The Experts Problem is the perceived withdrawal of expert editors from wikipedia due to discontent.
Aims of this article
This article is an attempt at a community project to investigate this issue, and an investigation into what further wikiprojects would be useful. This page, which is open for the community to work upon, aims to:
- Record those expert editors who are becoming discontented with wikipedia
- Formulate clear statements of the issues and problems they have with the project
- Locate evidence, where possible, that these are genuine problems
- Discuss solutions to the above
- Decide upon further wikiprojects to create or call upon to help with this
What are expert editors and why should we worry?
Expert editors are one of wikipedia's most valuable resources. These people are subject experts or skilled writers who hold the potential to significantly improve and add to wikipedia's coverage of their subject. Jimmy Wales has stated that wikipedia is in need of more work on quality of articles (as opposed to quantity), and expert editors are amongst some of the most able members of the community for much of this quality improvement drive. Peer reviewing of articles is dependant on Peer reviewers, who by their nature have to be experts within the field of the articles they peer review.
Expert users discontented with en-wikipedia
Based on the list collected at User:Dbuckner/Expert rebellion, we have the following:
See also Wikipedia:Missing_Wikipedians. Note however that this list is of all Wikipedians who have left (including clearly some cranks or vandals who were 'encouraged' to leave). Dbuckner's list is specifically those who are discontent because of the crank or edit creep problem (many of which have not left and are continuing to work despite discontent).
Stated Reasons for discontent
Please only list here reasons that can be directly attributed to expert authors
Edit creep
- According to Hillman "Articles reach a state of which WP can be proud, but then are gradually dismantled by careless edits, sometimes from well-intentioned registered users who are too hasty or inexperienced to take care not to shove in new material any old place, but rather to to try find some place where it fits neatly, or barring that, rewriting nearby paragraphs in order to correct any damage done to the previous flow of ideas." [1]
- Novice editors are typically insensitive "to the sometimes challenging high-level intellectual task of seeing how to fit material they wish to add into the existing structure and vision of a given article. In an unstructured wiki model, all too often, novice writers prove unable to maintain consistent paragraph structure, verb tense, terminology, and notation. Or even worse, they often do not appear to even be aware of such issues!". [1]
- " … other irritants include those that feel the need to 'polish' otherwise stable articles with bad grammar and oversimplifications; editors for whom English is a second tongue but have no grasp of this language's idiom making a stand on what they perceive the meaning to be". [2]
Failure to recognise edit creep
- There is a widely held belief in the WP community that there is no such problem. "Hillman talks of "the naive expectation that Wikipedia articles tend to naturally improve monotonically, at least "on average"". [Franco] A dangerously naive WP myth holds that (apparently by some previously unknown law of nature) articles can only improve monotonically in quality." [1]
Cranks
These fall into two classes:
- The loners. "Some users pose a particularly insiduous threat to the content value of the Wikipedia, because they are engaged in a persistent, determined, and often quite ingenious campaign to portray their highly idiosyncratic (and dubious) personal opinion as well-established mainstream scientific or historical fact.".[1] "By nature the classic crank is only interested in his own unique and bizarre vision (and cranks often abuse each other with extreme viciousness)". Hillman, [3] " A few months before I left I was treated to the spectacle of no less than six editors claiming Phds trying to reason one of these idiots out of his notions of the existence of a ceramic gas, and thinking what waste of talent. In the end the crank had to be brought before ArbCom and was subsequently barred, but only after tying up mine and several other editors time for months. Undaunted, this individual has opened several sockpuppet accounts and continues to push his ideas on the same pages he was barred from. The fiction is that these people need to be educated in the ways of the 'pedia - the truth is that by in large they are beyond redemption because they are parasites, scofflaws or insane." [2]
- Crank groups. However, "There are fairly sizable subcultures which adhere strongly to various anti-scientific conspiracy theories (e.g. Free energy suppression) or anti-scientific political movements (e.g. Intelligent design) masquerading as "scholarship", and therefore many science/math articles at Wikipedia have been slanted in cranky ways by several editors working together." (Hillman, [3]). "The bad guys (the ideologues, hoaxers, linkspammers, crank physikers, undercover political "dirty tricks" operatives, and guerrilla marketeers, among others) are winning this struggle for control of the Wikipedia.".[1]
There is an oddball... who has edited in passages of bewildering incoherence... What is happening is precisely what I feared... the work is being bowlderised and corrupted"[4]
Lack of adherence to or understanding of scholarly values
Hillman. " in order to make good judgements in content disputes regarding encyclopedia articles on scientific subjects, one must neccessarily adopt scholarly values. Unfortunately, the populist values of many prominent Wikipedians are generally antithetical to scholarly values, which is a huge part of the problem in attempting to deal with bad content in the scientific categories." [1] "There exists a class of editor so driven by ideological agendas that they simply will not recognize Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View Policy or seem to believe that it means that it guarantees uncritical place for their interpretations regardless of how flimsy the supporting facts or underlying logic might be. Worse, after an exhausting effort to bring these under control in a few months a fresh batch of POV pushers, unrelated to the first, show up to the same topics and the process must begin again from scratch." [2]
"I am sorry to report that I begin to feel-after very few weeks of browsing and editing-the whole Wikipedia enterprise verges on the worthless... It's a pity, really-but there are just two many people with perverse agendas, who care little for clarity or objective truth.... I did try reversion,.. but it was promptly edited back again without explanation. The whole exercise then becomes pathetically childish, and I simply refuse to compromise myself any further. If people prefer ignorance, so be it. I do not want to give you the impression that I consider myself to be infallible; I am as capable of error as any other individual; but I always welcome reasoned challenges to any point I put forward. Sadly, apart from one or two people.. it is not forthcoming."[5]
"There is, I think, a deep flaw in the philisophical grounding of the whole project, the assumption that 'truth' can somehow emerge through consensus. What emerges-depending on the topic- is a kind of mad Berkeleian world, where ideas struggle for dominance in complete disassociation from physical reality-I shout the loudest, therefore I am!."[6]
Vandalism
"the constant drizzle of schoolboy vandalism." [2]
Procedures
A comment when the Template:Tone tag had been placed on an article: "If you think it needs work then do it instead of adding puerile tags" [7]
Please keep this to personal speculation about discontent. Any discussion belongs on the talk page
Informed and mob consensus, by LinaMishima
Wikipedia is based on the idea that improvement happens via consensus. Consensus can be a powerful means to ensure accuracy, as long as the principle of informed consensus is followed. Informed consensus is the idea that all involved provide sound reasoning and are prepared to listen to provided reasoning, based on evidence. Those with the most soundly reasoned points become the most listened to. Variations upon the concept are used throughout science and industry, and the established means of checking scientific research, peer review, is quite similar (being a method of informed evaluation and requests for improvement).
However it is often the case that public forums (in the general, rather than online sense) and other places soliciting community involvement become controlled via mob consensus, whereby the loudest particapants are the most listened to, and generally dictate the outcome of the debate.
Wikipedia appears to seriously suffer from the clash between those who wish to discuss things professionally and academically, and those who wish to hammer a point home in a mob style manner. In such cases, it is inevitably those who are not using reason who win, for they do not require any thought, effort or personal involvement to drive their point in, and those who prefer reason are not able to counter them without resorting to similar tactics (which they find abhorant).
Proposed solutions to the problems
Please suggest here solutions based directly upon the discussion of problems only - for concepts not drawn directly from detailed problems, see /ideas for improvements
Three deadly rules
- At the root of all of the above issues is Wikipedia’s corpus of policy. It is gaps in this area that create the conditions that permit cranks and the incompetent to operate freely and makes bringing them under control such an exhausting exercise.
- My issue with the rules here stems from the fact that they are all in tension with each other. This along with the disabling policies of Wikipedia:Ignore all rules and Wikipedia:No binding decisions is an invitation for anarchy.
- Exacerbating this condition, ArbCom has as part of its policy that it will not be bound by precedent. Wikipedia:Arbitration policy/Past decisions. As a consequence this internal tension cannot ever be eased by due process. The excuse that this to avoid having to repeat a ruling that may have proved not to be workable is ludicrous on its face; they are not the last level of appeal, that belongs to the Foundation and Wales. If a precedent needs overturning it can be done there. DV8 2XL 19:49, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
- A doctrine of open ended rules was appropriate in the beginning of the Project; it provided room for quick maneuver and adjustment during the initial phase and allowed for some flexibility as the project defined itself. However if it is to mature beyond its present state some solidification has to occur. Getting rid of those three 'anti-rules' would be a good start.
Expand ArbCom to deal quickly with Cranks
- Cranks show themselves early on, not immediately perhaps, but sooner than most problem editors. One thing that works very well, albeit slowly, in dealing with problematic editors is ArbCom. Naturally as a court of last resort that is involved largely with serious charges of rule-breaking, cases that wind up there are complex and thus require careful and lengthy examination of the evidence. However all of the conflicts that I have been involved in, that wound up at ArbCom, started as content disputes that escalated. Looking back on many other cases that have gone to ArbCom it's apparent that this is the situation in for most of them, and in the overwhelming bulk of those there was an apparent violation of basic policy, like one of the Five Pillars, or What Wikipedia is Not. Had evidence been presented then and there a ruling could have been made and it would have been over. Some of these were clear issues of NPOV violations, yet the bickering went on for months until it got to the point where behavior problems broke out and it was on these that it went to arbitration.
- I submit that the present system of dispute resolution is is quite simply overwhelmed which results in disputes escalating far beyond the point where they need to be, thus becoming far more complex to sort out than they have to be. The solution, as I see it, is to create a much larger pool of arbitrators who would accept cases earlier in the conflict, and expand the purview of arbitration to include violations of basic policy. DV8 2XL 19:55, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
Featured Articles as a cure for edit creep
- An established process exists to nominate and approve an articles promotion to the status of ‘featured,’ also a similar process can be invoked to demote it. Featured should also automatically render the entry fully protected. At least until it falls back down to the lower level.
- Talk pages would still be open, of course, and should it be felt that some error, or important new information need to be inserted, it could be discussed first and when consensus had been reached any administrator could unprotect the article to permit changes to be made and lock it up again after. Should the contents need a more detailed reworking then a nomination to have it demoted would pass through existing channels.
- Editors would be encouraged by this policy to clean-up and nominate entries as they would know that there would be some stability obtained from their efforts. As it stands it’s just not worth the trouble as nothing is gained except exposing your work to more intense vandalism. DV8 2XL 20:36, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
- I like this. It is a small, practical method of making some degree of progress.--dburress
For articles not directly associated with this topic but may also be of us, see…
