repeating the same old mythology about Wikipedia — after all these years — in the face of all the contrary evidence that spits in the face of every trooper who spends a long enough time in the trenches.

There are as many likely explanations as there are favorite ways of denying the evidence — I simply picked on a likely first guess.

Of course, it hardly amounts to a fair test anymore — a Modern Major General slumming in the trenches for a day is just not going to get dressed down for having lacquered brass, now is he?

So you really missed out on all that, poor sap …

Jon Awbrey

Ira's Song & Dance about BLPs trots out more old saws than I have old wood

So let me just give my first & last hoot on the subject:


I am putting a copy here because the Conspiracy Blogware is so antique it can take you 10 minutes to find your own posts again.

Jon

If I understand this correctly, Mr. Awbrey is suggesting that Mr. Brad is too far removed from the realities of WP article-editing to fully understand how bad it can be for people with knowledge of a given subject to deal with the cluelessness and general interference than occurs on a fairly regular basis...?

That may be, but in Mr. Brad's defense, I've looked at his editing history without the benefit of a statistics generator, and IMO he's actually more like me, just on a different website. It isn't just that he uses the Preview button - he clearly tries to fully prepare articles in advance of their initial posting. That can indicate any number of things - meticulousness, mental organization, and most commonly of all, an attempt to avoid unwanted attention, particularly from people who might challenge the article's content or try to have it deleted. It's almost the opposite of the more attention-seeking narcissistic tendency to create new articles in as many edits as possible.

For example, take this relatively early-in-career stub: J. Daniel Mahoney (T-H-L-K-D). The initial edit is here, with all links and such already in place. After that, NYB makes only one edit to the article, to add a "source" template.

OTOH, most of Mr. Brad's newly-created articles have been about various Federal judges, so there isn't a lot of variety in the stubs - they all follow a fairly similar format. That makes it a little easier to obtain a low ratio of edits to newly-created articles.

Unfortunately, on Wikipedia it's difficult to determine user motivation unless that ratio is very low - I suspect that many non-narcissistic people deliberately use more edits to post a new article than they would otherwise need or want, merely because they don't want to be left in the dust by the edit-countitis sufferers, and they can see that few people really look at the details.

Perfect Illustration of what I'm talking about

Here is the entire 3 year edit history of the article, which remains a stub to this day.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to find yourself slimmed, er, slammed up against the wall by the Cabal in the neighborhood of that kind of turf — we all know better than that — but it's nowhere near as likely as working on Pseudoscience (T-H-L-K-D), or Sigmund Freud (T-H-L-K-D), or Truth (T-H-L-K-D), or even Charles Sanders Peirce (T-H-L-K-D), if that is where they or their minions stalk you back to.

Do you really think I put over 400 edits into an article like Charles Sanders Peirce out of narcissism?

Give me a break …

Jon Awbrey

Heavens no! But you didn't create any of those articles... (This is the creation diff for the Peirce article, btw.)

There are all sorts of reasons why people use lots of edits to develop an article - in your case, I'd say it was more of a "practice what you preach" thing, given the communal/collaborative nature of Inquiry as you define it (and as evidenced in the development of the Inquiry (T-H-L-K-D) article itself, I might add, which is one of yours).

All I'm saying is that the tendency to want to keep edit-counts to a minimum for newly-created articles can be seen as indicating that the person is trying to avoid attention, which is a fairly evident non-narcissistic impulse. It could also mean that the person is a perfectionist - a mature-depressive tendency - or simply doesn't want to be seen by others as narcissistic, whether or not he/she actually is... but I suspect most people don't engage in that kind of double-bind thinking when they're about to post a WP article.

Actually, it wasn't a Creation but a Conversion from a Wiki-Prehistoric Phase of Evilusion, but I don't really see why everything has to turn into a fight about Creationism …

Once again, the surprising observation under investigation is that a presumably intelligent person of presumptively good will is still repeating the Litany Of Lies (LOL) that we all know and many of us don't love so much as Wikipediot Doctrine.

If it was certain other people doing that, then the above-mentioned presumptions would be way too presumptuous, so we'd naturally have other explanations available to us.

The charitable interpretations in this case are:

1. Ira is extraordinarily blessed or gratuitously lucky.
2. Ira is blissfully lacking in the relevant experiences.

The relatively small exposure to editing in the trenches is weakly confirmatory of Hype № 2 — it is not itself the Phenom under investigation.

Jon Awbrey

That somebody doesn't come out of their Wikipedia experiences with the same outlook as yours doesn't mean that they (or you) are wrong. Wikipedia is enough of a big and complex thing that people's experiences with it can be as diverse as the proverbial blind men feeling parts of an elephant.

I agree.

I'm sure Reviewers notice all of the comments claiming that there's a left-wing bias on Wikipedia. Whatever else that claim is, it's at least an over-simplification. Parts of Wikipedia have a left-wing bias, an Israel bias, a promotional bias, and so forth. Some topics are abandoned garbage heaps, some are vicious partisan battle grounds, and others actually edit harmoniously.

The relevant question is whether Wikipedia can correct itself and more closely resemble the encyclopedia it supposedly aspires towards. I think people should harbor healthy skepticism about Wikipedia's chances of improving. At the same time, many casual contributors have had mostly positive experiences editing. Even at this late date they feel they're contributing to a useful compilation. There's nothing wrong with that.

A well-known fact of life, no matter what we're talking about.

Which is precisely why inquiring minds come together, compare their diverse experiences, seek explanations for the divergent conclusions that different minds draw from their many-splintered POVs, and strive to synthesize a more inclusive picture of the reality that generates them all.

Oh wait, I just violated all the Main Tenets of the Church of Wikipedia, where it's so much Wikier just to ban the books and burn the heretics that displease the Wiki-Priests of the Hour.

Nevermind …

Jon Awbrey

Let's get something straight about the ass-sym-metrics of the situation —

I am not the one who shunned them and shut out their experience.

They are the ones who shunned me and shut out my experience.

Klar?

Jon

Seven Days In May —

It's rather tricky keeping track of the disconnected blogicles and comments on that site, so I'll make a list here:

One Page To Rule Them All

1. Ira Matetsky (11 May 2009), Some First Thoughts on Wikipedia
2. Ira Matetsky (12 May 2009), Wikipedia, the Internet, and Diminished Privacy
3. Ira Matetsky (13 May 2009), Wikipedia and the Biography Problem, Part 1
4. Ira Matetsky (14 May 2009), Wikipedia and the Biography Problem, Part 2
5. Ira Matetsky (15 May 2009), Wikipedia : Who Runs the Place?
6. Ira Matetsky (16 May 2009), Some Responses to Comments
7. Ira Matetsky (17 May 2009), Wikipedia : Some Concluding Thoughts and an Invitation

Comment on "Wikipedia : Who Runs The Place?" —

Now here's a WikiPediot "Administrator" who is apparently too cowardly even to use his or her "real" pseudonym:

That's Horologium (T-C-L-K-R-D) , another laissez faire "libertarian" right-winger, using the classic but wait folks he isn't telling you that he's banned from Wikipedia!!! rejoinder.

Zzzzzz...

How did you know that? It's hard enough keeping up with pseudonyms without getting into meta-pseudonyms …

Jon

O I C …

Here's my followup —

They never seem to get the point …

I think they must have some sort of rule against it …

...not that there's anything wrong with that...

Not necessarily, anyway. I shouldn't risk alienating any Volokh Conspiracy readers who may be checking out our helpful little website, but the sad fact of it is, there are a lot of Bush-baby Neocon Republicans out there painting themselves as "Independents" and "Libertarians" so that they can avoid the Bush Stigma™ whilst carrying on the fight for various aspects of the Anti-Obama, Anti-Abortion, Pro-Censorship, Anti-Gay, etc. etc., agenda. If I were one of those real libertarians who were into it before it was "cool," dutifully following the smaller-government, fiscal-responsibility agenda, I would be extremely pissed off about this. Unfortunately, there's probably very little they can really do about it.

Then again, maybe they can turn a few of those people into Ron Paul supporters, by getting them really, really drunk the night before Election Day?

Timekeeper was such a boob, I just had to reply.

I have known some Card-Carrying Conservatives and some Card-Burning Libertarians, but I don't see a lot of either on the Internet. Pseuds of a feather pseud together, I guess.

What see in Wikipedia is neither fish nor fowl but a kind of Permanent Adolescent Philosophy (PAP), and all their Gang Colors and all their Battle Cries amount to the same thing in the end — sucking up to the Biggest Bully On The Block.

Jon Awbrey

Count yourself lucky, then! It may be that I encounter more people like that because I'm a businessman (just not a very successful one at the moment), and you're one of these Academia-with-a-capital-"A" guys. But these folks are definitely out there, trust me on that one...

And please folks, don't get me wrong - I have nothing against small-government, fiscal-responsibility conservatives at all, whether or not they call themselves "libertarians." My only beef here is with these people who elected George W. Bush, twice, and now refuse to own up to it, like leopards trying to change their spots overnight. (Bush obviously having nothing to do with small government or fiscal responsibility in any way whatsoever.)


True... Sometimes I wonder, though, to what extent political ideologues take advantage of simple human nature, or maybe I should say good-natured humanity, to achieve their often-nefarious ends on WP. There's actually a Wikipedia article on something called the Abilene paradox (T-H-L-K-D) that sort of explains what I'm thinking here. At first it will probably seem completely inapplicable, because after all WP'ers argue with each other all the time - that's the whole point of WP, in fact - and yet, putting aside whatever specific issue they're arguing about, they're all pretty much in agreement that their participation there is worthwhile and that they should all continue doing it.