[EM] 28 years of progress and a wakeup call

[Michael Ossipoff]

Re: Wikipedia voting-system articles, I’ll remind you that “Closed” has
rewritten a number of them.

If you’ve found a downturn in their quality….

Just saying

On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 05:00 Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>
wrote:

> 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
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