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

Chris Watkins chriswaterguy at appropedia.org
Thu Feb 19 20:26:48 CET 2009 

My own experience of Wikipedia is more positive (since I edit science and
tech articles, which are less controversial, and work better in Wikipedia).


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/>
>

Wikipedia Review seems to me to be somewhat less fair and balanced than Fox
News, from what I've seen. But this is at least a well structured argument,
even if I mostly don't buy it.

*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*."
>
This is the flip side of Wikipedia's greatest strengths.

   - Allowing anyone to edit - to fact check, to add or remove - means there
   are more people to contribute, leading to a far more exhaustive knowledge
   project than has ever been achieved before.
   - Requiring references regardless of whether you're a primary school
   student, a conspiracy theorist or a professor - keeps the argument focused
   on the facts, rather than the personalities. And sometimes the primary
   school student is right, and anyone who's been to university knows that
   professors can be wrong!

I'm not sure that this has driven expert editors away. What were they doing
in terms of contributing to  a free knowledge resource before there was
Wikipedia? Nothing. And are they now flocking to Citizendium? If they are,
the amateurs at Wikipedia are still doing a better job.

Some experts do edit. And consider that most content comes from anon
editors, or editors who do only a few edits, adding large amounts of
content, and mostly in just their field of interest. My guess is a lot of
these are people who really know the field they're contributing on.

Overall, this has been a good thing. There is probably a way of having their
cake and eating it, and we've been also been thinking about how to do this
at Appropedia, and have some ideas (in terms of flagging versions of pages
as being approved by a certain respected group, either an existing
organization, or several respected people).


> 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*."
>

This is the one point that I would mostly agree with. Wikipedia is still
better than anything else out there, in terms of making it easy for people
to contribute, but there is a problem that boils down to one word: Civility.
It's supposed to be one of the pillars of Wikipedia, but is not applied very
thoroughly these days. Certain other wikis - including Wikiversity (based on
conversations with Cormac Lawler a.k.a. Cormaggio), wikiHow and Appropedia -
place a much greater emphasis on being helpful and positive with
contributors, even in cases of disagreement.

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/>
>

Note that Andrew Lih is still a committed Wikipedian as far as I know. He's
making constructive criticisms, and I doubt that he'd agree with much in
this Wikipedia Review piece.

That's all I feel able to comment on.

> <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*."
>

Hang on - point 1 is that it doesn't respect the elites, and point 4 is that
it's not democratic? Okay, I see that this is a different kind of elite, the
Wikipedia in-crowd. Personally I haven't seen any case where I thought a
serious injustice was done - I won't say it doesn't happen, just that I
doubt the claim about their being "*frequently allowed to trangress...
**Wikipedia's
numerous policies**" *let alone change the policies. It mostly seems to work
well.

> 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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>>
>
>
>
> --
> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>
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>
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-- 
Chris Watkins (a.k.a. Chriswaterguy)

Appropedia.org - Sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives.

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I like this: five.sentenc.es
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