User:Mujinga/essays/dangers

The dangers of wikipedia

INPROGRESS

It's a dramatic title and of course the dangers of wikipedia are myriad and multiple, just like its good qualities. It's amazing that wikipedia exists as commonplace reference for the expansion of knowledge which is generated by everyone, yet there are problems too.

Everyone?
One immediate problem is that wikipedia is sadly not written by everyone. Sadly, there is a huge bias towards the interests of the people privileged enough to have a computer, to have electricity to run the computer, to be literate enough to contribute and so on.

As an example, every day EN wikipedia has 'today's featured article' and recently was [[Roberto Luongo. Who he? Apparently he is a "Canadian professional ice hockey goaltender for the Florida Panthers of the National Hockey League." If you look at the page, a lot of work has gone into it. Now I don't particularly have an argument against him specifically being a featured article, but it perhaps unveil certain biases. He is male, he is North American, he is a sportsperson, he is probably on TV a lot .... all these things seem rather predictable in producing a long wikipedia page. And of course y own bias is revealed her because none of these factors are at all interesting for me.

However, i will say if you look a tthe list of today's featured articles they definitely make an effort to be diverse, as you would expect. But at the same time the selectors can only deal with what is in fornt of them and the structural level is what I am talking about here. This is probably news to no-one.

Power dynamics
I have been editing wikipedia on/off for over a decade now (cripes) so i am in some ways at least familiar with its unique community generated process and bureaucracy. I do still have problems understanding all the arcane processes but it's a learning process.

I do wonder what happens to enthusiastic new editors nowadays. For example, they are encouraged to make new articles as drafts for review. A good idea to prevent vandalism and i suppose idealistically to allow experienced editors to pas by and offer helpful comments, but the problem is that some draft articles are sitting in drafts for MONTHS. That's pretty unacceptable and I'm sure would put me off editing.

Another issue is time spent on wikipedia. That's sort of insurmounable though, in that those editors who are here more will be able to do ore stuff. That's just life. Of course these peeps could also act responsibly but sometimes don't. That's also just life.

I also wonder how much the codes put people off. Probably visual editor would help with that, although i never used it so i can't comment. I do find the new referencing system a bit weird.

The references controlling the content
There are some ancient articles on wikipedia that i have stumbled across and really enjoyed, yet they are completely unsourced and will be erased if a deletionist ever finds them. That fact makes me a bit sad, good inclusionist that i am. Where I can, I of course improve a page if it needs it, but sometimes the sources are not there in English or other languages i can either speak or easily translate online, so there's little i can do except hope they are not found. I don't have a problem with unsourced things being deleted when challenged and after due process, however i can also be sad when interesting articles get the chop. Luckily nowadays there is the "Download as pdf" option over in the left menu column, so at least i can preserve these articles for posterity (for myself).

This points a bit to the problem i want to discuss, which i'll arrive via another digression.

As we all know, anyone can edit wikipedia with an anonymous name or indeed without signing in (although things have also been tightened in that respecty thanks to vandals). This i think is wonderful overall but it does mena that someone who know a lot about a topic can get steamroilled by someone more familiar with wikipedia bureaucratic processes and the time to impose them. This is simply an inevitable flaw which cannot be stopped without the horrible prospect of ID and credential linked posting (which of course could always be spoofed anyway). I addressed a corollary of that problem here<

Anyway to get to the actual point finally, I am noticing with my own work lately creating articles that my input is shaped by the sources and references i have. Again this is overall a very good thing, since i am creating referenced content, yet there are flaws.

To have a wikipedia article, someone or something needs to be notable according to various criteria. Any non self-evident claim is likely to be challenged and (people being people) opinions even on what is self-evident vary considerably. This is all good when you think about it, otherwise the project would be clogged full of everyone's pages about their favourite things :}

On the other hand, this means when i am writing I find that i have things i want to say initially and then i get gradually pulled away from that towards the sources and what they are saying. Let me give an example.

I just created an English language article about Rozbrat. It's a squatted anarchist social centre in Poland. It's going since the 1990s and of course has loads of projects and initiatives using the space. I will only add the ones which can be backed up by a reference becuase that is how i roll, it seems neater. However the corollary of this is that other things I mention then seem equally importnat.

For example, Rozbrat has twice been seriously attacked by neo-Nazis. This has been covered in the English language sources and it is worht mentioning yet it also give the article what is for me a wrong balance, since the section on neo-Nazi attacks is equally as large as the the section on a activities, on my curreent computer they both have seven lines.

This is of course my "fault" since i created both sections and perhaps this is not the best example of what i am talking about, but what i am trying to say is that the references dictate content.

Let's go the other way round. Over at autonomous social centre, a controversial page in my opinion (as you can read at the talk), there is one paragraph about Italian social centres. It is sourced from 4 different places and the article has a whole has just 6 sources (including those 4). It seems the creator just read a few sources and wanted to use them without recourse to others, perhaps because it fitted the fancy new sfn reference style. What is curious is that there is a further reading section with ELEVEN unused sources about only Italian social centres. That is bizarre to me. And an unlinked page on [[self-managed social centres in Italy, but that's a whole other story.

So to move back to the abstract discussion, we then might end up with a page that is referenced to certain sources but does not convey the whole reality of the situation at all. Furthermore these sources may or may not rely on one source themselves and thus one view is being subtly prioritised over others. Bearing in my mind everyone's reality perception is different, the obvious objection here is: if you don't like it change it. Well yes, but then we return to the issues of privilege and access mentioned above. Who has the time to do these things?

In the specific case of squatting in Italy i know of but not enough to write about that there are some pretty major schisms. It would then be a shame if only one perspective on the schism was represented. (Although also by no means the end of the world either, let's keep this in the correct scale!)

For my feeling, the autonomous social centre page has some severe issues, ones which my treatment by other editors makes me disnclined to try to fix (i rather create good content than get into dingdongs over banal issues). If i viewed this page as particuarly important it would be different but for me there are other pages which need work which are way more important, for example [[Squatting. I'm interested mainly to improve the coverage of [[WikiProject squatting, for which autonomous social centres are peripherally interesting.

The point, as i hope isclear,is that wikipedia editing according to references can produce well-sourced articles but can also introduce the wrong focus.