[p2p-research] Wikiversity’s potential in global capacity building

[Michel Bauwens]

http://p2pfoundation.net/Wikipedia_Controversies

Tere,

since you ask, here's the overview of the main arguments

from
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-something-fundamentally-wrong-with-wikipedia-governance-processes/2008/01/07

point 4, 5 and 6 are key, and have only worsened since it was written,

I'm no longer optimistic, I think the Wikipedia's flawed governance is
beyond repair, there is no social force that could reform it

my key argument: after the victory of the deletionist created artificial
scarcity and therefore an allocation problem, but without any democratic
governance structure to accompany it, the problems became structurally
entrenched

Michel


Is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia governance
processes?<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-something-fundamentally-wrong-with-wikipedia-governance-processes/2008/01/07>

 The Wikipedia is often hailed as a prime example of peer production and
peer governance, an example of how a community can self-govern very complex
processes. Including by me.

But it is also increasingly showing the dark side and pitfalls of purely
informal approaches, especially when they scale.

Wikipedia is particularly vulnerable because its work is not done in teams,
but by individuals with rather weak links. At the same time it is also a
very complex project, with consolidating social norms and rules, and with an
elite that knows them, vs. many occasional page writers who are ignorant of
them. When that system then instaures a scarcity rule, articles have to be
‘notable" or they can be deleted. It creates a serious imbalance.

While the Wikipedia remains a remarkable achievement, and escapes any easy
characterization of its qualities because of its sheer vastness, there must
indeed be hundreds of thousands of volunteers doing good work on articles,
it has also created a power structure, but it is largely invisible, opaque,
and therefore particularly vulnerable to the well-known tyranny of
structurelessness <http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Structurelessness>.

Consider the orginal thoughts of Jo Freeman:

"*Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a
'structureless' group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming
together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure
itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible, it may vary over
time, it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over
the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities,
personalities and intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we
are individuals with different talents, predispositions and backgrounds
makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis
whatsoever could we approximate 'structurelessness' and that is not the
nature of a human group*.

Consider also this
warning<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/every-cause-wan.html>
:

*Every group of people with an unusual goal - good, bad, or silly - will
trend toward the cult attractor unless they make a constant effort to resist
it. You can keep your house cooler than the outdoors, but you have to run
the air conditioner constantly, and as soon as you turn off the electricity
- give up the fight against entropy - things will go back to "normal".*

*In the same sense that every thermal differential wants to equalize itself,
and every computer program wants to become a collection of ad-hoc patches,
every Cause wants to be a cult. It's a high-entropy state into which the
system trends, an attractor in human psychology.*

*Cultishness is quantitative, not qualitative. The question is not "Cultish,
yes or no?" but "How much cultishness and where?*"

The Wikicult <http://www.wikicult.org/index.html> website asserts that this
stage has already been reached:

*With the systems, policies, procedures, committees, councils, processes and
appointed authorities that run Wikipedia, a lot of intrinsic power goes
around. While most serious contributors devotedly continue to contribute to
the implied idealism, there are those with the communication and political
skill to place themselves in the right place at the right time and establish
even more apparent power. Out of these, a cabal inevitably forms; the rest,
as they say, is history*.

Specialized sites have sprung up, such as the Wikipedia
Review<http://wikipediareview.com/>,
monitoring power abuse in general, or in particular
cases<http://antisocialmedia.net/>

*The Wikipedia Review offers an interesting
summary<http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20080104/criticisms-of-wikipedia/>of
the various criticisms that have been leveled agains the Wikipedia,
which
I'm reproducing here below, but I'm adding links that document these
processes as well.* Spend some time on reading the allegations, their
documentation, and make up your own mind.

My conclusion though is that major reforms will be needed to insure the
Wikipedia governance is democratic and remains so.

*1. Wikipedia disrespects and disregards scholars, experts, scientists, and
others with special knowledge.*

"*Wikipedia specifically disregards authors with special knowledge,
expertise, or credentials. There is no way for a real scholar to distinguish
himself or herself from a random anonymous editor merely claiming scholarly
credentials, and thus no claim of credentials is typically believed. Even
when credentials are accepted, Wikipedia affords no special regard for
expert editors contributing in their fields. This has driven most expert
editors away from editing Wikipedia in their fields. Similarly, Wikipedia
implements no controls that distinguish mature and educated editors from
immature and uneducated ones*."

Critique of Wikipedia's open source ideology, as opposed to free software
principles<http://www.anat.org.au/stillopen/blog/2007/08/19/open-source-ideologies/>

*2. Wikipedia's culture of anonymous editing and administration results in a
lack of responsible authorship and management.*

"*Wikipedia editors may contribute as IP addresses, or as an ever-changing
set of pseudonyms. There is thus no way of determining conflicts of
interest, canvassing, or other misbehaviour in article editing. Wikipedia's
adminsitrators are similarly anonymous, shielding them from scrutiny for
their actions. They additionally can hide the history of their editing (or
that of others)*."

*3. Wikipedia's administrators have become an entrenched and over-powerful
elite, unresponsive and harmful to authors and contributors. *

"*Without meaningful checks and balances on administrators, administrative
abuse is the norm, rather than the exception, with blocks and bans being
enforced by fiat and whim, rather than in implementation of policy. Many
well-meaning editors have been banned simply on suspicion of being
previously banned users, without any transgression, while others have been
banned for disagreeing with a powerful admin’s editorial point of view.
There is no clear-cut code of ethics for administrators, no truly
independent process leading to blocks and bans, no process for appeal that
is not corrupted by the imbalance of power between admin and blocked editor,
and no process by which administrators are reviewed regularly for
misbehaviour*."

Overview of developments<http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20071216/attacking-the-source/>

The blog Nonbovine ruminations critically
monitors<http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/>Wikipedia
governance

The Wikipedia has stopped growing because of the deletionists:
Andrew<http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2007/09/10/two-million-english-wikipedia-articles-celebrate/>
Lih<http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2007/07/10/unwanted-new-articles-in-wikipedia/>;
Slate
<http://www.slate.com/id/2160222/fr/rss/>

Wikipedia's abusive bio-deletion process: case by Tony
Judge<http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/bio/wikibios.php>

*4. Wikipedia's numerous policies and procedures are not enforced equally on
the community, popular or powerful editors are often exempted*.

"*Administrators, in particular, and former administrators, are frequently
allowed to trangress (or change!) Wikipedia's numerous policies, such as
those prohibiting personal attacks, prohibiting the release of personal
information about editors, and those prohibiting collusion in editing*."

The undemocratic practices of its investigative
committee<http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/12/wikipedia-al-qaeda.html>

A personal experience<http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/12/kicked-out-of-wikicult.html>

The badsites list <http://antisocialmedia.net/?p=118> of censored sites
belonging to Wikipedia's enemies

Lack of transparency and accountability <http://antisocialmedia.net/?p=118>

The Judd Bagley<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wikipedia_and_overstock/>case

InformationLiberation on Wikipedia's totalitarian
universe<http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=24450>

5. *Wikipedia's quasi-judicial body, the Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) is
at best incompetent and at worst corrupt*.

"*ArbCom holds secret proceedings, refuses to be bound by precedent,
operates on non-existant or unwritten rules, and does not allow equal access
to all editors. It will reject cases that threaten to undermine the
Wikipedia status quo or that would expose powerful administrators to
sanction, and will move slowly or not at all (in public) on cases it is
discussing in private*."

Monitoring of ArbCom's
activities<http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showforum=28>

Summary of criticisms<http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20071215/ten-reasons-why-the-arbitration-committee-doesnt-matter/>

The case of the secret mailing
list<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/>for
top insiders

*6. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the organization legally responsible for
Wikipedia, is opaque, is poorly managed, and is insufficiently independent
from Wikipedia's remaining founder and his business interests.*

"*The WMF lacks a mechanism to address the concerns of outsiders, resulting
in an insular and socially irresponsible internal culture. Because of
inadequate oversight and supervision, Wikimedia has hired incompetent and
(in at least one case) criminal employees. Jimmy Wales for-profit business
Wikia benefits in numerous ways from its association with the non-profit
Wikipedia*."

The Foundation's
budget<http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/12/foundation-budget.html>

Wikimedia chairwoman rejects demand for
transparency<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-December/036559.html>

Review of the conflict of
interest<http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20070821/the-tight-knit-web-of-wikimedia-and-wikia/>issue



Misc:

-
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/conflict-arbitration-at-the-wikipedia/2009/02/10

-
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/banning-the-wikipedia-bans-as-a-governance-tool/2008/11/21

-
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/update-on-the-bagley-wikipedia-controversy/2008/10/26

- http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-it-time-to-go-beyond-wikipedia/2008/11/11

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:18 AM, Tere Vadén <tere.vaden at uta.fi> wrote:

> > This is perhaps a good moment to ask Tere explicitely how they see their
> > relation to the wikipedia and the wikimedia foundation, especially in
> > the light of their problems with democratic governance?
> >
> > Michel
> >
>
> I forwarded the question to my co-authors as well, and here is what I got:
>
> Teemu, who, btw, is a member of the foundation's advisory board, replied in
> Finnish that he does not see/recognise a problem with regard to democratic
> governance.
>
> Juha wrote: "I am not aware of the possible democracy gaps in Wikipedia
> besides the obvious problems relating to the epistemological questions of
> specific article topics (what is worth knowing, what information gets
> through as a WP article etc.), and some stupid censors (a.k.a admins). But
> all and all, I hope that Wikiversity will develop as a true grassroots
> movement, that is, as much as possible as a bottom-up endeavor. What else
> that means in practice than that those who participate share some common
> elements of .... decency, honesty, openness etc. (Marxist tells that she is
> a Marxist as well as Christian fundamentalist)..."
>
> I really have not much add to Juha. So this seems to be a good time for
> everybody to instruct us on what *are* the problems of democratic
> governance. Links would be fine! :)
>
>
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