Me and Wikipedia/Original version

From ChapmanCentral

I have closed down my Wikipedia account and asked Cary Bass to remove the sysop bit.

Wikipedia cannot protect people from the efforts of determined trolls and abusers. It never could. It seems to be moving in the direction of not even trying, though, and actively welcoming the "criticism" of people who are justly banned for trying to use Wikipedia to boost themselves, their work or their opinions.

If you have a job or a family, do not do get involved with controversial subjects on Wikipedia. There are people out there who are batshit insane and will genuinely try to get you fired from your job, call you at home, solicit burglars to raid your home, and invite predators to look at your kids. They might even think it's not serious, that it's only a bit of fun. Only one of the above has not happened to me, and that one happened to someone else. Yes, really. Dan Tobias apparently thinks that linking to harassment can be compared with mentioning the word "rutabaga". So that's one person who doesn't understand. There are plenty of others. Let's be clear here: I strongly believe that anybody who refuses to accept that harassment and outing are a serious problem to be dealt with in a completely uncompromising way, should be shown the door, right now. It doesn't matter how much they love their pet attack site, Wikipedia is not Usenet and the kind of shit bandied about on the attack sites is utterly poisonous to any attempts to build a collaboration between opposing viewpoints. At its best, Wikipedia can perform this difficult feat very well, but only by rigorously reining in those on the extremes. Neutrality is not the average between one extreme and another, still less the average between one extreme and whatever the current state of the article might be. Zealots are a poison, a cancer that is spreading and needs the chemotherapy of bannination.

There are a thousand admins on the English Wikipedia. Most are just vandal-fighters, important but mop and bucket stuff. Some are seriously out of control, and have been known to leak logs and deleted revisions (which is why oversight was invented, a feature that a few hysterical idiots bitch about as an "abuse" and against free speech; why the fuck should anyone care if one edit is removed from history because it shows someone's IP address?). A few are honest, decent folks who try to keep the peace. And there are some like me who are the "heavy mob". All have the same problem: unless you are a really special kind of person (which I'm not), the relentless POV-pushing eventually gets under your skin. So we have a steady burnout rate. This is sad but not a tragedy unless there is no source of replacements. I think Wikipedia should actively recruit grownups, for the perspective they bring. If only I was a grownup, rather than an overgrown adolescent...

I'm not going to mount a line-by-line defence of my Wikipedia actions, partly because there are so very many of them and very few were even slightly controversial, but also because I have not always been very nice. I was not very nice to Rfwoolf, after about the tenth or eleventh time he repeated his lies about the deletion of an article. Sure, calling a troll a troll does not help. But not doing so doesn't stop them being a troll, either. Wikipedia is full of obsessives who won't accept a polite rebuff. Or, indeed, a blunt one. Even when they're banned by acclamation, they set up shop on Wikipedia Review where the culture is to accept that you were in the right just because you were banned. It wasn't always like that, but the lunatics took over the asylum there just as they did with WikiAbuse. My biggest problem on Wikipedia has always been with people who keep on presenting the same argument however often it is rejected; this is constantly being presented as a problem with this or that admin being "incivil" or "failing to assume good faith", but in the end there is absolutely nothing wrong with blaming abusers of the project for the trouble they cause. Yes, Jonathan Barber, this means you, among many.

And, just like them, I can never just drop it. Becoming obsessive over the neutrality of content is almost as bad as becoming obsessive over getting your esoteric point of view in. In the real world, nobody cares that the personal rapid transit article is a fanwank or that the articles on crop circles and Roswell are constantly being hijacked by people who believe Elvis was abducted by aliens. Why the hell should I care?

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The debates spawned by the likes of Rfwoolf are a perfect example of the kind of shit that make the project joyless for those prepared to actually take on the occasional hard case, because even the blindingly obvious easy cases now bring crowds of malcontents to cheer the trolls on.

• It is stressful. In case you had not worked it out by now, many of my views are controversial but based on an extensive review of the evidence. That means conflict with militant speeders, fans of cycle facilities and helmets. I can take that. Being a sysop, though, also brings one into conflict with large numbers of people who are there solely to promote themselves or their agenda. Wikipedia assumes good faith, a noble aim, but that gets harder and harder to do as more and more obvious trolls and sockpuppets demand that you assume good faith, and troll enablers come along to join the demands while systematically refusing to assume good faith on your part. The result is a feeling of isolation and a siege mentality, a steady procession of the busiest and most respected sysops being driven away.

• It is a time sink. I have spent as many hours working on Wikipedia as on my day job some days, plus it carries on at weekends. Sometimes you just need a break from the grind.

• It lacks a mechanism to control grudge-bearers. Work on Wikipedia for any kind of time and you will piss someone off. All part of life's rich pageant. Until, that is, they come back time after time repeating the same grudge over and over and over. Sorry, Fys, sorry, ATren, endlessly repeating your version of "the truth" will never persuade me to accept it. Party politicians edit warring over links to attack blogs from articles on members of the opposing party will always be treated with suspicion by people like me. Single purpose accounts inflating fantastic, unrealistic and politically charge concepts will always be resisted by people like me. For the sake of the project I sincerely hope that Wikipedia never runs out of people like me, however happy they might be when we go. Trolling is not a method for dispute resolution.

• It is extraordinarily bad at protecting its friends. Take, for example, MONGO. MONGO was baited for months by people pushing 9/11 conspiracy theories and other idiocies, including trolls from Encyclopedia Dramatica. Eventually they baited him to the point that he made a bad call and was desysopped. They reacted with glee. Wikipedia failed to protect MONGO from a sustained, vicious, well-orchestrated and relentless attack. MONGO is still there, albeit no longer a sysop; well done MONGO.

• Philosophical differences also cause friction. Wikipedia's misison is to be a free-content encyclopaedia. That means Wikipedia must make the very minimum use possible of unfree material (images which are copyright and used under "fair use" being the biggest offender). Fans of TV shows, bands and the like will argue endlessly that they should be allowed to upload publicity stills and the like. Wrong. They should go to gigs and take pictures themselves. This argument has been raging for ever, and bots which tag unfree images without a comprehensive fair use rationale have caused some savage and completely unacceptable attacks on various individuals. It is clear to me that the overriding principle on Wikipedia must be: when in doubt, take it out. If you can't find good citations, the text should not be there. If you can't find good sources, the article should not be there. If you can't write a really compelling case for having an unfree image - that is, an image which goes against Wikipedia's overriding license - then don't have the image.

• The Wild West. Wikipedia has a heritage akin to barn raising. It has got past that point. It is now probably more valuable to the project to add citations and detail to existing articles, than to add new articles. The days when important but minor composers had no articles are pretty much past, what Wikipedia really needs is people with extensive libraries working to source content. What it gets is people with huge libraries of DVDs adding detail they have gleaned from them to ever more comprehensive articles on Pokemon. And people who ABSOLUTELY MUST correct the APPALLING BIAS in the article on 9/11 which dares to suggest it might have been a terrorist attack rather than a conspiracy by the evil government. And that kind of nutter.

• Advocacy. Here's an example: wp:Personal rapid transit. This is a cool technology, but right now it does not really exist. The article portrays this wonderful system of widescale urban transit, but the only system currently being built is in an airport car park. The article describes a concept which is not just untested, right now there's nobody in power actually proposing it. But there are some people who like to use the chimaera of PRT to undermine funding for proven modes like light rail. Light rail, trams, is known to work. It's also pretty cheap as the routes tend to run over existing roads or old rail track beds. It can be built quickly because the hardware is stock, due to its use in many cites throughout Europe. PRT faces formidable political obstacles, but even that statement has been quietly edited out of the article by the PRT fans who "own" it. Instead of noting the formidable obstacles, we now have a PRT advocate's quote that the only barriers are political. No, they aren't. The barriers are technical, political and societal. Surveys on cycling all say that more people would cycle if only there were more cyclepaths; built the cyclepaths and mostr of those who said they would cycle if only they were there, still don't cycle. Same with PRT, I would bet. Whatever kind of public transport infrastructure you build, you will not get many people out of their cars, because people love their cars. All cyclists know this. We also have an article on UniModal, or SkyTran, a system which has no existence at all outside its developer's head. It's right up there with the Moller Skycar. So what, you say? So the advocates for this mode, and the people pitching for money to build a test track for SkyTran, seem to me to be using Wikipedia to promote their baby. The problem is, though, that Wikipedia is the place to document the fact that PRT faces massive hurdles to implementation and is not currently proposed as a wide scale transportation system; instead, its advocates are using Wikipedia to try to fix that. Similarly, we had a long-running dispute with Jean-Thierry Boisseau about the wp:list of major opera composers, a comprehensively referenced list. His problem? No women. Yup, absolutely right: the sources agree that the history of opera is one of white guys, mainly dead white guys at that. Wikipedia is not the place to fix problems with the real world, it's the place to document them. But, of course, if you try to point that out, you are immediately part of the Vast Conspiracy to Do Down the little guy, women, black people, Jews, neo-nazis or whatever other group is under discussion. And when a ton of shit is thrown by each of these advocates, only a tiny bit has to stick. Nobody is perfect. Nobody needs to be. But there is a world of difference between being slightly imperfect in some ways, and having frustrated advocates labelling you as anti-foo every time you start to discuss an even tangentially related concept.

• Nutters and zealots. Nutters are OK in small doses, but now Wikipedia is a top ten website it is the number one place for nutters and zealots to publicise their mad theories, and it desperately needs a much faster way to check their idiocy. Arbcom takes ages to reach a conclusion (except in the case of Jeff Merkey who was hounded off while the two experienced admins who had worked with him were looking the other way). I think a new mechanism is needed whereby restrictions can be imposed quickly, then discussed, rather than discussing for months before a restriction is imposed. The ceaseless edit wars caused by zealots and nutters are a huge waste of the community's time and thus impede rational discussion of anything.

• Tabloidism. Wikipedia has a notability guideline which says it does not normally include any subject unless there are multiple independent sources. A significant amount of meta debate now revolves around debates on whether two is counted as multiple, what exactly constitutes independent and so on, and almost invariably this is because someone wants to include either a bit of crap off Teh Internets or (infinitely worse) this week's tabloid cause célèbre. Jimbo has intervened and supported strengthening the policies on living individuals and what Wikipedia is not to stress that Wikipedia is not a tabloid, and not a tabloid aggregator either. We do not need "biographies" of people whose sole claim to fame is being one of ten victims of a serial rapist. That one event does not define their entire lives, however traumatic it might be. In ten years time they will not want to be known as the person who was attacked ten years ago, and no reputable encyclopaedia would list them as such. Murder is sufficiently common, sadly, that most murderers do not need an encyclopaedia article. The benchmark should be: do they justify a chapter in a scholarly volume on notable murder cases? The creeping sensationalism of Wikipedia, which until comparatively recently was doing a remarkably good job of not being just another chat site recirculating the same old shit, is actively degrading the project for me.

• Crap off Teh Internets. You do not need Wikipedia in order to find out about Encyclopedia Dramatica - it's already on the web. What Wikipedia is really for is documenting that which has real and lasting cultural significance, drawing on sources which are hard to access. It's a way of increasing access to knowledge, but a lot of people seem to think it's a just a place to collect information. Read the articles on Robert Hooke (around 800 words) and Frizzell County Championship Division Two in 2005 (24,700 words). Or King Bowser, the Super Mario character (7,800 words). Knowledge, or information? For a non-fan of Mario Brothers, the sum total of what you need to know about King Bowser is that he's the main villain from the games. That is the encyclopaedic content. The rest belongs on GameFAQs. Do you, gentle reader, think that King Bowser merits ten times the word count of the man who developed the anchor escapement, designed The Monument and the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, and was the chief experimenter for the Royal Society at a pivotal period in its history?

• Sometimes it really is obvious. As I said towards the end of the debate in respect of Rfwoolf's attack page: He had months to fix the deleted article, he did not fix it. He had months to file an RfC, he did not file an RfC. He had months to make contributions to the encyclopaedia, he did not make contributions to the encyclopaedia. And the debates he spawned are a perfect example of the kind of shit that make the project joyless for those prepared to actually take on the occasional hard case, because even the blindingly obvious easy cases now bring crowds of malcontents to cheer the trolls on. Yup, I told him to fuck off. Shame on me. But what the other admins should have done was (a) to prevent his querulous trolling from stressing me to the point of telling him to fuck off in the first place and (b) to tell him that the language is immaterial, if he doesn't want to be told to fuck off he should stop trolling. I know I'm rude and obnoxious at times, but the people who get the invective have usually worked long and hard to earn it. Rfwoolf is a troll. He has contributed virtually nothing to the project, and his pursuit of a completely baseless complaint over months and months means that we should have issued an ultimatum to shape up or ship out. Instead we banned Jeff Merkey, who is intelligent and sincerely committed to the idea of a free encyclopaedia, let the cretins hound away seasoned admins and long-term contributors, but leave Rfwoolf's idiocies unaddressed. Way to go, guys.

In the end, the reason I am currently inactive on Wikipedia is simply this: I am a depressive, and Wikipedia was making me unhappy. No, not Wikipedia - Wikipedia is a fantastic idea. What was making me unhappy was idiots. People who would rather extend the benefit of the doubt to someone with an average main space edit rate of two per week, than to someone who has spent many hundreds of hours trying to the best of their ability to make Wikipedia a better encyclopaedia. Fuckwits make it stressful, and people who come along to aid and abet that fuckwittedness make it joyless.

For the benefit of those who don't know the catalytic event, if there is one I believe it is the trolling campaign of Rfwoolf, and (much worse) the troll enablers who prolonged it. There is only one correct response to a marginally active editor who has been obsessing over a righteous deletion for months and then chooses to rekindle the debate, and that correct response is: fuck off. This is easy to do, it's never hard to make an obvious call like that. Escalating it by helping to prolong the debate serves absolutely nobody other than the drama lovers. Fuck them. Insert non-formatted text here