User:Jorge Stolfi/DoW/Stop the bullying

I am surprised at the reaction to the "rant" I posted to the "unsourced BLP" RfC. Perhaps there *is* some hope left after all.

The problem is the process

User Balloonman seems concerned about whether I got confused by page moves and edits. Thanks for the concern, but my disappointment is not personal. It is about the irresponsible and unfair decision-making process used by Wikipedia in general, and for this RfC in particular. The process is irresponsible, because it is carried out without a clear and impartial cost/benefit analysis; and completely unfair, because the "voters" are not a representative sample of the editor community, the list of alternatives is biased and badly presented, and "consensus" is decided by a subjective evaluation rather than by a vote tally.

Lack of representativity would not be a problem if the "voters" were selected for their wisdom and prudence; but instead they are invariably a small minority which has special interests in the issue (typically, people who helped write a new rule or standard).

Predictably, this decision process has resulted in a huge and growing mass of guidelines, mechanisms, standards, and other features that are having a terrible effect on the project. I have a long list of such "nonsensus" decisions, but the items most relevant to this tread are robot-assisted editing, article-side tags, the notability rule, and the AfD mechanism.

Bullypedia

Meanwhile I have found Ikip/Okip's much more extensive collection of "consensus" polls. I can see now why he is hated so much by the sausage-making crowd.

I have also been pointed to McKenna's Sep/2009 online article Bullypedia, A Wikipedian Who’s Tired of Getting Beat Up . McKenna's article makes my rant smell like rosewater. However it seems that an actual experiment has basically confirmed its central claim — that a new well-meaning editor is almost certain to be bullied and driven away by the roaming wikivogons.

Even though I am an old-timer, I did have my share of unpleasant experiences. Recenetly one of my old articles was deleted after going through the AfD. I hadn't looked at the article in years and it was not in a particularly good state; but it was not a BLP, it was duly sourced, the topic was notable, and it had been edited by other people in the meantime. That article was nominated for deletion on December 27, 2009 and killed on January 2, 2010, all before I had a chance to even see the nomination. It is too bad that Wikipedia etiquette forbids me from exposing my opinion on all the esteemed colleagues who cooperated on that deletion — including those who invented the AfD mechanism.

Many readers have appended their comments to Mckenna's article, including a few wikipedians. Some of the latter attempted to justify the bullying reported by McKenna and others as mere application of the notability rule. That is surreal. The notability rule is not an excuse for bullying: its a prime example of it! It was created and passed (in the usual "WP consensus" style) by a handful of deletionists, to give themselves the brass knuckles they needed for effective bullying.

I just found another article by Shane Richmond, technlogy editorialist for The Telegraph (UK), titled Wikipedia should delete the deletionists. Enough said.

Why Wikipedia?

One interesting comment in McKenna's blog was

"[Wikipedia is] wonderful for useless stuff. Except that fascist editors are removing the useless stuff. The not-so-useless stuff? I’ve yet to see a decent article. So, essentially, this means Wikipedia has become a parody of itself. No more adding ‘not notable’ things, and unable to improve existing ‘notable’ things because vigilant idiots are vigilant."

Some of you may remember the the explanation of why The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy sold much better than the Encyclopaedia Galactica. Wikipedia is still cheaper than the Britannica; but now it has "Panic!" written all over its pages, and whatever little it still says about the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster may soon be deleted because it fails the latest notability guidelines for interplanetary cocktails (oops, dear deletionists, please forget you read that!)

Which suggests an intriguing alternative theory to explain why Wikipedia seems to be run by bullies. I wonder, said Miss Marple, whether those gentlemen who tag articles and hang around the AfD might not perhaps be Britannica's employees? 8-)

Article tagging and spittoons

User Fram claims that the placement of the {{unreferenced}} tag was left free initially, but 10,000 editors chose to place it at top-of-article, and so the rule was changed to reflect the reality.

I disagree. Taggers were and are still a minuscule minority of the editors. The vast majority of those 10,000 --- including the creators of all those articles that got tagged --- evidently do not tag articles, and do not want that tag anywhere.

Top-of-article prevailed simply because a small number of robot-assisted editors started to place the tag in thousands of articles, at that location. (Note that top-of-article happens to be the easiest choice, from the programmer's point of view.) This, by the way, is a good example of why robot-assisted editing is inherently dumb and unfair against ordinary editors.

I doubt whether those taggers ever considered the placement "optional". A couple of times I tried to move the tag to the bottom of the article, or to the talk page. It was promptly moved back and I was bluntly told to stop such "disruptive" editing.

Anyway, modifying the guideline after the fact to make the prevailing custom become the mandated norm is the sort of abuse that I am complaining about. The prevailing *custom* is the result of robot-tagging, and does not represent prevailing *opinion*. With that change, the minority who had already lost in the poll — biased as it was — abusively imposed their opinion on the whole community. Because of that abusive change, dissent is now ignored, and editors who choose the other location are treated as vandals.

My image of an editor who inserts "unreferenced" tags is a janitor who, instead of scrubbing the floor, goes around the building spray-painting on the walls 'NO SPITTOON IN THIS ROOM. ADD ONE OR ALL THE FURNITURE WILL BE BURNED' - and abuses anyone who tries to remove the request without complying with it. You must agree that the fellow is doing very important work, since a room without a spittoon may have untold amounts of spit on the floor, and anyone who slips on it and breaks a leg could sue the skin off the landlord.

Socializing and creating

User Fram also proposes "warm applause for our 10,000 editors who find the time, inbetween their social networking, to create 1200 articles a day". Applause should go indeed to those editors who are still creating, and hopefully that is the majority of the 10,000. But it seems that all applause is going instead to a few hundred social networkers who are most active at tagging and deleting, and giving each other barnstars --- not for helping to build the barn, but for tearing down what other folks just built.

Wikipedia's future: change or die

User Peregrine Fisher writes "that's how WP works and you can't change it". Better say "that's how WP fails to work". And yes, I may not be able to change how WP "works": but it *will* change soon, one way or the other.

Judging by the new article rate, until the end of 2005 or so the pool of editors was doubling every year, just as the number of articles. At that time we had perhaps 16,000 regular editors and 1 million articles, or about 60 articles per editor. If growth had continued at that rate, we should now have at least 260,000 regular editors and perhaps 16 million articles --- but still a rate of about 60 articles for each editor.

One could argue that Wikipedia's resources could not sustaing that rate of growth anyway. Fine, but given that the articles tripled since 2006, one would expect the editor pool to have tripled too, to 45,000 people or so.

Instead, the editor pool has since shrunk by some 40%, to less than 10,000. So now we have over 300 articles for each editor, or five times the ratio we had in 2005. Guessing one printed page for each article on average, it means that today each regular editor is implicitly responsible for single-handedly editing a 300-page volume of our encyclopedia. That means inspecting every casual edit that gets made to those 300 articles, and bringing them from "half-written rough draft" to "barely publishable" state. That includes, in particular, write all the articles and sections that are still missing, satisfy all redlinks, flesh out the stubs, and (if the current "nonsensus" decisions are honored) providing at least one acceptable reference for every fact stated in those 300 pages.

If the present trend continues, the ratio will keep getting worse: . A few years from now we will reach a point where the regular editors will no longer be able to fight negative edits like vandalism and ad-spam (which, unlike positive edits, have not abated since 2006).

Forget the "always a work in progress" cliché. Soon Wikipedia will be like an abandoned construction site, an unfinished skeleton with gutted roof and broken windows, filled with grafitti and garbage and inhabited only by vandals. Who would want to contribute good contents to that wrecked project? Who will want to waste their time maintaining it? Who will donate money to keep it running?

Whodunnit?

What is the cause of this disaster? Depending on the forecast used, the policy changes that began in 2006 resulted in the loss of 35,000 to 240,000 good editors. Who is to blame for that loss?

There is plenty of evidence (like McKenna's testimonial and the "simulated newbie" experiment) pointing the finger towards editor bullying — including robot-assisted rude tagging, and paranoid deletion of "non-notable" or "unsourced" articles. Bullying may not be the only cause, but it is definitely a major contributing factor. I could not find any statistics on the number of otherwise valid articles that were deleted for "non-notable" or "unsourced" reasons alone, but "hundreds of thousands" seems a safe guess. That probably means hundreds of thousands newbie editors who were given a "prison's welcome" on their first attempt to create an article.

Deletionism is not and never was a "consensus", not even a majority opinion. It is the stupid and destructuve ideology of a small minority, that prevailed by a combination of robot power and a broken "consensus" mechanism that, in any other context, would be called "ballot fraud". It is stupid, because its goal is to move Wikipedia backwards, towards obsolete standards of paper encyclopedias. It is destructive, because it has led to the loss of tens of thousands of good articles and good editors, and earned Wikipedia some very bad press — which, this time, was quite deserved.

What can we do

In conclusion, Wikipedia will soon change, in spite of all shrugs and so-whats. If it does not change course now, radically and quickly, it will just die in a few years.

To save itself, Wikipedia must set as its top goal the recruiting and keeping of new bona-fide editors. That includes banning deletionism and any other unnecessary practice, rule or feature that may drive those editors away, no matter how dear it may be to its inventors and users. That includes, in particular,

• scrap the notability rule,
• delete and ban all editorial article-side tags, and
• stop the paranoia about usourced BLPs.

The about-turn should also include

• undelete all the articles that have ever been deleted for non-notability alone, and
• email a contrite apology to all the editors who worked on them.

If these measures succeed in bringing back only a few hundred "lost" editors, they will be well worth their cost.

All the best (with a bit more hope)