Misplaced Pages

After six months in WP I am totally fed up.

It is no longer worth the headache trying to write quality articles or to improve articles in this environment.

But I would like to post some of my observations in hopes that it might help out somehow, someday.

WP is a meeting ground for several types of people. The main types I've observed fall under these heads:

1. Accurate Reporters
2. Responsible Scholars
3. Infantile Vandals
4. Expert Disrupters

In the present state of WP, the rules in practice and the prevailing attitudes of Admins are all skewed in favor of Infantile Vandals and Expert Disrupters while Accurate Reporters and Responsible Scholars don't stand a chance.

By "rules in practice" I mean the way that policies and guidelines actually get enforced. The sad thing is that the "rules in principle" state all the right ideas, but people who are born and bred to check facts don't have a chance against puppet mobs of pseudo-newbies, who seem bent on nothing short of making the world safe for their current state of ignorance. "Assuming good faith" and "not biting newcomers" are so much easier for Admins to parrot that it has rendered them the most naive dupes of expert disrupters who have learned how it easy it is to exploit their naivete. In short, WP is like email before virus protection.

This is one of the biggest reasons that WP's reputation in responsible communities has gone from "not especially reliable source" (NERS) to "dump of popular error" (DOPE). It is my impression from my acquaintances that more and more responsible scholars who buy into the ideals of WP in the beginning quickly find themselves dismayed by the realities, and just go away quietly after a short while of seeing their efforts go to waste here.

I really do hope that something that lives up to the stated ideals and policies of WP does come into existence someday, so I will try to put aside my present discouragement and focus on the kinds of experiences that can be converted into constructive critique.

Jon Awbrey, 18 Jun 2006 00:04 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

CM = Charles Matthews

CM: Yes, editing WP doesn't suit everybody. And it is possible to leave, without feeling a need to blacken its reputation.

JA: The resistance to facing unpleasant realities is perfectly human and thorougly understandable, but real situations do not improve unless people squarely face the gap between ideals and realities. I am not such a newbie on Planet Earth that i have not faced constant disappointment and near-utter discouragement on a recurring basis, and I have survived long enough on Planet Earth to know that there is nothing for it, when the transient pain has passed, but to salvage what lessons can be learned from the experience.

JA: So, yes, it will be necessary in this parting feedback to recount a number of negative turns of events that I have experienced during my sojourn in Misplaced Pages. But the purpose of examining these incidentals is to find some means of learning from them.

JA: When CM says "editing WP doesn't suit everybody" does he mean WP the ideal, the ideals of WP, as set forth in its policies and guidelines, or does he mean WP the reality, its de facto way of operating in reality?

JA: That is the question.

Jon Awbrey, 18 Jun 2006 09:36 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

CM = Charles Matthews

CM: Yes, editing WP doesn't suit everybody. And it is possible to leave, without feeling a need to blacken its reputation.

JA: I will try to stay focused on the task at hand, which is simply to provide clear feedback that might become useful at some time in the future toward the actualization of a worthy objective with which I continue to feel a certain degree of sympathy, even though my personal resources on its behalf are approaching final exhaustion.

JA: Accesses of strong feelings as I lay out this narrative are probably inevitable, and defensive reactions on the part of some of its readers are quite natural and to be expected, especially with those who share a strong bond of common identity with each other and the ideals of WP. Indeed, until just a few days ago, I was commonly found to be voicing many of the same apologies and excuses to my acquaintances with regard to the rough-jeweled state and the promise of WP, so I know most of these by heart.

JA: I do not know if the reputation of WP could be diminished any further among the acquaintances that I have discussed it with, but I do know that whether its reputation improves or worsens, it will be through the acts of the WP community as a whole, and not through my words.

Jon Awbrey, 18 Jun 2006 15:24 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

SB = Sean Barrett

SB: Perhaps we can get straight to the point:

SB: What do you hope to accomplish by repeating the standard Mk.1 Disgruntled User Rant, modified only by the Gratuitous Use of Fatuous Initialisms (GUFI)?

JA: The purpose of an exit interview, as some organizations make use of them, is is to acquire from departing members an order of feedback information that for all sorts of humanly understandable reasons members are usually reluctant to share, or even proscribed from sharing, while still members of the group. A bit more directness, a bit more risk-taking, a lot less dancing around the bush, a lot less mincing of words, and in the case of WP, we can all drop that constant mental strain of trying to assume good faith of folk who behave like brown shirts, or brown sock-puppets in the current fashion.

JA: The frank exchange of views so far allows me to extend my classification:

1. Accurate Reporters
2. Responsible Scholars
3. Disgruntled Users
4. Infantile Vandals
5. Expert Disrupters

JA: In order to learn from the welter of distressing phenomena that we are bound to encounter in any complex environment, and especially any system that involves large masses of interacting human beings, it helps to stand back a bit from the fray and try to guess what sorts of dynamics are driving the developments in question. Lately, I have found myself spending a lot more time standing aback and a lot less time writing articles, and so I might as well share a few of my more persistent findings, plus a few more speculative guesses as to what the hell may be going on.

Jon Awbrey, 19 Jun 2006 00:20 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

RL = Roger Luethi

RL: I haven't run into this editor before and cannot make authoritative statements, but a quick search shows that he made over 6000 main space edits in half a year, nota bene in areas that we want to cover and where we need experts to help out.

RL: He does seem to be involved in disputes on quite a few pages, it's hard to see through the mess. One (apparently retracted) 3RR block on June 12.

RL: Based on my quick research I can't rule out that Jon Awbrey's problems are worth investigating.

JA: Thank you for your considerate attention. I will try to make constructive use of it, no matter how difficult the issues involved.

JA: Enough has been said about the ordinary uses of exit interviews. Indeed, just before my sense of futility became terminal, I had entertained the notion of starting a wikiproject to routinely collect the last wills and feedbacks of the dearly or direly departed membership in this conflagration, but I didn't yet know the ropes well enough to do that, and it doesn't look like I ever will. I believe a lot of useful information could be garnered that way, however easy it might be in some quarters to dismiss it all as the parting shots of disgruntled usurers and the socially net-warped. Still, I think it might be a good idea, if there is anybody who is up to the challenge.

JA: I started thinking about this idea when I happened across a page that was soliciting ideas for recruiting new members to Misplaced Pages. From the experiences of people I know who are involved in college recruitment, I know that one of the issues that develops over time is that sometimes too much attention gets devoted to recruitment at the expense of due attention being paid to retention, and it looks to me like a similar problem may be affecting WP. For sure, your rolls are no doubt padded with with many, many registered users, but how many of them are still actually participating in any significant way?

JA: It's something to think about.

Jon Awbrey, 19 Jun 2006 08:44 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

JL = John Lee
SB = Steve Bennett

SB: What is an accurate reporter?

JL: And do define "responsible journalist/scholar". If you arrive at Misplaced Pages with preconceptions of how things should be done from past experience, and don't adjust these preconceptions, then you will of course have a difficult time fitting in, especially when our editorial norms are established for good reasons.

JA: Some people just seem driven to get the facts straight, no matter what they might have believed beforehand. That's my intuitive sense of what makes someone an accurate reporter or a responsible scholar. I think that most accurate reporters and responsible scholars that come to WP find that the 3 content policies embody fantastically well what they have already been born or trained to do, since the basic ideas of grounded and sourced research were hardly invented locally, but derived from standards and practices, indeed, from norms of conduct that have governed the life of inquiry for as long as it has been alive.

JA: So the "preconceptions" of this ethos are in pre-established harmony with the principles set forth in the 3 content-governing regulations of WP, namely, the policies of NOR, NPOV, and VER, and most folks who have been living by these rules in the grounded research portion of their intellectual lives feel themselves to be, at least, at first, very much at home.

JA: And what some of them, I'd never say all, get disgruntled about is precisely the extent to which the WP community as a real body fails to live up to what it espouses as its ideals.

JA: If the perceptions of these disgruntled masses are nevertheless accurate and responsible, then it's important information for the long-term health and viability of WP.

Jon Awbrey, 19 Jun 2006 09:46 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

JW = Jesse Weinstein

JW: You've made 5 posts in this "Exit Interview" but haven't gotten around to explaining the details of what prompted you to lose patience with Misplaced Pages. This is, I think, what would of most interest and use to the rest of us. We've heard the generalizations you've made so far many times before - not that they aren't valid, just that they arn't news to us.

JA: Thank you for questions that go to the point. I thought that I went to the heart of the problem in my very first posting, namely:

In the present state of Misplaced Pages, the rules in practice and the prevailing attitudes of administrators are all skewed in favor of the Infantile Vandals and the Expert Disrupters, while the Accurate Reporters and the Responsible Scholars don't stand a chance.

JA: That still seems like the best summary of my experience, but I've been spending the subsequent posts mostly just responding to what seems like a massive immune response on the part of the faithful, and it just seemed like it was necessary to go a little slower than I did at first.

JA: I may have been stalling a little while I waited for the results of a promised sock &/or meat-puppet investigation, but it looks like I shouldn't hold my breath waiting on that, so I will just say what I currently suspect, as already posted in my answer to the 3RR action.

JW: However, the particular examples of problems you had probably are news to most of us on the list, so explaining them might be helpful.

JW: Just glancing over your contrib list, you seem to be working on Charles Peirce and various philosophy articles, like Truth and Propositional calculus.

JW: One possible issue you (and many others) have had with dispute resolution at Misplaced Pages is that, as intended, they give no advantage to any side, requiring possibly endless argument, and in practice, the endless argument can be short circuited either by all but one side being blocked due to violations of norms of discussion (i.e. 3RR rule, personal attacks). Factual superiority (i.e. citing more, or having the books on your side) is only successful if you can convince most of the people who happen to be interested in editing the page. This is very frustrating for many good researchers who come across Misplaced Pages. Is that the sort of issue you had?

JA: I am used to controversy and dispute resolution, and if proceedings are instituted and conducted fairly, then I can take my winnings or losings and go back to work. But I do not think that the system in place in WP works that way, and I have begun to see the reasons why it never will. There are too many flaws built into the system at its very foundation, and everybody is just shutting their ears to the creaks and the moans of the structure.

JA: It may have sounded so far like I'm blaming Administrators, but all I'm faulting them for, at least, the ones that I have interacted with so far, is the fact that they seem to be acting on default assumptions that date back to another era in WP's life. It seems to me that the Expert Disrupters know the ins and outs of the system far better than any of the Admins that I've encountered, and they jerk the rules around like any good Washington lobbyist.

JA: I understand that the Admins are out-numbered and over-worked, but none of that would lead to despair. The thing that makes it seem so hopeless at present is that the admittedly noble principles of WP are just not embodied and insisted on by the WikiPopulace at large, and frankly no size army of WikiPolice could force that spirit into their "hearts and minds", as the fatal saying goes, if they just don't really have it imbued in them already. And that is how it looks at present. It's not a few Brown Sockpuppets that make the Reich, it's the rest of the population that thinks they see some short-term advantage to themselves in letting them do whatever the devil they want for "just a little while, and then we'll reign them in in the end". Yep.

JA: If you have heard this before, then you should think about the fact that you keep hearing it.

Jon Awbrey, 19 Jun 2006 23:34 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

An Off-List Correspondent

JA: (I received a friendly off-list message, my response to which I will go ahead and post here in the hopes that a different stroke might work better for different folks.)

JA: Thanks for the friendly response.

JA: I'm a 50+ year old person with a solid lib arts BA, MA's in math and psych, lots of post-grad study in multiple fields, and years of cross-disciplinary experience as a statistical consultant where I specialized in constructing software and even philosophical bridges between sub-communities of researchers who had all but lost the ability to comprehend each others' ways and motivations.

JA: I understand about high ideals and non-elitism — I'm a onetime flower-child from a generation of non-elitists.

JA: But WP defeats me, and it's largely because it enforces a regime of dishonest communication, and it's gotten confused about the difference between non-elitism and anti-knowledge-ism.

JA: When I started out, I called a spade a spade. Things that any mature adult, not to mention trained scholar, would call obvious vandalism, manifest disruption, uninformed statements, or malformed citation are things that I described in precisely those terms. And all I got was one dire warning after another that you just aren't allowed to say those sorts of things.

JA: I have a life, periodic travel and the arts, I take the breaks that I need. I realized early on that some of the more generic and popular articles were a special hard case so far as their inertia against improvement goes, and I have a large number of non-pop articles that I normally go work on when the pop phil articles seem stuck in mud.

JA: But when a gang of sophomoric meta-puppets start tracking you back to your more quiet lairs just to wreak whatever destruction they can because you committed the sin of correcting their more obvious errors of fact, that anybody can check from the cites you give, or call them on their deviance from WP policy, and when the spineless cowardice or POV-serving connivance of the rest of the local community does nothing to stop it after numerous pleadings on WQA and RFC, then it becomes clear to any non-brainwashed person that this wiki has fallen and it can't get up.

Jon Awbrey, 20 Jun 2006 09:46 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

SB = Steve Bennett

SB (Responding to Post 8): A couple of assholes means the whole system has collapsed? I don't think so.

JA: If you refer to Post 1, the assertion that I've made is that the system systematically defends and excuses the e-holes in preference to ones who e-lect to live by the rules, and, yes, it'll lead this body of p-articles to anti-material collapse.

Jon Awbrey, 20 Jun 2006 10:11 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

GH = George Herbert

GH: Ok, I'm sorry, but I don't understand what your complaint is here that is causing you to want to withdraw.

GH: You appear not to have been seriously or lastingly sanctioned for anything; GTBacchus warned both you and JJL not to 3RR/edit war, and then Voice of All blocked you for 24 hrs and then 2 minutes later, changed that to just a warning. I think it's clear that for the activities of the 12th and earlier, both you and JJL were in some way misbehaving, though you're the one who got slightly and temporarily bitten.

GH: None of that concludes the underlying content issue in JJL's favor.

GH: You essentially "got away with" a 3RR vio (block was changed back to a warning), which is unusually tolerant. You may not be very familiar with block policy, but generally only well known and apologetic editors are unblocked early after a 3RR 24 hr block. You were clearly by normal standards given the benefit of the doubt regarding whether it was serious misbehavior.

GH: Being blocked and warned is merely a symptom that you carried on the mutual edit warring with JJL for a couple of hours too long after the warnings. That's not a decision that you were all wrong and he was all right.

GH: I also think that you and JJL have not constructively engaged in discussion on the article talk page regarding the key points of dispute. Nor have you asked for mediation with JJL.

GH: This is not intended as a personal attack on you, but you appear to be an ineffective editor, in that you do not appear to understand the mechanisms Misplaced Pages is using here. Your perception that you're being picked on or driven away is an overreaction to what are really fundamentally mild warnings and reactions to your making some mild but clearly good intentioned steps across the WP policy line.

GH: There are cases where I believe longer experience "more popular" admins and editors have abused newer editors to some degree or another. But I think your claims here are unsubstantiated. If you cannot understand Misplaced Pages well enough to work with the system, then perhaps you should stop editing for the time being. But blaming the system, when it has not fundamentally mistreated you, is an excuse.

GH: The system is not perfect, but the system isn't the problem here. You have a perfectly normal, reasonable content disupute with another editor. You haven't been abused or pushed around. If you can't work within the Misplaced Pages rules to resolve the problem, then that is your problem. Thousands of other active editors are able to resolve these sorts of problems routinely.

JA: Regarding the assertion:

In the present state of Misplaced Pages, the rules in practice and the prevailing attitudes of administrators are all skewed in favor of the Infantile Vandals and the Expert Disrupters, while Accurate Reporters and Responsible Scholars don't stand a chance.

JA: I don't want to argue the details of the specific 3RR charge. I have already stipulated that it was a "bad thing" for me to let myself get pulled into that, and probably wouldn't have let it happen except for the extreme circumstances.

JA: And I am not here to defend my individual self. I am speaking for what I know to be the generic attitude of folks who take things like accuracy and verifiability seriously, who do not suffer fools gladly, as the saying goes, when it comes to that. It's clear to me that most folks like that would have walked away, probably quietly but no less disgustedly, long before putting up with the kind of sophomoric toilet-papering that I have had to put up with on this score.

JA: I've already been told that the WP hieratchy thinks it can afford a high attrition rate among conscientious people, and that is confirming what I already said above.

JA: The fact that nobody has yet bothered to read the stuff that I have written in those WQAs, RFCs, and my answer to the 3RR is the thing that tells me that this place is utterly beyond hope.

JA: I will exercise the remainder of my responsibility to try and point out some obvious problems, and then I will get out of your hair.

JA: Let the sun shine in ...

Jon Awbrey, 20 Jun 2006 16:00 -0400

Regarding the assertion:

In the present state of Misplaced Pages, the rules in practice and the prevailing attitudes of administrators are all skewed in favor of the Infantile Vandals and the Expert Disrupters, while the Accurate Reporters and the Responsible Scholars don't stand a chance.

Incorporating responses to:

Rob (Responding to Post 11)

Rob: I'm sorry if you found our rules like 3RR and our dispute resolution process cumbersome and uninviting. As flawed as these may be, try to imagine what Misplaced Pages would be like without these rules. The 3RR is not that old, and prior to its implementation, edit warriors could revert a dozen times a day (I think the record I personally witnessed was 14) with impunity, a single edit warrior could essentially hold an article hostage for months. While it would be nice to summarily ban idiots or pov pushers or conspiracy nuts, etc., what metric do you propose we use to separate the wheat from the chaff? Who gets just three reverts and who gets more? How do we decide? It's not often that clear, and some trolls can talk a good game when they need to appear reasonable and sane.

Rob: I know from personal experience that it is frustrating to deal with stubborn nutjobs, and frustrating to deal with a system that treats you and the nutjob as equal players, but I haven't seen any serious proposal for a better system or one that doesn't introduce more problems, or reintroduce problems we've largely got a handle on. By and large, consensus works well. It can sometimes be difficult to get enough sane eyes on a particular article, but it can be done.

JA: If you read what I have written so far, it should be clear that I am not disputing any of the fine sentiments in WP:POLICY, nor am I disputing the 3RR action. I cited those details only because people have been asking me for more concrete examples of things that are leading me to say what I've been saying from Post 1. As far as reverts go, I try to use as few as possible, and in the case of really hot disputes I try as hard as I can to observe a Zero Revert Rule. And that is what I did from 16:03 on 20 May 2006 until the incident of 12 June 2006, when I let somebody get my goat, as the saying goes.

JA: That is not one of the problems that I am trying to point out. That is not the sort of thing that would lead me to postulate the conclusion that I've repeated for ease of reference above.

JA: I'm pointing to the fact that Infantile Vandals and Expert Disrupters have got the Well-Intentioned Folks, WikiPeons and WikiPolitburocrats alike, totally out-snookered in the current scheme of things, and I'm not seeing the requisite awareness or gumption to do a thing about it.

JA: Okay, maybe "totally" is too strong, but "seriously" at any rate.

JA: Having spent some of the increasingly non-productive time that I've been having lately in the WP environment musing on why this is happening, I have accumulated some guesses as to why, but this is already too mamy posts for one day, so I will save it for tomorrow.

Jon Awbrey, 20 Jun 2006 17:02 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

MD = Maru Dubshinki
PS = Pedro Sanchez

MD: Hey, if you can ...

JA: The truth is I came to WP to get away from discussion groups, their non-productive going round'n'round the same-old-same-old discursive circles with nobody really listening to each other, in a kind of mass solipsism that is always going nowhere but very noisly, and at first WP was refreshing break from that, as there was always the aim of producing an encyclopedia to focus one's xs energies on. Well, it's still possible to find a few places that nobody else cares about — yet — and to work on those isolated gardens of knowledge until the xpressway comes through, bringing the book burners and the brown sock puppets to trample it down into mush. But the problem with that is that the core articles that ought to be in a real encyclopedia are all becoming mush.

JA: And dat's da truth ...

JA: Cheers, anyway,

Jon Awbrey, 27 Jun 2006 09:58 -0400

Incorporating a couple of exchanges with:

SB = Steve Bennett

JA: Okay, I get it, everything is just hunky dory in WikiParadise. Do not let the fact that WikiPedia wastes expertise the way a Bradley fighting vehicle wastes gas trouble you one teeny bit.

SB: Don't get me wrong, there are things wrong with Misplaced Pages, but you don't seem to be particularly effective at identifying them.

JA replies:

In a way you are correct, since the things that I have identified so far
are only the more superficial symptoms of a condition that I don't think
is likely to improve a bit under this regime of defensiveness and denial.
Either that, or I'm talking to people who have just been extremely lucky
in their own experiences on WikiPedia so far.  Or maybe the first attack
of the WikiPiranhas and WikiPuppets is just the standard initiation rite
of WikiPassage around here, and you're not really interested in the sort
of potential contributors who just want off the island after their first
encounter with the local Lords of the Flies.  It is always possible that
some folks just prefer that kind of culture, but it's a culture of waste,
and a dynamics like that always eventually catches up, and overtakes you.

Jon Awbrey, 28 Jun 2006 22:26 -0400

WikiPediatrics 101. Diseases of Infancy
Major Syndromes, Section 1

In the present state of Misplaced Pages, the rules in practice and the prevailing attitudes of administrators are all skewed in favor of the Infantile Vandals and the Expert Disrupters, while the Accurate Reporters and the Responsible Scholars don't stand a chance.

JA: If I had to single out the single most serious symptom, the most critical systematic fault that I have observed interfering with the possiblity the WikiPatient ever recovering healthy functioning, it would have to be this:

Symptom 1. Inversion of Priorities (IOP)

JA: One of the more distressing aspects of WP's present condition, at least for the un-anaesthetized observer, is the fact that WP embodies within its basic constitution, namely, its most celebrated and clamorously espoused policies and guidelines, "all the right stuff" that it would take to return to health.

JA: Sadly, even tragically, "the vodka is good, but the meat is rotten", as that classic bytage of machine translation goes. So it behooves a "student of systems" (SOS) to ask about the reasons or the causes why.

JA: That will be the subject of this Section's inquiry.

Jon Awbrey, 29 Jun 2006 08:20 -0400

WikiPediatrics 101. Diseases of Infancy
Symptomania 1. Inversion of Priorities (IOP)

JA: The pages on WP:POLICY clearly identify the three content-definitive and non-negotiable policies of WP as WP:NOR, WP:NPOV, and WP:VERIFY, reiterating three times over on each of their individually dedicated pages, with no substantive variation, the following norm of participation in WP:

• These three policies are non-negotiable and cannot be superseded by other policies or guidelines, or by editors' consensus.

JA: Pending a properly controlled study of WikiPediatric epidemiology (Proposal Pending), it is this observer's estimation that the most prevalent IOP is the one that inverts the priorities of the superordinate policies cited above and the unofficial dictates of what is here nomenclated as "De Facto Consensus" (DFC). The DFC must not be confused with the Genuine Consensus — defined as the absence of dissent — the DFC as it's currently observed in WP means that any three users, or evatars, coming to agreement in a half hour period, can impose their absolute dictatorship over the direction of an article.

JA: If it were merely a matter of educating users about the standardized meanings of the words consensus, non-negotiable, and so on, then there might still be some cause to hold out a few dim hopes, for a better prognosis or a gradual remediation, but if WP administrators continue to exhibit themselves, as they do in my experience, to be every bit as (1) ignorant of, or (2) indifferent to these principles, then that is a sign that the condition is terminal.

Jon Awbrey, 29 Jun 2006 13:20 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

SB = Steve Bennett
DT = Daniel Tobias

SB: You seem to be constantly inventing new terms. Why?

JA: You seem to be constantly looking for things to talk about except what I'm saying. Why?

DT: Maybe because people are having trouble figuring out just what you're saying? Perhaps your points would be more understandable if you spent more time giving specific examples of things that have happened on Misplaced Pages that are not to your liking, rather than talking in vague abstractions using lots of odd terminology?

JA: Yes, that is a problem. I'm trying to summarize the types of things that I have seen happen repeatedly over the past six months, and I'm pretty much discounting the first month's experience when I was still learning the ropes.

JA: I wouldn't be bothering about it if it were just a few isolated incidents, and when I have detailed a few of these, the response is always the "few bad apples" defense.

JA: But these are persistent, recurrent, and systematic patterns of events that I've observed. The first dozen times you see things going haywire, and by that I mean people behaving contrary to the main Policies of WikiPedia, you think all you have to do is read them the policies and they will straighten up and fly right. But that is not what happens, and in my experience it only gets worse when you try to use WQAs, RFCs, and so on, and that is because the people who intervene do not bother to check the histories and do not care about the main policies either, but simply wing it on the basis of their own POVs and biases.

JA: In trying to understand a systematic problem, you have to try and come up with systematic hypotheses as to why the same damn things keep happening.

JA: I pointed to one sort of thing that I see happening over and over, and for ease of reference I gave it the name "priority inversion". A priority inversion is when people spend more time worrying over the dust under the couch than they do the elephant in the living room.

JA: One example of this is when 2 or 3 editors declare a consensus about an issue and use that to trump the major Policies of WP, namely NOR, NPOV, VERIFY, or the guidelines that are listed under the Five Pillars.

JA: There are two things that are wrong with this kind of tactic:

1. It is contrary to both the dictionary definition and the WP definition of consensus, which means absence of dissent.
2. It violates the main WP:Policy pages that say that NOR, NPOV, and VERIFY are non-negotiable and cannot be trumped by other policies or by editors' consensus, even a genuine universal consensus of local editors.

JA: For example, under the proper ordering of priorities a statement that is relevant and sourced should not be deleted in favor of an opinion that is unsourced just because the source is not the favorite writer of 2 or 3 editors or because the sourced statement contradicts the personal POVs of 2 or 3 editors. But this is actually the routine way that things are done in WP.

JA: Now, if you've never experienced a situation where the editors working on a given article engaged in this kind of conduct, then you have been very lucky, and you will not know what I mean. But I can only report my own observations that it happens quite a lot. What it means is that the quality of articles goes down in proportion to the non-compliance with the primary WP policies.

Jon Awbrey, 30 Jun 2006 00:08 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

MR = Michael Rosa

JA: For example, under the proper ordering of priorities a statement that is relevant and sourced should not be deleted in favor of an opinion that is unsourced just because the source is not the favorite writer of 2 or 3 editors or because the sourced statement contradicts the personal POVs of 2 or 3 editors. But this is actually the routine way that things are done in WP.

MR: Cite please — preferable at least a dozen or so of examples, they should be easy to find if this is really the "routine way" of doing things on WP. This is a persistent, recurrent, and systematic pattern in your emails that I have observed, you describe something that you claim is taking place without giving any specific and real-life examples.

JA: It's late here, so here is one recent example of what I mean.

• Priority Inversion: Case 1
• Article: Truth
• Section: Consensus theory
• Edit: Revision as of 01:30, 29 June 2006 by FeloniousMonk
• Line: (rv to the last reasonable version)
• Diff:

JA: This section had no sources at all for as long as it existed, so I went looking for some. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy has no entry for "consensus theory of truth". The Dictionary of Philosophy ed. by Runes has an entry under "consensus gentium" that says it is Latin for "agreement of people", that it is "a criterion of truth" to wit, "that which is universal among men carries the weight of truth". When I wikied "consensus gentium", it turned out it was a synonym for "argumentum ad populum", and listed as a fallacy. Inconvenient for a criterion of truth, maybe, but I play 'em where they lie. I added the reference to the article, added corrections and details to several other references, and I also placed {fact} tags on two unsourced claims of attribution. All of these edits and maintainance tags were reverted by Feloniuous Monk with no excuse but "rv to last reasonable version".

Jon Awbrey, 30 Jun 2006 00:40 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

MR = Michael Rosa

JA: Citing cases of "Priority Inversion", in this case where a few editors declare their "consensus" as an excuse for deleting relevant and sourced information.

• Priority Inversion: Case 2
• Article: Charles Peirce
• Section: Scholastic realism
• Edit: Revision as of 01:49, 11 June 2006 by Wylie Ali
• Line: (→ Scholastic realism - deleting section as explained on talk page)
• Diff:

JA: Entire section deleted by "new user" Wylie Ali (incept date 8 June 2006). This section was well-documented with both primary and secondary source citations.

JA: The explanation given on the talk page by Wylie Ali is this:

Deleted Material: Scholastic Realism
It is clear from above that there is a concensus that this article is pitched to journal level and not general educated audience as it should be. For that reason and others, I'm moving the Sholastic realism section to here (for consideration ;-) ). Besides the fact that most of it is taken up with an interpretation dispute among scholars (and it takes sides in that dispute), the first sentence calls "well known" something readers will have never heard of and the second sentence is obviously POV. The second sentence also assumes wrongly that one who believes that reality depends on many minds instead of one is not an idealist. The part beginning "Third" is weird because if Peirce's doctrine is not about realism vs. idealism, then why did this very paragraph start out talking about realism vs. idealism? Why not leave the latter topic out of this section entirely instead of putting it in and suddenly saying well Peirce is not really talking about that anyway. --Wylie Ali 01:49, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

JA: Note the spelling of "concensus". You will see it again.

JA: As far as I know, this section came in with an earlier Nupedia article by a recognized Peirce scholar that formed the initial material of the Misplaced Pages article. It is true that some of what it says is controversial among the scholars so affected, which is par for the course in any article about any philosopher worthy of note. Standard practice in WP dictates dynamic balance not wholesale deletion as a solution.

Jon Awbrey, 30 Jun 2006 10:10 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

MR = Michael Rosa

JA: Citing cases of "Priority Inversion" — feel free to call it what you will — in this case being a situation where a few editors declare their "consensus" as an excuse for deleting relevant and sourced information.

• Priority Inversion: Case 3
• Article: Charles Peirce
• Section: Peirce's philosophy
• Edit: Revision as of 15:17, 11 June 2006 by LogicMan
• Line: (→ Peirce's philosophy - delete quote. see talk)
• Diff:

JA: Quotation deleted by "new user" LogicMan (incept date 7 June 2006). The explanation given by LogicMan on the talk page is as follows:

This quote is being removed because it is just one expert scoring a point off of others. The point it makes is made just below it more briefly anyway.

It is not sufficiently recognized that Peirce’s career was that of a scientist, not a philosopher; and that during his lifetime he was known and valued chiefly as a scientist, only secondly as a logician, and scarcely at all as a philosopher. Even his work in philosophy and logic will not be understood until this fact becomes a standing premise of Peircian studies. (Max Fisch, in (Moore and Robin 1964, 486).

--LogicMan 15:16, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

JA: The quotation is from Max Fisch, a premier Peirce scholar. It was was added by another editor late in 2005. It makes an important observation, it is relevant, and sourced. The justification that LogicMan gives is partly speculative POV and partly false, as the same point is not made just below it. At any rate, there was no real discussion of its pertinence, and no attempt to arrive at anything approaching a local consensus.

Jon Awbrey, 30 Jun 2006 12:08 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

Rob (Responding to Post 20):

Rob: Was this block quote really necessary? Why can't we just say "Peirce was primarily known as a scientist during his lifetime" and be done with it? And what's the big deal? Either way this argument goes, the outcome is relatively insignificant and the article as a whole won't be affected much.

JA: It is of course possible to discuss the relative importance, the proper format, and the proper length of any article content. There are several WP guidelines and heuristics that recommend how to go about doing that in different circumstances. Like any set of guidelines and heuristics they aren't a consistent axiom system, but live in tension with each other, from Be Bold! to Don't Be A Dick!, and thus they require common sense, good judgment, and attention to the details of the ongoing situation in order to be applied with good results.

JA: But it's not my present task to delve into content issues. The issue at hand is whether the Highest Priority Policies of WP are being followed in each case, or whether they are being superseded by Lower Priority Guidelines, or worse yet, altogether subverted by cynical mockeries of WP procedures.

JA: The fact is that good faith contributions by previous editors were not being respected, worked with, and modified, if need be, in the recommended manner, but simply being deleted wholesale under the guise of a "consensus" that was ever being declared by a small (but mysteriously growing) number of editors, with no real attempt at discussion except among themselves.

Jon Awbrey, 30 Jun 2006 12:40 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

MR = Michael Rosa

Genus: Priority Inversion
Species: Pseudo-Consensus Superseding the Big Three (NOR, NPOV, VER)

• Priority Inversion: Case 4
• Article: Charles Peirce
• Section: Pragmatism
• Edit: Revision as of 15:46, 11 June 2006 by AnnMBake
• Line: (→ Pragmatism - editing for clarity and appropriateness to audience of generally educated as identified by Blainster)
• Diff:

Edit by "new user" AnnMBake (incept date 8 June 2006).

JA: There is no question that the clarity of any article in WP can be improved, and some of the edit here is well-conceived, but in the process of trying to be concise it converts several accurate statements into misleading ones, many of them recognizable from pop philosophy books and non-peer-reviewed sources. In addition, it wholesale deletes the most important quotation from Peirce to have in any article about his philosophy, namely, his most often cited statement of the so-called pragmatic maxim. All of these features of the edit violate principles of Verifiability and Reliability that are stated in the pages satellite to WP:VER and WP:CITE.

Jon Awbrey, 30 Jun 2006 13:30 -0400

Incorporating responses to:

MR = Michael Rosa

Genus: Priority Inversion
Species: Pseudo-Consensus Overturning the Big 3 (& the 5 Pillars)

• Priority Inversion: Case 5
• Article: Charles Peirce
• Section: Formal perspective
• Edit: Revision as of 16:09, 11 June 2006 by Wylie Ali
• Line: (→ Formal perspective - deleting long intro. See talk.)
• Diff:

JA: The entire contents of the section introduction, the part between a 2nd-level head and a 3rd-level head], was deleted by the "new user" Wylie Ali (incept date 8 June 2006).

JA: The explanation given on the talk page was as follows:

Removing intro to Formal perspective
I am going to remove the whole of the intro to the Formal perspective section for these reasons: It begins with two long (and too long ;-) ) quotations that won't be understandable to the audience of generally educated. Also, we are writing a secondary source, so it is our job to interpret and paraphrase so that the reader doesn't have to decode original material. The rest of it is original research about a "crisis" and the "life cycle" of a "symbolist perspective" that is not about Peirce. Looks like somebody has a thesis about symbolism, but they should submit it to a journal; not put it here. It suffers from the same writing problems mentioned above. I am not going to copy it here, since you can get it in the history. --Wylie Ali 16:08, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

JA: This section had quite a long history that had been discussed with previous editors. It purpose was to place some of Peirce's projects in logic within the context of his times, partly by comparing one of his important statements about mathematical symbols with similar statements by George Boole, and other mathematicians of that era who had emphasized the role of mathematical symbolism. The rest of the section was written in response to a reader who had explicitly asked editors to make up a concrete illustration of the very abstract ideas that were being taken up in this section. At a time when I still imagined that the newly arrived editors were going to help improve the article, I had already pointed to this section as one of the "known bugs" in the article that could stand improvement, both in writing introductions and transitions for the long quotes from Boole and Peirce, and also in improving the concrete example given.

JA: The help that came was simply a deletion of the whole section.

Jon Awbrey, 30 Jun 2006 14:38 -0400