I write with mixed emotions. Some years back, I edited some articles here, and quickly wound up in the sort of editing wars referenced in Timonthy Messer-Kruse's article The Undue Weight of Truth on Wikipedia. The commentary here and elsewhere inspired me to create a new account to make my comments. For reasons that will become clear, I doubt I'll ever edit another article here. I wanted to explain why, in tones even enough to survive the roving bands of deletionists. We shall see.
Does Wikipedia Want To Fix Its Problems?
In writing, I make some assumptions, at least for purposes of argument: that those who are especially influential here care about Wikipedia's accuracy and credibility; and that they want address its flaws; and that they'd like to fulfill the stated mission of Wikipedia as a "user edited encyclopedia." To me, those assumptions are somewhat debatable. After all, the problems that Messer-Kruse, and others like him, have highlighted are not new. At the very least, they have continued to fester, and more likely they have deepened, and eroded Wikipedia's reputation to an increasingly serious degree. Left unaddressed in effective ways, the problems will keep eroding Wikipedia's substance, and with it, the encyclopedia's credibility. No one can say which straw will break the camel's back, or what pinch of salt added to a supersaturated solution will leave a pile of crystals at the bottom of the beaker. Maybe it will never happen at Wikipedia. But maybe it will. If it does, the problems highlighted -- once again, for his article was hardly a surprise -- by Messer-Kruse are what will sink the experiment.
It should be clear by now that I think he's on very solid ground with his criticisms. And that's all I'll say about it, because I think he and those who have supported his account have covered all of the territory that needs to be covered with respect to the specific incident. My words are aimed at a different level, as those who decide to keep reading will see presently. The responses from Wikipedians fall into two broad categories. One is those who think Messer-Kruse was wrong. That group focuses mainly on his manners. Messer-Kruse wasn't patient enough. He engaged in grandstanding, and maybe even book promotion, by taking his complaint to the Chronicle of Higher Education. He violated the Undue Weight rule. Because he is an expert with an opinion, he ipso facto violated the NPOV rule. By citing his own book, he was self-promoting. A second category of responses are sympathetic to Messer-Kruse, and focus instead on the brusque treatment he received, and on the misinterpretation of policies used to justify the reversion of his edits.
Policies Are Not The Problem
Leaving aside the specifics of which policies Messer-Kruse did or did not violate, and whether the policies should be rewritten, or changed, I'd say this: To frame Messer-Kruse's experience almost exclusively in terms of Wikipedia policies, including the broader issue of whether Wikipedia is increasingly hostile to new input, dodges the problems that caused the incident to begin with. Wikipedia doesn't lack policies and rules. Quite the contrary, it has too many policies. Your rules resemble the federal tax code; the exemptions, exclusions, and inclusions run into each other. Policies are contradictory, and unclear. In the end, they are often ignored, except when editors are fighting amongst themselves, or at least as often, against an outsider who naively followed the prominent exhortation to "be bold."
Every single thing about Wikipedia -- its highly difficult user interface, its dense forest of contradictory rules, and its rapidly ossifying internal culture -- has coalesced to come down like a ton of bricks on anything or anyone who even remotely threatens this site with "boldness." Messer-Kruse's work is bold: He has spent his life accumulating expertise on the Haymarket riots; advanced a bold thesis about the events, and the trial; wrote a book that survived peer review; and came here to incorporate facts into Wikipedia's article on the subject. And for that, he was forced to run the same gauntlet that countless uncredentialed users have run when trying to make far less bold corrections and additions to other material here.
His experience matters not because he's a scholar or an expert; all that did was make him ultimately less assailable by the usual methods here. What resonates about Messer-Kruse's experience is that it shines a light on what happens day in and day out throughout the Wikipedia project. Multiply his story by a few thousand, or more, and you have what a significant proportion of hapless people, drawn in by Wikipedia's promotional rhetoric, have experienced at the hands of an insular community that cannot effectively deal with disagreement, and cannot seem to understand that its many procedures, in the end, serve to exacerbate rather than help reconcile disagreements. As a result, Wikipedia is increasingly known as a place to avoid if there is any controversy surrounding a topic. Left unchecked, your future is to be an online version of World Book, useful for grade-school level material about topics that no one cares enough to argue about in the real world.
Want To Fix Wikipedia? Grab It By The Ankles And Shake It
For starters, Wikipedia needs a fundamental overhaul. Not nips and tucks on this or that policy or rule, most of which are casually ignored anyway. You need to reassess Wikipedia's hostility to the very concept of a fact, and to the idea that anything might be true, or that the truth is worth pursuing. There are plenty of ways to elevate the role of facts and the truth without turning Wikipedia into a user-edited online Bible. But before you can even approach that potentially sticky wicket, you need to embrace the notion that there is such a thing as a fact, as opposed to something that was merely published in The New York Times.
From there, Wikipedia needs to ruthlessly prune its list of policies. They need to be clearer, less contradictory, and (especially) less numerous. When you do arrive at a slimmed-down core of them, then they need to be followed strictly. Groups (cliques, really) of editors who follow each others' edits cannot be allowed to descend on articles, repelling input that is neutral, factual, and sourced. Any honest Wikipedian knows that this happens all the time on this site, and that it repels not only newcomers but veterans. And finally, Wikipedia needs to radically de-emphasize the role of what can only be described as a sort of juvenile popularity contest when it comes to judging content. A contributor's irascibility, or even blatant self-interest, should never be an excuse for excluding content that is accurate, factual, and otherwise neutral. But at Wikipedia, much of the discussion in article talk pages winds up revolving around the contributor, as opposed to the contribution.
That's all for now, anyway. I'm not exactly hopeful, because I know you've been told all of this before, by many other people, in all kinds of ways. Yet, the steady stream of excluded, embittered contributors, and unreliable articles, continues. It's been a while since I've seen any statistics about your retention of editors, and what those who remain here are actually doing with their time. But, given the steady drip of accounts like Messer-Kruse's, it's readily apparent that the organization has grown steadily more resistant to outside input, not less so. As the old saying goes, "If you keep doing what you always did, you'll keep getting what you always got."
Again: Does Wikipedia Want To Fix Its Problems?
Which brings me back to my original assumptions, and my mixed feelings. Do those who are especially influential here care about Wikipedia's accuracy and credibility? Do they want to effectively address its flaws? Would they like to fulfill the stated mission of Wikipedia as a "user edited encyclopedia?" We'll see.Moynihanian (talk) 01:35, 25 February 2012 (UTC)