[EM] 28 years of progress and a wakeup call

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2024-05-24 02:36, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

> Kristofer, I dunno what to say about the English Wikipedia.  It has
> it's own strange politics and mob rule.  17 years ago I was permanently
> banned ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rbj ) because of an
> uncompromizing and wrong position they took regarding Intelligent
> Design, essentially attributing the meaning of the term to whatever the
> Discovery Institute says it is.  I resisted and it just got worse and
> worse.  Tried, unsuccessfully, to get Jimbo involved.  Omegatron knows
> about this, I think.
> 
> I still edit anonymously.  The lede for
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time is still mostly my writing and I did
> that anonymously as a banned editor.  But
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem
> got all fucked up despite that my drawings still exist in it.

I don't think Wikipedia itself is (all that much) to blame here. It's 
mostly just the other editor successfully deterring me from going there.

Let me indulge in a bit of general observation.

Every system, even those that encourage radical participation, needs 
some way to keep the griefers out: those who both have more power of 
some sort, and who have the inclination to use that power to make the 
lives of others worse.

Most obvious or incremental ways to do so tend to lead to an increase in 
bureaucracy. It takes deliberate and careful design to minimize such, 
and even more deliberate and careful design to avoid creating a 
different sort of implicit power imbalance.

So that there is a Wikipedia "bureaucracy" doesn't surprise me. That 
there is an implicit power imbalance doesn't surprise me either: the 
editors with the most endurance and/or knowledge of the process 
naturally have a leg up on the rest.

I think that the Wikipedia admins would probably be helpful were I to go 
through the proper channels to involve them. I just don't have the 
staying power to do that.

-km