Recently I was having a casual conversation with a friend, and he mentioned that he spent too many hours a day playing video games. I responded with a comment that I, too, spent way too much time on an activity of my own – Wikipedia. In an attempt to reply with a relevant remark, he offered something along the lines of: "So have you ever written anything?" After a second, I quickly answered yes, but I was still in shock over his question. It seemed to be rooted in a belief on his part that using Wikipedia meant just reading the articles, and that editing was something that someone, hypothetically, might do, but not really more likely than randomly counting to 7,744.
This made me realize how much of the general populace views Wikipedia – as a website put together by some mysterious people, probably professionals. "that anyone can edit" is a phrase like Coca-Cola's "It's the real thing", seen a thousand times without ever really being thought about. The numerous [edit] links? Who knows what will happen if you click, but probably not worth finding out. Most sites have dozens of random links floating around, so people tend to mentally adblock them, especially considering that the links are all the way on the right side of the page.
That's right, a simple change of moving the [edit] links to a more visible location might gather many new editors. Companies spend vast amounts of money and time to determine the perfect layout to attract customers; we need to spend just as much effort trying out various tweaks to determine what will attract editors. This needn't harm the readers, if done right. But we absolutely must engage in trial-and-error to figure what will work best. Maybe my suggestion will help; maybe not. But there's no excuse for ignoring the issue.
Of course, the position of the [edit] links is hardly the only reason for the popular misunderstanding of Wikipedia. MediaWiki may be simpler than HTML, but is nothing compared to Microsoft Word. It's not a coincidence that so many Wikipedians understand some form of programming. VisualEditor should help the issue somewhat, but it's years behind schedule. Other causes may include the uniqueness of Wikipedia: readers have no experience with the idea that online info comes directly from other readers.
But perhaps the main reason why readers don't realize that this is really an encyclopedia "that anyone can edit" is that it isn't. Consider this: out of the top ten articles visited per this, three are semi-protected. Most major articles like United States, science, sun, apple and encyclopedia are protected (from a reader's perspective), so the edit links don't show up at all. While it's been claimed that only 5% of articles are protected, these more or less coincide with the 5% most viewed articles (with plenty of exceptions which prove the rule). Readers don't see protection as an unfortunate action taken to prevent vandalism; they see it the same way they can't edit the New York Times's website, evidence of a clear-cut distinction between readers and editors. To make matters worse, so-called anonymous editors can't create pages (unlike in most language versions of Wikipedia), so a casual visitor will have little inclination to believe that (s)he can, indeed, take part in building the world's greatest source of knowledge.
There isn't a simple solution to this. Encouraging helpful edits while preventing unhelpful ones is an ultimately impossible task. But as time goes on, we feel an increasing need to fully-protect Wikipedia's reputation by semi-protecting its articles, making us resemble Citizendium. It's easy to revert vandalism; let's not focus solely on preventing it no matter the cost.
The introduction of pending changes protection may help somewhat. Readers are once again given the [edit] links, thus being invited to contribute. But after they click "submit (not save) changes", they are told that their submission will need to be reviewed by an experienced editor. Encyclopædia Britannica offers the same thing, and almost any newspaper will take a look at what you mail them. The concept of readers being the writers is completely lacking. And in any case, pending changes can not feasibly be applied to thousands of pages, as a huge backlog would quickly develop.
A lot of effort has been spent on trying to enhance newbies' experiences. This effort, including the Teahouse, is certainly vital. But it does nothing about getting people to make a single edit in the first place. We're so used to seeing Wikipedia through the eyes of editors that we don't understand how it looks to a reader. We enjoy claiming that "All readers are editors" without doing anything to make this saying a reality. Before I started seriously editing, I didn't even know what a star or plus in the upper right corner meant. The average visitor has no clue and no real desire to have a clue – fact: most people who want to join Wikipedia already did – and we don't really care, preferring to spend time making new rules about hyphens and dashes, and designing a Teahouse to help newbies navigate them.
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"WP:OUTING", the normally little-noticed policy corner of the English Wikipedia that governs the release of editors' personal information, has suddenly been brought to wider attention after long-term contributor and featured article writer Cla68 was indefinitely blocked last week. This snowballed into several other blocks, a desysopping by ArbCom, and a request for arbitration.
The saga stems from a post by Cla68 on the talk page of User:Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and its sister sites. There, Cla68 asked her to comment on a post published on Wikipediocracy, the successor to Wikipedia Review, which outed User:Russavia.
Wikipediocracy includes articles written by current, blocked, banned, and retired English Wikipedia editors. Its mission statement says that it exists "to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with the structural flaws; and to inoculate the unsuspecting public against the torrent of misinformation, defamation, and general nonsense [from Wikipedia]." The site's founders conceived Wikipediocracy as a successor to Wikipedia Review, seeing the reincarnation as an attempt to return to Wikipedia Review's "better days" (as opposed to its worse days, when it gained a reputation as a toxic attack site). In at least one part, the project succeeded: the Signpost notes that Wikipediocracy is more active than Wikipedia Review, which has not allowed new registration since April 2012 and has one moderator left.
Long-time Signpost readers will remember Russavia's involvement in several arbitration cases, including Russavia–Biophys, Eastern European mailing list, and enforcement of the earlier Eastern Europe. He was blocked for 12 months from the English Wikipedia in May 2012, but this was lifted on 7 March by the Arbitration Committee after a successful appeal. He is also a prolific contributor, administrator, and bureaucrat on Wikimedia Commons.
Twenty-two hours after the post, User:Beeblebrox oversighted it and blocked Cla68 indefinitely. In most cases, an outing is accidental and the situation is swiftly resolved with an apology and promise to not do it again. Cla68, however, asked for an unblock in a statement on his talk page that again could be construed as outing. The names Cla68 used in this statement were quickly suppressed by Someguy1221. A second similar appeal was also rejected, and Cla68's access to his talk page was revoked.
The oversighting team was hampered by long-standing conventions that prevent them from publicly discussing oversight actions, but Beeblebrox pointed out that the block "was discussed at length on the oversight mailing list and there is broad agreement that the oversighting, the block, and the revocation of talk page access were all not only permitted by policy but the right thing to do."
The story quickly gathered pace, with watchers of Cla68's talk page chiming in on both sides of the debate. Cla68 told the Signpost that he did not see the original post as outing, as "[Russavia's] real name was linked to his [Wikipedia] username on two official, public mailing lists that are hosted on WMF servers. Since links to those mailing lists are used in Wikipedia and many, if not most, are presented as being an official part of Wikipedia, then it appears that he self-outed on Wikipedia." Cla68 also highlighted other self-outings that, in his view, suggest that Russavia had already outed himself and that Cla68's subsequent unblock request was within the outing policy.
Defenders of Cla68 used much the same reasoning. Beeblebrox rebutted these arguments to the Signpost, saying "whether the information is available on some other website is not the point—there has never been such an exception to the outing policy. Each of us has the right to choose not to use our real name on Wikipedia regardless of whether or not we tie [our] account name to our real name elsewhere." Cla68 noted, though, that "each individual Internet user is responsible for their own privacy. If someone is at least making an effort to be private, then Wikipedia should try to help them ... however, the editor in question was not making much effort ... to protect his privacy. In that case, it makes Wikipedia's administration look very foolish to act like a serious violation of privacy had occurred."
Supporters of the block additionally discovered that Russavia had previously blocked Cla68 on Wikimedia Commons, leading to accusations of petty revenge. Echoing similar positions, Prioryman stated that "while Cla68 didn't write the blog post in question (I assume), his act of posting a link to it also clearly constitutes an act of harassment ... Honestly, none of this is rocket science."
Discussion on Cla68's talk page has led to nearly 100,000 bytes of text, while the snowball has also been rolled large enough to capture User:Kevin, who unblocked Cla68 without approval from ArbCom's Ban Appeals Subcommittee. This led to his desysopping under Level II procedures and even greater amounts of debate. The saga has led to a request for arbitration, and a motion proposing the return of his administrator rights is pending and currently succeeding. The committee is allowed to refuse a reinstatement of the administrator right, but for this a full arbitration case is required.
Beeblebrox told the Signpost that he believes Kevin's unblock was an "extraordinarily poor idea. This should have been handled by the ban appeals sub committee ... because they are experts [who] specialize in handling difficult or sensitive block situations like this." For his part, Kevin told the website Examiner.com (in an article written by banned English Wikipedia editor Gregory Kohs):
| “ | One of the policies of Wikipedia is that blocking is only used to prevent disruptive edits, so once the threat of disruption was removed, the block became unnecessary. The other reason [for unblocking] is that [Cla68] was blocked from responding on his own talk page. All the while, discussion raged on that page about what should be done with him, of course he was unable to respond. I find this situation offends my sense of natural justice, and is one of the more obnoxious aspects of Wikipedia. | ” |
Also caught up in the controversy was User:MZMcBride, who was blocked by User:David Fuchs for "Disruptive editing: WP:OUTING, IDIDNTHEARTHAT, trolling" in regards to comments made on the Arbitration Committee's noticeboard.
The Signpost asked Cla68 to provide a hypothetical reply to editors who think Wikipediocracy is unhealthy for the Wikipedia community. He told us:
| “ | I can't imagine how corrupt and incorrigible Wikipedia's administration would be if not for Wikipedia Review and Wikipediocracy. These two forums have exposed so many issues that Wikipedia's and the Wikimedia Foundation's administrations have tried to sweep under the rug, including mailing list cabals, BLP abuses, COI abuses, and unethical shenanigans in at least one of the foundation's chapter organizations. ... Editors who speak up on-wiki about abuses have often been threatened with sanctions, blocks, or bans or been ganged-up on by cabals of activist editors. I have personally experienced it, so I know how it feels. Having an independent forum allows people a place to expose and highlight issues that need to be addressed where they can't be bullied or intimidated. I believe the threat of exposure has influenced Wikipedia's administration, the foundation, and chapter organizations to be more transparent and straightforward in their operations and procedures. | ” |
Commenting on the same topic from another point of view, User:Risker stated:
| “ | Speaking personally, ... I am not particularly in favour of knee-jerk removal of all links to such sites. On the other hand, I'm also pretty much opposed to providing them with much of a platform here, particularly given the poor quality of their blogs and the discourse in the forums. Unfortunately, [Wikipediocracy] has never really been terribly valuable as a criticism site, unlike Wikipedia Review in the 2008–2011 era. It's been pretty obvious for a while that a lot of the links people were adding that led back to [Wikipediocracy] pages were being inserted in the hope that they'd recruit more readers and participants. Guess they've got their wish now. | ” |
Three featured articles were promoted this week:
Six featured lists were promoted this week:
Three featured pictures were promoted this week:
Celebrate Women's History Month by taking part in this month's collaboration or joining the ongoing efforts of these projects:
This week, we tuned to WikiProject Television Stations, a project that dates back to March 2004. WikiProject Television Stations primarily focuses on local stations, national networks, television markets, and other topics related to television channels in North America, the Caribbean, and some Pacific countries. Other areas of the world are handled by the regional subprojects dedicated to British, Australian, and Indian television or by the parent WikiProject Television. Among the various tasks handled by WikiProject Television Stations are developing the television station infobox, keeping the project's categories tidy, updating station lists, and building articles. The project has a fair bit of work ahead of them with over 4,000 unassessed articles and only one Good Article out of 626 assessed articles, giving the project a relative WikiWork rating of 5.262. We asked Nate (Mrschimpf) how we can help.
Next week, we'll begin oral arguments in the landmark case of this century. Until then, enjoy the supreme wisdom of our previous interviews in the archive.
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