User:Smuckola/Wrong

 A second-year assessment of Wikipedia This is an early draft personal essay, which could contain ideas that are wrong.

Wikipedia's base cultural assumptions
These are the assumptions in effect within the institutional bedrock foundation of Wikipedian culture. These assumptions are embodied and enforced in the form of policies and guidelines. Many of the policies and guidelines originated approximately a decade ago by people who are mostly not now actively maintaining, enforcing, or experiencing their effects. See also: False community.
 * Everything is relative and aggregate. No one thing matters. Life is a shifting sand.
 * Infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters will eventually produce the works of an encyclopedia.
 * Wikipedia is the only free encyclopedia. All internal efforts are focused not upon Wikipedians but upon an outside world which is infinitely better for whatever we give it.
 * There are no rules, but anyone can be blocked for not following them. It's like high school: there is no ironclad orientation, training, certification, motivation, or organization but we are suddenly spot checked and held to professional standards. And experts are forced to witness the coddling, enabling, and tolerance of slackers, vandals, and asocials.
 * Freedom is totally fragile and can't be strengthened, thus deserving mandatory hypervigilance.
 * Hoarder mentality: all content and contributors are scarce. But its influx is entitled and eventually assured.
 * All editors are competent individually or in aggregate + any content may have value + all content is scarce but eventually assured = all contributors at any cost. What's the worst that could possibly happen?
 * All contributions are equal in merit.
 * "...an encyclopedia that anyone can edit": In a crowdsourced content management system, everything exists in a state of the aggregate and the undoable. Time and energy are effectively unlimited and self replenishing, and nothing of value can be lost. Thus, these things are effectively worthless.
 * Vandalism, competency, and civility are ultimately non-issues because people cool off or are blocked, and everyone will eventually fix everything. When, how, and why, are unspecified and immaterial.
 * Wikipedians will remain civil because a Wikipedian is a font of unlimited self efficacy, self respect, hypervigilance, and vigor—sourced from elsewhere, not here. Like a Dunning–Kruger effect shows, the organizers drastically overestimate humanity's competency and tolerance. Maybe they think everyone is like a non-profit employee or public servant.
 * Anonymity is assured by being publicly associated only with your geographically and commercially identifiable IP address.
 * An encyclopedia is flat, not round. Wikipedia is the center of the universe, but the priority is upon the anxious acquisition of editors.
 * In a landscape of shifting sands, everyone tolerates, gets over it, and happily commiserates.
 * Wikipedians are islands in an archipelago of stormy chaos—survivors, alone, together.

Anyone who doesn't voluntarily run their lives as a public institution is a casual participant. The casual participant's perception and assumptions of the project are these:
 * This place needs me. I don't see how I could do any worse. Expertise is overrated. WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS.
 * Maybe I wouldn't walk into a privately owned physical building with no clue of who owns it, the culture that lives within it, or how to abide—and yet stomp all over it as if I own it. But.  I think someone on the Internet is wrong, and information is incomplete. With anonymous editing openly solicited at the press of a button.  This trumps all common sense and decency.
 * The creation of an account is unenforced, and thus inherently devalued. Accounts (thus any pretense of identity and accountability) are worthless here, and are only a matter of the pleasure of my vanity.
 * Assumptions are inherited from any number of other user-generated content sites and wikis.

Abuse: Wikipedia is a trap
The base policy is "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit". There are many ways to implement that policy. The idea that we can ignore all rules, and the idea that freedom must have no limits (including accountability), is just one implementation of the policy. It is an extremely, gratuitously, destructively irresponsible implementation.

In reality, this particular implementation of the policy is more like a non-policy or anti-policy. it's the lynchpin of a quasi-anarchistic entity. It directly devalues any identity, even pseudo-identity, and allows anyone full access with no credentials, competency, or positive intent. This implementation of the open policy serves to actively create and maintain a gaping hole in the Internet. Wikipedia is one of the world's top web sites, and is intended to have maximal credibility. Even with the site holding a neutral common carrier stance, its editors are acting toward the world, on behalf of the institution and culture of Wikipedia. In any other fundamental public-accessible network resource (such as any operating system for servers, desktops, routers; any email server; any social network)), this kind of policy would constitute a gross negligence in security liability. It would be akin to an open relay or open proxy.  If there was a spam botnet that had such a target with such a policy, the target could be considered complicit in the botnet. If this was a physical entity, it would be like a giant construction site with an open pit, with plastic "do not cross" tape around it at best, if anything at all.  In that physical analogy, signage would be irrelevant, and the site's owner could be held liable for anyone who falls into the pit. The policy drags down the institutional owners of potentially any IP address in the world, increasing their burden against a transparent type of abuse that their users may perpetrate. Such network providers have always already been absolutely expected to stop their users via both automatic and manual means, from sending spam, viruses, hate speech, and other abuse via email, Usenet, and other mediums—under the automatic penalty of effective network death. They do so via onerous scanning methods that already exist against the sending of spam, viruses, and the banning of sites. So how could they be expected to additionally monitor or stop the pseudonymous abuse of Wikipedia, as is enabled to occur by the site's extreme policies? How many other sites in the world allow even trivial comments to be published by anybody with no loggable pseudoidentity whatsover? How many other sites rely completely upon the moment-to-moment good will of a global army of counterabuse volunteer editors, volunteer engineers, and software infrastructure? Can the Wikipedia community and the WMF honestly throw up its hands in the face of such abuse, and how far can it stretch the idea of neutrality and common carrier into the space of doing absolutely nothing? How far can the Countervandalism volunteers—even the programmers of automated bots—be expected to be thanklessly sacrificed upon this needless battleground?

Like every other aspect of Western society, the apparent abundance of natural resources allows the cost of doing business to be externalized. The natural resources include the population levels and coping mechanisms of established and new editors which curbs the hemorrhaging of previous editors, as well as the hypervigilant ingenuity of the Countervandalism Unit and other anti-abuse efforts, as well as the overall abundance of contributed content. It's the death of a thousand cuts.

It seems that a Wikipedian is lost, they will be replenished in the aggregate. This is false. Just as each human being is fairly unique in the world, each contributor and contribution is fairly unique. The moral and sociological principles of volunteerism dictate that each volunteer must be treated as a personally valued employee, even if they have no contractual commitment to duty and no direct material compensation.

Usability: Wikipedia parties like it's 1999
Hello, the 90s called, and they want their web site back. Its user interface is bare but inordinately complex, manually operated but outmoded. Unlearnable, inaccessible, indigestible, unfathomable.

There is no way a usability test could ever be performed, let alone passed, on this site. Like a 1990s static HTML dump, there is no sitemap or directory for the project or its encyclopedic content. The closest things are WikiBooks, which are just an automatic collection of manually listed articles—but the articles themselves are not actually related. All content is a flat and incohesive sprawl of manually hyperlinked documents—not a book, not visualizable. That's true of the encyclopedic content itself and of the metacontent which everyone constantly needs for orientation, policy, and technology. Countless revitalization projects have failed or delayed. After two years of intensively devout expertise, I suffer daily culture shock, and disorientation of technology, procedure, and policy. The community has a scarcity-based hoarder mentality of contributors and content, as if we don't know if anyone will ever show up to write anything and get this thing off the ground. The project, and all its contributors, have no coherent identity. Therefore, any contributor and contribution must be enticed and catered to; and somehow, all existing contributors must want to entice and cater to them.

This is a trap.

Dependent completely upon the hypervigilance of volunteerism, it's a "house of cards" of content. Self-orientation requires hypervigilance; constantly re-researching the policy, procedure, and technology requires hypervigilance; constantly monitoring and defending all the content you could ever care about (even if you care only that it's not degraded) requires hypervigilance; detecting and defending yourself against vandals, asocials, and incompetents requires hypervigilance.

The project's efforts tend to focus upon acquisition of totally new editors, not retention of existing ones. They target an amorphous and infinite external supply of contributors and content, and an amorphous and inexhaustible supply of established highly skilled volunteer overseers. With no formal orientation or training, editors are expected only to magically acclimate to the project's atmosphere. "Thanks so much for whatever your monkey typed into your typewriter. Everyone loved it and only wants more.  I hope you like the place, and decide to stay!"

This is apparently because Wikipedia operates on self-evident virtue, and isn't an inherently mind-breaking, choice-paralyzing, and anarchistically anti-organizational disaster. So those editors who are already established will self-maintain as an inexhaustible supply. But for those who need additional wooing into the hive, we can occasionally hold their hand, or pump their ego with momentary cuteness in the form of banners of virtual cookies and kittens. We can awe them with amicable walls of very real text.

Wikipedia doesn't have an identity crisis if "chaotic mess" is an identity.

Addressing the wiki grind
Sometimes it can be a useful illustration, to collectively anthropomorphize and personify disparate systematic things—as if the system or the people within the system were all one person with one personality, one self image, and one belief system. The overall impression of Wikipedia's collective personality (thus yielding a self-defeating prophecy of how it often actually is) is that of a very hypocritically savant and schizoid entity. It's an environment where all content and the quality standards thereof are treated as if they are desperately impoverished. It acts culturally traumatized into believing that it is still living in the information desert of 2001, where it was desperate for legitimacy and starving for absolutely any contribution by anyone of any interest or skill level or lack thereof, like a million monkeys at a million typewriters in an anarchistic free-for-all. In reality, it's a nervously information-binging entity which is actually awash in quality and surplus, while overzealously defiant against marginalization by its overzealous critics and proprietary competitors. And it's a hoarder, living in its hoard of best intentions; its community interface is a hopelessly complicated, convoluted, chaotic, coddling, enabling mess where a preposterously gratuitous assumption of good faith is all that matters; a safe haven for contentiousness and incompetency; an idiot savant.

An open mind so open, stuff falls out
The phrase "a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" does not require wildly unqualified abandon. Wikipedia's true fundamental fault is in the misconception held by the Wikimedia Foundation and by various senior volunteers, about the meaning of "open" or "free". It's so unrestrictedly extreme. The desperate anarchy resulting from WMF's policy-enforced interpretation of the phrase "anyone can edit", is obviously made hypocritical the first moment any editor is restrained. The saying "freedom isn't free" applies because one must personally show some qualifications and self-restraint in order to respect their own liberties, especially unearned or inalienable ones; and the saying "keep an open mind, but not so open that stuff falls out" applies. We could have a free encyclopedia that any qualified person can edit, but we don't.

Specifically, the fault lies in the lack of any reputation system (including training and certification), and ultimately a herd-mentality deficiency of social and intellectual accountability. Although well meaning, Wikimedia Foundation's hopelessly optimistic charter policy directly creates a ludicrously open and abuse-inviting-and-enabling nature of Wikipedia as a project and as a social phenomenon, with its needless lack of qualification or orientation of open volunteers. That refers both to the new volunteers as they each wander in, and to the established volunteers as they uphold policy and guidelines and attempt to educate, collaborate with, and reform others.

The lack of individual reputation, certification, and identity (individually or in the group), creates a power vacuum. It just means that "anything goes". The extreme promotion of the idea of total anonymity leads to the perception that accounts and accountability are worthless. Even the pseudonymity of an account is fallaciously seen as being less anonymous than an IP address which can geographically and legally identify the user. But most IP editors aren't doing so because of any belief except for laziness and apathy, and that's who we're attracting. There are virtually no expectations. Many people get the impression that the project (or each article, or each factoid therein) can't survive without them. These impressions are exacerbated by a multitude of open wikis on the Web. Many are actually astonished or hurt to learn otherwise, as corrected by exasperated veterans. The term "veteran" can apply along with the scarring, callousing, and trauma it implies; because, there is no way to know who's actually right. In a power vacuum, "might makes right". Without any structured reputation or identity system, a power vacuum tends toward an extreme stratification of the admins vs. the plebians. The Dunning-Kruger effect leeches into the power vacuum, hard. The new user will tend to be systematically intimidated into thinking that everyone else who has learned the almost impossible learning curve is vastly senior to them; and the genuinely incompetent user is going to think that they are far more skilled and self-entitled than they really are.

Wikipedia is a chaos generation machine, throwing us all into the churn to rescue each other, and to rescue it from itself daily. If it was a physical phenomenon, it would be like a giant open pit at a construction site, and would be shut down or walled off on the basis of wanton negligence in any civilized country. Even doing our best, we're bound for needlessly continuous imperfections. In defiance and denial of its true nature as a social network, it fails to fully apprehend and compensate the fundamentally unaccountable and reputation-deficient nature of text-based, asynchronous, anonymous, intensely technical, communication.

Who can stand it?
The type of person who is attracted to this type of chaotic, anarchistic, hypocritical environment is self-selective. It's a type of person who has a high tolerance of chaos, relativism, hypervigilance, abuse, cognitive dissonance, longsuffering, and futility. It's probably more often going to be an autodidactic dropout than an academic researcher, an employee, a professor, or a doctor. And not infrequently, one with any number of infectious psychopathologies.

Most human beings don't possess these extreme personality dynamics, while maintaining performance integrity. And if they did, such a pedestrian grind is a criminal waste of their time and ability. For most people, the grind results in a needlessly poor compromise. Usually, one is either here to enact global social reform in the guise of writing an encyclopedia, by inviting, enabling, and coddling recidivistic abusers; or one is here to selectively cobble together a contradictory patchwork of written policy and guidelines in an attempt at neutral communication like the very fabric of the encyclopedia that I'm writing. One can't always do both. There's only so much a person has to work with, in a text-based medium with no physical reception facility featuring real cookies, kittens, body language, hugs, and especially real physical administrators. And yes I sadly do have some isolated events amongst many many many events, and I primarily work with other admins who explicitly mentor and approve the process overall. I try to stay as chatty as I can with admins and other senior editors, even just to routinely sanity-check my overall comprehension and to avoid a battleground mentality amidst such pointlessly manufactured strife. That's a constant threat to everyone.

Here are some ways to survive:
 * Be a part of the problem, obviously. It's a playpen.
 * Find a less popular niche, or be otherwise submissive.
 * Become a hypervigilant and legalistic expert. Submit all content in an unassailably high quality way, including completeness of prose and citations. Then prepare to defend it.
 * Become an encyclopedic butterfly. Be a WikiGnome or other form of subtle, furtive contributor.  Gain a sense of traction in the aggregate of lots of small contributions. They can't all be shot down.

Instead
In reality, there is no reason for anything free or open to be this free or open. We don't need to have a zero barrier to entry, in order to nonetheless fulfill WMF's objective of being perfectly welcoming, all-inclusive, anonymous, and free. "Anyone can edit" can still mean "anyone qualified can edit".