I am currently trying to collect my muddled thoughts as I ponder the reasons for my forthcoming disengagement from WP. CH 11:23, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
I am keeping this page mostly for my own use as I try to organize my thoughts on the problem on Wikicruft and how the Wikipedia community can or should respond to it, but if anyone wants to comment (with civility), please do so in the talk page.
TIA --- CH 05:13, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
See also User:Hillman/Media commentary on Wikipedia. --- CH 04:01, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
This is a draft. Things will get worse before they get better. Expect seemingly random insertions, redundancies, and general chaos until I begin to sort out the mess.
Robert McHenry has pointed out that the wiki model appears incompatible with the goal of attaining any global balance of coverage, and I think he has a point. That is, because in order to further the goal of building a better Brittanica under the wiki model, to create good articles on topic X, we need to attract a fair-minded, wise, judicious, self-less, industrious, and dedicated pool of editors who happen to be experts on topic X. Amazingly, this unlikely combination of virtues has proven not impossible to attain in some areas, such as mathematical topics. However, I think we must concede that it is highly unlikely that any wiki could ever attract such a pool of editors competent to write good encyclopedia articles on every topic. The resulting global imbalance of coverage does not contradict seeking a local balance, however. Indeed, a resource such as this metalist suggests that the wiki model need not result in utter chaos within a well-defined subject area such as mathematics. Indeed, I suspect that if Brittanica itself is not already using an internal wiki (accessible only to editors and authors) to track and guide the development of the next edition, it soon will be doing so! Several astute observers of the software scene, recognizing that wikis work best when restricted to a pool of editors who share some common core principles, have predicted that such internal wikis is the path of the future, rather than Wikipedias somewhat notorious slogan, "which can be edited by anyone".
Similar considerations apply within individual articles, where I feel that the classical wiki model is incompatible with maintaining an overall structure and vision. Here, I believe that some kind of modified wiki structure, which establishes gradations of privileges, is required to ensure that articles are improved in coherent directions, and to encourage novice authors to improve their sensitivity 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! This is one aspect of edit creep, a lamentable phenomenon which tends to disprove the naive expectation that Wikipedia articles tend to naturally improve monotonically, at least "on average" (but on what time scale?, we should immediately retort). Or in an even more asinine version: Wikipedia is globally attracted to a state of perfection without requiring any leadership or concious organization.
Like many Wikipedians, during the course of my year as an active contributor, I grew increasingly concerned with the problem of quality control at Wikipedia and what to do about it. Or, to put it more bluntly, with the misuse of Wikipedia in order to mislead readers by manipulating information in order to pursue a hidden agenda, sometimes motivated by the possiblity of financial or other personal gain. I was aware before I became a contributor of the potential for this kind of misuse – as well as the potential for good, by disseminating accurate and timely information about math/sci topics which might be hard for general readers to find elsewhere – and while I was here I tried to foster the latter while combating the former. Ultimately, I sadly concluded that 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.
I tried several strategies to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation in the Wikipedia, some of which were almost comically disastrous, but I do believe that I have proved willing to learn from my mistakes and to adapt to new circumstances. I think my later efforts, based on insights won at the cost of harsh experience, were wiser than my earliest attempts, but ultimately I was forced to sadly conclude that:
I say more about this elsewhere in my user pages. Here I will say only that I believe that while allowing anonymous edits from unregistered users may have played an important part in helping Wikipedia grow to its current size, I believe that continuing to permit anons and socks will prove a key strategic error which will prove fatal to the experiment if it is not addressed. I believe that the problem posed by anons and socks is only one of the potentially fatal problems which the Wikipedia community needs to promptly address in an effective way, but it is probably the easiest to fix. However, these are complicated issues, so I hope to be able to direct comments elsewhere in my user pages in the near future.
I'll define wikicruft, via a gloriously mixed metaphor, as
wikicruft (noun): the accumulation of undesirable content which slips under the radar screen of the alleged army of watchful eyes, or otherwise (smack! twhack! whack-a-mole!) evades eradication from the WP.
Wikicruft can take various forms, including
For our purposes, content is considered to be bad if it includes elements such as these:
OTH, good content is characterized by elements such as these:
This page also attempts to discuss more insiduous forms of the degradation of content in WP and related issues. I focus on degradation of math/physics-related articles, but some of this discussion is no doubt relevant to WP articles and categories dealing with other parts of science or scholarly research.
For purposes of this discussion, I will assume that 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. Needless to say, I didn't appreciate this crucial point when I first started participating in WP, and I doubt that the many other editors who have built some excellent math/physics-related content here did either!
Let me elaborate slightly. Populism has always formed a powerful undercurrent in American politics, and currently is enjoying a powerful revival in the U.S. To see why this affects the pursuit of science, at least in the U.S., it is crucial to recognize that populism tends to be hostile toward elitism of all kinds, because (to oversimplify) populists believe that the opinions of all individuals are equally valid. Scholarly values are on the other hand unintentionally but ineluctably elitist, because scholars address complex issues which often require much background knowledge to appreciate. It follows that in scholarly discussion, the contributions of well-informed experts who know the relevant scholarly literature well tend to be worth far more than contributions from people who know very little about the subject under discussion, however intelligent or otherwise well-informed they may be. This is particularly true for math/physics, where considerable mathematical ability may be required to closely follow a scientific discussion, regardless of the amount of effort made the participants to include laypersons in the discusssion. My point is that even those mathematicians and scientists who happen to prefer, in principle, populist ideals to elitist ideals, really cannot avoid behaving as elitists when the topic of discussion turns to their field of study, at least not if they want to function effectively as scholars.
Readers who haven't thought of populism in quite this way before might want to take a moment here to reread some of the many pages which describe official Wikipedia guidelines and policies. It should not be hard to spot populist ideals once you start looking for them.
(A quick aside concerning the Americanism implicit in the previous two paragraphs: I am tacitly assuming, on the basis of various public statements by Jimmy Wales, that a nightmare scenario in which a lawsuit effectively shuts down the WP overnight, whether due to some kind of injunction or to hefty fines and legal fees breaking Wikimedia's financial back, has driven much of the response to recent media scandals. My point is of course that Wikimedia is incorporated in the U.S., and some angry cranks and other malcontents have publically taken note of this fact.)
Jimmy Wales recently wrote: I am a firm believer in the validity of allowing anons to edit. Most anon edits are good, and done "on impulse". This seems innocuous enough, until you reflect that the result of "impulsive" edits of carefully constructed articles dealing with complex subjects is unlikely to lend support to the claim that wikis somehow encourage the monotonic perfection of encyclopedia articles. His claim also does not appear to correspond to the facts (see Zocky's study in the next section).
I suspect that much of the anguish (or anger) expressed by many Wikipedians regarding media stories involving the WP involves the inevitable collision of utopian ideals with some harsh realities of human nature. Our problems as scholarly wikipedians are compounded by the unintentional clash of the dominant political philosophies of the leaders of our community with some nonneogotiable requirements for the conduct of scholarly discourse (for example, in resolving content disputes concerning science-related articles). From this statement, I also suspect that the accidental conflict between populist values and scholarly values ultimately lies behind the departure of Larry Sanger from the WP (which happened well before I arrived).
Since I am not intrinsically interested in politics as such, I find it irksome that political ideologies should affect our work here, but it would be a grave mistake to ignore the role played by political ideals at WP simply because one feels that scholars should be left alone to sort out intellectual issues in the way which hundreds of years of experience has shown works best: scholarly discussion, peer review, consideration of evidence, and so forth.
Alas, it doesn't end here. Libertarianism is a younger but related political ideology which informs many RfC, AfD, and talk page discussions, and which is admired by many prominent Wikipedians. Unfortunately, Libertarian ideals also tend to be hostile toward deletionist practices, because (again oversimplifying) Libertarians tend to dislike any restraint upon individual freedom, and therefore are likely to be reluctant to adopt such measures as banning problem users, or in any way restricting what they regard (not always with due attention to legal nicities) as the right of free speech.
User:Zocky tracked the fate of a sample of articles created on Fri 2 Dec 2005, from which he (if neccessary I will exercise my free will and redefine this pronoun to gender-neutral) made some rough estimates of the rate at which anons are creating bad articles (e.g. ones which are later deleted following an AfD discussion). He summarized his results in a self-explanatory table which he posted at the Village pump policy discussion forum on 8 Dec 2005. His results turned out to be quite similar to my own informal statistical study in Sept 2005.
Zocky's sample suggests these estimates:
The sample size in Zocky's study might seem small, but statistical theory suggests that it might nonetheless be large enough to give some information about the magnitude of the problem.
The lesson seems clear: by forbidding new article creation by anons, WP can expect to
Here is Zocky's table:
New pages, Friday, December 2, 2005 | pages I checked | calculated values for all pages created on Friday | ||||
created by: | IPs | logged in | total | IPs | logged in | total |
new pages, still existing | 95 | 145 | 240 | 773 | 1182 | 1955 |
good pages, properly done | 63 | 125 | 188 | 513 | 1018 | 1531 |
good pages, didn't get attention from experienced users | 16 | 10 | 26 | 130 | 82 | 212 |
all good new pages | 79 | 135 | 214 | 643 (37%) |
1100 (63%) |
1743 |
on AFD | 7 | 3 | 10 | 57 | 24 | 81 |
bad pages, should be deleted | 8 | 3 | 11 | 65 | 25 | 90 |
mistakes (wrong language, namespace, etc.), should be deleted or moved | 1 | 4 | 5 | 8 | 33 | 41 |
all bad pages still existing | 16 | 10 | 26 | 130 | 82 | 212 |
deleted pages | 264 | 89 | 353 | 1149 | 388 | 1537 |
all bad new pages | 280 | 99 | 379 | 1280 (73%) |
469 (27%) |
1749 |
all new pages | 359 | 234 | 593 | 1935 (55%) |
1557 (45%) |
3492 |
I should point out that one issue which Zocky didn't address is the commonly seen claim that most WP users start by editing anonymously, and eventually decide to create an account. I myself created an account right off the bat, so I would like to see this bit of WP mythology (?) put to the test. In any case, I don't think it neccessarily follows that forbidding new page creation by anons will slow the rate at which new editors are recruited into the WP community, but certainly this is a valid question to study by means of a proper survey followed by valid statistical analysis.
Recently I have carried out some surveys of anon edits in particular articles which are frequently the target of bad edits.
This article was created 09/12/2002 14:11 by WkPark ( talk · contribs) (single edit account!).
In reverse chrononical order, covering the ten IP anons who made contributions between Apr 14, 2006 and Jun 3, 2006:
Here, geolocations/domains are used to disambiguate the various anon editors. By my count, this gives
Much better than any results I've seen so far in similar survey!
This article was created on 11/20/2001 05:21 by Chenyu ( talk · contribs) (inactive since Jan 2002).
(Note: copy of this study)
Just took a quick look at recent bad edits by anons.
OK, so over the past 21000 minutes or so, this article was in an obviously vandalized state for something over 375 minutes, which would be suggest that this article typically exists in an anon-vandalized state just under 2% of the time. This is consistent with previous estimate from many months ago. Over this time period, only a handful of non-bad edits by anons were observed. This seems consistent with earlier estimates that less than one in five anon edits is acceptable. I didn't systematically check whether registered users made a comparable number of bad edits in this time period, but spot checks suggested that they did not. If we subtract out Danras, this article was anonvandalized for something like 285 minutes over about 21000 minutes, for a rate of about 1.4%. This also seems consistent with earlier estimates for anon vandalization rates, suggesting that contrary to the hopes of some, semiprotection does not seem to be ameliorating the anon vandalization problem; anons are just damaging easier targets, such as this article.
I think that finding this article in a vandalized state two percent of the time is too high a frequency to be acceptable. Even those who don't agree probably will agree that it is utterly unacceptable that this article should have existed in a vandalized state for 75 minutes on 25 August or 280 minutes on 13 August. Clearly, in such a popular article, that does not serve our readers well.
Once again, the inexorable conclusion is that Wikipedia must follow the model of all other large public forums (of which I am aware), by prohibiting all edits by unregistered users (by technical means, not social means). The figures above are consistent with my estimates from last fall suggesting that we could more than halve our problem with bad edits with no effort at all, simply by eliminating anon edits. --- CH 07:20, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
The needed word would express the sense of: "this person has IMO absolutely no idea what he is talking about". Danras ( talk · contribs) continues to actively edit this and other physics-related articles, with similar results.
(Note: copy of this study)
Alterations like this constitute utter hogwash, and any good student in an undergraduate gtr should be able to spot some specific howlers:
Well, you get the idea: absolutely every sentence Danras added is a howler (which is in itself evidence he is just trolling). Apparently this user was also responsible, at least in part, for the recently deleted "symmetrical relativity" (no such notion is recognized in physics).
The sad thing is, based on his contribs, I suspect his motivation might not have been trolling after all, but performing some kind of extremely misguided "service" to his church. See Robert Sungenis, another "apologist" who just doesn't know what he is talking about when it comes to gtr, but note that Danras's wild misstatements appear too naive to suggest that he might be some kind of Sungenis sock. BTW, for all I know, Danras and Sungenis might be fine fellows when they are not going on about physics; I am just saying that they don't know what they are talking about when they talk about physics.--- CH 05:57, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
Forthcoming: studies of
Will move to seperate page.
The article Albert Einstein, was created on 11/05/2001 18:26 by Zundark ( talk · contribs), and eventually evolved into a featured article. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most vandalized "flagship articles" in the Wikipedia (at least compared with other science-related articles). As of 8 Oct 2006,
See
These statistics clearly suggest that, at least for this one article, individuals who (at least in my judgement) tend to vigorously push minority viewpoints in their edits, vastly outnumber individuals willing to put in a comparable effort to maintain WP:NPOV, despite that fact that anti-relativists are such a tiny population compared to mainstream scientists and others who recognized that relativity theory is one of the best tested scientific theories ever known. Unfortunately, in my experience, this pattern holds true throughout the science pages at the Wikipedia; there is tiny handful of individuals who try to maintain WP:NPOV in science-related articles, but I have documented almost one hundred individuals (many of whom have created numerous sockpuppet accounts, and some of whom form more or less acknowledged meatpuppet clusters) who push specific minority viewpoints in the physics-related pages alone.
Media fallout from the Seigenthaler scandal apparently induced Jimmy Wales to make a statistical study of his own, whereupon he issued this thunderbolt (sent to a WP mailing list):
Many users, including myself, don't subscribe to this list or (embarrased grin) read the paper, and therefore first heard about the change from not entirely accurate news stories. In the discusion of this policy change which ensued in various places on WP, including the Village Pump, several readers, including myself, commented on their first experience of the CNN Syndrome (in which the murrrrican Secretary of Defence complains that he learned from CCN that France has invaded New Zealand five minutes before he heard it from his befuddled minions. Not, of course, that France would really invade New Zealand...would she?)
Below I have archived some comments by Zocky and myself which orginally appeared at the Village Pump policy discussion formum on or about 8 Dec 2005. I have slightly modified the indentation for improved readibility and also removed a few remarks from my own comments which referred to pieces of the discussion which I am not trying to archive here.
There is no question in my mind that 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. It is very striking that they use many of the same methods, including manipulation of users who subscribe to populist or Libertarian ideologies, which have been so successfully employed in the past decade to subvert the teaching of science in the U.S. Unfortunately for Americans, not even the will of the people can trump natural law, as they may yet discover the hard way--- unless scientists succeed in saving them from their own idiocy. (I'm an American, so I can say that, right? This is a free country..isn't it?)
Like EMS and Linas (I don't know Rudy Koot) I claim expert knowledge of some of the math/physics-related areas in which Carl insists on writing, and I also have extensive experience in expository writing both at WP and at elsewhere. See for example two expository websites which I created a dozen years ago and which still have mirrors:
Like the complainants, I have wasted a huge amount of time trying to reason with Carl. Like them, I have been led to conclude that the only way to stop his misbehavior at WP is to ban him. It is important to recognize that, if Carl is truly interested in promoting possible applications of his Actor model to physics, we feel that directing his energies to developing his (currently highly inchoate) ideas is in his own best interests, because he is the only person who can develop his ideas until they reach a more significant status than "vague speculation".
OTH, allowing him free reign here would be highly detrimental to the health of WP and the community of expert editors whose presence here, I think, should be particularly valued (as long as they don't lose sight of the fact that WP is above all an encyclopedia, not a stump for personal speculations).
I am not participating in presenting evidence because I am so sick of trying to deal with Carl that I have told him I want nothing to do with him, and I certainly don't want to revisit talk pages to collect links or study the appropriate pages to learn the rules of the arbitration process. However, I thought I'd drop by here long enough to try to provide a summary of why I have concluded that Carl is a problem user, indeed a problem user whose actions here are habitually manipulative, highly insiduous, and particularly detrimental to the reliability and fairness of the WP as an encyclopedia.
The problems begin with Carl's refusal to accept the premise that WP is not the place for unbridled personal speculation. Particularly not WP article space.
Unfortunately, rather than confining himself to writing fair and factually accurate descriptive encylopedia articles on the current state-of-the-art (as reflected in current professional practice and the current research literature) on subjects in his area of acknowledged expertise (certain parts of computer science, henceforth CS), he has insisted on writing articles which claim, at least by implication, to describe well-established interdiscliplinary theories but which in fact contain badly expressed and ill-informed speculations about (vaguely described) relations he thinks should exist between a CS concept he helped develop ( Actor model) and relativistic physics (see WikiProject GTR and note that both EMS and myself are members). These articles are often followed by long lists of citations which consist largely of Carl's own CS publications. You might look at... arghghgh, now I can't find the link, but somehow Carl manipulated me into completely rewriting an article called something like relativistic information theory. I was going to suggest you compare his version with my rewrite to see what I am talking about.
I and others have pointed out to Carl the existence of a huge (if rather disorganized) research literature concerning relationships between relativistic physics and information theory, and pointed that there are apparently no papers published in physics journals or by persons other than Carl Hewitt himself (or, at a stretch, according to him, one section in the unpublished Ph.D. thesis of one of his former students in C.S.) which speculate on possible applications of his actor model to physics. I and others have suggested that he keep his speculative essays (which aren't even very well expressed) at the MIT website, or at his own personal website, and have urged him to spend his energies on developing his thinking rather than in tying up valuable Wikipedia users like EMS or myself in endless and bootless content disputes here. If you consult the talk pages of various articles Carl has authored, I think you will see how hard users like myself, CSTAR, and others have tried to reason with him.
His response has been especially frustrating because so many have tried have tried so hard to persuade him to develop his speculations to the point where they are acknowleged by some significant subset of researchers in both relativistic physics and CS before attempting to describe them in WP articles. Because of his background, Carl is surely well versed in developing ideas to the state where they can be published in the research literature, yet he apparently refuses to pursue this traditional (and far preferable) route, in favor of (in my view) spamming WP article space with his ill-expressed and virtually incomprehensible personal speculations.
Clearly, Carl thinks there should be an interdisciplinary field applying his actor model to relativistic physics and information theory, and clearly he wants to bring about this state of affairs. If that were the end of the story, I am sure we would all say, "more power to him!" The problem for WP is that Carl insists on manipulating WP, often in very subtle ways, to mislead non-expert WP readers into believing that such a field already exists, which is absolutely not true. There is as I said a large and rather disorganized literature on various relationships between information theory (a field on applied mathematics) and relativistic physics, but I have seen no papers in this area which even mention Carl's actor model.
Carl's refusal to pursue what we regard as the proper route to establishing a useful interdisciplinary field in science (namely, publication in repected research journals in all affected fields) is particlarly bizarre because as a faculty member (emeritus) at a major university, he has extensive experience in getting research papers published. As someone with expert knowlege of the classical gtr literature, I took considerable pains to give him some good advice on one possible direction in which he could try to develop his ideas, which I am confident would be of interest to researchers in this field if he were successful in publishing a good paper in one of the journals they read, but I was very disappointed to see that he was ignoring not only my suggestions, he was ignoring even the elementary step of studying the existing relevant literature in field B before asserting that he is creating, or even has already created, a new interdisciplinary field combining elements of A and B.
For me the straw that broke the camel's back was seeing Carl engage repeatedly in what I regard as gaming the system, manipulation of other users, and so forth. He is clearly highly intelligent and I am baffled why he would devote his intellect and energy to manipulating WP (as I eventually concluded), possibly as some kind of "social experiment", rather than trying to develop his ideas in the academic environment which has been so kind to him (and in which he has enjoyed considerable professional success).
Since this is a critical point, let me try to emphasize it: I happen to be a rare user with expert knowledge of at least two of the fields (relativistic physics, information theory) in which Carl wants to create an interdiscplinary subfield, and I offered to help him do that, by providing suggestions, references, and at one point even offering to discuss his ideas in another forum (I was open to suggestion), one more suitable for speculative discussions and scientific development work than the WP. So Carl cannot plausibly claim that I am somehow trying to "suppress" his ideas. To the contrary, I offered to help him polish his ideas to the point where he can publish them in respectable journals (other than CS journals; he has apparently published some speculation in CS journals, but the physics literature shows clearly that physicists don't read those journals and probably would need more help in explaining CS background than Carl tends to provide even if they did).
The issue is not whether his ideas have any merit (or rather, might one day turn out to have merit), the issue is whether he should be allowed to describe his speculations here as if they have the same scientific status as well-established theories such as information theory and general relativity, when in fact such a claim would be analogous to suggesting that some author's notebook of unorganized jottings is comparable to the Odyssey or The Great Gatsby. There is a huge difference, even if the author in question happens to be, say, J. D. Salinger. (Comparing Hewitt to Salinger is excessive, but no doubt you take my point.)
It is telling that another user with expert knowledge (in CS and physics), CSTAR, also offered to help Carl at every turn, and spent an enormous amount of time trying to help him clarify his thoughts (and to learn the WP way). And guess what has been the end result of CSTARs attempts to help Carl out? Carl's flagrant misbehavior has caused CSTAR to quit the WP! And now Carl is apparently on the verge of driving out EMS as well. If that happens, WikiProject GTR cannot survive, and I will have to leave.
If you somehow manage to add up the trouble he has caused here, I think you will be amazed at what you find, in terms of his driving away some of the most valuable editors I have encountered here. As a user loyal to the stated goal of creating an on-line, free, universal, timely, and accurate encyclopedia for the benefit of humanity as a whole, I find it extremely troubling that manipulative problem users like Carl are empowered by current WP policies to waste so much time of valuable Wikipedians like EMS, CSTAR, Linas, and now of course three members of the arbitration commitee.
Anyway, good luck, you'll need it. And be careful, in my experience, Carl is a master of gaming the system.--- CH 02:01, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
I came across this particular RfC (which lies outside my current areas of Wikifocus, if not my areas of interest) while researching social networks among anons who regularly engage in vandalism, trolls, hoaxes, or the promotion of cranky agendas. The RfC concerns the misbehavior of another user, one User:Roylee, who is also engaged in a persistent effort to slant the WP toward his own highly peculiar opinions, which seem utterly lacking in support in terms of verifiable facts.
An additional wrinkle is that Roylee, when challenged, apparently decided to abandon his user account and to start editing exclusively from anonymous IP addresses. This explains how he came to my attention, and it might support the suggestion that registered users are more accountable to demands that they cease making claims which they are unable to support with verifiable sources. Be this as it may, User:Mark_Dingemanse and User:BanyanTree (and possibly others) have created pages related to this RfC. In one of them, BanyanTree made some comments which I liked:
I am sure there are more Roylees out there. The good news is that while the number of individual IP addies used is large, the number of guilty parties might be much smaller. (Possibly hundreds of individuals behind a huge number of sometimes very insiduous anon edits, compared to roughly six thousand active Wikipedians, of whom the majority are presumably well behaved.) Be this as it may, in response to a brief comment by myself in his talk page, BanyanTree remarked that he has seen valuable Wikipedians driven out by frustration over nasty RfCs and such like, saying in part:
Question posted by Pce3@ij.net ( talk · contribs) (IMHO) to Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Science 04:36, 19 June 2006 (UTC), apparently in reference to Half life
This may seem like a rare problem but I have noticed that some scientific and technical articles are being edited to prevent other users from obtaining a complete and full comprehension of a topic in the same manner as a member of a trade or artisan guild might try to hide techniques or methods or understanding of what the topic actually involves. Such articles are only permitted to have a highly technical version or explanation of the process being presented in the same manner as a tradesman or artisan might withhold simple explanations from a patron for the sole purpose of mystifying the topic and keeping the patron from knowing “too much.” What is the Wikipedia policy on such behavior where simple and accurate explanations are continuously deleted from an article on the false pretense that the article is not about the example although the example fully clarifies the topic?
— IMHO
This drew sceptical queries, but also this, from StuRat ( talk · contribs) 17:11, 19 June 2006 (UTC):
The problem with reaching consensus is that there is a small group of committed academics who jealously guards some articles, immediately removing any attempt to make them accessible to the general public (which, while far more numerous, lacks the same level of commitment and is thus easily scared off by such actions). The only way I was able to find around this problem was to create a separate article for laymen. For example, the article Boolean algebra suffered from this problem, so I created the simplified version as Boolean logic, and added dabs at the top of each, pointing to the other.
— StuRat
IMHO then created his own article; see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Half-life computation
Some WikiGroups whose members might generally favor the views expressed here:
Some WikiGroups whose members might generally oppose the views expressed here:
The MetaWiki pages are humorous spoofs... I think. But still worth reading.
Also well worth visiting:
I am currently trying to collect my muddled thoughts as I ponder the reasons for my forthcoming disengagement from WP. CH 11:23, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
I am keeping this page mostly for my own use as I try to organize my thoughts on the problem on Wikicruft and how the Wikipedia community can or should respond to it, but if anyone wants to comment (with civility), please do so in the talk page.
TIA --- CH 05:13, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
See also User:Hillman/Media commentary on Wikipedia. --- CH 04:01, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
This is a draft. Things will get worse before they get better. Expect seemingly random insertions, redundancies, and general chaos until I begin to sort out the mess.
Robert McHenry has pointed out that the wiki model appears incompatible with the goal of attaining any global balance of coverage, and I think he has a point. That is, because in order to further the goal of building a better Brittanica under the wiki model, to create good articles on topic X, we need to attract a fair-minded, wise, judicious, self-less, industrious, and dedicated pool of editors who happen to be experts on topic X. Amazingly, this unlikely combination of virtues has proven not impossible to attain in some areas, such as mathematical topics. However, I think we must concede that it is highly unlikely that any wiki could ever attract such a pool of editors competent to write good encyclopedia articles on every topic. The resulting global imbalance of coverage does not contradict seeking a local balance, however. Indeed, a resource such as this metalist suggests that the wiki model need not result in utter chaos within a well-defined subject area such as mathematics. Indeed, I suspect that if Brittanica itself is not already using an internal wiki (accessible only to editors and authors) to track and guide the development of the next edition, it soon will be doing so! Several astute observers of the software scene, recognizing that wikis work best when restricted to a pool of editors who share some common core principles, have predicted that such internal wikis is the path of the future, rather than Wikipedias somewhat notorious slogan, "which can be edited by anyone".
Similar considerations apply within individual articles, where I feel that the classical wiki model is incompatible with maintaining an overall structure and vision. Here, I believe that some kind of modified wiki structure, which establishes gradations of privileges, is required to ensure that articles are improved in coherent directions, and to encourage novice authors to improve their sensitivity 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! This is one aspect of edit creep, a lamentable phenomenon which tends to disprove the naive expectation that Wikipedia articles tend to naturally improve monotonically, at least "on average" (but on what time scale?, we should immediately retort). Or in an even more asinine version: Wikipedia is globally attracted to a state of perfection without requiring any leadership or concious organization.
Like many Wikipedians, during the course of my year as an active contributor, I grew increasingly concerned with the problem of quality control at Wikipedia and what to do about it. Or, to put it more bluntly, with the misuse of Wikipedia in order to mislead readers by manipulating information in order to pursue a hidden agenda, sometimes motivated by the possiblity of financial or other personal gain. I was aware before I became a contributor of the potential for this kind of misuse – as well as the potential for good, by disseminating accurate and timely information about math/sci topics which might be hard for general readers to find elsewhere – and while I was here I tried to foster the latter while combating the former. Ultimately, I sadly concluded that 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.
I tried several strategies to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation in the Wikipedia, some of which were almost comically disastrous, but I do believe that I have proved willing to learn from my mistakes and to adapt to new circumstances. I think my later efforts, based on insights won at the cost of harsh experience, were wiser than my earliest attempts, but ultimately I was forced to sadly conclude that:
I say more about this elsewhere in my user pages. Here I will say only that I believe that while allowing anonymous edits from unregistered users may have played an important part in helping Wikipedia grow to its current size, I believe that continuing to permit anons and socks will prove a key strategic error which will prove fatal to the experiment if it is not addressed. I believe that the problem posed by anons and socks is only one of the potentially fatal problems which the Wikipedia community needs to promptly address in an effective way, but it is probably the easiest to fix. However, these are complicated issues, so I hope to be able to direct comments elsewhere in my user pages in the near future.
I'll define wikicruft, via a gloriously mixed metaphor, as
wikicruft (noun): the accumulation of undesirable content which slips under the radar screen of the alleged army of watchful eyes, or otherwise (smack! twhack! whack-a-mole!) evades eradication from the WP.
Wikicruft can take various forms, including
For our purposes, content is considered to be bad if it includes elements such as these:
OTH, good content is characterized by elements such as these:
This page also attempts to discuss more insiduous forms of the degradation of content in WP and related issues. I focus on degradation of math/physics-related articles, but some of this discussion is no doubt relevant to WP articles and categories dealing with other parts of science or scholarly research.
For purposes of this discussion, I will assume that 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. Needless to say, I didn't appreciate this crucial point when I first started participating in WP, and I doubt that the many other editors who have built some excellent math/physics-related content here did either!
Let me elaborate slightly. Populism has always formed a powerful undercurrent in American politics, and currently is enjoying a powerful revival in the U.S. To see why this affects the pursuit of science, at least in the U.S., it is crucial to recognize that populism tends to be hostile toward elitism of all kinds, because (to oversimplify) populists believe that the opinions of all individuals are equally valid. Scholarly values are on the other hand unintentionally but ineluctably elitist, because scholars address complex issues which often require much background knowledge to appreciate. It follows that in scholarly discussion, the contributions of well-informed experts who know the relevant scholarly literature well tend to be worth far more than contributions from people who know very little about the subject under discussion, however intelligent or otherwise well-informed they may be. This is particularly true for math/physics, where considerable mathematical ability may be required to closely follow a scientific discussion, regardless of the amount of effort made the participants to include laypersons in the discusssion. My point is that even those mathematicians and scientists who happen to prefer, in principle, populist ideals to elitist ideals, really cannot avoid behaving as elitists when the topic of discussion turns to their field of study, at least not if they want to function effectively as scholars.
Readers who haven't thought of populism in quite this way before might want to take a moment here to reread some of the many pages which describe official Wikipedia guidelines and policies. It should not be hard to spot populist ideals once you start looking for them.
(A quick aside concerning the Americanism implicit in the previous two paragraphs: I am tacitly assuming, on the basis of various public statements by Jimmy Wales, that a nightmare scenario in which a lawsuit effectively shuts down the WP overnight, whether due to some kind of injunction or to hefty fines and legal fees breaking Wikimedia's financial back, has driven much of the response to recent media scandals. My point is of course that Wikimedia is incorporated in the U.S., and some angry cranks and other malcontents have publically taken note of this fact.)
Jimmy Wales recently wrote: I am a firm believer in the validity of allowing anons to edit. Most anon edits are good, and done "on impulse". This seems innocuous enough, until you reflect that the result of "impulsive" edits of carefully constructed articles dealing with complex subjects is unlikely to lend support to the claim that wikis somehow encourage the monotonic perfection of encyclopedia articles. His claim also does not appear to correspond to the facts (see Zocky's study in the next section).
I suspect that much of the anguish (or anger) expressed by many Wikipedians regarding media stories involving the WP involves the inevitable collision of utopian ideals with some harsh realities of human nature. Our problems as scholarly wikipedians are compounded by the unintentional clash of the dominant political philosophies of the leaders of our community with some nonneogotiable requirements for the conduct of scholarly discourse (for example, in resolving content disputes concerning science-related articles). From this statement, I also suspect that the accidental conflict between populist values and scholarly values ultimately lies behind the departure of Larry Sanger from the WP (which happened well before I arrived).
Since I am not intrinsically interested in politics as such, I find it irksome that political ideologies should affect our work here, but it would be a grave mistake to ignore the role played by political ideals at WP simply because one feels that scholars should be left alone to sort out intellectual issues in the way which hundreds of years of experience has shown works best: scholarly discussion, peer review, consideration of evidence, and so forth.
Alas, it doesn't end here. Libertarianism is a younger but related political ideology which informs many RfC, AfD, and talk page discussions, and which is admired by many prominent Wikipedians. Unfortunately, Libertarian ideals also tend to be hostile toward deletionist practices, because (again oversimplifying) Libertarians tend to dislike any restraint upon individual freedom, and therefore are likely to be reluctant to adopt such measures as banning problem users, or in any way restricting what they regard (not always with due attention to legal nicities) as the right of free speech.
User:Zocky tracked the fate of a sample of articles created on Fri 2 Dec 2005, from which he (if neccessary I will exercise my free will and redefine this pronoun to gender-neutral) made some rough estimates of the rate at which anons are creating bad articles (e.g. ones which are later deleted following an AfD discussion). He summarized his results in a self-explanatory table which he posted at the Village pump policy discussion forum on 8 Dec 2005. His results turned out to be quite similar to my own informal statistical study in Sept 2005.
Zocky's sample suggests these estimates:
The sample size in Zocky's study might seem small, but statistical theory suggests that it might nonetheless be large enough to give some information about the magnitude of the problem.
The lesson seems clear: by forbidding new article creation by anons, WP can expect to
Here is Zocky's table:
New pages, Friday, December 2, 2005 | pages I checked | calculated values for all pages created on Friday | ||||
created by: | IPs | logged in | total | IPs | logged in | total |
new pages, still existing | 95 | 145 | 240 | 773 | 1182 | 1955 |
good pages, properly done | 63 | 125 | 188 | 513 | 1018 | 1531 |
good pages, didn't get attention from experienced users | 16 | 10 | 26 | 130 | 82 | 212 |
all good new pages | 79 | 135 | 214 | 643 (37%) |
1100 (63%) |
1743 |
on AFD | 7 | 3 | 10 | 57 | 24 | 81 |
bad pages, should be deleted | 8 | 3 | 11 | 65 | 25 | 90 |
mistakes (wrong language, namespace, etc.), should be deleted or moved | 1 | 4 | 5 | 8 | 33 | 41 |
all bad pages still existing | 16 | 10 | 26 | 130 | 82 | 212 |
deleted pages | 264 | 89 | 353 | 1149 | 388 | 1537 |
all bad new pages | 280 | 99 | 379 | 1280 (73%) |
469 (27%) |
1749 |
all new pages | 359 | 234 | 593 | 1935 (55%) |
1557 (45%) |
3492 |
I should point out that one issue which Zocky didn't address is the commonly seen claim that most WP users start by editing anonymously, and eventually decide to create an account. I myself created an account right off the bat, so I would like to see this bit of WP mythology (?) put to the test. In any case, I don't think it neccessarily follows that forbidding new page creation by anons will slow the rate at which new editors are recruited into the WP community, but certainly this is a valid question to study by means of a proper survey followed by valid statistical analysis.
Recently I have carried out some surveys of anon edits in particular articles which are frequently the target of bad edits.
This article was created 09/12/2002 14:11 by WkPark ( talk · contribs) (single edit account!).
In reverse chrononical order, covering the ten IP anons who made contributions between Apr 14, 2006 and Jun 3, 2006:
Here, geolocations/domains are used to disambiguate the various anon editors. By my count, this gives
Much better than any results I've seen so far in similar survey!
This article was created on 11/20/2001 05:21 by Chenyu ( talk · contribs) (inactive since Jan 2002).
(Note: copy of this study)
Just took a quick look at recent bad edits by anons.
OK, so over the past 21000 minutes or so, this article was in an obviously vandalized state for something over 375 minutes, which would be suggest that this article typically exists in an anon-vandalized state just under 2% of the time. This is consistent with previous estimate from many months ago. Over this time period, only a handful of non-bad edits by anons were observed. This seems consistent with earlier estimates that less than one in five anon edits is acceptable. I didn't systematically check whether registered users made a comparable number of bad edits in this time period, but spot checks suggested that they did not. If we subtract out Danras, this article was anonvandalized for something like 285 minutes over about 21000 minutes, for a rate of about 1.4%. This also seems consistent with earlier estimates for anon vandalization rates, suggesting that contrary to the hopes of some, semiprotection does not seem to be ameliorating the anon vandalization problem; anons are just damaging easier targets, such as this article.
I think that finding this article in a vandalized state two percent of the time is too high a frequency to be acceptable. Even those who don't agree probably will agree that it is utterly unacceptable that this article should have existed in a vandalized state for 75 minutes on 25 August or 280 minutes on 13 August. Clearly, in such a popular article, that does not serve our readers well.
Once again, the inexorable conclusion is that Wikipedia must follow the model of all other large public forums (of which I am aware), by prohibiting all edits by unregistered users (by technical means, not social means). The figures above are consistent with my estimates from last fall suggesting that we could more than halve our problem with bad edits with no effort at all, simply by eliminating anon edits. --- CH 07:20, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
The needed word would express the sense of: "this person has IMO absolutely no idea what he is talking about". Danras ( talk · contribs) continues to actively edit this and other physics-related articles, with similar results.
(Note: copy of this study)
Alterations like this constitute utter hogwash, and any good student in an undergraduate gtr should be able to spot some specific howlers:
Well, you get the idea: absolutely every sentence Danras added is a howler (which is in itself evidence he is just trolling). Apparently this user was also responsible, at least in part, for the recently deleted "symmetrical relativity" (no such notion is recognized in physics).
The sad thing is, based on his contribs, I suspect his motivation might not have been trolling after all, but performing some kind of extremely misguided "service" to his church. See Robert Sungenis, another "apologist" who just doesn't know what he is talking about when it comes to gtr, but note that Danras's wild misstatements appear too naive to suggest that he might be some kind of Sungenis sock. BTW, for all I know, Danras and Sungenis might be fine fellows when they are not going on about physics; I am just saying that they don't know what they are talking about when they talk about physics.--- CH 05:57, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
Forthcoming: studies of
Will move to seperate page.
The article Albert Einstein, was created on 11/05/2001 18:26 by Zundark ( talk · contribs), and eventually evolved into a featured article. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most vandalized "flagship articles" in the Wikipedia (at least compared with other science-related articles). As of 8 Oct 2006,
See
These statistics clearly suggest that, at least for this one article, individuals who (at least in my judgement) tend to vigorously push minority viewpoints in their edits, vastly outnumber individuals willing to put in a comparable effort to maintain WP:NPOV, despite that fact that anti-relativists are such a tiny population compared to mainstream scientists and others who recognized that relativity theory is one of the best tested scientific theories ever known. Unfortunately, in my experience, this pattern holds true throughout the science pages at the Wikipedia; there is tiny handful of individuals who try to maintain WP:NPOV in science-related articles, but I have documented almost one hundred individuals (many of whom have created numerous sockpuppet accounts, and some of whom form more or less acknowledged meatpuppet clusters) who push specific minority viewpoints in the physics-related pages alone.
Media fallout from the Seigenthaler scandal apparently induced Jimmy Wales to make a statistical study of his own, whereupon he issued this thunderbolt (sent to a WP mailing list):
Many users, including myself, don't subscribe to this list or (embarrased grin) read the paper, and therefore first heard about the change from not entirely accurate news stories. In the discusion of this policy change which ensued in various places on WP, including the Village Pump, several readers, including myself, commented on their first experience of the CNN Syndrome (in which the murrrrican Secretary of Defence complains that he learned from CCN that France has invaded New Zealand five minutes before he heard it from his befuddled minions. Not, of course, that France would really invade New Zealand...would she?)
Below I have archived some comments by Zocky and myself which orginally appeared at the Village Pump policy discussion formum on or about 8 Dec 2005. I have slightly modified the indentation for improved readibility and also removed a few remarks from my own comments which referred to pieces of the discussion which I am not trying to archive here.
There is no question in my mind that 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. It is very striking that they use many of the same methods, including manipulation of users who subscribe to populist or Libertarian ideologies, which have been so successfully employed in the past decade to subvert the teaching of science in the U.S. Unfortunately for Americans, not even the will of the people can trump natural law, as they may yet discover the hard way--- unless scientists succeed in saving them from their own idiocy. (I'm an American, so I can say that, right? This is a free country..isn't it?)
Like EMS and Linas (I don't know Rudy Koot) I claim expert knowledge of some of the math/physics-related areas in which Carl insists on writing, and I also have extensive experience in expository writing both at WP and at elsewhere. See for example two expository websites which I created a dozen years ago and which still have mirrors:
Like the complainants, I have wasted a huge amount of time trying to reason with Carl. Like them, I have been led to conclude that the only way to stop his misbehavior at WP is to ban him. It is important to recognize that, if Carl is truly interested in promoting possible applications of his Actor model to physics, we feel that directing his energies to developing his (currently highly inchoate) ideas is in his own best interests, because he is the only person who can develop his ideas until they reach a more significant status than "vague speculation".
OTH, allowing him free reign here would be highly detrimental to the health of WP and the community of expert editors whose presence here, I think, should be particularly valued (as long as they don't lose sight of the fact that WP is above all an encyclopedia, not a stump for personal speculations).
I am not participating in presenting evidence because I am so sick of trying to deal with Carl that I have told him I want nothing to do with him, and I certainly don't want to revisit talk pages to collect links or study the appropriate pages to learn the rules of the arbitration process. However, I thought I'd drop by here long enough to try to provide a summary of why I have concluded that Carl is a problem user, indeed a problem user whose actions here are habitually manipulative, highly insiduous, and particularly detrimental to the reliability and fairness of the WP as an encyclopedia.
The problems begin with Carl's refusal to accept the premise that WP is not the place for unbridled personal speculation. Particularly not WP article space.
Unfortunately, rather than confining himself to writing fair and factually accurate descriptive encylopedia articles on the current state-of-the-art (as reflected in current professional practice and the current research literature) on subjects in his area of acknowledged expertise (certain parts of computer science, henceforth CS), he has insisted on writing articles which claim, at least by implication, to describe well-established interdiscliplinary theories but which in fact contain badly expressed and ill-informed speculations about (vaguely described) relations he thinks should exist between a CS concept he helped develop ( Actor model) and relativistic physics (see WikiProject GTR and note that both EMS and myself are members). These articles are often followed by long lists of citations which consist largely of Carl's own CS publications. You might look at... arghghgh, now I can't find the link, but somehow Carl manipulated me into completely rewriting an article called something like relativistic information theory. I was going to suggest you compare his version with my rewrite to see what I am talking about.
I and others have pointed out to Carl the existence of a huge (if rather disorganized) research literature concerning relationships between relativistic physics and information theory, and pointed that there are apparently no papers published in physics journals or by persons other than Carl Hewitt himself (or, at a stretch, according to him, one section in the unpublished Ph.D. thesis of one of his former students in C.S.) which speculate on possible applications of his actor model to physics. I and others have suggested that he keep his speculative essays (which aren't even very well expressed) at the MIT website, or at his own personal website, and have urged him to spend his energies on developing his thinking rather than in tying up valuable Wikipedia users like EMS or myself in endless and bootless content disputes here. If you consult the talk pages of various articles Carl has authored, I think you will see how hard users like myself, CSTAR, and others have tried to reason with him.
His response has been especially frustrating because so many have tried have tried so hard to persuade him to develop his speculations to the point where they are acknowleged by some significant subset of researchers in both relativistic physics and CS before attempting to describe them in WP articles. Because of his background, Carl is surely well versed in developing ideas to the state where they can be published in the research literature, yet he apparently refuses to pursue this traditional (and far preferable) route, in favor of (in my view) spamming WP article space with his ill-expressed and virtually incomprehensible personal speculations.
Clearly, Carl thinks there should be an interdisciplinary field applying his actor model to relativistic physics and information theory, and clearly he wants to bring about this state of affairs. If that were the end of the story, I am sure we would all say, "more power to him!" The problem for WP is that Carl insists on manipulating WP, often in very subtle ways, to mislead non-expert WP readers into believing that such a field already exists, which is absolutely not true. There is as I said a large and rather disorganized literature on various relationships between information theory (a field on applied mathematics) and relativistic physics, but I have seen no papers in this area which even mention Carl's actor model.
Carl's refusal to pursue what we regard as the proper route to establishing a useful interdisciplinary field in science (namely, publication in repected research journals in all affected fields) is particlarly bizarre because as a faculty member (emeritus) at a major university, he has extensive experience in getting research papers published. As someone with expert knowlege of the classical gtr literature, I took considerable pains to give him some good advice on one possible direction in which he could try to develop his ideas, which I am confident would be of interest to researchers in this field if he were successful in publishing a good paper in one of the journals they read, but I was very disappointed to see that he was ignoring not only my suggestions, he was ignoring even the elementary step of studying the existing relevant literature in field B before asserting that he is creating, or even has already created, a new interdisciplinary field combining elements of A and B.
For me the straw that broke the camel's back was seeing Carl engage repeatedly in what I regard as gaming the system, manipulation of other users, and so forth. He is clearly highly intelligent and I am baffled why he would devote his intellect and energy to manipulating WP (as I eventually concluded), possibly as some kind of "social experiment", rather than trying to develop his ideas in the academic environment which has been so kind to him (and in which he has enjoyed considerable professional success).
Since this is a critical point, let me try to emphasize it: I happen to be a rare user with expert knowledge of at least two of the fields (relativistic physics, information theory) in which Carl wants to create an interdiscplinary subfield, and I offered to help him do that, by providing suggestions, references, and at one point even offering to discuss his ideas in another forum (I was open to suggestion), one more suitable for speculative discussions and scientific development work than the WP. So Carl cannot plausibly claim that I am somehow trying to "suppress" his ideas. To the contrary, I offered to help him polish his ideas to the point where he can publish them in respectable journals (other than CS journals; he has apparently published some speculation in CS journals, but the physics literature shows clearly that physicists don't read those journals and probably would need more help in explaining CS background than Carl tends to provide even if they did).
The issue is not whether his ideas have any merit (or rather, might one day turn out to have merit), the issue is whether he should be allowed to describe his speculations here as if they have the same scientific status as well-established theories such as information theory and general relativity, when in fact such a claim would be analogous to suggesting that some author's notebook of unorganized jottings is comparable to the Odyssey or The Great Gatsby. There is a huge difference, even if the author in question happens to be, say, J. D. Salinger. (Comparing Hewitt to Salinger is excessive, but no doubt you take my point.)
It is telling that another user with expert knowledge (in CS and physics), CSTAR, also offered to help Carl at every turn, and spent an enormous amount of time trying to help him clarify his thoughts (and to learn the WP way). And guess what has been the end result of CSTARs attempts to help Carl out? Carl's flagrant misbehavior has caused CSTAR to quit the WP! And now Carl is apparently on the verge of driving out EMS as well. If that happens, WikiProject GTR cannot survive, and I will have to leave.
If you somehow manage to add up the trouble he has caused here, I think you will be amazed at what you find, in terms of his driving away some of the most valuable editors I have encountered here. As a user loyal to the stated goal of creating an on-line, free, universal, timely, and accurate encyclopedia for the benefit of humanity as a whole, I find it extremely troubling that manipulative problem users like Carl are empowered by current WP policies to waste so much time of valuable Wikipedians like EMS, CSTAR, Linas, and now of course three members of the arbitration commitee.
Anyway, good luck, you'll need it. And be careful, in my experience, Carl is a master of gaming the system.--- CH 02:01, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
I came across this particular RfC (which lies outside my current areas of Wikifocus, if not my areas of interest) while researching social networks among anons who regularly engage in vandalism, trolls, hoaxes, or the promotion of cranky agendas. The RfC concerns the misbehavior of another user, one User:Roylee, who is also engaged in a persistent effort to slant the WP toward his own highly peculiar opinions, which seem utterly lacking in support in terms of verifiable facts.
An additional wrinkle is that Roylee, when challenged, apparently decided to abandon his user account and to start editing exclusively from anonymous IP addresses. This explains how he came to my attention, and it might support the suggestion that registered users are more accountable to demands that they cease making claims which they are unable to support with verifiable sources. Be this as it may, User:Mark_Dingemanse and User:BanyanTree (and possibly others) have created pages related to this RfC. In one of them, BanyanTree made some comments which I liked:
I am sure there are more Roylees out there. The good news is that while the number of individual IP addies used is large, the number of guilty parties might be much smaller. (Possibly hundreds of individuals behind a huge number of sometimes very insiduous anon edits, compared to roughly six thousand active Wikipedians, of whom the majority are presumably well behaved.) Be this as it may, in response to a brief comment by myself in his talk page, BanyanTree remarked that he has seen valuable Wikipedians driven out by frustration over nasty RfCs and such like, saying in part:
Question posted by Pce3@ij.net ( talk · contribs) (IMHO) to Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Science 04:36, 19 June 2006 (UTC), apparently in reference to Half life
This may seem like a rare problem but I have noticed that some scientific and technical articles are being edited to prevent other users from obtaining a complete and full comprehension of a topic in the same manner as a member of a trade or artisan guild might try to hide techniques or methods or understanding of what the topic actually involves. Such articles are only permitted to have a highly technical version or explanation of the process being presented in the same manner as a tradesman or artisan might withhold simple explanations from a patron for the sole purpose of mystifying the topic and keeping the patron from knowing “too much.” What is the Wikipedia policy on such behavior where simple and accurate explanations are continuously deleted from an article on the false pretense that the article is not about the example although the example fully clarifies the topic?
— IMHO
This drew sceptical queries, but also this, from StuRat ( talk · contribs) 17:11, 19 June 2006 (UTC):
The problem with reaching consensus is that there is a small group of committed academics who jealously guards some articles, immediately removing any attempt to make them accessible to the general public (which, while far more numerous, lacks the same level of commitment and is thus easily scared off by such actions). The only way I was able to find around this problem was to create a separate article for laymen. For example, the article Boolean algebra suffered from this problem, so I created the simplified version as Boolean logic, and added dabs at the top of each, pointing to the other.
— StuRat
IMHO then created his own article; see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Half-life computation
Some WikiGroups whose members might generally favor the views expressed here:
Some WikiGroups whose members might generally oppose the views expressed here:
The MetaWiki pages are humorous spoofs... I think. But still worth reading.
Also well worth visiting: