Wikipedia internal solidarity politics are just messed up if you approach the inner circle. There is no fixing it. There is a lot of behind the scenes back scratching, horse trading, and manipulation via back channels between the members. Just stay away from them and avoid their gaze. It has also been like this, it isn't new nor does it mean there is impending doom for Wikipedia. It is just how it is. It is like the black whole at the center of the galaxy, you want to just stay away from it.
Well, some people care about an organisation's internal politics. That's basically what the "delete uber" movement is, otherwise why would the clients care how they treat women internally?
But in the case of Uber, the internal company politics don't really affect my ride from point A to point B. The editorial policy within Wikipedia however may have an impact on the content I read. Particular on politically sensitive topics, it is important to keep a critical mind and be aware of the intentions of the authors.
Seems like an awfully big jump. You can have a crapload of internal politics without harassment, sexism, or anything like that. You'll probably also get some of those in any sufficiently large group of people, but it's possible to respond to them well and still be a political minefield in terms of interpersonal relationships and power games.
Avoiding situations like this has swung me around to the profound organization health effects of regularly shuffling director+ level personnel (e.g. every 2-4 years).
What you lose in efficiency (as they refamiliarize themselves) -- you more than gain in healthier politics, cross-organization cooperation and knowledge, and overall following of rule of law / documentation.
Reminds me of chatting with a director level manager at a fortune 500 firm. He was on vacation between assignments. When I asked why he was being reassigned he said the company moves them around every 2-3 years.
Another example friend lives in a small rural town. The county sheriffs department rotates deputies every two years. Because the deputy needs to be willing to arrest respected members of the community for drunk driving and not be taking bribes from the local meth dealer.
> Reminds me of chatting with a director level manager at a fortune 500 firm. He was on vacation between assignments. When I asked why he was being reassigned he said the company moves them around every 2-3 years.
This is a healthy practice in larger organizations. Not only does it avoid the concretion of personal politics but it exposes managers to a breadth of experience, which is useful if they are promoted. It also ensures that the organization has stretched its adaptation muscles regularly, and is not brittle in the event of personnel turnover.
One of the issues I found with the first company I worked at was because there was little turnover there wasn't a lot of horizontal knowledge transfer that you get at more dynamic companies. Meant their processes, technologies, etc were stale and getting more stale as time went on. Which is why I left.
Best thing that happened to them was they let one of my utterly burned out coworker go, followed by exit of myself and another more sr engineer. Which forced them to hire three outsiders within a short span.
Well put. Imho, it's especially important in businesses that are stable enough that it doesn't have to be done (e.g. utility, insurance).
I saw functionally identical insurance companies with and without the practice. Those without were, every single time, more disfunctional and less likely to successfully deliver projects.
Part of the "Delete Uber" movement was because the company's behavior hurt women customers. For example:
1. Lying about conducting background checks on drivers, some of whom committed violent crimes against women passengers,
2. Illegally obtaining a the medical history of a woman who was raped by her Uber driver in an attempt to discredit her claims against the company,
3. And coercing rape victims into arbitration clauses that mandate silence against the company.
Of course, men can be victims of sexual assault, but it's a crime that disproportionately affects women, and, perhaps, if Uber's internal culture wasn't so anti-woman it's possible they would have treated women customers better as well.
This is just how bureaucracies work. In other contexts, it's hidden from public view, and often hidden from internal view as well. Many careers have been knee-capped by bureaucratic factors where the subject never even knows.
I suppose. But for me, that means that it's not worth my time to contribute. I've considered it, now and again over the years, but there's just too much evidence of corruption.
Edit: OK, "too much evidence of corruption" isn't fair. It's just too politically complicated. I came out of academia. There's pervasive criticism and disputation, and indeed that's fundamental, but everyone gets (ideally) a fair chance to publish their stuff. And then, peers either pay attention or don't. But then, I left academia mainly over pervasive politics, so maybe I'm just too impatient.
I stopped editing once I realized what gets onto Wikipedia has absolutely nothing to do with facts and more to do with opinion. I even had edits removing links to malware reverted automatically when logged in because some chucklehead locked down the topic.
I've dipped my toes in Quora. And ran into a situation where some moderator kept deleting an answer about VPN services. Because they thought that Wireshark is a VPN service, and that I was spamming for it ;)
That broad brush of a judgment doesn't work. Wikipedia is so massive, no human will ever have even a tiny clue what's all there. Go look at articles on botany or something and you'll see basically all facts and no opinions. Look at articles on people and politics… well, what would you expect?
I'm sure there's some way to create an evaluation of of the network of editors. We'd see that there are sections of Wikipedia where the editors all overlap and sections with near-zero connections, and those different sections are almost different worlds.
Your hypothesis is wrong. I find none of those surprising. And they are mostly single pointed facts that are disputed, not complex patterns of edits that involve opinion.
I guess this is one of those many laws of bureaucracies, any time there's enough power and hierarchy the top is self serving tribal warfare. I guess the question is to what extent that warfare is isolated from the interests of the members. If you look in parallel to the government, I guess you're talking about separation of powers - political leaders vs independent arbitrators, does this exist in wiki? There's no overall elections right more a kind of election at each level for the one above?
>There's no overall elections right more a kind of election at each level for the one above?
Not at all! The highest positions in terms of the user rights granted would be Admins and Bureaucrats.
The elections for those are the RfA and RfB (requests for Adminship and Bureaucratship respectively).
And contrary to what you might think, anyone with an account is free to nominate themselves, or to chime in on someone else's nomination (to the point that the process can be really hard to go through, as your history will be combed through relentlessly by overzealous users).
Note that those are not traditional elections either, instead of a pure vote, the process is more of a structured discussion to establish a consensus.
Like all places on the internet that grant special roles and privileges, you'll find people hungry for power, but Wikipedia fares pretty well in this respect.
I know I can look this up but can you expand a little bit on "instead of a pure vote, structure discussion...".
What's the actual hard decider? Like for page edits if there's a conflict it basically escalates up the hierarchy right? If there's no consensus what happens in this admin/bureaocrat thing? Who decides what constitutes consensus?
No problem, I'm happy to explain, but this is just my own understanding so you may still want to look it up for the fine details!
The main idea is that because it's not a formal vote, there's isn't supposed to be a hard threshold for passing. Now in practice >75% of support almost always shows strong consensus, and will result in the request being a clear-cut accept. Similarly, if you get 65% oppositions, chances are your request can be closed without further considerations.
But what's important to keep in mind is that commenters are expected to explain the reason for their position, it's not just a +1/-1 system. If several people raised an important issue or found some serious problem with the way you've contributed recently, that's more important than the raw numbers.
When there's no clear consensus, generally your request will be postponed for a couple day until issues are resolved, or eventually fail. (In close cases a public chat with the Bureaucrats — the people responsible for enforcing the decision of the community — sometimes takes place to clear things up, but it's unheard of for crats to go against the opinion of the community)
>Like for page edits if there's a conflict it basically escalates up the hierarchy right?
It's not supposed to, really. If there's a conflict, we would really like everyone involved to go calmly discuss it in the article's Talk page with the community.
No one owns an article, no one who follows the rules has more right to edit it than anyone else.
When that fails and people cannot cooperate at all, it sadly has to escalate and can end in bans for the involved users.
>Who decides what constitutes consensus?
In the end the definition of what constitutes consensus is defined by the community, and that includes anyone that feels like starting a discussion and challenging the status quo. Wikipedia has no firm rules, just guidelines and policies that people have and continue to argue about endlessly.
That's the whole problem with Wikipedia, isn't it? It's full of messy, complicated, imperfect people.
I'd say that your explanation is correct in theory, but not in practice. On some issues people can not see eye to eye and then it is simple majority votes that decide topic matters.
For example, I used to edit articles about international law on Wikipedia. Most of the edits were accepted no problem, but there are some countries that tends to violate a lot of international law. Those countries also have a huge amount of supporters on Wikipedia. Supporters who aren't really interested in international law, but are very interested in improving their countries reputation online. Long arguments doesn't convince these editors at all and due to their sheer number can block any edit they don't like.
Finding other editors interested in international law to combat this is impossible for two reasons. First, not many people are interested in legal topics and second, conflicts are risky. If you go up against "the consensus" too many times, you'll be labelled a trouble-maker and will have a harder time arguing your points of view in the future.
The only real solution is to network as hell and try to make allies ("you scratch my back I scratch yours") on Wikipedia. But that takes years so the only people who do it are those who get paid for their time or those who are truly obsessed zealots.
When it comes down to conflicts over opinions, like whether we should write that X country's behavior technically counts as violating international law or not, consider that both sides arguing their views are in the wrong!
The role of editors is emphatically NOT to write their objective, honest assessment of a subject. It is to find reputable sources, and state whatever opinions they express.
Sources type things down; You report their views.
The only point left to argue is what sources are reputable, which source to pick other which. Only that's a much more productive debate to have since there's often a lot of precedent (the same controversial sources tend to come up again in different arguments about different topics), there are pretty clear guidelines to fall back to, and since it's not about a very narrow topic it's easy to bring outside people to the discussion.
I can't claim that this will magically solve every content dispute, clearly not, but if you're stuck arguing opinions on niche topics it's a good first step!
Unfortunately it doesn't work when people can't agree on definitions. For example, Wikipedia has lots of pages listing all entities of class X (all these list of pages). Who decides if an entity is of class X or not? In my opinion that would be decided by acclaimed experts on X. Wikipedians routinely disagree and will assign entities to class X of their own volition even if no support can be found among acclaimed experts. They will then challenge you to find a source claiming that the entity does NOT belong to class X, or else it should remain listed. That is of course almost always impossible because there aren't many experts out there spending their time publishing articles refuting Wikipedians misconceptions!
> But what's important to keep in mind is that commenters are expected to explain the reason for their position, it's not just a +1/-1 system. If several people raised an important issue or found some serious problem with the way you've contributed recently, that's more important than the raw numbers.
I've read a lot of talk pages. Mainly about articles that had been deleted, I admit. But anyway, "explain the reason for their position" seems to all-too-often devolve into legalistic debates over rules, procedures and so on. And "several people raised an important issue or found some serious problem with the way you've contributed recently" seems to mostly be about gang warfare, not about the merits.
So basically, people who don't play the game well, and don't go along, tend to get banned.
It'd be far better if those who disagree with the consensus could stand aside, and have their own dissenting fork.
One way is for an admin who is not party to the conflict to summarize the presented arguments, existing rules and precedents, and write a decision.
Serious irresolvable conflicts are decided by the Arbitration Committee for the particular language edition of Wikipedia, and the committee's decisions are binding.
Each language editions of Wikipedia has its own slightly different take on how the Arbitration Committee is selected and how it makes decisions, but the general gist is that commissioners are highly active editors (not necessarily administrators) who are elected for a limited term by a vote of active editors.
Well, I'm not trying to deny your experience, but that's a different thing, isn't it?
The fact is many admins active today were voted in around 2007-2008 when the standards were much more lax, and because the process is so hard to go through fewer admins are elected these days.
I'm just a normal user myself, and sadly I don't have any good answer to that, the best one can do is participate and try to change things for the better.
At the core of it, these are all just people gathering around a common goal.
No, it’s not. I wrote neutrally and sourced my material about a controversial figure and was pursued (wikistalked) by a user who doesn’t make substantial contributions other than page patrol.
In fact, my article remains roughly the same, but is only half of what I was trying to make it because of what they did to me. I’m a hugely experienced editor who was researching the topic openly and transparently but was accused of an agenda because I showed my sources in the talk page of the article.
I complained on ANI and asked for help, but it was shutdown and nobody has ever reviewed the abuse I suffered from the other parties. Those other parties actively canvased on another board, and didn’t bother communicating with me. Then one of the editors actively changed the archives of the talk page of the article I was working on to auto archive in a few days and once all my talk discussions rapidly expired restored the default archive timeframe. Totally got away with it too!
Don’t think for a moment that most admins know what they are doing. They can’t, the topics are too broad and the agendas can often be opaque.
You didn't complain on AN/I. You complained on the 3-revert-rule violation (now Edit Warring) noticeboard, and failed to even mention the edit warring that the noticeboard is about. Again, it's errors like this, and mis-labelling people as Wikipedia administrators when they are not and never have been, that undermine the credibility of this account of events.
And I never claimed that all the people involved are Wikipedia admins. In fact, I specifically didn't say any names. You will also note that I didn't initiate the edit warring notification.
And I never said I didn't complain on that other board. In fact, if I recall correctly (and on this point, my memory may not be 100% correct, but you have raised this...) it wasn't me who initiated the notice, but I did respond.
What is your point? You are the one telling me I never took it to ANI.
In the end, I was clearly not in my right mind. I started having suicidal thoughts, and I did indeed edit as an IP address but not to evade any blocks. I accept that this was not wise, but in my own defense, I was in a heightened state of anxiety and unwell. After the whole debacle, I left Wikipedia and never came back.
It is remarkable that I didn't mention who I was, yet you know specific revisions from an IP address. Who exactly are you?
Neither of the two main people that you talked to on that talk page were, or are, Wikipedia administrators. If you cannot get that part of the story straight, people are naturally going to ask what else you aren't recounting accurately.
It was an Australian Wikipedia admin who banned me indefinitely. [1] It was Wikipedia admins who allowed this all to happen. My story is completely straight. People should be asking what you aren't getting straight, and your agenda.
Edit: hold on a tick, I didn't mention the article, my username or the people involved. And yet you know the article and specific edits to an edit to a relatively obscure Wikipedia board from over 3 years ago. Who are you again?
That's one, singular, not "admins", plural. And xe blocked you. Xe did not ban you. An "experienced editor" knows the difference. ("Bans are different from blocks" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Banning_policy)
All of the mistreatment that you allude to ("actively canvassed on another board", which was in fact the BLP noticeboard) was not by that administrator, and not by anyone who was an administrator. Indeed, one of the people who was a Wikipedia administrator opined somewhat differently.
You really need to have a look at the block log. NickD has an indefinite block on that account. So that's multiple admins who blocked me.
Tim Starling blocked my IP address for a year, on my request (to be clear, Tim is a friend).
You have no idea what you are talking about.
And the board I'm talking about was the Australian Wikipedian's Noticeboard.
And believe me, I'm an experienced editor. I created the [citation needed] tag, started the ANI noticeboard and did a thousand and one other things that you don't know about on Wikipedia.
This is my last comment, the trauma is too great for me (I nearly killed myself over this) and I don't want any more Wikidrama to spill over onto HN. I have just emailed the HN admins to let them know this.
I think it's often referred to as the "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" - that over time, all organizations for a purpose will be taken over by people who care more about the organization than the purpose. I'm not sure it's actually inevitable, but it's certainly predictable; the more you care about the cause the less time you want to spend on clawing your way to the top, and the more you'll expend your power on achieving things instead of fighting rivals.
It's one of the better pitches for representative democracy, - making rulers at least semi-accountable to people who care about the outcomes instead of the infighting. But I think Wikipedia's "nomination and consensus" approach largely destroys that benefit by primarily engaging the people who care most about the internal politics of the system.
Wikipedia in particular is a target for takeover and subversion because they govern a reputable/widely relied-on source of knowledge. If you're some kind of spook, for instance, and you want to rewrite history in some fashion, or spin it, getting the wikipedia version to match your own is a major win.
Very much agreed, although I think spooks are perhaps not the standard case of this problem.
Wikipedia has a major problem handling inflammatory subculture issues, because the ratio of highly-invested partisans to casual observers is so high, and the topic is too arcane for most administrators to even decide what constitutes a bare-bones neutral article. At best, you end up with something where every single claim is caveated with "side A says, side B says" and so the broad thrust of the thing is incomprehensible. At worst, you end up with something that looks neutral because it has a 'Controversy' section, and obviously everything outside of that is just a review of facts, except it isn't at all.
There are lots of politically charged instances of this, but a fairly tame one is the article for any smallish town or school district. They seem to be written almost exclusively by members of the local Chamber of Commerce or PTA and disaffected high schoolers, because no one else knows or cares about the topic enough to edit, and so the page for every small town I've ever lived in is laughably inconsistent with what any actual resident would recognize.
And of course all of that is prior to 'citogenesis'; I'm pretty sure I've found a couple of claims that exist only because someone put them on Wikipedia. If that's not a win for someone trying to spin an issue I don't know what is.
The idea that anyone (including me and you, dear reader) is free from bias, especially when discussing politics, seems painfully obvious after reading lots of history. And yet, the claim that this or that person or organization is 'neutral' is very common.
Further, the desire to create a 'neutral' 'encyclopedia' online is presumably what drives the entire Wikipedia community. I'd wish for a Wikipedia that consistently allows all viewpoints to be given an opportunity to be presented on any given topic, but I have no faith that such a thing is possible given the pervasiveness of the idea of neutrality and the interests at work to preserve that myth.
This isn't about content provided by some editor (Phillip Cross) being neutral, it is about being abusive, threatening, and vindictive, as well as particularly politically focused with an regular activity level that indicates either group activity or a profoundly unhealthy mental state. This took place over a period of years without any response by Wikipedia.
It is about Wales/Wikipedia demanding diffs to substantiate "outrageous" claims and ignoring the very diffs that are presented multiple times by multiple people. Then it is about punishing those who provided the diffs. It's about sickness not neutrality
:edit perhaps you are referring not to Wikipedia, but to the lack of a need for any curated "neutral" documentation available on the web.
> as particularly politically focused with an regular activity level that indicates either group activity or a profoundly unhealthy mental state
Why would an organized group use one account to make thousands of edits in their own favour? That would make it really obvious it's coming from one source and make themselves far easier to spot.
The fact he's a conservative poster, with people on both sides showing highly-politicized tendencies (including his favourite targets for abuse who themselves are known for highly polarizing politics) my default response here it to be highly skeptical of claims that it is some organized grand scheme by some party, intel agency, or group of rich people to manipulate the world for the worse.
That secret "cabal" behind everything bit is a cliche pattern in political conspiracy theories.
There have been plenty of individual Wikipedia editors with an inhuman-amount of work they contributed. You find prolific contributors like that in open-source projects all the time too.
> That secret "cabal" behind everything bit is a cliche pattern in political conspiracy theories.
Except in Wikipedia's case, it's been shown, on numerous occasions, that such a thing _does_ exist. Backdoor channels, IRC, mailing lists, where a small in-crowd of Administrators regularly ask for "backup" when they're about to do something, shall we say "contentious", and make clear that certain topics are only to be discussed there, where there are no logs, rather on other moderated forums.
The statement you quoted and challenged is well-supported by facts. Have you seen the graph of contributions of "Philip Cross"? Very evenly paced across very long and predictable working hours. Nearly impossible that it is one person.
"Cabal" is a strawman. Think "PR office with outsourced help" for one much more mundane hypothesis that fits the available facts.
You can recognize bias and try to avoid it, like Wikipedia, by requiring credible citations and having processes to avoid editorial bias from impacting the end result (which it obviously did, eventually, as we're reading about here). Like CNN, the WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg, WP, and many other sources of information (across the political spectrum) do every day.
Or you can go the route of Fox news, take a pronounced editorial bias that takes clear precedence over reporting facts. I would post video of Jeanine Pirro or Hannity, but it seems unecessarily crude.
This ignores the problem of bias by ommission, where an editor merely doesn't include something that goes against their bias. This is impossible to solve with sources because editors still need to be able to choose to ignore something they see as unimportant.
It also ignores that the degree to which a sources "credibility" derives from your agreement with it, and therefore its political bias. When a source you agree with says something wrong, this is seen as an honest mistake, but when you disagree with them, it acts as a tarnish on their credibility forever more. Wikipedia editors can use "credibility" to prevent others from correcting their ommissions.
Credibility is earned and lost. Question if this article would happen if the source material was Alex Jones/Infowars. There would not be an article about "British politics bias" there. It's noteworthy if they concede that there aren't sinister forces trying to steal your precious bodily fluids.
The only reason the posted article exists and that we are having this thread is that Wikipedia takes pains to be unbiased and has some expectations of being so by reputation.
>having processes to avoid editorial bias from impacting the end result
>like CNN, WP, NYT
Um... really? Are you saying those three specifically aren’t putting out very biased results? You could be left of Marx and know that isn’t true for those three specifically. Esp CNN!
The only explanation here is a different topic, that you yourself are so biased that you think CNN is putting out good journalism.
CNN, WP, and NYT basically do just present the facts in their reporting. To the extent that it's a big deal when they put out a falsehood and people have gotten fired. Opinion sections are obviously different.
We all know that even a composition of words used (or avoided) to report a fact may be very loaded. And it just how it happens in all media, big and small, because apparently journalists are humans, and editors are humans. There are worse, and better cases, but there's no such thing as 100% neutral reporting.
The Clinton campaign specifically asked the news media (including CNN, WP, NYT) to increase coverage of Trump (as well as Carson and Cruz). This is so that they'd either have someone easier to beat in the case of these 'pied piper' candidates, or pull a stronger opponent farther right come the general.
Nate Silver didn't know about this in March of 2016 when he wrote that article.
This is the most inconvenient truth of the entire 2016 Campaign. Hillary requested Trump to be propped up as someone she "knew" she could beat. If she had just played fair, she might have actually won against Jeb who the GOP actually wanted.
Don't like Trump? Thank Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the media for playing along.
CNN constantly uses loaded words in their reporting, along with more subtle things like condescending smiles when a person is talking who does not hold a left-wing opinion.
The news is almost all factual but is meant to swing a person's opinion in just about every way without actually citing false facts (unless the subject is WMDs in Iraq). It is probably the best TV news source we have in the US but it still sets a fairly low bar in terms of objectivity.
Oftentimes, just leaving out certain facts while including others can have just as much of an influence as citing false facts outright, especially when done repeatedly.
Yes. All of those outlets attempt to put out unbiased news. CNN is "left of Marx"? I sincerely hope you are being sarcastic.
ps: instead of downvoting, why don't you do something more effective, and post an example of biased reporting by CNN (and something that isn't a story about a biased article that resulted in reporters being disciplined or fired)
The person youre responding to isnt saying CNN is “left of Marx”, they’re saying a reader to the left of Marx politically could tell that CMN is biased
I'm sorry but out of those only the WSJ and Bloomberg are what I consider impartial, with NYT doing a better job than CNN and WP because they at least refrain from loaded language, though are not entirely unbiased in what they choose to report.
"Nobody can avoid being X, so therefore X is pervasive, and it is pointless to try to constrain X"
In this case, it's "everyone has bias, so being unbiased is possible, therefore all viewpoints are equally valid and should be presented as such".
You can substitute X with greed, violence, jealousy... any human failing, and it can be used as a method to justify poor behavior by appealing to epistemological or moral nihilism (all knowledge, morality). It's essentially the last refuge of people backed into a corner of epistemic closure and an attempt to avoid reconciling their worldview with reality but rejecting that there is any knowable basis for morality or truth.
"Nobody can avoid being X, so therefore X is pervasive, and it is pointless to try to constrain X"
That's not a nihilist. It's being defeatist. Giving up because you can't win is defeat. Giving up because there's really no point in the first place is nihilism.
>rejecting that there is any knowable basis for morality or truth.
Which is correct. There is no such thing as The Morality or The Truth or The Good.
They are but figments of our imagination, byproducts of a mind that's evolved to generate
patterns and see order in the chaos that is reality. Blame Plato's witchcraft.
The golden rule is so trivially easy, has been repeated in multiple cultural and historical contexts, and provides a reasonable basis for all moral philosophy. If you want to indulge epistemological nihilism then please turn in your laptop and cell phone, because you don't even want to know how many things they take for grant as "The Truth".
I used to pick my general news from a financial newspaper. Why? Because they didn't care. As far as they were concerned, non-financial news were there only for their readers to have the most basic understanding of the main topics and not make fools of themselves. "There was this protest, so many people showed up, and these were their central demands", done.
I don't doubt that a neutral article about anything is possible. The problem is removing from the loop those who care deeply about it.
Lindsey Anderson, left wing film director of "If" only read the UK right wing newspaper The Telegraph because "it's easier to see the lies" compared to papers his peers read.
What does that have to do with what the OP said? That is quite the opposite of neutrality. And the fact she self-identifies as 'left-wing' says everything you need to know.
The point being, I assume, that as a left-wing person they would be more sensitive to right-wing lies, so that they would get a more accurate model of the world through right-wing media.
> so that they would get a more accurate model of the world
...Assuming that is the goal instead of seeking out counter-narratives to fulfill confirmation bias and fuelling the outrage culture that has exploded in recent years (and which online newspapers have learned to feed into they way 24/7 news shows have been doing for years). The fact she summarized it as lies says a lot.
>The idea that anyone (including me and you, dear reader) is free from bias, especially when discussing politics, seems painfully obvious after reading lots of history.
As a Canadian I find Wikipedia very US-biased. Such topics as the Alaskan panhandle or Machias Island or anything the US views as right from its viewpoint.
A good rule of thumb is if the topic does not concern current politics or other hot-cake issue, Wikipedia is a usually good source of common facts (i.e. ones that would not require very deep knowledge to understand or present properly) and a decent source of links to more in-depth treatment of the topics. Not always true, but very frequently is.
However, when you approach a topic having to do with everyday politics, the neutral point of view is nothing but a dream. A noble dream, but a dream nonetheless. There would be facts omitted, there would be facts presented in a distorted fashion, there would be biased sources quoted, there would be claims that the source does not support, there would be unsourced claims, there would be biased and agenda-driven language. There be dragons.
And that is just from well-meaning (and probably even supporting the NPOV dream if asked) volunteers, I am not even talking about paid and conflict-of-interest (i.e. editing page about oneself or one's boss) editors which exist too. Such is human nature. It is possible to fight it, and sometimes it is possible to win, but it is hard, annoying, exhausting and demands a lot of time. So, a lot of people don't have time or desire to get into this. Which means, be careful with Wikipedia pages that are about current politics.
What viewpoints do you feel are underrepresented? Personally I’m not convinced that all viewpoints require “airtime” and I’d prefer not to endure anti-vaxxer, flat earth, creationist, ariosophy, QAnon, or whatever David Icke is raving about today, in the name of “balance”.
When I go to an article about quantum mechanics, I don’t need a section on The Secret because it’s a “viewpoint” that exists. I want a curated experience, not the full hue and cry of the Internet. I also want to avoid undue bias, but that doesn’t mean a total abrogation or editorial policy.
these minority viewpoints don't need to be given prominence, but I think they should certainly be given the right to exist and to be documented. From my perspective, even the most egregious views should be aired against their subject of interest, for numerous reasons:
- if they are badly argued ideas they will stand in stark contrast to well supported ideas, naturally diffusing the benefit that conspiracy theories often gain from being "banned" in the style of "what they don't want you to know"-type arguments.
- The best way to critique an idea into the ground is to understand it better than its advocates.
- Even a bad idea can raise questions of good ideas, in the same vein as getting to the right answer through the wrong reasoning. Poking holes in our best ideas forces innovation.
- More awareness of the kind of ideas that exist in the world is, in my opinion, never a bad thing.
- An outlier opinion can still be right. Obviously theories like flat earth don't fall into this category, but quantum mechanics and heliocentrism once did.
From development to widespread acceptance QM didn’t take very long, because of course it’s possible to test to a high degree of accuracy. Flat Earth was debunked many centuries (millennia really) ago, but still persists. I’m not sure how much more critique needs to be done, or what questions can be raised. Most people are aware of it, and rightly dismiss it. The only people who think it should be treated seriously are people who, believe in it.
So why entertain it? Because of some vague ideological opposition to curation? It seems to me, from experience at least, thst it usually has to do with a desire to use “universal acceptance” as an excuse to smuggle someone’s own pet crank idea into the mix. Creationists don’t seriously care about scientific inquiry or bias, they just started using those lines when legal bans on teaching evolution failed. Fascists and racists turned from trying to dominate society, to undermining it.
Once an idea has been thoroughly and comprehensively discredited it’s a waste of time at best, propaganda at worst. Yes, it can be challenging to deal with ideas on the borderline, and we should always try harder, but the solution isn’t intellectual nihilism. Ceasing to use any critical thinking because it might invite bias is a bad idea, and I think only really put forth by people who’s marginal ideas have no other hope of being heard.
After all, terrible ideas are documented, but there’s no moral, practical or intellectual reasons to document them everywhere.
All of these things should certainly be given the right to exist and to be documented, but not in an encyclopaedia. Going through all your reasons:
If an idea is badly argued - it's not yet ready/mature enough to be described in encyclopaedia.
The best way to critique an idea into the ground needs to happen in the scientific discussion, and only the aftermath of that critique needs to be included in an encyclopaedia.
Poking holes in our best ideas - again, that's the scientific discussion happening on papers in response to other papers; this process is good and important, but it should happen in that medium, and kept out of Wikipedia.
More awareness of wrong ideas without appropriate disclaimers that they're wrong and why they're so leads to mass disinformation and is essentially harmful propaganda. There is a tradeoff between being authorative+truthful and all-encompassing; getting one of those requires to actively work against the other. As Wikipedia has chosen that it "wants" to work towards the first, so it's chosen not to be the place that will facilitate "more awareness of the kind of ideas that exist in the world" - this was a contentious issue some decades ago, resulting multiple other wiki-like resources with lower criteria for notability, achieving what you propose but sacrificing other things that are important for Wikipedia.
An outlier opinion can later be shown to be right - when that happens, an encyclopaedia like Wikipedia should describe it.
My point is that there are lots of people who don't want to endure the viewpoints that you perceive as being so obviously correct that there is no need for further discussion. This attitude is much closer to the Catholic Church's ancient position on astronomy than Galileo's.
For example, I have no doubt that the flat earth theory is incorrect, but it wouldn't bother me if it we're included in Wikipedia. How can anyone learn to think critically if certain ideas are forbidden? And once the idea that it's ok to forbid certain ideas takes hold, the list of forbidden ideas always expands. That is far more dangerous than allowing what seem to be obviously ridiculous ideas to be expressed.
The problem with editorial policy for a site like Wikipedia is who gets to decide what that policy is? Thus, we have the endless fights like this one. It's avoidable in theory, but "curation" is always in vogue -- so long as the curators think like us.
Wikipedia is like a microcosm of public politics, large version of a high school social system, or maybe a cult.
There's cliques, arcane rules, and always always an agenda. It would make for a fascinating study on human behavior and how it relates to politics in the real world. Wikipedia internal politics are a scary beast fraught with peril. And the actual content suffers horribly.
Indeed, it's always fun to read about a controversial topic one day and find a totally different article the next. Then watch the talk where some news-sources are unacceptable when they support the wrong narrative but unsubstantiated blogs can be used to push the right one. It's fascinating although a little scary.
I think the most productive move that folks critical of Wikipedia can make is to create an alternative. It's unfortunate that Jimmy Wales and his clique comport themselves the way they do, because Wikipedia would be much stronger if they didn't.
I find it useful for browsing on subjects that interest me but I don't tend to use it for subjects that are too controversial. At least superficially. And yet given what I know about the biases of Internet denizens I have to wonder how much of what I expose myself to is accurate and not the result of some weird personal biases.
I also consider the citations listed in the footnotes which gives me a bit more confidence than none, I suppose.
I had an idea that you could create a Wikipedia with the same content, but allow for certain, more opinionated alternative articles. A link to these would be incorporated into the UI of the site and by default the best, most neutral one would be shown but you would suspend neutrality on the alternative articles. All the other Wikipedia policies would still apply.
For example, Wookiepedia shows the cannon articles by default, but at the top you're able to select the Legends version of the article, which uses sources that were retconned. Just replace Legends with a different name/bias, and add multiple tabs.
That makes sense to me. Instead of aiming for a consensus article, just point searches to a consensus neutral article. Or maybe not even that, if there's too much contention, but just a list of labeled articles. Just as there are now disambiguation pages.
But of course, you'd need consensus labels, but at least that seems more feasible than consensus articles.
In 2002 there was an attempt to fork the Spanish Wikipedia. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork. There was a lot of internal pushback to the forking, but they did it. But the technical and economic issues of keeping a fork of Wikipedia up and running was one of the biggest obstacles. Wikipedia requires huge amounts of infrastructure (both technical and human maintained).
The technical infrastructure to run a fork isn't that horrendous. The real challenge is to build a community that actually wants to work on it. For Wikipedia forks, you face a big uphill fight against the network effect.
Smaller wikis sometimes have been successfully forked though. And true: Spanish Wikipedia DID pull it off, I guess due to being early. :-)
It wouldn't. Someone would need to develop an alternative. It could work - just use the existing Wikipedia, but branch it. In essence change Wikipedia to a decentralized model.
OK, Wikipedia uses open-source software, so one could clearly branch that. And given Creative Commons licensing, I suppose that one could clone the entire site, as the basis for an alternative. Providing attribution, and marking changes, would be somewhat hairy, but conceivably doable.
And indeed, I see that Larry Sanger has been championing a blockchain-based alternative, Everipedia.[1] Wikipedia calls it "commercial".[2] And I see that its business model relies so far on ads and sponsorship notices.
However, I gather that they didn't just clone existing Wikipedia content. But accounts are invite-only, and I don't do either Telegram or Reddit. I wonder why they didn't use Wikipedia content. Maybe they don't want to use Creative Commons licensing.
Edit: Damn, Telegram wants a mobile number, which Mirimir doesn't have. So is there another way to get an invitation to Everipedia?
>I think the most productive move that folks critical of Wikipedia can make is to create an alternative.
Would not work.
There are a lot of alternative wikis. Almost any forum or web has one (and they are like a deserted city). Most of them (if not all) would fall into two types: The private wikis restricted to a small topic and paid by the owner of the brand; and the wikis covering any topic and supported by volunteers
The first group are created to keep control over a product (films, music, superheros) and promote a fanbase. This is supported by the owner of the brand normally. If done by fans will be quickly closed if damages the image of the product in any way, so is free to say anything only if this helps to sell the product.
The second ones are created normally as a parody of wikipedia. Treating all topics for comedic effect and shock value. A new something-pedia would be instantly classified as parody and ravaged by trolls, or would be jailed inside the boundaries of some very specialised topic.
Fivefilters.org is very good at cherry-picking; they are quite ...selective... with the truth. Take everything they say with a barrel of salt, and keep your eyes peeled for what they leave out.
Philip Cross cannot be said to be an agenda driven editor; people checked all the evidence (One person went so far as to hand-check and score large samples of his edits; a hellish job!). The facts just weren't there to support that assertion.
KalHolmann was ultimately NOT the messenger here, and was also not the person who brought the arbitration case. In fact, when KalHolmann was explicitly invited to help sort things out, they couldn't back out fast enough. What little KalHolmann did do brought more heat than light to the situation.
Correct, and if I recall correctly, former threads discussing pages on that website had highlighted that. It does not seem to be the be the case in this thread.
> Philip Cross cannot be said to be an agenda driven editor; people checked all the evidence (One person went so far as to hand-check and score large samples of his edits; a hellish job!). The facts just weren't there to support that assertion.
Philip Cross edits in different areas, e.g. jazz and film. He's highly prolific. He needn't have an agenda in all areas to be called an agenda-driven editor in other areas. And the fact that he's made over a 100,000 edits means someone who approaches an examination of his edits by looking at a small random sample of his total output (as the editor you mention did) is not likely to come up with anything useful (I think this was pointed out to him). So to say "the facts just weren't there to support that assertion" is not really true. We've documented his editing in three articles now:
> KalHolmann was ultimately NOT the messenger here, and was also not the person who brought the arbitration case.
Who was the messenger, then? As far as we're aware, he was the Wikipedia editor who attempted to notify the community to the problems when the story emerged. Only to be shut down by admin Guy - who, it should be mentioned, appears to be an acquaintance of yours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:JzG/Archive_155#meat...
> In fact, when KalHolmann was explicitly invited to help sort things out, they couldn't back out fast enough. What little KalHolmann did do brought more heat than light to the situation.
I am basing myself on those pages you mentioned. I already communicated to you about some of the omissions I noticed before. I am explicitly cautioning readers who read those pages that I noticed a lot of unbalanced omissions. They can then be on the lookout for that and indeed check and decide for themselves.
I don't think your earlier comments contained much substance, but were more an attempt to deflect and defend a Wikipedia admin with whom you are perhaps acquainted. But I will link to those earlier comments below for the interested reader. We've had three articles about this story discussed on Hacker News, including this one. Here are your comments on the previous articles, and my replies:
I'm familiar with a lot of wikipedia editors. That doesn't mean I agree with all of them all at once. (Even if that was possible, which it definitely isn't :-P )
As you observed: after reading your first story, I managed to convince JzG to at least consider changing tack wrt Kalholmann. Which they did!
Unfortunately Kalholmann was a very bad choice for a champion. In fact, they decided to post Personally Identifying Information right in full view of the arbitration committee; even after being advised not to! (this behavior is at best unethical, arguably illegal, but definitely against the rules!)
In practice, the ironic fact is that JzG turned out to be more effective for your cause than Kalholmann!
I guess I'm just surprised that you're still sticking with your old story, even despite the added clarity of 20/20 hindsight.
You appear to be rather prone to cherry-picking. I'm not sure whether this is by accident or on purpose. (I'm also not sure if it matters; either way it causes harm!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking
> Unfortunately Kalholmann was a very bad choice for a champion. In fact, they decided to post Personally Identifying Information right in full view of the arbitration committee; even after being advised not to! (this behavior is at best unethical, arguably illegal, but definitely against the rules!)
Care to provide some evidence?
Worth pointing out that Philip Cross never claimed to be using a pseudonym. In fact he claimed the opposite, right on Wikipedia: stating that he wasn't using a pseudonym. He linked his Twitter account to his Wikipedia account. None of this was exposed due to sleuthing/doxxing - it was simply what he himself stated. So there was understandably a lot of confusion around posting personally identifiable information (ie. his name) when he himself claims on Wikipedia that that is what he's called and he's not operating under a pseudonym.
Also, did you see Guy/JzG's own doxxing effort? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests... (he outed someone and another admin had to revision delete his outing). Curious that you don't consider that a big offense, but are happy to accuse Kal Holmann of something without providing any links.
> In practice, the ironic fact is that JzG turned out to be more effective for your cause than Kalholmann!
It's hilarious that you're still attempting to defend JzG. How can we know he was more effective? We can't see how this would have turned out had JzG not interfered. So why speculate? But there's plenty he did wrong, and faced no consequences for, which we are attempting to highlight.
> I guess I'm just surprised that you're still sticking with your old story, even despite the added clarity of 20/20 hindsight.
Right, so JzG clearly had it in for you. And yet somehow their actions ended up getting the exact result you were hoping for (as reported by you).
In the mean time Kalholmann was your best friend ever... and somehow every time they tried something, they got themselves in more trouble and ultimately got sanctioned by the arbitration committee. (also as reported by you)
Yup, right, clearly your narrative makes perfect sense here. Good job, well done. ;-)
( Just because someone doesn't immediately prostrate themselves and profess their undying loyalty to your cause, that doesn't mean they can't effectively be your friend-du-jour. Vice versa, just because someone does say they support you doesn't mean they're automatically competent and able to help.)
> Right, so JzG clearly had it in for you. And yet somehow their actions ended up getting the exact result you were hoping for (as reported by you).
We never said JzG had it in for us. We highlighted problems with his conduct in relation to the case. And what we consider the double standards of the arbitration committee when it came to certain parts of their decision.
> In the mean time Kalholmann was your best friend ever... and somehow every time they tried something, they got themselves in more trouble and ultimately got sanctioned by the arbitration committee. (also as reported by you)
Your comment here suggests that you think the arbitration committee can do no wrong. We're highlighting what we think is unfair treatment in this case (with supporting evidence). The fact that the story got voted to the front page of Hacker News shows that many others find it convincing too. The many comments here also show that people have had their own experiences of unfair treatment participating in Wikipedia.
> ( Just because someone doesn't immediately prostrate themselves and profess their undying loyalty to your cause, that doesn't mean they can't effectively be your friend-du-jour. Vice versa, just because someone does say they support you doesn't mean they're automatically competent and able to help.)
You're stating the obvious here, but we don't need to talk about hypotheticals. We can examine the conduct of everyone involved. We've tried to support our position by showing evidence of what we consider is unfair treatment. I haven't been convinced otherwise by your contributions, but maybe others will be.
Yes, I'm aware of that, but it bears mentioning in this discussion for other readers who perhaps did not follow the discussion from over two months ago.
My initial reaction to this was that this was typical. I was similarly treated. But frankly, I know Guy and something doesn’t seem quite right.
I’m not certain we have heard the full story on this.
One thing I will say: I often regret creating the admin’s noticeboard. It helped centralise control and the incidents offshoot is a cesspool of conflict. It often is not managed well at all.
I don't know Guy, but purely from that linked discussion (Guy on George Galloway):
> He is without question a controversial figure, and not in a good way
That is, without any need for further context, a statement of bias, and if the user Guy is espousing such views of relevant subjects here they absolutely shouldn't be involved in decision-making of any kind on this topic. This follow-up statement is worse again:
> ... and allow PC to definitively clear his name
Presumption of innocence is one thing, but presumption of a future outcome of arbitration is quite another.
It's pretty clear where Guy stands on this from the outset, and it's not good.
With respect, I would suggest a quick reading of George Galloway's biography would substantiate that suggestion.
Mr. Galloway has a long history of loud oppositional politics and tribal attacks on his opponents. There are politicians I profoundly disagree with and yet respect for their service and their conduct; George Galloway is not one of them.
I think you're missing the point here. Your opinion of Galloway shouldn't matter; whether you're a supporter or detractor of his, you shouldn't allow that to come into the discussion if you're claiming to act as a non-biased admin. Guy did that.
Not at all. There are people who are controversial because their opinions are difficult or challenging, and there are people who are controversial because their opinions are provably wrong or their actions are demonstrably hostile.
Neutrality between fact and proven falsehood isn't neutrality but pandering. Noting when discussing Mr. Galloway that his conduct has repeatedly fallen far from truth and decency is a reasonable and well-referenced baseline. We wouldn't require an admin on a page discussing the physical structure of the earth to recuse themselves because they had expressed a public opinion that it wasn't flat and carried on the back of a turtle, would we?
> being attacked by RT and George Galloway is a reasonably reliable indicator that you are doing something right
Ok this just further proves my point. If you're justifying your actions based on the identity of individuals who criticise them (particularly individuals you've already previously stated your own negative views on), then that's the very definition of bias.
If you need to do this to defend your position, personalising and individualising it rather than sticking to objective statements, there's a problem and you are not a neutral party.
To an extent, but it's hardly the first time that any of these people involved have had their fair share of controversy, backroom dealings, being shown to openly and repeatedly lie about the topics they're admin'ing or "neutrally" arbitrating. Hell, half of them are so voluminous in their misdeeds that they got entire subforums dedicated to them on Wikipedia Review (before that place turned into a ghost town inhabited by crazy folk):
Are you saying that people can't be controversial in "not a good way"? I hope not.
Whether this applies to Galloway is a matter of popular opinion. Look at Assange. First he was hailed as a hero in the West; now he's looked at as a Russian agent.
> Are you saying that people can't be controversial in "not a good way"? I hope not.
Of course not. I'm just saying that judgement of whether it is in "a good way" or "not a good way" will always be subjective, and representative of a biased viewpoint. Noone is completely unbiased but espousing such a viewpoint publically on a thread about arbitration isn't in keeping with responsibilities of Wikipedia's admins.
> Whether this applies to Galloway is a matter of popular opinion.
The popularity of the opinion should not be a qualifier for it to make up a part of a Wikipedia aministrator's discourse on non-biased arbitration.
> It's pretty clear where Guy stands on this from the outset
... and it's mostly irrelevant. A good Homo wikipediens, like a good judge or journalist or scientist, may well have his biases and private opinions, but is supposed to be able to put those initial biases and private opinions aside, impartially delve into the sources, and write a neutral, well-researched article about a subject.
Anything centralized on en.wikipedia these days is likely to exceed Dunbar's-Number-Of-Participants. That makes such things quite exciting and entertaining, but perhaps not always as useful ;-)
(Ironically: in small wikis you actually need to have centralised places like this, else no community can form. :-/ )
Sounds like there's a lot more to this story than it seems at first...
I really hope this is not based in some right vs left wing political drama and is legitimately about abusive behaviour.
Listening to the BBC show (as I'm not very familiar with this story), it sounds like it's a lot of one and a little of the other https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csws6q
Certainly feels like someone found a reason to kick a right-leaning admin off Wikipedia. Just because someone has an agenda and seek out negative information about people, doesn't mean said information is wrong.
Cue the people trying to claim that anyone in this entire world is unbiased. I'm biased, you're biased, everyone's biased. CNN is biased, NYT is biased, Fox News is biased, NPR is biased. We should all stop pretending that our own news source is unbiased. It's simply not true.
Sure, but a reputable source actively tries to mitigate bias. Not to mention, Wikipedia is supposed to be a repository of factual information as opposed to news publications that often deliberately focus on their own opinions rather than facts - not that editorials are inherently bad, just that news publications are distinct from encyclopedias.
However, some news sources make some effort to reduce bias and otherwise function within an ethos that bias is something that reporters should try to avoid unless there's good reason for apparent bias. (For example, stories about smoking causing lung cancer, or about plate tectonics, don't require "balance" and contribution from opposing viewpoints because the opposition viewpoints are a tiny fringe without support.)
English wikipedia on various aspects of 'British' history is pretty biased and prejudiced. There is the typical careful framing to tilt perception positively and negatively as required, such a desperate bunch.
I really miss the web from 10 years ago. It felt so liberating back then. Everything felt so open and genuine. I made so many friends in the early days of the internet. I don't even know how, forums, MSN messengers, games. You'd just add people and talk to them for hours.
Now the internet today seems to be mostly ads, corporate corruption, government censorship, and political outrage. It's a shame. I don't enjoy the internet half as much anymore. Maybe it's more my age or that I'm used to the technology now, but it really feels like we lost something innocent and special about the early days of the internet.
I don't know how old you are, but my bet is: its an age thing.
Actually I miss the web from 1999-2004 for the exact same reasons you do, and 2008 was already way downhill for me. But when I think about it a bit more carefully... How old was I at the time? 14-19... An age where almost everything is exciting and new: music, parties, friends, philosophy, technology you name it. I can easily apply this sentiment to most categories of interest during this time period.
I wonder if in 15 years from now, the people around 30 will rumble about how wonderful it was back then, when it was all the rage to be on Instagram etc. and how easy it was to connect to people, and how quickly you could organize events via social media.
Don't despair, the web is being reinvented all the time. The Decentralized Web Summit is going on right now, for example. http://www.decentralizedweb.net/
Everything looks good here. The biased Wikipedia editor can no longer edit pages on post-1978 British politics. The whistleblower can no longer speculate on any editor's off-wiki behaviour.
No more biased edits from the accused, and no more witch-hunting from the whistleblower.
Relevant quotes from article:
Philip Cross is indefinitely topic banned from edits relating to post-1978
British politics, broadly construed. This restriction may be first appealed
after six months have elapsed, and every six months thereafter
KalHolmann is indefinitely restricted from linking to or speculating about
the off-wiki behavior or identity of other editors. This restriction may be
first appealed after six months have elapsed, and every six months thereafter
I think the issue raised is the definition of Holmann's actions as whistleblowing or witchhunting.
If it's the latter, that would seem to imply he shouldn't have engaged in that witchhunt, in which case the ban on Philip Cross would definitely not have come to pass. Are you saying this should be the case?
If it's the former (whistleblowing), it can't be defined as witchhunting and you must agree Holmann should not be restricted.
You can only agree with one of the above and remain logically consistent.
Kalholmann didn't open the arbcom case, and they didn't provide the bulk of useful evidence. I'd say they were neither whistleblowing nor witchhunting; just producing more heat than light (sadly).
KalHolmann's post about Philip Cross' conflict of interest was posted on 18 May 2018 on the Wikipedia Administrators' noticeboard. It ended with the following proposal:
> I request that Philip Cross be topic banned from editing George Galloway and the other "goons" with whom he is at war—Matthew Gordon Banks, Craig Murray, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Tim Hayward (academic), Piers Robinson, and Media Lens— all of whose Wikipedia pages Cross has frequently edited. KalHolmann (talk) 21:04, 18 May 2018 (UTC)
Five minutes after posting that, your acquintance Wikipedia admin Guy rejected it, as he'd done the previous attempt (also within minutes).
As it turns out, two months later, the arbitration committee essentially ruled agreeing with his initial request (and in fact broadening the ban to all of post-1978 British politics).
So your claim that he was "producing more heat than light" is nonsensical.
Do you deny that this happened? Would you put forward the position that KalHolmann changed his mind later? Or (checking the record) do you see that mostly other people took over and examined the case instead?
It could just be that KalHolmann isn't sure of their footing: It's still not the most brilliant of openings in building a case against Philip Cross of course. I was disappointed.
I can't speak for Kal, but if you examine his actions from the start (I quoted his 18 May 2018 post, which precedes the one you linked, here it is again https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...) it appears he simply wanted to notify the community of Philip Cross' conflict of interest and to suggest a topic ban to prevent Cross from editing pages of people he had a conflict of interest with. There is nothing to indicate he wanted to open an arbitration case, nor be party to one. So that all occurred because of Guy (JzG) who after blocking all of Kal's attempts to start a discussion about this, finally started one himself in which he misrepresented the issue (by making the whole dispute to be about Galloway) and falsely accused Kal of being a supporter of Galloway, among other baseless accusations.
In light of that, Kal Holmann's statement which you linked above makes perfect sense. He was dragged into an arbitration dispute by a Wikipedia admin (Guy/JzG) who you seem very keen to defend, and then posted a statement denying the accusations levelled against him. Wikipedia arbitrators end up punishing Kal but say not a word about Guy/JzG's actions.
Well, if Philip Cross's alleged conflict of interest were to be examined and dealt with, ultimately it would need to be looked at by the arbitration committee. Once you understand that, other things start falling into place.
JzG changed tack because I poked them and pointed them at your story.
JzG went back to admin's noticeboard to gather further input, and people confirmed that an Arbcom case would indeed have merit.
At that point, the Arbcom case became inevitable.
Now, as an honorable human being, you can't go and start something, and then when it happens turn around and get cold feet.
I'm a bit disappointed in KalHolmann because they ran away when things Got Interesting.
I'm also disappointed in you because your stories turned out to actually not be as well researched as they seemed at first blush.
> Well, if Philip Cross's alleged conflict of interest were to be examined and dealt with, ultimately it would need to be looked at by the arbitration committee. Once you understand that, other things start falling into place.
Not true. The community is more than able to reach a decision without arbitrators. As was done when they voted to topic ban him from George Galloway.
> JzG changed tack because I poked them and pointed them at your story.
That doesn't excuse or explain his shutting down of Kal Holmann's initial report of conflict of interest - there was plenty in there deserving of discussion whether one looked at our story or not. And part of Guy/JzG's 'changing tack' was to misrepresent the issue by making it out to be a dispute mainly between Philip Cross and George Galloway, confusing other editors in the process. Something that the arbitrators also failed to comment on in their decision, but appeared to be aware of because they re-titled his arbitration case from "George Galloway" to "BLP issues on British politics articles" and later expanded the scope of the ban even more to "post-1978 British politics". Quite a jump from Guy's preferred focus of just Geroge Galloway.
> Now, as an honorable human being, you can't go and start something, and then when it happens turn around and get cold feet.
You're not making sense. Earlier you wrote "KalHolmann...was also not the person who brought the arbitration case." So why are you now saying he started it and then got cold feet?
The fact is he didn't start it. Guy/JzG requested it and dragged him into it with false accusations. I started to participate in the evidence phase of the arbitration case myself and was alarmed at the way the arbitrators were treating Kal so I withdrew too. The rest of the evidence we published on our own site. I won't rehash what I've already said in my other replies to you here regarding this, they're easy enought to find. You seem determined to misrepresent this story without providing any useful evidence. Bit rich to be accusing us of "cherry picking".
The wikipedia community disagreed with you there. The consensus was in favor of sending this to the arbitration committee, with the topic ban being a temporary first fix. And it did go to arbcom, and arbcom did take action.
On the one hand, JzG is obviously not your yes-man; this particular person has a mind of their own and presented the case from their own perspective. That said -on balance- their behavior came out in your favor. (as is abundantly clear now that we have 20/20 hindsight)
Kalholmann was given every opportunity to set/correct the record from their own perspective, but they just didn't take it. Hence my dissapointment.
You and I are working with the same set of evidence. I guess the main difference (if even that) is that I'm not just reading the partial account on your site, but I am also reading directly from the primary source including the bits that your team have left out.
Obviously our interpretation differs. ;-)
I guess only you yourself can know whether you are deliberately spinning things; or whether you are genuinely personally convinced by the narrative that you present.
> The wikipedia community disagreed with you there. The consensus was in favor of sending this to the arbitration committee, with the topic ban being a temporary first fix. And it did go to arbcom, and arbcom did take action.
You miss the point. You wrote "if Philip Cross's alleged conflict of interest were to be examined and dealt with, ultimately it would need to be looked at by the arbitration committee." I was pointing out that that is not in fact true. The Wikipedia community can make decisions without referring everything to the arbitration committee. I wasn't expressing an opinion about whether this case should or should not have gone to the committee.
Agenda driven editor sounds exactly like the kind of editors you need for an encyclopedia. If you have no agenda, won't you just sit at home and watch TV?
I don't think I need to explain why some website might not display correctly with it, even if most website are displaying correctly. But I haven't look why this one in particular is not working.
I'm no expert, but I guess it might be a font that renders differently on IE vs Chrome / other browsers - or it's a font not supported and what you're seeing is a less legible fallback.
I'm sorry about this! I should've checked on IE. Just have and Edge shows right background colour but chunky font which is difficult to read. And IE 11 shows white background. We used Typora to write this up and used its bundled Night theme. Assumed it had been tested in IE, but appears not. I'll make sure we fix this soon.
Edit: It's also possible that we tweaked the CSS it generated, which might have caused this, so I'd rather not blame it on their theme before I test it.
Considering the IE marketshare, I don't think it's much of a problem to not test on IE (or even Edge). And I'm less bothered by a browser compatibility issue than illegible design.
Also on Edge I see the same white background as on IE, but I'm on Windows 10 1703, if it's a version dépendent bug.
It appears this was related to CSS variable support.
Typora's themes use CSS3 variables which aren't supported in IE and weren't supported in Edge until more recently. I tried on Edge 42 (EdgeHTML 17) when I said the background colour displayed correctly. Perhaps you're using an older version of Edge (the version is displayed at the bottom of the settings panel).
In any case, I've added CSS to set the background colour without using CSS variables. It now shows correctly for me in IE 11 too.
