Exactly. I'm headed back to wikipedia, where I found community as a teenager. I think you can draw a direct line from wikimedia's nonprofit status to 22 years of greatness and steady improvement.
There is definitely interests that have captured Wikipedia. It takes the form of editors that have slowly built up a lot of credibility and power that then use it years later in some manner that does not agree with the neutral nature of the site.
The events leading up to the US 2020 election are burned into my mind. Sure people tend to talk about the craziness of the US far-Right but the non-centrist Left also got attacked and censored.
In one case a popular Youtuber on the Left (Kyle Kulisnki) had posted some commentary on independent attack ads that were extremely negative to the Democratic party. That led to a multiple threads on Wikipedia calling for the deletion of his page.
After 3 attempts to remove his page by the same editor, it finally got removed on the 4th attempt.
Watching this whole experience play out in real time was utterly disgusting and showed me how the site has since become captured.
Its a shame because despite calls for secondary sourcing in my experience many people do in fact trust Wikipedia whole heartedly. It is really dangerous that leadership did not clamp down on this behavior when it was happening. Now they have exposed themselves to attacks from the far right and eventually people with a lot of exposure (People like Musk) might call them out(if he hasn't already). That will begin the slow slide into half the country not trusting the site at all and their minds being made up no matter what Wikipedia does.
Interestingly the page was recreated over a year later after the election was over but the lasting damage has been done. I presume that in the next election it will be targeted again.
We see this behavior on other platforms such as Reddit during election season and you can be sure that Musk is whipping up something big for 2024 (and his rivals are probably developing some sort of countermeasure) but I thought I could always count on Wikipedia being a place of refuge. I guess not.
Sounds like a regrettable epsiode. However, looking at the deletion, I see he was deleted as non-notable. Debates about notability are common on WP and not inherently political.
Back in the day (2006-2010ish, I think) I was a pretty active member of the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians. I was kind of on a crusade against people who would put up their own pages to try to promote themselves, in violation of the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy. Mainly, I was worried that it would be untenable to keep WP accurate if we had too many pages. I also went on a rampage deleting pages for individual pokemon, which I'm not proud of. There was a well-established consensus at the time that most individual pokemon did not meet the notability threshold (I don't remember the exact criteria, but it had to do with multiple sources of the information being available) and therefore their pages should be deleted. Looking back, that was kinda silly... The Wikipedia is not Paper policy probably outweighs the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy when it comes to Pokemon.
Anyway, I don't doubt that there is a political element in the case of this Kyle guy, but it's probable that I would have voted to have him deleted on completely apolitical grounds. (I haven't heard of him and haven't read enough to form a political or notability opinion on him at this point)
This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by "intangible as well as tangible things" which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which at the same time are recognized as the tangible par excellence.
A more charitable take in this case: fictional anime characters may not be as important as real human beings, but Pokemon are shared culture. The right comparison isn't with this or that person, but with poems, or paintings, or landmarks, etc. - all kinds of social objects.
And of course, giving back to Debord, we can say that the society of the spectacle is one of infinite supply of manufactured social objects.
My litmus test in this case would be are other political youtuber of similar or smaller size being deleted? If you go through the page and the previous attempts at deletion you'll see that this was not the case. I also noticed this as well during the event as it was occurring. Thats where I think something more suspicious is occuring.
> Debates about notability are common on WP and not inherently political.
"sometimes it's not political" is not really a defense to the claim of "this time it probably was".
Anyway, the problem is there's a lot of valuable content on wikipedia that is essentially borderline according to the rules, but also delivers a lot of value, and this content exists at the suffrage of whether or not they have some greasy nerd as patron or whether another one gets a bee up their ass about it.
"Lists" policy is a great example, and I've seen quite a few important lists go through cycles where despite being a de-facto resource for 10 or 15 years, all of a sudden some editor will get a bee up their ass and just delete it all, because WP:Lists. But of course having been the resource for 15 years, nobody external has bothered to collate a list that already exists on wikipedia, but if you point that out then you get the WP:OriginalResearch response. If you revert the changes, they'll lock it for "vandalism", etc. So we just lose that resource that's existed for 10-15 years, unless some other sufficiently greasy nerd pushes back on it.
The wikipedia editor cadre sucks, it's the definitive answer to the question of "what's the absolute least power that can go to someone's head". It's a real problem with the public trying to interact with wikipedia, much like stackoverflow answers everyone just knows it's not worth the time and does their damndest not to interact with it if they have any other alternatives.
And yes, "anyone can do it" in principle but it's not the public's job to push uphill to try and chase out bad actors in the organization. People won't do it and they'll just go do better things and you'll be left with only the toxic people - it's the "dead sea effect" in action. A sufficient concentration of poison will kill any life that might have any chance of remediating the poison.
Much like stackoverflow and the "come to jesus" moment a couple years ago when they tried to get SO members to stop being so fucking toxic to newcomers and people trying to ask the questions that let SO create content (to which the community basically shrugged and said they wouldn't "compromise community standards" by not shitting on people/pressing their mod buttons to suppress stuff for arbitrary reasons/etc), the cancer is so ingrown at this point that you can't save the organization without putting policies in that those greasies are going to hate, and that will kill the host organism. So it's terminal. Wikipedia editing is the same as StackOverflow commenting and has been for years. It's not that they're going to go under, but they're not everything they could be either, and there are often distinct points where the quality of the product has gone down over the years rather than up due to these problem children.
(I found a comment from myself 5 years ago saying this exact same thing in fact, lol)
Powermods on reddit are sort of another case of this too... it's not a great system to have some random greasy nerd from 2008 squatting on some common keyword/brand name while moderating poorly. But now it's entrenched and if you change the policy they're all going to shut down their subs in solidarity, so you have to essentially be willing to hammer down on the whole mod class and come in and replace all of them. It's the old "10% of the employees are real shitasses but they're protected by the union so we can't really do anything about it" problem.
Did you try proposing a policy change that heavily used lists or articles, unique on the internet, should not be deleted? It seems like a good idea and browsing the policies now I don't see "people are using this" as a criterion anywhere. I think you might actually find broad support for that.
Just in case anyone here is taking paulmd too literally, it's not possible for "some editor" or any one person to cause an article or list on WP to be deleted. If I remember correctly (and if it hasn't changed) speedy deletion requires at least 3 people, and if it's contested then there's a whole voting procedure. Speaking as a (former?) greasy nerd, I've actually always been impressed with the democracy and consensus systems on Wikipedia; it strikes me as pretty effective, especially compared to most governments.
You're probably right that self-aggrandizement and gatekeeping is a problem among wikipedians.
I'm sorry to hear the diagnosis is terminal... but since you say you've been complaining for at least 5 years, maybe WP has a few more years to live?
> I'm sorry to hear the diagnosis is terminal... but since you say you've been complaining for at least 5 years, maybe WP has a few more years to live?
Well, that's the point of the stackoverflow comparison. Nobody actually goes to stackoverflow to ask questions anymore. The culture is rotten and there are better places to ask. It's become "read-only" for most of its potential userbase, people actively avoid using it. But is there still a site called stackoverflow? Yes. It's just lingering in agony, like many cancer patients. Doesn't mean without some turn in fortunes (or leadership) that it's ever going to come back though.
> Did you try proposing a policy change
That's the thing I said though... why would I voluntarily choose to spend more time working with a toxic organization in a fruitless attempt to solve its organizational culture for them? Not only is that not actually going to change anything but it's a huge drain on me personally for little direct benefit. Why is it my responsibility to tilt at windmills to try and fix your organizational culture?
That's the whole point about StackOverflow and Wikipedia's culture problems in a nutshell: at a certain point you are just so toxic that nobody who's not interested in the game-playing itself is going to tolerate the game-playing. And at that point you have the "dead-sea effect" going, because the game-players will always stay around.
Is this a little unreasonable in the abstract? Sure, I am not engaging with the organization and then complaining when it doesn't work the way I want it to. But this is the practical reality - the public isn't going to build a better Wikipedia organization just for the sake of it. If you have a viable organization then some of them will contribute content, maybe. And if your editors piss it all away because it didn't meet X rule or Y rule then you will simply have a worse product, and in the long term people will stop contributing content because they see it doesn't matter (which is where we are with wikipedia right now in general).
I am not being prescriptive here - merely remarking on a phenomenon that is observable. Nobody likes interacting with career StackOverflowers or Wikipedians. They're, on the whole, kinda tedious and unpleasant people, and the product is worse as a result of this public disengagement. And this is not an uncommon opinion, you will not find a single person on Reddit who speaks positively of StackOverflow or Wikipedia's organizational culture, everyone (including their CEOs) knows they suck to interact with. The culture is toxic and rotten and the organizations cannot change it because a subset of the members relish in it being toxic and rotten, and over time the projects lose steam and falter due to public disengagement. You'll always have the greasies but the public is not beating down SO's door in 2023 to enlarge the community or to edit wikipedia and create content they know will be reverted by some basement-dweller.
Anything beyond fixing a minor typo or awkward sentence is kind of a waste of time on wikipedia, and that's really more than most people will even do to begin with. Just not interested in the social-game-playing aspects of it, and the content you create will be reverted and removed without you there being an advocate for it. The gameplaying matters more than the content, and that's what's killing SO too.
The problem for SO and Wikipedia is - those tedious, unpleasant people still generate a lot of short-term value even if they're a long-term problem. And just like the powermods of reddit, they wield a lot of internal power and can cause a lot of problems if you overtly (or even subtly) show them the door or put "please be nice" policies into place and anger them.
I'd prefer to think of it as being WP:BOLD. Sorry to be insulting your org to your face, but if it makes you feel better it's likely a case of a toxic 10-20% or so more than everyone. I know nice wikipedians too, but they're not the ones that represent the interactions that turn people sour.
If it were just me, I'd keep my mouth shut (ok maybe not). Everyone knows SO and Wikipedia have culture problems, almost nobody has good experiences with their interactions on those sites, when that's the uniform experience you have an org problem.
But yeah, it's the paradox of intolerance in action. Being tolerant of shitty people leads to a shitty org culture or a shitty society/world. If they get too entrenched, you end up being unable to pry them off the levers of power and the dead-sea effect begins.
There's just also not really a way for them to move past them because the people causing those problems are powerful internal stakeholders. There's no easy solution to a rotten organizational culture and it leads to bad outcomes. It's a shame to see it happen but again, there's no magic wands to fix any of it. Whatcha gonna do.
I've had projects fail because of org culture problems (may have taken down the whole company at this point). But when the boss and the boss's boss are part of the problem, what can you realistically do? Not interact with that org anymore, that's about it.
> "sometimes it's not political" is not really a defense to the claim of "this time it probably was".
Was it probably? I took a quick look at the deletions, the deletion reviews, and some of the older versions of the article. The article seemed to be very thin on actual citations, with way more text for a living-persons biography than I'd think reasonable for that level of sourcing. The deletion discussions were a hot mess, but my main takeway is what somebody else wrote there: "There's still not a single keep !voter here who has discussed which sources actually show notability."
Looking at the current article, my take is similar. I only skimmed, but I'm not seeing a lot of WP:RS compliant sources listed that would persuade me of notability even now; it's an awful lot of citation to his own works.
The Democratic Party is no longer center-right, not since at least 2016. The progressive faction has taken a lot of place. Just look at AOC and the likes.
US Senate and the solid blue core? Still firmly center-right.
For instance, Republicans are very unlikely to be elected in my city. So competitive candidates call themselves Democrats. And to establish their bonafidas, they might even hold a few select leftish positions to brag about. But when it comes to legislating and appropriations, the boring stuff that no one pays attention to, they're just as nimby, reactionary, regressive as any generic Republican.
The 3.5 trillion budget in 2021 with broader socialism policies would be a good example.
However, it doesn't have to be limited to legislations passed, but rather what is widely being discussed and pushed forward by the Democratic factions, the biggest example is the "Green New Deal"; more government intervention, increased spendings, massive expansion of state power.
Sure, they're far from perfect. I don't mind if build a nice big contingency fund or even become personally wealthy -- but I think it makes a difference that greed isn't the central organizing principle.
True, but luckily they don't intrude on the community or impact the Wikipedia site too much beyond their ever more frequent "We desperately need donations" campaigns. As the Foundation has gotten richer, its desire for more milk from its Wikipedia cash cow has only grown.
Which makes sense in case of a nonprofit that relies on donations and can’t predict whether the next year will be a hard one for people, making their sole income drop.
It sounds like you think it odd that exec-level staff should be honoring the wishes of the people who do all the work, but I'm not getting why. Sure, most companies are authoritarian hierarchies. But most companies also pay people enough that they'll put up with the authoritarianism, at least for a while. When you pay $0 for core labor, that means you've given up most of your ability to push people around.
I think the pace of change has been just right, though. They added a graphical editor and modernifed the interface styling. Both of those changes happened about 5 years later than I would have expected, but you can tell they were carried out with extreme care not to piss off any users. We end up with an experience that pleases everyone.
Yes, I think it’s the way of the world. If the power users and gatekeepers are aligned with the bulk of user’s needs it works well. We usually see issue like this when things get out of alignment.
The last year I could find for their largest donors from a quick Google search was 2018. Three of the big 5 tech companies are in the top 10 of largest donors. Do you think they are going to donate to Reddit?
