Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 21:11, 11 March 2015

Goodbye statement

I never thought my last article would be on a Greek painter.

I am obviously addicted to this project, and I care deeply about it, but I think it's best if I don't return to it.

I have been subjected to multiple assumptions of bad faith, not just the one unfounded accusation of lying and the accusation within it of contributing to driving off new editors, but also the upholding of an editor's demand that before undoing one of their contributions among many to the same article, I should obtain consensus, the accusation that I only belatedly "deigned" to join a talk page discussion that was opened anything but "immediately" (and where I and others had already discussed with the editor) and the dismissal of my reasoning as mere preference on grounds of ... mere preference. I have tried to hold to my nuanced view on infoboxes, but it has become clear that nothing satisfies editors who believe they should be universal other than bowing to their wishes.

Stewardship is not ownership. It is basic to the way we work that we evaluate the usefulness of changes to articles: we collaborate by correcting the spelling, grammar, word choice, formatting, and organization of what others have put into articles, and we remove things others have added for any number of reasons, not merely undoing vandalism and jokes such as name checks and shout-outs to friends, but removing unnecessary detail, repetitions, unencyclopedic trivia, unreferenced contentious material about BLPs, promotion and link cruft ... and sometimes replacing it with something that is either longer or shorter. All of these involve evaluation, and in none of these should the overriding issue be, "Am I undoing someone's work". It has to be "What do I judge best for the article (and the encyclopedia)", or we are merely a writing club. In many, many cases there will be disagreement: people have different styles, different preferences about the amount of linking that is desirable (let alone about red links), different views on how a lead section should be written and how much overlap there should be between it and the body, different views on how many references to use and where ... let alone national differences in English usage, which can extend to matters of style and organisation. People also differ in how they collaborate; engaged editors with a vision for the structure of the whole article sometimes thrash out a compromise version by making a series of alternating rewrites, with comments in the edit summary and sometimes also on talk pages. That can get heated, but in many cases a compromise is reached that works for the article and is in many respects better than if one editor had worked on it alone, because the other(s) have brought up and worked on issues that one alone had not seen, or found solutions that one alone would not have thought of. That is collaboration.

Yet it's defined as edit warring: policy was rewritten a few years ago to define any revert, partial or complete, as edit warring.

We have a guideline page, WP:EXPERTS, that while I assume it makes the important point that experts are one of Misplaced Pages's strengths, and that one of the reasons they are so is that they can be expected to have good references at their fingertips—I haven't looked at it in a while—spends considerable space on denigrating experts for being aware of the nuances of their field. A few years ago, an RfC rejected correct capitalization in the area of bird names; many editors got their edit counts inflated by moving a large number of articles and changing a large number of links, and several expert and productive editors left the project.

Earlier still, someone thought too many newly created articles were being marked for speedy deletion. Rather than the admin corps performing a study on whether speedy deletion tags were being acted on too hastily and unquestioningly, and whether certain admins needed to be reminded to be patient and inquisitive before deleting, or trying any other approach (such as relaxing the conditions for granting the autopatrolled flag, which have risen beyond the reach of slow and steady article creators), it was decided to lay a trap for the new page patrollers, which was done with a breaching experiment involving false identities and deliberate creation of test case articles. As a result most of the experienced new page patrollers walked out, either after being censured or in disgust. Unreviewed new pages piled up—and spilled off the back of the queue—and the perception of a vacuum drew in over-eager volunteers who created a shooting gallery environment that has driven off new editors who join us to create an article in an abstruse area, and is a constant source of worry about articles being tagged almost immediately after creation.

Our much-touted slogan is "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit". In principle that has to include experts, and people creating their first article. It also has to include unregistered editors. Most of us made our first edits before registering. Almost all of us occasionally get logged out without our realising it (for one thing, Mediawiki requires a separate log-in and when returning to Misplaced Pages, one finds oneself logged-out.) But a large proportion of editors believe IP editing should not be allowed, and an even larger proportion is biased against IP edits. This prejudice may be unavoidable, but it undermines our mission. In particular it is driving off new editors, as well as that unknown number who prefer for whatever reason to continue editing without registering. I tried as an administrator to help the site by reducing the problem of the "Best known for IP". It proved intractable not just because the editor eventually returned to edit warring, but because they were held to be unreformable because they are an unregistered editor who has had a long-term abuse page created about them, and thus no improvement in their behavior outweighed their having been abusive in the past. They have stated that they will probably be unable to resist making improvements in the future, and as the blocking admin has noted, this will be socking. They will be (mostly) good edits of which we seek to deprive ourselves on bureaucratic grounds and because of a prejudice against IP editors.

We have indeed become a massive bureaucracy. In addition to the redefinition of edit warring that lays open all give-and-take collaboration to punishment as edit warring, the methods of discussion are more and more byzantine. Both the Witiquette noticeboard and Requests for Comment have been closed down, leaving AN/I, a dreadful gauntlet where reporting editors are likely to be set upon and censured, or alternatively the complaint languishes unnoticed until it's archived, with or without first generating long discussions between the editors involved in the dispute and/or more or less hasty and sarcastic commentary from gadflies and more or less clueful admin wannabees. There's a regrettable amount of failure to read the complaint carefully, or the diffs. I used to read AN/I to learn about policy and practice. Now I see Social Darwinism. Meanwhile, WP:BRD is fine and dandy as a theory, but works very messily in practice: many go to each others' talk pages instead of the article talk page; many flat out refuse to discuss, or simply use "talk page!" as a club, as that editor did to me, and we're seeing the rise of flying pressure groups of editors who overwhelm article talk page discussions, on issues such as WP:ENGVAR, naming conventions, nationalist POV, WP:FRINGE ... and infoboxes. Increasingly the labyrinth channels people to ArbCom, which more and more functions as a law court, with use of impenetrable legal terminology, inscrutable rules (I never did figure out whether I was allowed to weigh in on, for example, the case of a fellow administrator whom I only know as a colleague, and if so, how) and decisions that are both hard to interpret (no, I should not need to say, I was not lying about the infobox ruling; that's what I believe it means; and I believe there is a case at AN/I right now about what's included under "gender, broadly construed") and hard to reconcile with the encyclopedic mission (the last few rulings against Eric Corbett).

In fact we have a serious problem with our whole model of consensus. First of all, the word means "agreement", not "winning an argument by more effective appeal to policy". We call it consensus because it makes us feel good and papers over the underlying bureaucracy. Secondly, we have at best uneven application of the principle, especially in the increasing number of non-admin closures (in effect, the rule that non-admins should not make a contentious close has been suspended for lack of admins and because voters at RfA have decided that candidates need to have already been doing admin stuff; see also, AN/I) but also by admins. At my RfA, I deliberately flubbed the consensus question; I had an AfD in my past that I had started, and where the article creator, a wikifriend of mine, had agreed with me that the subject was not notable; but the AfD was closed as "keep" on a blatant supervote by an admin applying a personal, non-policy criterion. Enforcement of the rules against canvassing is highly uneven (the infoboxes wikiproject is not going to be a neutral venue to advertise an infobox dispute, and one of the primary functions of many wikiprojects is to enforce their definitions of notability and MOS rules), and always will be: off-wiki canvassing of fellow editors and others is increasingly trivial and socially normal at this point in the development of the internet. In practice, because we are not prepared to take a hard look at what we mean by "consensus" and whether that's what we are actually doing, we have mob rule leavened by an increasingly deprecated expertise and sense of stewardship.

This bureaucratic drift away from the purpose and principles of the project hamstrings admins, too. The principle that admins don't make content decisions is fine and dandy, but as I said above, all editing is evaluative: we determine what is vandalism by evaluating it and inferring its intent. There is no clear border between content decisions - what's best for the article - and decisions about editor behavior - which rest in large part on evaluating what the editor has been doing in articles. In the discussion about the latest clamp-down against the "Best known for IP", after I had bowed to consensus, it also became apparent that the "involved" rule can be interpreted very strictly and would in effect prevent an admin from semi-protecting an article they have edited, or blocking an editor who has edited that article. This would rule out one of the two main reasons I (and I presume many other admins) have articles on our watchlists: because they have drawn vandalism or POV editing. It would mean the admin could only intervene with tools after seeing a noticeboard posting or getting a message, and that not if they were familiar with the article from editing it. That's a recipe for inept administration based on hasty, uninformed judgements that rest entirely on a guess as to the editor's intent, without context, and it encourages admins not to be stewards of articles. Having a Chinese wall between administrative actions and content decisions may seem good theoretically, but in practice it just makes admins cops and discourages them from being what they were in theory chosen for being: editors whose judgement is trusted.

In any event, I didn't so much run for adminship as get pushed. I didn't have any desire to be an admin: I stepped up after others decided it was a good idea. I have almost no ambition—very hard for ambitious people to understand, I know, and I keep forgetting that a lot of people are motivated by ambition—and I hate being a cop. I have worked hard to be worthy of the trust placed in me, and it changed my activities on the project a lot. Some of those who opposed at that time did so because it would curtail my writing for the project, and they were right, although there have been other factors, including the other way in which I use my watchlist: most of the articles I create or substantially change, I keep an eye on. That's what the list on my user page was originally for: I go by to see whether they need updating or whether I now see something I could have said better, and I also keep an eye on them for vandalism and other unfortunate changes. I regard it as my duty, having added them to the encyclopedia, but my watch list has become rather large.

As I say, after I became an admin I tried to be useful. I don't think it worked out very well. I made a number of mistakes, as I was afraid I would. And I kept rigidly away from determining consensus, which ruled out helping with many of the worst backlogs. I realized early on that a lot of adminship, done right, is deciding which tool to use: I have remained partial to discussing with editors in preference to blocking, protecting, or even making threats, and I've tried to explain at Talk:RfA that I don't see how the tools can be further separated. I have stayed away from AfC because I don't trust myself to decide whether a draft is ready; my instinct has always been to try to make it ready myself. But I registered on IRC and helped a few people that way, and responded to a few of the talk page requests for help that the bot reports there. I stayed away from the speedy deletion requests category for a similar reason, but I found I could add to my work at Pages needing translation into English by speedy deleting the inappropriate pages that got reported there. I saw and quietly deleted some awful things in languages I can read. I deleted some A2s, and conversely I talked to people who were wrongly nominating articles for speedy deletion that were simply created in a foreign language and didn't already exist on the other project. I always told the article creator what I had done and why. I tried to step up at the admin noticeboards, but it was just too horrible. I did do a couple of stints at user names for administrator attention, but it was soul destroying. So many people have no idea we forbid names of organizations/companies as user names; there is nothing telling them this when they create their accounts. And we have a real problem with promotional article creation; not only companies trying to use us for promotion, but people thinking we're LinkedIn. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of our problems with new editors and new articles, at this point, stem from an increasing number of people not knowing what an encyclopedia is. That plus all the stupid joke and name-check/shoutout edits mean we are drowning in good-faith or at worst idiotic edits that hurt the encyclopedia. Graffiti and illegal bill-posting are not always vandalism, in my view, but they deface what so many people have worked hard to build. However, I didn't feel good blocking these people, and I noticed that the official guidelines, to ask people to change their names first and to move them to holding pens if their edits are mixed or they haven't yet edited, are not followed: another admin would block someone after I'd left a message on their talk page. That made me feel even worse.

In the interests of community peace and not tugging on that fragile fabric of the acceptance of consensus that enables us to work together—making the wiki method continue to work despite the bureaucracy that works like hardening of the arteries, hampering discussion and making it harder to work out disputes—I've shut up and walked away in many cases. One was that AfD. Another was over the use of the "death dagger" in battle infoboxes, imposed by the military wikiproject. That symbol is inscrutable to the vast majority of English-speaking readers—I had to guess its meaning when I started meeting it in books written in other European languages—and it's fundamentally a Christian symbol, meaning "pray for his soul"—whatever it may be called, it's a cross (and I came across a reference to that effect, over a year later). As such it's a major violation of neutral point of view as well as an incumbrance for the average reader. (And neither commander in that battle was even Christian.) But I walked away. I've also walked away in at least one case when drive-by editors have dumped infoboxes in articles I created or saved. Those articles are off my watch list. I hope those who insisted they were right have adopted them onto theirs and watched for vandalism. But I have no doubt they failed to understand why I walked away: it was for the greater good of the project.

Actually, I will say now that I believe the kind of tin-eared unexamined bias that is behind the insistence on the "death dagger" is more harmful to the encyclopedia than many threats people focus on. More than vandalism, for example, given the number of vandalism hunters we have, both the eager beaver zappers and the many experienced and thoughtful editors who make that part of their work here—and a superb anti-vandalism bot. Our coverage is even more uneven than our crowdsourced, almost entirely volunteer mode of creation would suggest. It reflects a terrible recentism (I found that a moderately long article had been created on someone who published in the last few years fairy tales that had been in an archive, forgotten, since a 19th-century folklore collector's death; that person also co-founded a society to research and revive the collector's work; but no one had thought to write an article on the collector himself, or even to red link him), perhaps understandable bias against anything "unscientific" or definable as "fringe" such as alternative medicine, spiritualism, or neopaganism, but our policy actually says to cover such things providing there are sources and we make clear they are not universally accepted—and where do we expect the reader to look them up if we don't cover them because we don't like them, Britannica?—even within popular culture and sports, which we cover out of all proportion, there are yawning gaps: non-English-speaking TV series and films, athletes in less popular sports and from more than about 20 years ago, even, as I recently discovered, Barbie dolls. (There are also of course vast tracts of the encyclopedia that are just one-line stubs, maybe plus an infobox: look for example at all but the largest settlements in non-English-speaking countries, and at non-films from countries where English is not one of the official languages, in general).

And yet most of us assume all's right with the wiki. In fact there's a meme, promulgated by the WMF, that the encyclopedia is nearing completion; that most of the topics have been written up; that we should now focus on improving existing articles to Good Article or Featured Article status. This is massively wrongheaded. First of all, I find it hard to understand how anyone can have such a limited frame of reference as to think we don't have a vast number of articles left to write. Perhaps a contributing cause is that some editors mistakenly remove red links (I initially thought they indicated the article had been deleted). But for the most part it has to be lack of imagination—and unconscious bias. And promulgating this view discourages new editors. If the project is approaching completion and what is left are improvement tasks and the writing of harder articles, then there's less opening for newbies to make themselves useful; plus many potentially useful editors first approach us because they want to write a new article. Not all of these are promotional articles, things we already have by another name, or otherwise not worthy of inclusion in the encyclopedia. If we say most of the articles have been written, we're implying we assume they are. Some of them are things that we didn't know about yet. I also believe the focus on improvement is a mistake. It provides content for the Main Page, and some of the community do their best work with that kind of challenge. But it rests on assumptions about quality being objectively measurable that are another kind of entrenched bias. Ultimately, the GA and FA criteria are arbitrary, self-determined, and self-measured. There are GAs and even FAs that don't cover their subject completely, and there are GAs and FAs where reasonable people can disagree about both content and presentation. I'm positive that there are also articles with no bling that are at least at GA standard in someone's view. Focusing on GAs and FAs also undermines the wiki philosophy; these articles are explicitly held up as better than other volunteers' work. The bad effect of that is shown by the DYK project, now struggling to survive. That project had multiple aims: to provide interesting snippets for readers of the Main Page; to demonstrate to readers that we are continuing to build the encyclopedia, and possibly even encourage them to help fix up one of these articles, since they are new and more likely to still contain obvious problems (certainly more than the other Main Page items, which are all vetted for being close to perfect before being featured); and to encourage people creating and improving articles, including ... and this used to be important&nbsp... offering them workshop-style help in fixing up their articles after they were nominated, by themselves or others. I like multi-objective things like that, particularly in a volunteer context, but DYK stuck out by not requiring near-perfection, so those who volunteered there have been constantly assailed, and I myself left after it was diluted with GAs.

I see the decision to require references to reliable sources to demonstrate notability as the original cause of our decline in new editor numbers. In particular this impacted purely online areas of interest. (It speaks volumes that I was the first to get an article on Techno Viking to stick, and how hard I and a friend had to work to find the sources, since the lawsuit had not yet happened.) It also made us inhospitable to pagan topics and to most topics in the Developing World, no matter how often we affirm that we will trust references to books and newspapers not available online. We raised the bar and we made the project significantly more bureaucratic. That tagline "that anyone can edit" became a little less true. It may have been necessary, but we should be aware of that and see whether anything can be done to ameliorate its effects in terms of entrenched bias. Not assume that it's beyond discussion.

Part of entrenched bias of course is the underrepresentation of women and "women's topics" in the encyclopedia. Here, our insistence on reliable sources exacerbates the problem already presented by historical (and continuing) gender bias - there are online projects to document the lives and achievements of unsung women that in some cases don't pass our litmus test, and the sources for things like Barbie dolls, traditional knitting and quilting patterns, and so on are often unimpressive even when in print. I wrote up a toy manufacturer (founded by a woman and using local women for labor) that I had seen news articles on in the late 1970s, but what had been put online was patchy.

However, on the woman issue, the WMF's approach does more harm than good. their research on the percentage of female editors is fatally flawed, and they have used those bogus numbers to negate the existence of those of us who are female editors, to condescend, and to divide the community. Seeing pop-up ads inviting people to apply for grants to fix the problem that I don't exist alienates me. Being told in a blog post by the past head of the WMF that half a dozen of her friends know better than me about what turns off women from editing Misplaced Pages—about the fact the lady assumes I don't exist—alienates me. (Most of these turn-offs don't matter to me at all, by the way.) The constant advertising of editathons on women's issues, for women, is divisive. The demonizing of editors who dare to question the statistics while being male-identified is divisive and counterproductive ... as well as condescending. I left the Gender Gap Task Force alone because hey, each to her own, but it does not speak for me and the WMF's promotion of this political effort and lionization of those women who spend their time yacking there instead of actually writing the encyclopedia chaps my butt.

Moreover, underlying the WMF's promotion of panic about an undemonstrated gender gap and divisive tactics to remedy it is a push by the WMF to encourage editors to reveal their real names. They use the carrot of funding and of course that of the supposed fun of face-to-face events, particularly the big convention whose name escapes me (I don't do cons) to get people to reveal who they are, they make it mandatory for certain positions, and they more or less quietly encourage us to give up our internet identities and use our actual names. This is potentially dangerous—at least one editor has recently been threatened with harm for their editing—there is a long trail of women's, gays, and trans* people's lives ruined and ended because their identities became known on the internet; and I would have thought that since GamerGate started, anybody active on-line would realize women have to consider the danger before revealing their identities. This project was founded on anonymity, anonymity is part of its strength, it is a volunteer project, and for women especially, probing identity is a privacy violation. The WMF is not just being controlling here, it's expressing contempt for the volunteers it says it wants.

I also have it on good authority that the WMF wants to get rid of "old timers" and replace them with new editors. That's certainly the impression I get from the constant mucking about with the editing interface, which requires us all to unlearn everything and try to adapt to whatever brokenness they shove at us. And a comflict between old-timer and newbie is implicit in the metaphor of the "wikidragon" who makes big bold edits and from whom the "wikiknight" rescues the innocent victim. But it may not be quite that calculated on the WMF's part: the demolition of the Toolserver and its replacement by labs, which requires different programming skills and malfunctions more than half the time, suggests the more important motivation is the insatiable need to control. Of course, the answer to both the oldtimers vs. newbies and the techies vs. non-techies split is that the project needs us all. It's insane both to drive away new volunteers and to drive away experienced editors who are needed to show them how to do things, in addition to whatever else they may choose to do, and asserting that volunteership has a "natural cycle" whereby people will inevitably choose to retire is, again, condescending—it's entirely up to volunteers what they choose to do. Speaking of newbies, we are indeed turning them off in many ways. For one thing, we (or the WMF) assume they are all young and tech-savvy, whereas it's the nature of the project that we attract a lot of retired people and academics; newbies have told me they find templates and the citation help video more baffling than helpful—much like me. For another, see above about first articles. Furthermore, the Teahouse has in my view been a disaster, well intentioned though it was. The Teahouse seeks to avoid linking to policy pages, which leaves the new editor ignorant of where to look up the rules and guidelines, and especially defenseless if they get a templated warning. At its inception it turned away experienced editors, including me, so it's continued to be an isolated culture, and initially we were told not to welcome people to it, because that would be done by the Teahouse hosts; the result of that was that editors stopped putting welcome templates on newbies' talk pages, and the Teahouse has since gone over to a welcome bot—which initially they wanted to avoid—so I have repeatedly found a user talk page has several templated warnings, but no welcome of any kind, or a "We have a Teahouse for new editors!" placed by the bot after a string of warnings and maybe a confused response by the new editor. How is anyone to be expected to understand the rules and guidelines of this project if they are never told where they reside on the site? How is it either welcoming or useful to give a new editor templated warnings and no welcome, no matter how wonderful the metaphorical teahouse may be? What we had worked better: a significant number of editors welcomed newbies as part of their normal editing, and they and others followed up with help if it was asked for, we had and had a variety of welcome templates to suit different tastes and needs, and we had a special help desk for new editors (I asked a couple of questions there and got patient help, possibly from the same people who now patiently staff the Teahouse). It dovetailed with our warning templates, it gave a person a chance to read the manual, so to speak, or to get personal assistance if they preferred, and it didn't come off as condescending.

In terms of being welcoming, I think we've effectively gone backwards. And I don't think it's because we maintain stewardship over the encyclopedia—except in the areas of over-zealous vandal fighting and speedy deletion of new articles. Fundamentally, I think the WMF has lost sight of the aims of the project, and that they have so divided the community that many of us are working at purposes that don't suit it well.

So. Rather than writing essays or otherwise becoming active in wiki-politics, I wrote and improved articles and tried to help people. All the more so because I'd been entrusted with adminship. But it's reached a point where I'm being accused of harming the project, as well as of being dishonorable, and I was already questioning whether I should continue to volunteer here after what happened to the "best known for IP". As you see, I perceive dangerous problems with the project. If I stay, I would have to fight for it. But Misplaced Pages is not supposed to be a battleground, and it's apparent that my views are not shared by most. So instead, I'm leaving. I'd like to say I'll come back, but I doubt I would be welcomed given what I have finally said here. And I had already been facing the likelihood of leaving when WP:FLOW is instituted—incidentally, one of the few indications that there are few of us women editors is that there has not been a big reaction to that name, which to me as a woman (maybe of my time and place), says "The WMF wants to put us all on the rag" in big neon letters. That will fatally impair our ability to talk to each other. So ... I'm leaving earlier than I expected and it won't be "us" any longer when that happens. Goodbye. I loved this project. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:11, 11 March 2015 (UTC)