Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia

I am not an expert...

...but my understanding of the Wikipedia project is that its strength comes from a vast number of people making small changes.

However, the process self-selects to self-destruction - to wit, people who have lots of free time get the most power. But those people are usually the ones who are involved in order to gain personal prestige - the antithesis of Wikipedia in the first place. They're experts in the expert-less community.

So the community automatically becomes run by unstable people who care more about their personal power than the results. And this becomes impossible to stop, because reasonable people by definition will not be obsessed enough to fight the tendency.

And therein lies the doom of a good idea.

Witch Hunting...

Perhaps the admins of Wikipedia need to be directed to the entry for the Salem Witch Hunts... paranoia of that intensity become self perpetuating... it would be a shame to see such a useful project decend into repression and fear....

Credibility?

(I realize this is off-topic to the article, but I've missed the last few articles and this gives me a chance to bag on them and the REAL problem here on the whole. Wikipedia is only a symptom of the internet disease.)

Wikipedia - and Jimbo Wales in particular - possess credibility? This is the sort of self-important pompous crap that only Web 2.0 and its associated internet figureheads could believe. I get so tired of reading about the power of the internet. Collective intelligence is one of the biggest scams ever pulled on the global populace. Everyone in the history of the world possessing half a brain knows that evolutionary breakthroughs, engineering marvels, social progress and artistic renaissances work best and most often succeed in tight-knit, less populated groups. Success never comes about as a result of committee.

The problem here is that, collectively, the general populace is more arrogant, more self-important, more cocksure than any given individual itself. Everyone wishes they had something to say and believes that what they have to say is important. This is why you have entities like Wikipedia, and why it is riddled with paranoid, back-stabbing, pretentious twats that will do anything to ensure their continued importance.

The internet is single-handedly the worst invention ever. Not because it is lacking in any technical sense or its value to humanity is vastly over-stated. It is one of the most amazing engineering breakthroughs in history both for what it is and for what it allows: near-instantaneous communication across an entire globe and, in the future, providing the blueprint for near-instantaneous communication across our galaxy. You don't get much more important than that.

The unfortunate bit about it is that previously it was nearly impossible to gather an entire world's worth if stupidity together in a room. Now it is almost a guaranteed hourly phenomenon. All the brilliant minds in the world cannot possibly hope to fight back against the worldwide Idiocracy. Survival of the fittest - mentally, in this case - no longer applies. The world is amusing itself reading Jimbo's Big Bag o' Trivia because of what it promises to be, instead of what it really is. It's socialism all over again and they're getting away with it because of its feel-good marketing.

Wikipedia, groupthink, hive-mind intelligence, and all the other monikers that the internet's collective intelligence goes by has all ready been addressed by an existing mathematical calculation: the infinite monkey theorem. The infinite monkey theorem states that a single monkey at a typewriter would, given an infinite amount of time, write one of Shakespeare's plays. Put 50,000 of them in a room together and you'll significally cut down either the length of time taken or the probability of a positive outcome during the same length of time. Not exactly a guaranteed outcome, mind you.

The only difference between the two - worldwide collective intelligence and a room full of monkeys trying to replicate Shakespeare - is that the room full of monkeys lacks the ability to comprehend the futility of their endeavor and the pretentiousness of continuing to try.

What's humanity's excuse?

A note from the so-called "enemy camp"

It's a fine article, though from a purely selfish perspective it would have been nice if you'd asked for a comment from one of us over at The Wikipedia Review!

As a humble member of the staff over there, I'd just like to assure everyone that our website is most definitely NOT involved in some sort of well-organized "conspiracy" to "disrupt" Wikipedia - they're perfectly capable of doing that themselves these days. And paranoia has long been a stock-in-trade among Wikipedia's "inner circle," along with the longstanding traditions of self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and revenge. Regardless, Wikipedia Review is just a collection of disparate individuals who are, for the most part, concerned to varying degrees (and with varying levels of anger) about Wikipedia's impact on the internet and society at large, and how its mind-boggling system of rules and policies have been manipulated for the benefit of a fairly small handful of individuals with some rather questionable agendas. And a significant number of our members actually tend to defend Wikipedia, rather than criticize it.

Still, it would certainly not be fair to characterize Durova as being in any way typical of the average Wikipedia administrator, most of whom are decent people with perfectly benevolent (if misguided) motives. Almost as soon as she gained administrator status, Durova began to exhibit almost shocking levels of self-aggrandizement, vindictiveness, paranoia, and incompetence that are already legendary in the annals of Wikipedian absurdities. The incident you've documented here is hardly isolated - it's just one of a long series of blunders, slanders, and attacks on undeserving volunteers whose only offense, in some cases, was to question her actions or motives. (And, in one particularly galling case, to ask for a simple apology for a statement that could only have been interpreted as outright libel.)

The Wikipedia Review's purpose is to help expose the corruption, abusiveness, and hypocrisy that exists at the heart of Wikipedia. In a very small number of cases, that has - admittedly - involved exposing some information about the Wikipedians themselves. Ultimately, it's perfectly understandable that the Wikipedia hard-liners would come to despise us, publish all manner of lies and distortions about us, and attempt to censor links to (if not actual mentions of) us. After all, nobody likes being criticized, particularly when they're not being paid for it! But the degree of paranoia and vindictiveness we're now seeing is getting beyond all hope of rationality. Moreover, this is coming long after we've taken significant steps to remove offensive or potentially compromising information from public areas of our own website, if not to delete it altogether. (As it turns out, we don't care so much about our search-engine rankings. *Imagine that!*)

We can only hope that Wikipedia finds a way to right its ship sooner, rather than later, but history suggests that we're in for a long wait.

Fraud

Wikipedia is a fucking fraud. All hype, no substance. Anyone using their stuff for "research" deserved to be laughed at. No rigour. No actual peer review.

Now this? Fuck 'em. It's a nice scam, but why oh why have so many people fallen for it?

Well that's a good example

I have now the perfect example of what I call a Wikinazi. Secret lists, secret tribunals, information on need-to-know basis that you never need to know, all the typical behavioral patterns of an organization that has none of the goals referenced under "freedom of information", "justice", or even plain old "common sense".

It would appear that common sense is not so common after all.

In any case, behavior like this is the very reason why I despise Wikipedia : ignoramuses who abuse their powers remove all credibility from anything they touch. I'm sorry for all the people who honestly work to contribute to this failure of a model, but I approach Wikipedia with just as much circumspection as I would approach an angry rattlesnake.

knitting tightly until recently

"Tight knit groups". I suspect throughout history most failures have come from small tight knit groups, as well as most successes, because anything bigger was hard to produce.

Inevitable result of the psychology of systems.

In any system for work, the larger the system, the more time and effort it spends on the system, at the expense of the work.

Or to put it another way: people are a problem.

A ripened sock

Well I usually find stories about Wikipedia entertaining, but there's something especially lovely about an organisation which dismisses its detractors as "ripened socks".

Nothing new here of course. Plenty of real-world organisations have an idealist basis and an avowed intention to do good, but end up doing nothing but in-fighting because control over what is done has become more important than what is done. Human nature innit.

Technology outgrowing ability to manage it

Seems Wiki is suffering the same problem as the recording industry - a technology has been introduced that allows free flow of information, yet the security model and user management "science" have not adjusted to best manage the results.

Kind of a shame that one of the "poster boys" for the new information age hasn;t figured out how manage its technology.

More research on social science, psychology and trend analysis needed? Better "filters" to remove "false positives"?

Share and Enjoy!

Decree from the desk of the Supreme Leader

It's all going a bit comunist isn't it? How long until Jimbo (The Supreme Leader) starts describing people as lickspittle, reactionary, 'the hated former comrade-contribiter "!!"' etc. etc.

I think that they should implement a five year plan, or some sort of era of change.

It's a sect

I used to edit and my account got "damaged"

I have experienced that if you add a significant content to any established article it is reverted.

After annoying myself for a few days again, I not editing again. It's too much hassle.

The way they implement the NPOV is madness too.

Comrade Durova?

Dose this whole thing remind anyone of the USSR? A bold an laudable Idea, no matter how right or wrong in its basis, brought to its knees by a ruling elite, who were put there to "make sure everything runs smoothly". People who were given power, and when they abuse it they are fine, but when they are caught they are shunned until it all goes away.

Next thing? They will become so arrogant about there power that they wont care who knows about the abuse, and start ranting that they are doing what they do to "keep the stability of the community" and that they "did nothing wrong. You are listening to the outsiders, who are trying to undermine us".

They are doomed.

@AC Revolutions

From Terry Pratchett....Don't put your trust in revolutions. They

always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions

publish this (on Wikipedia)

This article sounds like it belongs on Wikipedia, as a reminder of what can go wrong when a small number of people assign themselves unaccountable power over others.

@Anon Coward

"ironic ring as "Communist party insider". .. or maybe "fat capitalist whoremonger"

ahhh .. you pays your money you takes your choice

Given Google, Why Wikipedia?

If have any expertise in a subject and the time and inclination to express that as a web page or two, why would I then place the article under someone else's editorial control, when I could place it on my own site. Search engines will find it and, though they have their own problems with self-publicists trying to bias the results, they are evidently much fairer than *any* human editorial process yet discovered.

themightyspangs first law of humanity

asshat+asshat = clique

Lord Of The Flies 2.0

I once spent some time updating an article with accurate information. It was an area in which I have considerable experience and knowledge. In the process I corrected a number of basic mistakes in the information already present.

A few days later I went to add some more information, only to find all my work undone with the explanation "rv" (which I found means reverted vandalism)! I restored the info and added my new updates. Within hours it was once again undone.

At that point I couldn't be arsed any more. It appeared to be a battle of wills, with the winner being the person with a) the most time and b) the largest ego. Frankly I've got better things to do. I let the incorrect data stand and don't trust anything these days on the consensus reality that is Wikipedia.

The most annoying thing is the way that it's ranked very highly by Google, and the world at large seems to embrace the truth (Truth?) of Wikipedia without question. I initially found this tedious, now I find it rather worrying. By definition, Reality According To Wikipedia will be written by the biggest, most obsessive control freaks out there, and Google is serving this shit up as fact without question.

The whole Wikipedia architcture naturally graduates to this state of control freakery and clique power. It seems that the idea of collaberation works with small groups; with large, disparate groups, it becomes much more down to a desire to control.

Welcome to Lord Of The Flies 2.0

Sometimes wiki is good

The only time I seem to use wikipedia is to find info from the hard sciences. As far as the posted information for science on wikipedia is concerned it is almost always 100% correct. But maybe that's just because it's such an objective topic it's hard to fudge it up.

Wtf is 'sockpuppeting'?

Wtf is 'sockpuppeting'? Everybody else seem to know :(

It's a Cult. Quelle Surprise.

That the inner workings of Wikipedia has turned into a cult, with obscure language, deified leaders, diabolic opponents and all mod cons, in the manner of Scientology or EST, will make for an interesting sociology PhD in a few years' time.

WTF??

I'm astonished that anyone, anywhere, takes wikipaedia seriously. I have never seen a more obvious mutual masturbation club - These saddoes exceed even Mensa in their pompous mediocrity.

Why is this news? We've all (hopefully) experienced playground politics, but in the PLAYGROUND, which is where it belongs. That these losers would rather flick wet towels at each other than improve the lamentable quality of their "project" says it all for me.

Sadly, this is typical Web 2.0. It's like the Pajamahadeen who read genuine journalism, where someone has actually done some work, and then bend it around their preconceptions and prejudices and turn it into dishonest and misleading bollocks (allowing for one moment that it wasn't in the first place). Even better, this tripe is then read by other pajamahadeen and, through the twin mechanisms of chinese whispers and profound personal dishonesty, it trancends all reality and even sanity.

Consider Star Trek's Borg for a moment. Whereas it looks painful, and they obviously don't get out in the sun often enough, these are minor drawbacks compared to having all the dubious nonsense that their entire civilisation is thinking going through all their heads all the time. It seems to me that Web 2.0 has at least closed off that nightmare for us. In spades.

Do you rate Web 2.0 as anything other than the largest communal waste of time that H. Sapiens (Ho Ho) has yet come up with? Then you're an idiot.

Examples of bias in wikipedia

It was quite possible people are being blocked because their world view is not consistent with the majority of people (or people of influence) in wikipedia: http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia

External linkage

Apart from the info that Wikipedia contains, wether there's false information or not, one of the strongest points is one which the editors appear to delight in removing, the external links to sites that often contain better & more detailed info on the subject in question.

It's like the admins are trying to stop people believing in the internet "nah nah nah nah, you don't want to go searching with Google, we've got all the info you'll ever need right here! We Are Your Internet"

@Maksim

A sockpuppet is when you use a second anonymous identity on a forum or website, usually to cause trouble.

Was sind und was sollen ein Sockenmarionette?

A sockpuppet is an Improvised Entertainment Device (IED) for young moppets, much like Wikipedia itself.

Intenet worst invention ever?

Bryce Prewitt: "The internet is single-handedly the worst invention ever."

Wow, even worse than democracy? You seem to believe that power should be left in the hands of the Privileged Few who can handle it. Beware the unwashed masses!

Always happens

This is why, once its reached a certain size, your average guild/clan/forum/mailing-list eventually always implodes thanks to a negative chain reaction of backstabbing, paranoia, power-hunger, conspiracies (and accusations of), ect, ect.

Welcome to the Internet.