Wikipedians are not neutral

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia only ArbCom can edit?

Are we working on a neutral encyclopedia, or aren't we? Sometimes I wonder.

Time and again, the question comes up. Usually it's asked in the context of outside influences "pushing" a point of view on some page or another; all too often, a POV is pushed from inside our community, subverting the neutrality content for our own ends.

In February, after questions arose regarding the relationship between the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and for-profit Wikia, Wikimedia UK chair Alison Wheeler created a template called "Wikia is not Wikipedia," a large banner linking the WMF's official press release on the matter,
and placed it atop Wikipedia's article on Wikia while making other "corrections" to footnotes. It's worth noting the template included lots of scare text insisting it couldn't be removed from any article without approval from the WMF Communications Committee. Several users questioned this, pointing out that it was hardly a neutral content decision and that no other article subject would ever be allowed such latitude. The template was removed and nominated for deletion, as it should have been. Alison's response? Rolled back the edit as vandalism and issued block warnings so stern the user was scared off the project. It took an angry mob at TfD to get the template deleted. She claimed to be acting on behalf of the Foundation itself, and ominously threatened to take the issue "higher up."

Not to worry, even though the template was deleted, Alison kept trying to insert it. Fortunately she dropped the ridiculous block threats, in later episodes.

Eventually, WMF chair Florence Devouard had a try at it.

This isn't the only time the Wikimedians have interfered with article content for their own ends. Take as another example the never-ending "sole founder" debate at the article on Jimmy Wales. Jimbo also appears to have successfully agitated to have his date of birth removed from the article about him. It's not clear to me whether WMF deputy director Erik Möller had a hand in anything similar, but it may be worth noting his date of birth is likewise absent at that article.

More recently, in March, advertising firm Modernista! implemented a rather minimalist website, one which simply placed their main menu around the page currently being viewed. One "about" link from this menu likewise sends readers to Wikipedia's article on the firm. Some readers apparently were confused by this, and thought Modernista somehow controlled the article. Initially, Jimbo asked them to stop, but soon enough other solutions were in the works: a technical solution might break out of the frame and subtly solve the problem; a big red banner would explain what was going on, but would get us into the business of trying to embarrass companies into doing what we want by leaving nasty notes on articles about them. Guess what happened? Alison Wheeler returned again to toss up another banner.

The latest episode I find troubling is at the freshly recreated Encyclopedia Dramatica article. There's a big hubbub about whether or not the ED website should be linked from the ED article. Never mind that we regularly link to a whole variety of websites with hateful content, as in articles on Stormfront or the Westboro Baptist Church, or iffy copyright status, as in articles on Pirate Bay, Youtube, or 4chan, apparently we plan on diverging from the common-sense rule applied at pretty much every article on the site because ED and Wikipedia don't get along well. What does this accomplish, exactly? We won't stop anybody from finding the site, we won't even deny them a PageRank boost, we'll just look incredibly petty by refusing to place a blatantly relevant link right where it so obviously belongs. What message are we sending, here? It's okay to break the law, but not WP policy. It's okay to harass people, as long as they're not Wikipedians. Way to establish our priorities.

A bit of explanation, the editors who want the link excluded are claiming that prior decisions of the arbitration committee in the MONGO and Attack sites cases support their position (they don't). They're also citing WP:BADSITES a lot, even though the "policy" was quite clearly rejected after a very long and painful argument. They'll just keep pushing until people are tired of arguing about it, I guess. Currently there's a painfully redundant request for clarification: can we link to ED at the ED article? Thank the heavens that arbitrator Kirill Lokshin displayed a hefty amount of clue when suggesting the prohibition on links to ED made a lot more sense when there wasn't an ED article. Too bad Wikipedians aren't listening to him. Administrators MBisanz, Hu12, and Sandstein have worked to keep the link out of the article. Even David Levy, who supports inclusion of the link and is doing his best to mediate the discussion fairly, seems to insist we cannot add the link without approval.

As you might expect, the article was put up for deletion the moment it saw daylight. I could go either way as far as having an article or not, but if we're going to have an article at all, we should be doing it right. We're after NPOV, not WPOV.

So I ask again: are we working on a neutral encyclopedia, or aren't we?

--

Edit 1, 2008-05-15: Had posted this, the other day, but apparently it got lost somewhere along the line, for reasons I don't quite follow. Worth noting the link is currently present but still being argued over.

Edit 2, 2008-05-16: NonvocalScream is not currently an administrator. He is a former admin. Pointed out by a few readers, thank you.

Edit 3, 2008-06-01: NonvocalScream contacted me to let me know I'd misstated his position, when I said he opposed the ED link. He did strongly advocate waiting for a go-ahead from Arbcom, but he also supported inclusion of the link. I've removed the brief mention of him above. My apologies once more, NVS.

Picture if you will

Picture, if you will, a scenario where a young man is walking through an apartment complex on a Saturday night while carrying the following: a spare coat, a laptop, assorted half-empty bottles of booze, and... a bright plastic plunger.

Noticeboard bloat, part two

Last year, I wrote about the rapid proliferation of noticeboards on Wikipedia. Shortly after that, the Editabuselinks template got trimmed down a bit. Unfortunately, the bloating has continued since then. Compare if you will between the 5 July 2007 and 28 March 2008 versions.

The linked July version sports two sections: Editing abuse, including Administrator intervention against vandalism, the 3RR noticeboard, WikiProject on open proxies, Long term abuse, Suspected sock puppets, Abuse reports, Requests for checkuser, and Usernames for administrator attention; and Noticeboards, including the Administrators' noticeboard, Incidents noticeboard, Community sanction noticeboard, Arbitration enforcement noticeboard, Biographies of living persons noticeboard, and Conflict of interest noticeboard.

Today's version has exploded into four sections: General help, including the Help desk, Department directory, Media copyright questions, Image copyright help desk, WikiProject User Page Help's own help desk, the New contributors' help page, and Village pump assistance subpage; Report abuse, including Administrator intervention against vandalism, WikiProject Spam, the 3RR noticeboard, Usernames for administrator attention, WikiProject on open proxies, Suspected sock puppets, Copyright problems, and Long term abuse; Request assistance, including Requests for page protection, ISP Abuse reports, Requests for checkuser, Requests for arbitration, Requests for mediation, the Mediation Cabal, and Requests for comment; an,d Noticeboards, including the Administrators' noticeboard, Incidents noticeboard, Arbitration enforcement noticeboard, Checkuser clerks noticeboard, Bot owners' noticeboard, Conflict of interest noticeboard, Biographies of living persons noticeboard, Fiction noticeboard, Fringe theories noticeboard, Original research noticeboard, Neutral point of view noticeboard, and Reliable sources noticeboard.

Notice a trend? From 14 to 35 pages linked, in about half a year. What once took two rows of text now takes at least five or six, depending on your display. Previously I mentioned a 60% increase in link count in roughly a year; here we're looking at 250% in half that time.

Looking at the template history, links added are rarely removed or get replaced in short order.

What's good about this growth? It allows people to focus on topics they're interested in, and as such may allow return users to address complex issues. The topical archives produced by subject-based pages may be easier to browse, when dealing with issues that come up repeatedly. Consensus on a given area of policy may become more clear if discussions are kept together.

What's bad about this? Because it's so hard to watch (or search) an ever-increasing number of pages, large portions of the community are effectively excluded from discussion at these boards. Where one perspective might see a group of experienced users addressing complex issues, another perspective might see a cabal or posse dominating a particular area by virtue of being the only users regularly active on a page. I worry newcomers will be overwhelmed -- I imagine the difficulty of figuring out where to go only grows as the option count increases, and I'd bet the rate of growth is more than linear. Consensus on a given area of policy may become less clear if discussions exclude a large number of users.

Do we have other options? I'd be curious about finding a happy medium, here, something that allows for quick temporal awareness of current discussion and topical browsing of pages and their archives. Even something simple like a list of thread links, sorted by topic, could be a great step in that direction. Efforts like Eagle 101's AN archive search tool or Messedrocker's RFC bot are definitely a help, here.

Mostly, though, I don't think this rapid proliferation of noticeboards and overcrowded navigation templates is any sort of indefinite solution.

Another chapter in the Betacommand saga

By the time you wind up with an admin noticeboard subpage dedicated to your name, it should be clear you're a bit of a lightning rod. I won't go into an in-depth analysis of these long-standing controversies, aside from: Betacommand does a lot of wonderful bot work for Wikipedia, work that is direly needed and often thankless, but his abrasive handling of that work all too frequently leaves a wake of confused and angry users, which in turn leads to increasing controversy and argument. Rinse and repeat.

Isn't that the stereotype? "Skilled programmer needs to work on interpersonal skills." I somehow doubt that's going to make headlines as a surprise story.

Numerous proposals have come up, over the past few months: keeping BC in charge of the bots, but allowing other people to respond to complaints at User talk:BetacommandBot and the newly created Image copyright help desk; splitting up the various BCBot tasks into multiple bots, to allow for (hopefully) less fragmented discussion; moving some of the most-argued-over tasks to Non-Free Content Compliance Bot; finding ways to limit the frustrating, harassing effect of suddenly getting potentially dozens of rapid-fire, lengthy messages at bot speed regarding their image uploads, either by compressing duplicate messages, refining the content of those messages, or allowing users to opt out of receiving them. That last proposal seems to have caught fire, today.

Proponents of an opt-out list argue that it would significantly reduce problems: these messages seem to attract the most drama, out of all the things BCBot does. Users often find the sudden hail of messages frustrating or confusing. Experienced users should be familiar with policies, and may not even find the messages useful. Users who wish to receive the notifications, of course, needn't sign up for the list. Such a list might help to reduce the vicious cycle of aggravation going around. This seems to be a reasonable position.

Opponents of an opt-out list argue that such a list might actually increase problems, if users later complain that they "weren't notified" of impending image deletions. The notifications can be an important notice of policy problems, either for users unaware of problems or for users interested in tracking them. The messages direct users, especially new users, to review image policy and compose fair use rationales, potentially saving a large number of images from sudden deletion, or helping users to realize that their images aren't appropriate. All of this is important for the NFC policy. This seems to be a reasonable position.

For my part, I think such a fix could go a long way to calming down this little war. It's not a perfect solution, but it may be a quick one that gets us all working on the wiki again.

Last night, Betacommand created an opt-out list at User:BetacommandBot/Opt-out. According to BC, users signing up must agree to two provisions:

• Keep in mind that when you sign this list, you fully are aware that you lose the right to complain about deletions, reversions, etc. because you were "not notified" about them.

Harsh phrasing aside, this seems more or less fair. Doc glasgow proposed what seems to me a much better version: "Keep in mind that if you sign this opt-out list, you should not later complain that you were "not notified" about deletions, reversions, etc performed by the bot." BC replied that the harsh wording was intentional.

• You also lose the right to complain about BetacommandBot itself or the issues it raises.

This second clause has ignited edit wars and furious debate. Arthur Rubin speedily deleted the page, and initiated an MfD when it was restored. BC has reverted attempts to remove this clause, calling them "vandalism," and likewise removed the signature of one user who rejected the agreement (currently there are no signatures on the page). Numerous users have objected to such a requirement, and rightfully so: it goes against basic principles of fair play, and there's no way that we as a community can stand for such a proposition. Users cannot forfeit their right to participate in discussion, in this fashion -- trying to force them to violates so much of what a wiki is about, including open editing and participation, the assumption of good faith, even fundamental civility. Are we really coming to gang warfare and coercion, here? The only way for users to avoid what they perceive as harassment is by giving up their right to speak? How long before we're looking at demands for protection money?

I find it hard to believe BC would seriously expect such a two-faced offer to last. Was this a cry for attention?

BrownHairedGirl had some comments I found quite insightful:

Doc glasgow has put an alternative wording on the table, but while I'm sure he was trying to help, I don't think that was necessary. I doubt that it would take more than a moment's work for BC to edit this short document to remove the gagging clause if he wanted to do so. However, if Betacommand believes (rightly or wrongly) that anyone who criticises him is just a drama queen, I can't see any amount of discussion here changing his mind on that point or on this wording.

I'm afraid that this just a manifestation of the wider problem that BC seems to have got himself into a position where he doesn't trust the editing community, and this particular problem won't be fixed until the wider problem is fixed. The question of how it is fixed remains to be seen, but this document is just another symptom of a breakdown of trust between a bot operator and the comunity.

I don't know if there is a solution. We definitely have a problem.

Riana's RfB a referendum on Kelly Martin?

See: Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/Riana, closure currently pending a closed but public "Bureaucrat discussion" -- the sort we see when a single crat isn't willing to close a discussion alone.

There are apparently two major points of contention, as described by WJBScribe in the bcrat chat:

• The fact that Riana's decision to nominate Kelly Martin for adminship calls into question her judgment (emphasis mine)
• Issues of temperament - with diffs cited of a couple of incidents involved the use of profanity/incivility

I won't speak to the second. In my mind, that's a legitimate reason to oppose, regardless of whether I agree.

The first, however, I have to take strong issue with. Since when did a single RfA nomination become a defining moment in anybody's Wikipedia career? Are we so bitter with ourselves, so divided into petty factions, that we deny a widely trusted and long-active user access on such a flimsy basis? Apparently some of us are so far gone that even the mere spectre of Kelly Martin becomes a deciding factor in bureaucrat discussion.

Sound nuts? Not everyone thinks so. After FeloniousMonk's oppose first linked Martin's second RfA from October 2007, several others including Guettarda, SlimVirgin, Jossi, Secret, OrangeMarlin, KillerChihuahua, B, and even Mailer Diablo stated the KM nomination as the primary or even sole reason for their opposition. Others, including MONGO and Ral315, later withdrew similar opposition.

Riana's been a Wikipedian for two years, now, and an administrator for about half that (see her hugely successful RfA). According to ST47's ADMINSTATS, she's logged over 17,000 admin actions. One failed RfA nom overrides all of that? We're not even discussing two years of dedication, here, because of one thought the community happened to reject.

There's one thing several in opposition seem to have missed: Riana is not Kelly Martin. If you want to oppose KM, fine and go ahead, but that's not the topic under discussion. The impression I get is that it's not what you do for the wiki that counts, but who you happen to bring forward for consideration by the community.

Mailer's comment about the "full gravity and consequence" of the nomination was rightly quipped down by Dorftroffel: "The full consequence was that Kelly was (of course) not promoted." Isn't that how we're supposed to look at these things? If "adminship isn't a big deal," as the saying goes, why is the mere nomination given center stage?

Personally, I don't keep track of who nominated whom. I don't consider it important, and definitely not in the long run. Doing anything else will only breed an atmosphere of political infighting and careful cabalism.

All I ask the community and the bureaucrats is this: show some sense of fair play and let Riana stand or fall on her own merits. It would be a damned shame to judge her on any other basis.

An email mole

The other day, I got an email from User:Wikigender:

Dear User of Wikipedia,

You have created or modified an article related to gender. We would like to inform you that the OECD Development Centre (www.oecd.org/dev) has recently introduced a new wiki-based Internet platform exclusively focused on gender equality, called Wikigender (www.wikigender.org).

If you are interested in joining this initiative and sharing your knowledge with other experts of gender equality, please contact us at [email removed].

Please be advised that you will need a password to enter the site prior to its official launch on March 8 (International Women's Day), which we are happy to provide upon request.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely, The OECD Wikigender Team

Perhaps I'm being naive, but I don't think I've run across any similar use of Special:Emailuser previously. Register an account without any/much editing, confirm an email, and wait silently for anyone to edit a relevant article... once they do, send them your email pitch. So long as there's no significant on-wiki activity or complaint, you can probably continue this behavior indefinitely. For lack of a better term, I guess I'll call it an "email mole."

I appreciate that this is at least significantly better targeted and tailored than everyday spam, but I can't help being a bit uncomfortable with what seems a possible misuse of account priviledges and resources. They won't have direct access to my email address unless I reply, but they can continue to make use of Special:Emailuser unless their access to it is revoked.

One more example of how marketers and politicians are gradually moving into narrowcasting, I suppose.

What do others think? Is this an acceptable thing to do? What happens if this sort of thing occurs on a large scale? Or has it, already, and I just haven't run into it, yet?

Metapedian, 2008-02-06

A recently created "Wikia is not Wikipedia" template intended for use atop articles relating to Wikia is up for deletion. The template was created in response to possible reader and media confusion regarding the relationship between Wikia and Wikimedia. Use of the template, including related administrative actions, has been controversial.

Extensive and widespread discussion continues regarding the use of images in Wikipedia's Muhammad article which depict the prophet himself. Numerous readers are upset by the inclusion of the images, citing religious taboos. The debate itself is not new, but is getting renewed attention. The article's talk page and wikiEN-l in particular are active forums. The article has recently been covered by the New York Times.

Following the deletion of Wikipedia's "Adult-child sex" article, numerous copies have appeared in userspace. A miscellany for deletion discussion regarding the subpage recreations is ongoing.

Membership of the recently founded Working group on ethnic and cultural edit wars has been announced.

Crazycomputers announced on wikiEN-l the creation of a tool to help search for active rangeblocks. At least one other similar tool exists, as is mentioned in the linked thread, but some users apparently have had trouble using it.

East718 and Betacommand worked together to add a large number of revisions to en.wikipedia's Main Page, which would prevent it from being deleted after the recent implementation of measures to prevent regular deletion of pages with several thousand edits. The action became controversial, including blocking and calls for other sanctions, with some editors preferring more discussion or a better technical solution. Tim Starling quickly altered some settings which will render it more difficult to delete any Wikimedia wiki's front page. Discussion is split between wikitech-l and wikiEN-l.

Current adminship candidacies: Remember the dot (2nd), Barneca (2nd), Master of Puppets (2nd), Aitis, TheDJ.