User:Mrt3366/Experience/Consensus

Procedural flaws of Consensus-building measures

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by Mr. T

12:28, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Assume good faith has its limits, I submit.

In a world where religious orientation, adherence to a mutual belief system and dogma act as strong adhesive force, people's prejudices, biases and other interests will naturally converge. It would be suicidal to summarily preclude the possibility that, as Wikipedia's popularity grows, the major prejudices and memes in the real-world would spill over to Wikipedia content.

Postulations

The whole idea of consensus depends on the following presuppositions:

1. all the concerned editors will keep abreast of any discussion they might want to take part in
2. a fair percentage of honest and competent people would be involved in shaping the consensus.
3. the preponderance of the commenters would be honest in their evaluation,
4. most would be competent enough to acknowledge and admit the fairly objective assertions

I posted similar concerns on Jimbo's talk where my comments were treated mostly like a pariah, but I got one cheeky bon mot,

To assume that "consensus" works for anything other than low-level content decisions is nothing but technolibertarian masturbation—we need to create a proper institutional structure on this encyclopedia. I've said many times already that Wikipedia has been hijacked by self-serving, angry cabals, and that that needs to change.
— User:Wer900

(I thank him for giving me something to adorn my post)

Problem

Biases

“ How can we build on our success to overcome the challenges that lie ahead? Less than a fifth of the world's population has access to the Internet. While hundreds of thousands of volunteers have contributed to Wikimedia projects today, they are not fully representative of the diversity of the world. Many choices lie ahead as we work to build a world wide movement to create and share free knowledge. ” — Michael Snow and Jimmy Wales

Since global population is not homogenous everywhere and disparities exists in every portion of our civilization, there are demographic biases in race, religious beliefs, sex, etcetera in the real world as well as on Wikipedia, the troubling fact is that the people belonging to

1. global minority groups, or
2. the underdeveloped nations, or
3. the underprivileged classes

have significantly less chance of having a neutral representation on Wikipedia. Some believe that since there is "little diversity" among editors and "the contributor with an agenda often prevails" the controversial content of Wikipedia are "controlled by a stagnant pool of editors from a limited demographic".

Apathy

“ They are able to do so largely because they have the numbers (and patience) to drown out, shoot down, and quash all dissenting opinions, no matter how well-sourced. ” — Ari Lieberman

There are a number of articles on controversial subjects that don't garner response or support from vast majority of wiki-community. The RFCs and Noticeboard entries often become irresponsive where the heavier group (comprising mainly of involved editors) buries the dissenters with arbitrary, stern and often autocratic assertions but no one cares to force the bullies to base their opinions on policies. Most of the times, no matter how diligently "minority-editors" point to WP:NOTAVOTE, the bigger group, just by sheer number of arbitrary "votes", has its way.

Complacency

Many find repose in the fact that these controversial articles are nugatory in number, I agree, but nevertheless our goal includes them too. Few numbers to put into perspective, Wikipedia, as of now, contains 4,244,289 entries in namespace. If even 0.1% of pages are controversial that would give 4,244 controversial pages. Wikipedia has 5,855 reviewers, 4,850 roll-backers, 2,908 auto-patrolled users and 1,448 administrators. If even 1% of each is seriously biased (not pointing fingers but I have seen bias, oh trust me!) that would mean 58 biased reviewers, 48 biased roll-backers, 29 biased auto-patrolled users and 14 seriously biased administrators. That is enough to wreak havoc on the controversial articles of Wikipedia. Given that everybody has some sort of predilection it should not sound like exaggeration or scaremongering.

Dishonesty

“ I would have banned him outright years ago. So would many others. That we did not, points to serious deficiencies in our systems. ” — Jimbo wales

Another problem arises when unctuous biased editors most of the times knowingly (perhaps because of contumacious desires or ulterior motives) support a stance that is antithetical to the goal of our project itself and decreases credibility of Wikipedia. Some wiki-administrators commit numerous faux pas while closing debates by not paying due attention to the inherent irrationalities of certain "votes" or should I say, "wishes"?

Nobody should really believe that User:Jagged 85 or User:Qworty are the only ones who were dishonest, biased, or detrimental to the site. Jagged 85 had made roughly 82,096 edits distributed in an array of 11,433 articles (mostly about subjects that were related to Islam in some way) before he was eventually banned. Although there is a cleanup template {{Jagged 85 cleanup}}, who can guarantee that all the biased edits have been traced back, let alone scrutinized?

“ The brutal fact is that a work of reference which depends mainly on volunteer amateurs, whose good faith, ability and expertise are unknown, and whose contributions are largely unchecked, cannot be other than unreliable.
I don't think there's a way of telling what proportion of Wikipedia entries are deficient, whether because of the writer's bias, mischief or lack of knowledge. It's clear that a significant number are questionable, sufficient to lead us to suspect all entries. ” — Marcel Berlins

Editorial discretion

Both editorial discretion and its scope are often abused. Sometimes well-sourced info are omitted from a controversial article, sometimes unsourced synthesis is included, sometimes legitimate sources are excised with arbitrary rationales that have nothing to do with policies, often undue weight is given to minuscule assertions and all these happen under the auspices of "consensus".

Inconsistent enforcement of the policies

Dan Murphy, too, believes, "Wikipedia’s rules are applied inconsistently, and capriciously, and incidents like these never lead to discussions about the underlying structural problems that make abusing others on Wikipedia so easy. The question is never asked about the ethics of allowing “Qworty” to have more influence over Ms. Filipacchi’s article than Filipacchi herself (she has a conflict of interest, or “COI,” you see. “Qworty,” thanks to “agf,” is clearly simply a good Samaritan adding to the sum of human knowledge in his spare time.)

Or about the fact that anonymity is such a powerful tool for people that manipulate editorial content. Or the fact that there are no editorial controls exercised by professionals over the articles.

The best that can be hoped for is that an accumulation of incidents like Robert Clark Young and Johann Hari will eventually filter out into the broader public consciousness and damage the Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising to the extent that they finally take steps to enforce better standards. That time does not seem close (Wikimedia broke its fundraising record again last year)."

Lacking deterrence

There is no provision for any speedy action to be taken against the above-mentioned editors. There is not enough deterrence in place. "Consensus on Wikipedia does not mean unanimity", you may quip. Yes but majority can be prejudiced or biased too. May be I am not being articulate enough but I hope you get the idea.
There is no real yardstick with which we can measure our allegiance to the purpose of the project. I guess, what I am trying to say is there is bias in the application and enforcement of Wikipedia policies themselves and there is no team which is actually guarding the project from these surreptitious attacks on its neutrality. And probably no one is even aware of this loophole, much less trying to amend it.

End result

As you can already see, this is worrying. How can we revert the community-wide biases and accepted but harmful status quos? Is there a mechanism in place for that? Who knows, Wikipedia may even become a propaganda vehicle if this is allowed to go on.

Solution?

In short, better governance on Wikipedia. If you ask, "How?" then I have not the faintest idea. There is no easy way. But one thing for sure, since the ArbCom is a like an apex Court, I wouldn't call it speedy action if I had to go to ArbCom every time for such actions. It is really so darn hard that I don't know where or how to begin.

See also

• The unblockables
• Gaming the consensus-building process

Notes

Further Reading

• Lanier, Jaron (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Penguin UK. ISBN 0141960884.
• Hasan, Heather. Wikipedia, 3.5 million articles & counting : using and assessing the people's encyclopedia (1st ed. ed.). New York: Rosen Central. ISBN 1448855578. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
• Lessig, Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. ; foreword by Lawrence (2010). Good faith collaboration : the culture of Wikipedia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 0262014475.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" By Jaron Lanier.

Discuss this essay

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• Hello, Wikid77 here. I have read your essay about wp:consensus, and understand the frustrations with the current system. In many cases, "management by consensus" has become a slanted form of "management by committee" as "management by self-appointed committee" rather than control by a broad consensus of active Wikipedians. To overcome the current powerplays, in gaming the consensus viewpoints, I think Wikipedia will need to run wide-ranging user surveys to gain "1,001 random opinions" (3% margin of error) as done with political polls. However, I think your point about "governance" is a valid priority, if only those in charge were more objective and pro-active to stop the games. The core concept behind "consensus" was to be a near unanimous consent, focused around a mutual compromise agreement, of editors working together in good faith (not insulting others, or else removed from the agreement). The deduction I have used is: "Two people discuss an issue, and one says they have reached consensus but the other disagrees". The way true "consensus" would stop the committee could be a lone voice insisting, "I object" and then the decision would be stopped, until a true consensus was formed. Unfortunately, such mutual agreements (as compromises) are very time-consuming, and the result in practice has been, instead, "We discussed this issue in an RfC last year which established consensus, and 'You do not have consensus' to change that viewpoint". For people who want to control the rules, then majority vote (with "consensus thumping") is the preferred method (as "tyranny of the majority"), and they often drag any dissenter to wp:ANI claiming the dissenter's repeated requests to change consensus as wp:DE "disruptive" to so-called harmony on Wikipedia. So, we are back to "governance" which depends on fair-minded admins to police the consensus games, and declare "consensus dissolved" when dissenters say no. Hence, I think the solution is to have more fair-minded admins, and they could block the biased admins who do not respect a broad consensus which includes most people but instead favor the majority-vote style of powergames. -Wikid77 (talk) 08:44, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

• Young was simply one of hundreds of anonymous editors assiduously pushing POVs on Wikipedia. They get support from the like-minded. Reason can be anything hatred towards various creeds or a particular theory or a person who they think swindled them, or a celebrity. Qworty aka Robert Clark Young himself said, after making 13,000 edits to wikipedia, “Wikipedia is the great postmodern novel, Wikipedia is ‘not truth’ … Wikipedia, like any other text, is not reality.”
  Andrew Leonard wonders, “If Qworty has been allowed to run free for so long — sabotaging the ‘truth’ however he sees fit, writing his own postmodern novel — how many others are also creating spiteful havoc under the hood, where no one is watching?”
  —Many!

  That fact of the matter is[1], ″the smart ones carry on for years, by adhering to the letter of Wikipedia’s byzantine internal rules, its love of anonymity and its childlike mantra of “Assume Good Faith” (“agf” is a key piece of Wikipedia jargon, and is frequently used as a very effective shield and weapon by people there who do very little good at all)″. Mr T^(Talk?) 05:46, 25 June 2013 (UTC)