User:ATren

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This user plays ice hockey.

An essay on civility

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[edit] The Wikipedia Middle Class

I have no major Wikipedia ambitions. I have no clue what my edit count is, nor do I care. I sometimes go weeks without editing. If I see vandalism, I revert it. If I see grammar or spelling errors, I fix them. I don't care to be an admin.

I have a very few articles on my watchlist, which I edit very occasionally. They roughly correspond to my interests. This doesn't make me a troll or POV warrior or SPA - it just means that I don't like to edit a topic unless I have a deep level of understanding of that topic.

I'm the Wikipedia middle class - just one of the many thousands of editors who do a little work here and there, mostly anonymously. I've gotten involved in a few protracted disputes - mainly because I have a difficult time walking away when I know there is a wrong being committed - but I've always tried my best to remain civil and respectful. By and large, I think I've succeeded - I challenge anyone to find a blatantly bad or uncivil edit in my history in the past year - and yet I've been called a troll by established users who disagree with me. I've actually been in the position, multiple times, of having to defend my relatively low edit count in disputes with elite editors.

Should a purely quantitative measure represent the value of our work here? Sometimes it does.

Wikipedia is like Usenet of the mid-to-late 1990s - right around the time it became popular and the trolls showed up. The right thing to do back then was to ignore the baiting by abusive users, and it's still the right thing to do. But many Usenet regulars were incapable of ignoring the trolls - they instead engaged them in epic battles. This alienated the "middle class" of Usenet, who flocked to private moderated forums, and Usenet was left to the trolls and a few remaining regulars who couldn't resist the troll bait. Usenet is now a shell of what it once was.

Wikipedia has its share of problem users, but the real problem is the regulars who don't know how to deal with them. Ignore a troll and he goes away; engage him in battle and he will continue baiting. Too many long time Wikipedians are apt to engage with guns-a-blazing, causing epic battles that poison the environment here. And some long time users have become so reactionary that reasonable editors get caught up in the troll roundup - good, casual editors who have been labelled trolls after minor disagreements with battle-cynical regulars. And the cycle continues.

Will Wikipedia end up like Usenet? It's looking like it will. How many "middle class" editors like me have been driven away? I know of a few such former Wikipedians, and if it could be quanitified I bet it would total in the thousands - good faith editors who got caught up in the crossfire of an epic war, and subsequently left the project for good. How long are we going to alienate these kinds of users?

There seems to be an attitude that an established editor with 15k edits is inherently more valuble than any single "middle class" editor, but that's a short-sighted view. A few hundred editors casual making one or two edits a day adds up to hundreds of thousands of edits a year - far more any single editor, no matter how profilic. And each brings his or her own unique knowledge and expressive ability.

So Wikipedia needs to stop alienating its middle class, and it starts at the top: admins and arbitrators must set a high level of discourse, even in conflict -- and in the cases where have no choice but to block or revert, they must do so dispassionately and professionally. They must stop treating every disagreement like a troll attack; assuming good faith is essential because often times a clueless newbie might act trollish. Assertiveness without agressiveness is key.

Otherwise, Wikipedia will go the way of Usenet.

[edit] Do not trust Wikipedia for anything that's remotely controversial

Here is my impression of Wikipedia after 2+ years:

Wikipedia cannot be trusted for any topic that is controversial in any way.

This is not to say that Wikipedia is useless. On the contrary, most non-controversial articles on science, history, computer science, technology, etc, are quite reliable and informative. Wikipedia is a great starting point for hard research in such non-controversial subject matter; and if you're just learning for the sake of learning, Wikipedia might be all you need.

But if you're here for articles on politics, religion, fringe science, or any other contentious topic, Wikipedia is almost guaranteed to give you a skewed viewpoint.

The problem, contrary to public opinion, is not newbie fanatics pushing their views - such users are quickly chased off before doing any real damage. No, the real problem is long-term established users who use their clout to take ownership of articles and assert their points of view.

I've seen it dozens of times: good faith Newbie tries to correct an obvious problem; Established Editor reverts, usually dismissively. Newbie objects and reverts. Established Editor reverts again, calling him "POV pusher", "tendentious editor", or worse. Newbie gets frustrated, looks for help from Uninvolved Third Party. Uninvolved Third Party see Newbie's low edit count and supports Established Editor unconditionally, usually in a way that further insults Newbie. Newbie gets really angry now, and lashes out. Newbie gets banned. Article gets reverted back to problematic version - supporting Established Editor's view.

And not only that, Uninvolved Third Party has now gained support and friendship from Established Editor. Uninvolved Third Party will later seek out Established Editor to support his own point of view, and the cycle continues. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, like members of Congress trading votes for pork.

It's really not surprising that it's come to this. The real power on Wikipedia is derived from popularity, not merit, and therefore the power elite are those who know how to make friends, not necessarily those who know how to write good, neutral articles. In the above example, Newbie might be an expert on the topic in question - he will still lose the battle if he happens to butt heads with a long term user who has a lot of Wikifriends.

There's really no way to fix this, short of fundamentally changing how Wikipedia works. And that's never going to happen because Wikipedia rules are controlled by the "commmunity" of established editors - the users who benefitted most from the current rules. Why would they change the very system that elevated them to a position of POV-pushing power?

So, seeing as there's little hope of fixing this, my advice is this: use Wikipedia for what it's good for (non-controversial topics in science, math, technology, history, etc) and avoid it for everything else. ATren (talk) 05:54, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Civil editors are less intelligent than uncivil editors"

The quote above is paraphrased from a comment by a long time editor notorious for incivility problems; an established user who was found to have used multiple sock puppet accounts abusively - an offense that would get most users banned permanently - but still edits freely here because he has powerful friends.

Think about the implication of this statement: if I act civilly in a debate with this editor, I will be judged to be less intelligent. If I want to gain this editor's respect, I must act like a jerk.

But he leaves out an important detail: there is a difference between acting uncivil in support of him, and acting uncivil in opposition. Rest assured, if I acted uncivil against this editor and his POV, he would get one of his friends to block me in a heartbeat.

So, it goes like this:

  • if I oppose this editor in a civil way, I'm not intelligent.
  • if I oppose uncivilly, I'm banned.

Conclusion: do not oppose this editor under any circumstances.

This, in a nutshell, is why Wikipedia cannot be trusted for anything controversial. ATren (talk) 15:13, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] My username

My former username was "A Transportation Enthusiast". That name was too long and restricting -- I have other interests besides transportation. :-)

So, my username is now ATren, which still references my old name (A Transportation Enthusiast) but is much less verbose and looks better in edit histories. I still contribute to blogs and forums as "A Transportation Enthusiast".

I am a thirty-something software engineer from Western New York State. I am married with three children.