Wikipedia talk:Al Capone effect

That feeling when you write an essay and then some rando comes along and creates its talk page because they want to talk about the essay you just wrote
I'm surprised that this essay was written in 2024 and not like 20 years ago. It's so on point, it's such a common phenomenon on Wikipedia. But there are some real differences between the real-life Al Capone effect and the Wikipedia Al Capone effect, and I wonder if the essay should be expanded to discuss this at greater length. Here's a stab at a draft:

In real life, the Al Capone effect -- someone being punished for a relatively minor offense that can be proven because their major offenses, while clear, cannot be proven -- happens because of certain key factors. Namely, the real-world accountability system -- courts of law -- have strict rules about how they operate: the standard of proof is high ("beyond a reasonable doubt" in the US), and in order to ensure procedural justice, there are strict rules of evidence. Meanwhile, criminals are gaming that accountability system in very sophisticated ways, using vast resources (millions of dollars), doing things like hiding or disposing of bodies, intimidating or murdering witnesses, bribing officials, and so forth. The sophisticated and well-funded gaming ends up working, and we end up in a situation where we cannot prove, within the strict confines of the accountability system, the major crimes that we know the guilty party is responsible for. So instead, we punish Al Capone for whatever we can prove, even if it's something relatively pedestrian like tax evasion.

On Wikipedia, things are rather different. The accountability system is almost nothing like a court of law. The standard of proof is "a majority of random people on the internet agree." The rules of evidence are "there must be evidence." We don't ignore evidence because of its provenance, and we don't have jury sequestration, or any of these obstacles. Nobody is bribing admins or arbitrators to look the other way. (Right?) So why does Wikipedia have an Al Capone effect? Why is Wikipedia unable to hold people accountable for their major crimes, but instead ends up holding people accountable for relatively minor incidental offenses like sockpuppetry or incivility?

I have a theory about what the answer is: whereas in the real world, the problem is that sophisticated gaming suppresses evidence to prevent clearing the high bar of a criminal conviction in a court of law, or it corrupts through bribery the officials who are charged with acting on that evidence, on Wikipedia, the problem isn't a lack of evidence or corruption of admins, it's that nobody reads the evidence. It takes a lot of evidence to prove civil POV-pushing or long-term disruption; one has to read not only many diffs but also read many reliable sources in order to conclude that someone is misrepresenting sources across multiple articles over a long period of time. But it only takes a few minutes to read a couple of "fuck you!" diffs to identify incivility; it only takes a few minutes to run a checkuser check and block two accounts who are a technical match. So if you do something where it only takes a few minutes to get caught, then you'll get caught; beyond that, nobody is going to read the evidence, so you don't have to worry about it. And while there are counterexamples -- instances where volunteers have spent significant amounts of time poring through evidence of misconduct in order to put a stop to it -- those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

What to do about it? I've said it many times before: start paying people to read the evidence. Because it's the only way it's going to get done. Hire professionals to pore through the data and write a report summarizing it. Then hope that volunteer editors will read the summary, which they might, if it's short enough, and we include some pictures of naked people or something.

Anyway, thanks for writing this essay! Levivich (talk) 16:00, 6 July 2024 (UTC)