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The Top Ten Wikipedia Stories of 2016

Tagged as Alt-right, ArbCom, Arnnon Geshuri, Donald Trump, Emily Temple-Wood, Fake news, Fundraising, GamerGate, Gender gap, Harry Frankfurt, Hillary Clinton, Hugo Awards, James Heilman, Jimmy Wales, Katherine Maher, Lila Tretikov, Sports, The Signpost, vandalism, WikiInAction, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipediocracy
on January 3, 2017 at 1:30 pm

2016 was a hell of a year. In matters of war and peace, politics and governance, arts and celebrity culture—not to mention unexpected crossovers among them—it was a year that seemed to come off the swivel. Was this true on Wikipedia as well? In this post The Wikipedian will attempt, as it has done each year since 2010, to summarize the year in the Wikimedia movement by itemizing and ranking ten of the biggest trends and events.

The list this time may be noteworthy less for what is included than what is not: in 2016 there was no major sock puppet or COI scandal (hopefully that’s because there weren’t any, not just that they weren’t called out), no major milestone (Wikipedia turned 15 in 2016, but it felt less consequential than the 5 millionth article last year), no mention of perennial fears about a declining editor base (is it still actually declining?) and nothing about last year’s number one, the implementation of HTTPS (it’s a done deal, and China hasn’t changed its mind about unblocking Wikipedia on the mainland).

That said, in 2016 Wikipedia still had more than its share of turmoil, more ominous signs than one ever really wants to see, plus the occasional inspiring story that makes for much more pleasant anecdotes. In this post, we’ll attempt to do justice to them all, or at least the ten that made the biggest impressions on this blogger. Ready? Let’s go:

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10. Women Scientists Revolt

Among Wikipedia’s more problematic systemic biases, the gender gap in participation and representation is one of the more frustrating. This year it was momentarily a bright spot, when Emily Temple-Wood, one of Wikipedia’s best known female editors, became a minor media sensation for a project with an irresistible hook: for every instance of online sexual harassment she experienced, she would create another Wikipedia article about a woman scientist. The story was picked up by the BBC, Washington Post, Guardian, New York, and Huffington Post, among many other outlets. The sudden micro-celebrity placed her in the unique category of Wikipedia editors with a Wikipedia biography earned as a result of their editing activities. Jimmy Wales also named her Wikipedian of the Year (along with Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight). And then she started med school.

9. Wikipedia Vandalism, Spectator Sport

If you’re the kind of person who searches Google News for “wikipedia” with any frequency, you have undoubtedly seen headlines like “Denver Broncos ‘own’ Carolina Panthers, according to Wikipedia edit”. Seriously, search “wikipedia sports owned” and you’ll find the same combination for Chase Utley and the Mets, LeBron James and the Bulls, Jürgen Klopp and Manchester City. And that’s just one gratingly common construction. Yes, sometimes it can actually be funny. Occasionally, even heartwarming. But no sport is safe, and the phenomenon is familiar enough for Fox Sports (a frequent offender) to have once created a list of “most entertaining” examples. In early 2016, former WSJ reporter and Wikimedia staffer Jeff Elder called out the trend, spotlighting the tedious extra work it creates for Wikipedia volunteers. VentureBeat followed up by making the argument it was time for sportswriters to move on. And so that put an end to it? Yeah, right. It’s not clear what will ever kill this “story”; there is almost certainly nothing within anyone’s actual control. While individual writers or readers may tire of it, the thing about sports is that every big win is a moment without precedent, that obliterates all reason, and naturally seeks a good, mean-spirited to laugh top it off. All things considered, better to vandalize Wikipedia than light a car on fire.

8. The Business of Wikipedia is Fundraising

Wikipedia is alone among the top 50 global websites (give or take) for the lack of advertising to be found on its pages. As a consequence, its funding model is the focus of fascination and frustration for both the editorial community and news media alike. And as you’re certainly well aware, every year the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) launches a fundraising drive featuring very prominent and slightly annoying banners—which look a lot like advertisements for Wikipedia itself—to raise money from its millions of readers. To be sure, Wikipedia also raises money via grants and gifts from wealthy donors, but the vast majority comes from the annual campaign.

Beginning in mid-November, the WMF stepped up its annual efforts with a persistent email campaign fronted by Wikipedia’s founder-mascot Jimmy Wales, using sophisticated techniques—variation, highlighting, boldfacing, talky subject lines, and more. WMF fundraising has been A/B tested for awhile, but this was undoubtedly the slickest incarnation yet. And what do you know, it worked: this year Wikipedia reached its annual goal faster than ever before. Such success cannot come sans scrutiny. An op-ed in The Wikipedia Signpost called for greater transparency, The Register needled Wikipedia about this as it does about pretty much everything, and philanthropic publications have second-guessed the WMF’s fundraising strategy writ large.^[1]Update: This link previously went to an article on a different subject; this one is from late 2015 but illustrates the same point.

All of which is fair, and one should be so lucky as to have to answer for this kind of success. As The Wikipedian sees it, the question of how much money WMF raises should be secondary to how it is spent, a topic historically less-well reported.

7. ArbCom and the Alt-Right

Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committees (ArbComs) are elected panels of dedicated volunteer Wikipedia editors who agree to take up the often unpleasant and always time-consuming task of reviewing disputes involving the behavior of fellow editors. About a dozen of the most-active Wikipedia language editions have one, and it is by its nature the locus of controversy, year in and year out (said fundamental dysfunction last made this list in 2013). Lucky us, now we get to merge that with the rise of an international right-wing movement represented on last year’s list by Gamergate, and which in 2016 we learned to call the “alt-right”.

This is based on two separate incidents on the two most prominent Wikipedias. Worse between them, the German ArbCom saw eight of its ten members resign in the last third of the year. The reasons are too complicated to recite here, but it concerns a single member who IRL is actively involved with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party but had previously hidden his offline political activities from fellow editors. The decimated German ArbCom now lacks a quorum to act, and seems likely to remain inactive at least until new elections are held in May. Second was the near-election to the English ArbCom of a Canadian editor with a troubling Reddit history that included activity on the Gamergate-affiliated WikiInAction subreddit, dedicated to promoting alt-right views on Wikipedia. This candidacy was not successful, but it was a nail-biter, and close ArbCom observers are not reassured about future elections.

Wikipedia has always had obnoxious contributors with noxious views, but their dispersal across the vast expanse of topics meant the problem areas were fairly isolated, and usually avoidable. But ArbCom is one of the few places on Wikipedia where actual power is concentrated. In a U.S. presidential election year (about which more later) in which anti-semitic tropes were promoted by the winning candidate, has there also been a concurrent rise in such views on Wikipedia? Some think so. And will ArbCom face an organized assault like the one the Hugo Awards has faced in recent years? It seems unlikely—but it’s definitely not impossible.

6. Wikipedia Needs Better Critics

Our 2013 installment listed the rise of Wikipediocracy, a website devoted to criticism of the Wikimedia movement. This time we’re here not to praise it, but to bury it. The site’s multi-contributor blog has published exactly once in the second half of the year, while its once-lively (and sometimes disreputable) discussion forum has slowed to a crawl. What happened? The biggest factor was the departure of its most serious contributor, Andreas Kolbe, who took his talents to The Signpost. Second was an apparent falling out between mainstays Greg Kohs and Eric Barbour. The latter went on to create an alternative site named, hysterically, Wikipedia Sucks! (And So Do Its Critics.).

The decline of Wikipediocracy highlights the dearth of effective Wikipedia criticism. What have we got? There’s the UK IT news site The Register, which harps on a few recurring themes of narrow appeal. There’s WikiInAction, affiliated with Gamergate, focused even more narrowly. Wikipedia Sucks is a joke, itself barely registering a pulse. For what it’s worth, The Wikipedian does not consider itself to be among their ranks. This site offers Wikipedia criticism, but will admit to being pro-Wikipedia in most ways; The Wikipedian is an apologist, if also a realist. And to drop the pretense for a moment, I don’t post often enough for it to matter but a few times a year.

There is something about Wikipedia criticism that attracts people with fringe views, who are not always the most stable personalities, and whose obsessions tend toward the arcane. Of course this is generally true of the gadfly profession, but when you consider that Wikipedia owes its very existence to freaks and geeks, it shouldn’t be any wonder that participants who hold themselves apart from mainstream Wikipedia may be stranger still.

As of late, the best criticism happens at The Signpost, especially under former editor Kolbe, and now under Pete Forsyth. Given the competition, however, that isn’t necessarily saying much.

5. The Brief, Less Than Wondrous Board Membership of Arnnon Geshuri

We now arrive at the first of a few related topics which dominated the early months of the year, a series of interrelated controversies far greater than this annual list has previously contemplated. The least-related among them was the early January appointment of Arnnon Geshuri to the WMF board of trustees. Geshuri received no public vetting, as most appointed board members do not. However, other board appointees also had not played a public role in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest recent scandals.

To wit: Apple, Google, Intel and others secretly agreed (until, of course, it was found out) not to recruit each others’ employees, thereby holding back the careers, and holding down the salaries, of thousands of employees. As a Google executive, Geshuri had taken the initiative to fire a recruiter after then-CEO Eric Schmidt received an unhappy email from Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs. In his note back to Schmidt, Geshuri added: “Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs.” The U.S. Department of Justice eventually forced the firms to pay $415 million to settle class action claims.

Geshuri’s membership on the Wikimedia board proved to be short-lived. Facing public criticism by former board members, a debate over what to say about it on his own Wikipedia entry, a no-confidence petition signed by more than 200 editors, and probably his own realization that this just wasn’t worth all the trouble, Geshuri stepped aside only two weeks after accepting the position. In another year, this could have been a top story. But 2016 had only just begun.

4. Wikimedia’s New Leader

Another contender for top story in a less eventful year: the Wikimedia Foundation got a new leader. Katherine Maher was named interim executive director (ED for short) in March, and was made permanent in June. She is the third person to hold the title—the third woman, in fact—and brings experience in global governance, international institutions, and even the Arabic language.^[2]Yes, I’m looking at her Wikipedia entry as I write this. Maher also brings something her predecessor lacked: a great deal of experience with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement.

I am burying the lede, of course: she was previously the WMF’s chief communications officer, a position she had held since 2014. Oh yeah, and about that predecessor… as Wikimedians have already realized, I’m leaving out a lot of back story, and it’s because there is more coming further down this list. All that said, the advent of a new ED is big news in any year, and that’s true this year as well. The fact that Maher’s ascendancy falls outside the top three stories of 2016 owes as much to the public drama leading to her promotion as the absence of drama characterizing the start of her tenure.

3. Fake News and the U.S. Presidential Election

The U.S. presidential election was literally the biggest story on Wikipedia this year, if we mean the topic that received the most edits across multiple entries. The biographical entry for president-elect Donald Trump, plus articles about Hillary Clinton’s endorsements, the general election, and GOP primary occupy four of the top five slots on the list of most-edited articles.^[3]Number one was Deaths in 2016, but that’s pretty much always the case. But there’s a lot more to be said about Wikipedia’s relationship to the craziest and most surprising U.S. election in living memory.

A chief attribute of Trumpism is, well, bullshit—in the Harry Frankfurt sense of the word—and anti-intellectualism as a virtue. As it became clear Trump’s victory was owed in part to falsehoods propagated on social media, the phrase “fake news” gained widespread currency among news commentators. With the mainstream^[4]OK, fine, liberal media casting about for a better model, what better exemplar of valuing real facts over imagined realities than Wikipedia? Even before the election, Wikipedia’s model of requiring verification of information and allowing anyone to question received wisdom had garnered positive press attention. Afterward, Wikipedia’s commitment to veracity was held up as a kind of antidote to Facebook’s hands-off attitude toward the truth or falsity of claims shared by its users.^[5]Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was initially dismissive of “fake news” concerns, only to do an abrupt about-face and announce plans for a fact-checking feature. The Wikimedia comms team took something of a victory lap in an early December post, declaring:

We are not in a post-fact world. Facts matter, and we are committed to this now more than ever.

Still, it would be a mistake to think that Wikipedia is free of falsehoods. It is only as good as its contributors and the reliability of the news sources they rely upon. Long-persisting hoaxes are not unheard of. Therein lie the biggest threats to Wikipedia: it must maintain an editorial community to uphold its own standards, and the media must keep up its end of the bargain with good reporting. Not unlike democracy, eternal vigilance is the price of an encyclopedia anyone can edit.

2. Lila Tretikov Resigns as Wikimedia ED

Right, so about Katherine Maher’s predecessor as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation…

Last year, The Wikipedian included “Exodus from New Montgomery Street” at number nine in the top-stories list—i.e., the large number of staff departures from the organization since the appointment of Lila Tretikov in 2014. In retrospect, this should have been higher, but in my defense the whispers were rather quiet until the emergence of a matter that we’ll explain better in the next entry.^[6]Yes, this year was largely dominated by one very big story at the beginning of the year which had enough distinct elements to be treated separately, making for a confusing narrative. Alas. Tretikov, whose tenure got off to a rocky start for reasons not entirely her own fault and not worth going into again here,^[7]if you must, you can go here was eventually forced to resign after losing the confidence of Foundation staff. Morale fell to such depths, and management became so unresponsive that, once the dam burst, virtually the whole thing played out in public, online.

Low-level staffers came out of the woodwork to say what managers would or could not, and community observers filled in the gaps. Most persuasively, ArbCom member Molly White created a detailed timeline of Tretikov’s WMF leadership that presented the sequence of events without commentary—selectively perhaps, but damningly for sure. This very blog took the highly unusual step of actually calling for her ouster, a position this blogger never imagined when launching this site late last decade. Nobody wanted things to arrive at this dire situation, but once they had, Tretikov could no longer effectively lead the organization, and resign is what she did.

Anyway, we’re not quite done with this topic.

1. The Knowledge Engine and its Discontents

The biggest story of 2016 actually began unfolding in the waning days of 2015, when just-elected community board trustee James Heilman announced his resignation with a cryptic message on a community email list. Subsequent comments from other board members failed to resolve the ambiguity. Thus began the most tumultuous period in recent Wikimedia history, ultimately leading to Lila Tretikov’s jumped-before-she-could-be-pushed departure and the elevation of Katherine Maher to the executive director role.

Honestly, I’m kind of dreading the idea of recapping it all here. This blog expended 7,000 words^[8]a conservative estimate on the topic earlier this year, and it’s a chore just to summarize. But let’s give it a try:

Heilman’s departure owed to a disagreement about how to handle sensitive information related to the secretive development (and eventual abandonment) of a misbegotten “Manhattan Project” to create a search engine intended to preserve Wikipedia’s prominence if Google ever stopped sending it traffic on its historically massive level. In its most ambitious form, it was called the Knowledge Engine, and Tretikov’s WMF sought a grant for it from the Knight Foundation, with which it previously had enjoyed a good relationship, without disclosing the precise nature of the project. When scaled back, it was called Discovery and was limited to Wikipedia’s on-site search, which isn’t a bad idea by itself but wasn’t clearly a top priority for the volunteer community at large, let alone the foundation staff. The lack of public discussion was echoed in the catastrophic appointment of Geshuri to the board, establishing a pattern that could no longer be overlooked.

The seriousness of the Knowledge Engine fiasco itself may have been overstated in terms of time and money allocated to it (and away from other projects) but it became emblematic of Tretikov’s ineffective leadership. More important probably was the botched Knight request, which contradicted good sense, and was seen to have damaged an important outside relationship. It wasn’t a crime, but it was covered up nonetheless, and Tretikov’s failure to communicate effectively—with external stakeholders, internal managers, staff throughout the organization—was what really did her in.

If you really must have the whole story, and you have a few hours to spare, I recommend the following links:

The Crisis at New Montgomery Street, The Wikipedian
So, what’s a knowledge engine anyway?, The Signpost
Search and Destroy: The Knowledge Engine and the Undoing of Lila Tretikov, The Wikipedian
Wikimedia timeline of recent events, MollyWhite.net

The regrettable history of the Knowledge Engine, the wasteful exit of Heilman from the board of trustees, the ill-advised appointment of Geshuri to same, the calamitous leadership of Lila Tretikov, the unfortunate departure of so many valuable foundation staffers, were separately and collectively the biggest story on Wikipedia this past year. Here’s hoping 2017 is just a bit less eventful.

All images via Wikipedia, and the copyrights held by their respective contributors.

Notes[+]

Notes
↑1	Update: This link previously went to an article on a different subject; this one is from late 2015 but illustrates the same point.
↑2	Yes, I’m looking at her Wikipedia entry as I write this.
↑3	Number one was Deaths in 2016, but that’s pretty much always the case.
↑4	OK, fine, liberal
↑5	Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was initially dismissive of “fake news” concerns, only to do an abrupt about-face and announce plans for a fact-checking feature.
↑6	Yes, this year was largely dominated by one very big story at the beginning of the year which had enough distinct elements to be treated separately, making for a confusing narrative. Alas.
↑7	if you must, you can go here
↑8	a conservative estimate

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Edit wars, Wikipedia in the news

Some Thoughts on Gamergategate

Tagged as ArbCom, Arbitration Committee, Béyonce, Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning, GamerGate, Gamerghazi, Mark Bernstein
on February 26, 2015 at 11:31 am

It’s still early in 2015, yet Wikipedia’s volunteer community has already experienced one of its most traumatic events in recent memory. Not the most, mind you. Wikipedia is a fundamentally volatile place, as one might reasonably expect from a self-directed movement whose stated mission is to sort through all of the world’s knowledge and present it for universal consumption.

In recent months, however, Wikipedians have stared down a kind of invading army the likes it hasn’t seen in awhile—maybe ever.

Its name is Gamergate, and it too is an online movement of sorts: one that is either a roving band of anti-feminist thugs whose agitation started over a false story involving a sexual affair and a game review, or a broadly-engaged reformist coalition focused on ethically challenged video game journalists with some adherents prone to rhetorical excess. Readers will already know which side they take.^[1]If you read any of the above and thought to yourself: Wait, isn’t a gamergate a reproductively viable female worker ant?, my hat’s off to you.

I’ve struggled to write about this, because a proper accounting would require a blog post much longer than I am prepared to write or you are interested to read. Mid-procrastination, I was invited by Quartz to write a first-person column on another controversy, in which I couldn’t avoid including some limited thoughts on what I’ll now call “Gamergategate”^[2]I will also accept “Gamergateghazi”. but here I’d like to expand on it. Although the relevant Arbitration Committee case has now been closed for several weeks, allowing some time for perspective, I am finding it still difficult to summarize adequately.^[3]The best I’ve seen, as usual, can be found in The Wikipedia Signpost.

For the unitiated: late last year, Gamergate activists took their fight to Wikipedia, kicking off a massive edit war across several entries, including the all-important Gamergate controversy. The ensuing carnage involved several dozen Wikipedia stalwarts trying to prevent controversial and often unconstructive changes made by several dozen more^[4]Maybe hundreds? An accurate count is likely an impossibility. Gamergate sympathizers, but also extended to personal attacks and much acrimony not strictly related to the substance of the debate.

Most of the Gamergate participants operated in guerrilla style, using just-created, easily disposed-of accounts, many of which were quickly blocked. But not all: unlike past battles between Wikipedians and antagonistic outside parties, there is some overlap between these two: Gamergate is primarily composed of video game enthusiasts, many of them technically-minded, something also true for no small number of longtime Wikipedians. If nothing else, they were a savvier opponent than, say, the #JusticeforBeyonce #BeyHive.

As if that wasn’t enough, once Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee decided to get involved, a preview of their final decision spooked some editors for appearing to level sanctions against the “good” Wikipedians trying to hold back the barbarians at the gate. One observer, described by The Verge in late January as a “former editor”, Mark Bernstein, sounded an alarm with four arrestingly titled blog posts—“Infamous”, “Careless”, “Thoughtless” and “Reckless”—picked up by a wide array of news outlets, claiming that Wikipedia was going to “ban feminist editors”, thereby delivering Gamergate to ultimate victory.

It was an irresistible story. Here’s a fairly representative headline from The Guardian: “Wikipedia votes to ban some editors from gender-related articles”. It was also wrong, or “too soon to say” at best. Bernstein’s essays were overwrought and oversold—reckless, if you will. Journalists have a difficult time enough writing about Wikipedia accurately; this certainly didn’t help. Yes, Bernstein identified some worthwhile questions about Wikipedia governance, but he also suggested it might “permanently discredit not only Wikipedia but the entire open Web”. That’s a bit much.

Bernstein wasn’t completely out to lunch: eventually the committee did in fact come back with sanctions against “good” editors who overreacted to provocations. Several were “topic banned” meaning they are disallowed only from editing pages in this topic area; only one editor actually received a “site ban”, effectively kicking him off Wikipedia for the foreseeable future.

Well aware of the outside scrutiny, the Arbitration Committee took the unusual step of issuing a press release of sorts, explaining their decision in terms that outsiders could follow. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which always takes pains to stress that it has no role in policing the editorial community or the content it produces, also posted a comment to its blog. Both are recommended reading for the hyperventilating.

One really can’t understand this decision without knowing that the Arbitration Committee as organized is only charged with enforcing matters related to editor behavior, not site content. Perhaps there should be a body focused on content… but that’s an entirely different conversation. And it may well be that ArbCom members agreed with the Wikipedia editors who fought with Gamergate^[5]I assume most or all do. but it did not mean they could ignore actual violations of site policy even by well-meaning editors.

On the other hand, critics have accurately pointed out that ArbCom spent little time with the matter of off-wiki coordination by Gamergate, much of which violated Wikipedia’s rules and then some. As Bernstein correctly noted, “It’s much easier to pick out isolated misjudgments culled from hundreds of thousands of words of discussion by an army of anonymous trolls”.

There’s another very good reason why they didn’t spend more time with this—and it’s a problem that no one can solve, even if ArbCom could weigh in on who was “right”.

To wit: the large majority of Gamergaters had little invested in Wikipedia outside of these topic areas, mostly using brand new accounts they did not mind having blocked when another one could be created within a matter of minutes. Longtime Wikipedians care a great deal about the project and have user accounts they have years invested in. This was asymmetrical warfare of the sort waged by stateless actors against major powers in the real world^[6]I think I’m going to refrain from making specific analogies, sorry. and it worked here just as well as it has elsewhere.

The incident reminds me quite a bit of another traumatic episode in recent history: the battle over the article now called Chelsea Manning, previously known as Bradley Manning. To recap: after the convicted Private Manning announced her transgender status, the Wikipedia article very quickly converted over—and Wikipedia’s community was prematurely lauded in the media for doing so—only for the page to be summarily changed back, and fall into a contentious battle along a kind of right vs. left divide arguably similar to the dynamic here. Then as now, an editor making the supposedly progressive argument made waves for writing an impassioned blog post in protest; in that incident, the author was subsequently banned by ArbCom for violating a behavior policy separate from the underlying controversy. In the end, the pro-Chelsea forces prevailed, and the controversy eventually quieted down. On this issue, at least, the matter has been resolved for now.

Back to Gamergate, the story isn’t necessarily over. Have a look at the Gamergate controversy discussion page today and, while things seem to be somewhat more civil than before, you’ll see the debate continues apace. Also active^[7]On this very topic, no less. as of late February? Mark Bernstein. When your mission is to sort and present all the world’s information, you always are.

Provenance of GamerGate images unknown; attribution available upon clarification. Bradley / Chelsea Manning juxtaposition by Associated Press.

Notes[+]

Notes
↑1	If you read any of the above and thought to yourself: Wait, isn’t a gamergate a reproductively viable female worker ant?, my hat’s off to you.
↑2	I will also accept “Gamergateghazi”.
↑3	The best I’ve seen, as usual, can be found in The Wikipedia Signpost.
↑4	Maybe hundreds? An accurate count is likely an impossibility.
↑5	I assume most or all do.
↑6	I think I’m going to refrain from making specific analogies, sorry.
↑7	On this very topic, no less.

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Direction of Wikipedia, Future of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia culture, Year in Review

The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2013 (Part 2)

Tagged as 28Bytes, ArbCom, Bradley Manning, CBC, Chelsea Manning, COI, Cooley, Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, Phil Sandifer, Software development, Sue Gardner, Visual editor, Wikipediocracy
on January 2, 2014 at 5:20 pm

On Tuesday, this blog published the first half of our annual roundup of the biggest Wikipedia events over the past 12 months. In that post, we covered the untimely passing of Aaron Swartz, the launch of Wikivoyage, the rise of Wikipediocracy, battles at Wikimedia Commons, and problems that have followed Wikipedia’s impressive fundraising. Today we finish the job:

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5. Basically ArbCom will never get its act together

Fair warning: I am not an ArbCom insider, I rarely follow its various dramas, and so I am not going to even going to attempt a satisfactory summary of everything that happened with ArbCom this past year. But let’s start with some background: ArbCom is short for Arbitration Committee, a group which I’ve just discovered has its own Wikipedia article. It’s an elected volunteer panel of (generally) respected Wikipedians who weigh in on tough issues and make binding decisions. The comparison to a national Supreme Court is glib but not entirely wrong, especially as they can (and often do) refuse to take certain cases, not to mention set precedents affecting future decisions.

The problem with ArbCom, if I can describe it generally, is that the organization has long been characterized by turnover and chaos. Nothing that happened this year was especially new, but that’s also part of the problem. Back when Wikipedia was just an experimental project, it was plausible enough that ArbCom’s dysfunction was something Wikipedia could grow out of. But the opposite has proved to be the case—as far as I can tell, no one thinks it’s ever getting better.

Two major incidents were big enough to merit rate a mention in episodes later in this post. Among others which didn’t, one more or less started off the tone for the year when, in March, an ArbCom veteran resigned his position while excoriating his fellow members for “stonewalling, filibustering, and downright ‘bullying’” when they weren’t “getting their way”. And then 2013 ended with another bang, as the top vote-getter in the latest ArbCom election, conducted just weeks ago, resigned his position after admitting to maintaining a secret account on—wait for it—Wikipediocracy.

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4. Wikipedia has more than a gender problem…

It won’t take us too long to get back to ArbCom, but first let’s observe that Wikipedia is well known to have a “gender problem”; as The Wikipedian (and many more mainstream publications) have written extensively, Wikipedia’s editorship is overwhelmingly male, and it doesn’t cover certain topics (like women scientists, for example) very well. But this year an ugly row exposed what seems to be a more localized but still serious problem with transgender issues.

In August, Private Bradley Manning was convicted under the Espionage Act, and subsequently announced a public transition from male to female and the intention to be known as Chelsea Manning. (As I’ve written before, Manning’s transgender status was known, but until this point unconfirmed by Manning herself.) Wikipedia is generally considered a more progressive community than most, and references on Wikipedia were changed more quickly than at most news organizations. In fact, some of those same mainstream news publications praised Wikipedia for being quick to act. As it turned out, they should have been slower to praise.

The move was challenged, and the article was even changed back to Bradley, where it stayed as the debate heated up. Some objections were made in good faith and based on interpretations of guidelines, but some people were just being assholes. And then some of some of Chelsea Manning’s defenders crossed the line as well, and of course it ended up at ArbCom, which could seem to make no one happy in its various conclusions. First, ArbCom decided that yes, “Chelsea Manning” would indeed be the article’s name going forward. But among the punishments handed out, a pro-Chelsea editor was banned over an issue many considered a technicality—specifically for writing this blog post. During the fracas, the media was still watching, and some of the headings stung. Indeed, a newspaper may be slower to change, but when it makes a decision, it usually sticks with it.

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3. What happens when the COI guideline is contested in court?

Some of the problems involving the Wikipedia community have to do with the unusual compensation-based class system that has evolved around its community and “conflict of interest” rules. The more important Wikipedia has become, the more reputational impact it has shown to have, and the more it has been seen as both an opportunity and problem for celebrities, semi-public figures, professionals, companies, brands, bands, campaigns and non-profits. Since this first became an issue in 2006, Wikipedia has never quite figured out what to do about it. At the risk of oversimplifying things, mostly it has done nothing.

This year the worst nightmare of many came true when it turned out that a little-known but ever-expanding investigation into a network of secretly connected “sock puppet” user accounts traced back to an obscure but apparently quite successful startup called Wiki-PR. The name was familiar to some Wikipedians, but no definitive link had been established between the company and these accounts, owing something to the community’s (inconsistently applied) hang-ups about identifying editors’ public identities.

The revelation prompted the Wikimedia Foundation to issue a strongly-worded cease-and-desist letter to the company, although the impact was blunted when it emerged that someone from the Foundation’s own law firm had once anonymously edited the company’s article, violating the same rules it was supposedly defending. One can almost start to understand why the issue has been allowed to slide for so long.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s volunteer community banned the company’s known accounts, and then Arbcom angered some editors when it ordered one of the volunteer investigators to back off for reasons it said it couldn’t explain. Legal action from the Wikimedia Foundation is still possible, which could put the Foundation on an uncertain path just as its longtime leader is about to leave (see next).

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2. Sue Gardner’s departure and the uncertain new era

Sue Gardner is not exactly the only leader Wikipedia has ever known. After all, Jimmy Wales is still its most widely-recognized figure, and there was that guy who called the FBI on them, once, too. But Sue Gardner is (with one interim exception) the only executive director the Wikimedia Foundation has ever known.

In 2007 she left a position running the CBC’s web operations in Toronto to join the Wikimedia Foundation. By the end of that year she was in charge of the whole thing, at a time of significant growth and staff turmoil (does anyone remember Danny Wool? Carolyn Doran? no?). In the years since, it has grown considerably more (150+ staffers now vs. a handful at the beginning), and she has led the Foundation about as well as anyone could be imagined to do. Now she’s announced that she is leaving on an as-yet-unspecified date to pursue as-yet-unspecified plans. An decision about her replacement is expected by March 2014, though a presumptive favorite hasn’t publicly emerged.

Whomever gets the job in the end has a very difficult task ahead. In fact, asking how much the leader of this San Francisco non-profit is really in control of Wikipedia is really asking the wrong question. The executive director leads the Foundation’s staff, but that’s entirely different than saying she leads the Wikipedia community. Which, as a matter of fact, brings us to the biggest Wikipedia story of 2013…

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1. The Visual Editor debacle is also a potent metaphor for Wikipedia’s chief organizational dilemma

To conclude the thought above: the Wikipedia community does not always agree with the Wikimedia Foundation. Some Foundation initiatives have been met with a indifference at best (see last year’s #9, which is arguably the real predecessor entry to this one). Others have been rejected like antibodies to a transplanted organ.

Into this latter category falls the Visual Editor, a long-in-development software initiative which was rolled out this summer to mixed reviews (hey, I thought it was fun) followed by a backlash that grew and grew until a volunteer editor’s uncontested edit of the source code summarily immobilized the whole expensive project.

Maybe I’m overdoing it to place this at number one. Maybe the underlying issue is less than the existential struggle between those two classes of community members than I think; perhaps the issue was simply one of a botched deployment and avoidable toe-stepping that only temporarily poisoned the well.

But I believe no single event in the past year encapsulated the biggest challenge facing Wikipedia today: it seems no better able to organize itself now than when it was a freewheeling experiment stumbling into greater and greater success in its first seven years of its life. Seven years further on, Wikipedia is a different kind of community, one struggling to cope with its fantastic success, but which hasn’t yet learned to adapt.

Whether the Visual Editor itself ever finds its way into everyday usage—and I think it will, after a long “eventually”—it spotlights Wikipedia’s most critical challenges more than any other story, and that’s why it’s the most important Wikipedia story of 2013.

Photo credits: U.S. Army, Chelsea Manning, Wikimedia Foundation.

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Direction of Wikipedia, Wikipedia in the news

Wikipedia on the Brink?

Tagged as ArbCom, Chelsea Manning, Conflict of Interest, Drama Boards, Jimmy Wales, MIT Technology Review, Phil Sandifer, Sue Gardner, Tom Simonite, Visual editor, Wikimania
on November 18, 2013 at 9:36 am

A few weeks ago I was contacted by a writer for a big magazine, asking for my take on the much-discussed MIT Technology Review article “The Decline of Wikipeda” by Tom Simonite. As far as I’ve seen, no article has yet appeared, so: I figured I would repurpose my comments for a blog post here, rewriting enough that my remarks remain exclusive, but my views are known. (If that article ever comes out, I’ll update this post.) Some of these topics I’ve previously discussed on Wikipedia Weekly, but a more comprehensive take is long overdue. So here it is.

For those who haven’t read it, the Technology Review piece outlines a few reasons for concern about the long-term health of the Wikipedia community. The central points are not at all new: fewer new contributors are joining the site, many veterans are drifting away, the site’s culture and bureaucracy can be stifling, and a startlingly low percentage of contributors are women. All worthy topics, of course. Meanwhile, the piece does a good job of synthesizing these concerns, and explores some recent research that tries to make sense of them.

It also comes at a particularly apt time. In August, when I posted a summary of Wikimania Hong Kong, including Jimmy Wales’ keynote, the event projected something like satisfied aimlessness. Wikipedia was bigger and better than ever, such that the big question was: what would it do next? Wales had some vague ideas about saving journalism, but that’s been about all we’ve heard of it since.

Yet even at that time, and especially in the few months since, the community has experienced several controversies producing animosity and discord not seen since… OK, there is animosity and discord at Wikipedia every single day, especially if you follow the “drama boards”—but these incidents have been very high-profile, in some cases making news (like this Technology Review article), calling into question the community’s ability to reconcile its philosophical differences, spotlighting a rift between the Wikimedia Foundation and the community it serves, and raising doubts about the ability of Wikipedia’s highest judicial authority (the Arbitration Committee, or ArbCom) to make sound decisions. And while most participants would agree that these incidents represent legitimate issues, it’s also fair to say that there is disagreement about much else: how to prioritize issues, how to respond to each, and even what should be a desired outcome in each case. I owe you some details:

Visual Editor Debacle—in a post for this blog earlier in the summer, I offered early praise for the Visual Editor, a big initiative from the Foundation, a WYSIWYG version of the Wikipedia editing interface. The big idea was to make editing easier—the standard Wikipedia “markup” is more like computer programming than not—and that doing so might create a path for new people to get involved.
But this was an untested proposition, and anyway who was to say whether it would attract more helpful or unhelpful edits? Alas, my praise arrived too soon. Scratching a little deeper, the new software had bugs—lots of them. Besides which, existing contributors were unhappy to find that this new system was also the default, a huge change that hadn’t been clearly explained to them ahead of time. Following an extensive debate among the site’s core editors, and after a few strategic retreats by the Foundation’s developers, a single community member changed the code and disabled the Visual Editor for everyone. The Visual Editor is back in beta once again, and its near-term future is uncertain.

While there were undeniable errors in the launch of this initiative, the Visual Editor’s misfire is less the disease and more the symptom of it. Of late, I’ve been telling anyone who cares to listen that major tensions between the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia community pose serious doubts about Wikipedia’s ability to grow into the future. The former group comprises mostly paid professionals who may or may not have originated from the community, while the latter is composed of a vast, disparate, passionate, sometimes disagreeable group of not-quite-like-minded individuals. The formalized former has a greater ability to act in a concerted effort, yet its charter states that it must follow the lead of the leaderless community.

While Wikipedia was still growing and expanding, rapid growth seemed to solve all problems. Now that the community is contracting and entrenching, it looks like a serious roadblock. How can Wikipedia and its community of editors take on big initiatives—such as revolutionizing journalism—when they can’t agree on something like this? Is consensus still working for Wikipedia at this point?
Chelsea / Bradley Manning—Following a high-profile conviction under the Espionage Act in a U.S. military court, the infamous Army Private Manning announced her transgender status (confirmed, really, for those paying close attention) and with it sought public acknowledgment for a name change from Bradley to Chelsea. Although transgender acceptance is rocky still in 2013, it wasn’t too long before most media outlets had adopted the feminine pronoun. Likewise, the Wikipedia entry for Pvt. Manning was updated to /Chelsea—and then it was rolled back to /Bradley—and then the fighting began.
I’m not even going to get into the details, except to say that I’m still fairly stunned that the Wikipedia community had to argue about it at all, let alone that it got so ugly. After some debate, ArbCom stepped in. Eventually the entry was moved back to /Chelsea_Manning, and sanctions were imposed on some debate participants. Surprisingly, the heavier penalties were levied on pro-Chelsea editors over technical matters, while some more hostile pro-Bradley editors were let off more easily. A veteran editor named Phil Sandifer complained about this on his personal blog. Soon after, ArbCom returned to say Sandifer had revealed personal information about another participant in violation of Wikipedia’s policies, and he was subsequently banned from Wikipedia. This was a shocking outcome (and I hope I’m not risking my own standing on Wikipedia merely by linking to his post). Assuming ArbCom is correct in their reasoning, I see why they took the position they did—but the punishment seems much harsher than it should be.

Given the above, it can be very easy to forget that one of Wikipedia’s “five pillars”—the most important organizing principles of the entire project—states: “Editors should treat each other with respect and civility”. Technology Review points out that acrimony among editors and complaints about the increasingly unpleasant and bureaucratic nature of Wikipedia is a reason editors are leaving. Given the above, it’s not difficult to see why.
PR Sock puppet scandal—This fall a long-running, low-profile, on-wiki investigation into a network of sock puppet Wikipedia accounts broke wide when several news outlets connected the anonymous accounts to a rogue PR company I’ll decline to give further publicity here (no, it’s not Pets.com, but wouldn’t that be great?). This company was not unknown to editors, but the specifics of their activity had been. All accounts known to be associated with the company were blocked, and while this one was not a tough call, much else in this topic area is. Wikipedia’s official guidelines say one thing, although Jimmy Wales has promoted stricter guidance.
The terminology is a challenge, too: “conflict of interest editing”; “paid editing”; “paid advocacy” and “paid advocacy editing” are all similar terms often used to discuss this issue, although they are not identical and the widely different conclusions one may draw can be strongly influenced by unspoken assumptions related to each.

A number of policy proposals were offered up, but at this time none has attained substantial support, and some are clearly dead in the water. The Wikipedia community has tried more than once in the past five years to draw up some rules to regulate this kind of activity, but nothing much has come of it. Meanwhile, individual editors have set up the occasional effort to assist PR representatives (and offer an alternative to direct edits), but these have always been understaffed. While not a new debate, it doesn’t seem like any new epiphanies will come of it this time.

(Note: I have already written about this for the blog, and I have a greater involvement in this subject compared to the others.)

The above are all specific incidents with their own unique circumstances and complicated outcomes, but it’s not difficult to see how they point toward larger issues with the direction of Wikipedia. As it happens, the direction of Wikipedia is very much at issue right now. Sue Gardner, the first (and so far only*) executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, is leaving at the end of the year. She prepares to depart with significant respect and goodwill among a wide range of community members—and yet there’s also significant concern that her successor is in for a really difficult time. Meanwhile, the Foundation is narrowing down its search, and a decision is expected soon. The name of this leader-to-be and his or her vision for Wikipedia is still a mystery.

One evening last week, I ran my views past another longtime member and leader (such as they are) of the Wikipedia community. While this person acknowledged the issues I raised, there was another aspect I had been overlooking. Is Wikipedia at a crisis moment? Not exactly—it’s been in crisis for awhile now. The problem is not that the disagreements are any worse than they were previously, but the difference is that these disagreements are now much higher profile than they were before.

Wikipedia was once able to grow its way out of its problems, but that hasn’t been an option for awhile: these issues have loomed larger ever since the growth of new editors slowed and turned into decline, and since Wikipedia found that it couldn’t avoid the public spotlight. Remember, the Technology Review article is literally called “The Decline of Wikipedia”. As I said at the beginning: there’s not much that’s new in the article. But it might just summarize the problem better than it realizes.

*It’s been pointed out to me that WMF had an interim executive director at one point, however this individual was basically a caretaker in the position. But the point stands: Sue Gardner is still—please forgive the forthcoming play on words—sue generis.

Images courtesy, respectively: MIT Technology Review, Wikimedia Foundation, U.S. Army, Jacob Bøtter, and Paula Wilson via Wikimedia Foundation.

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Biographies of Living Persons, Direction of Wikipedia, Popular culture, Uncategorized, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia critics, Wikipedia culture, Wikipedia in the news

The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2012 (Part 1)

Tagged as Adrian Chen, Anatole Broyard, ArbCom, Blackberry, Gawker, HighBeam, iPhone, Jimmy Wales, JSTOR, Justin Knapp, Philip Roth, Sayre's law, Signpost, Streisand effect, The Human Stain, The Next Web
on December 28, 2012 at 12:18 pm

In these waning days of 2012, let’s take this opportunity—for a third year in a row—to look back and come up with a list of the most important Wikipedia news and events in the last 12 months. Like our first installment in 2010 and our follow-up in 2011, the list will be arbitrary but hopefully also entertaining. There is no methodology to be found here, just my own opinion based on watching Wikipedia, its sister projects and parent organization, and also thumbing through the Wikipedia Signpost, Google News and other news sites this past week. So what are we waiting for?

Wait, wait, one more thing: this post ended up being much longer than I expected, and so I’ve decided to split this in two. Today we publish the first five items in the list, 10-6. On Monday 12/31 we’ll publish the final five. Enjoy!

♦ ♦ ♦

10. Wikipedia bans a prominent contributor — Let’s start with something that did not make the news outside of the Wikipedia / Wikimedia community at all, but which took up a great deal of oxygen within it. It’s the story of a prominent editor and administrator who goes by the handle Fæ. In April of this year, he was elected to lead a new organization within the community based on his leadership of the UK chapter. The move was not without controversy: Fæ’s actions both on Wikipedia and the sister site Wikimedia Commons (best known as a vast image repository) and interactions with editors became the subject of intense scrutiny, and even an ArbCom case (the Arbitration Committee is sort of like Wikipedia’s Supreme Court). Fæ ended up resigning his adminship—he basically jumped to avoid being pushed—and the end result had him banned from editing Wikipedia, which he still is. Not that he’s gone away—he’s still a contributor to Commons, and a very active one.

This might sound like a lot of insider nonsense, and I’m not about to dissuade you from this viewpoint. (Sayre’s law applies in spades.) But the key issue involved is about governance: is the Wikimedia community’s organizational structure and personnel capable of the kind of leadership necessary to maintain and build on this important project? The Fæ incident (along with other incidents in this list) suggests the answer may be no.

9. Confusing software development — Not all of Wikipedia’s contributors are focused on editing articles. Some are also developers, working on the open source software to keep Wikimedia sites running and, perhaps, improving. Some (but not all) are paid staff and contractors, and the hybrid part-volunteer, part-professional organizational structure can make it difficult to get projects off the ground.

One longtime project that has yet to see wide implementation is a “visual editor” for Wikipedia articles, to make editing much easier for users. Everyone knows that the editing interface for Wikipedia articles feels like software programming, and almost surely turns away some potential contributors (though it’s not the main reason people don’t contribute, as a 2011 Wikimedia survey showed). But the visual editor is a bigger technical challenge than one might think (as recently explained by The Next Web), and the outcome of a current trial run (also not the first) is anyone’s guess.

Another announced with a great deal of hype but which no one really seems to understand is Wikidata. It calls itself a “common data repository” which by itself sounds fairly reasonable, but no one really knows how it will work in practice, even those now developing it. Wikidata could be a terrifically innovative invention and the very future of Wikimedia… but first we need to find out what it does.

Other projects have been released, but have received thoughtful criticism for adding little value while diverting resources from more worthy projects. For example, a feature briefly existed asking you to choose whether a smiley face or frowny face best represented your Wikipedia experience. Uh, OK? Some projects have been better-received: the Wikipedia iPhone app, for example, is a definite improvement over the mobile site. But there are some odd decisions here, as well: does Wikipedia really need an app for the failed Blackberry Playbook?

8. Sum of human knowledge gets more human knowledge — If you’ve ever seen a [citation needed] tag on Wikipedia—and I know you have—then you know that, well, citations are needed. And while citations do actually kind of grow on trees (if by “trees” we mean “the Internet”) there is a lot of information out there which isn’t readily searchable on Google, and sometimes that information costs money. This year, some of those paid services cracked the door open just a bit.

The interesting story to the HighBeam Research partnership is that there really isn’t one. First of all, HighBeam is a news database which charges for reader access to its vast collection of articles. But in March, a volunteer Wikipedia editor who goes by the name Ocaasi reached out to HighBeam and asked if they would be willing to grant free access to Wikipedia editors. They said yes—and supplied one-year, renewable accounts to editors with at least one year’s experience and 1,000 edits. For Wikipedia, it meant greater access to information. For Highbeam, it meant a 600% increase in links to the site in the first few months of the project. Seems like a fair trade.

More recently, the Wikimedia Foundation announced an agreement with the academic paper storehouse JSTOR, making one-year accounts available to 100 of the most-active Wikipedia editors. With almost 240 editors petitioning for access, if you haven’t spoken up yet, chances are you’re a bit too late.

7. The first person to 1 million edits — OK, how about a fun one? In April, a Wikipedia editor named Justin Knapp, who uses the handle Koavf, became the first person to make 1 million edits to Wikipedia. To the surprise of everyone, perhaps none more than Knapp himself, this made him an overnight international celebrity of the Warhol variety. Jimmy Wales even declared April 20 “Justin Knapp Day” on Wikipedia.

It’s worth pointing out that most editors with many, many edits to their name typically are involved in janitorial-style editing activities, such as fighting vandals or re-organizing categories. And many very active editors spend a lot of time squabbling with others on the so-called “drama boards” such as Administrators’ noticeboard/Incidents. Not Knapp: his edits over time have overwhelmingly focused on creating new articles, plus researching and improving content in existing ones. In short: Wikipedia doesn’t need more editors—it needs more Justin Knapps.

Also, this is one I actually played a small role in, as verified by Knapp’s own timeline of events. I’d happened to see someone note the fact on Jimmy Wales’ Talk page that day, which I tweeted, and was then picked up by Gawker’s Adrian Chen, and the rest is history. Actually, then Knapp kept right on editing Wikipedia. As of this writing, he’s closing in on 1.25 million edits.

6. Philip Roth’s Complaint — Wikipedia has been extraordinarily sensitive to complaints by living people the subject of articles ever since a 2005 incident where a veteran newspaper editor found his article maliciously vandalized to implicate him in the murder of the brothers Kennedy.

In what was arguably the biggest row since then, in September 2007 the celebrated, prickly author of Portnoy’s Complaint, American Pastoral and numerous other novels took to the pages of The New Yorker to issue “An Open Letter to Wikipedia” complaining that the site had the inspiration for his 2000 novel The Human Stain all wrong. And this wasn’t his first resort: Roth’s first attempt had been to authorize his biographer to change the article directly, which was rebuffed. His consternation here: not inexplicable.

But Roth’s complaint was not really with Wikipedia. Several book reviewers had speculated (apparently incorrectly) about the real-life basis for the novel’s central figure, and it was these speculations which had been introduced to Wikipedia. Roth’s publicity campaign brought the issue to much wider attention, which got his personal explanation of the novel’s inspiration into Wikipedia. However, in a twist on the Streisand effect, the controversy is now the subject of a longish and somewhat peevish section written by editors perhaps irked by Roth’s campaign. So he got what he wanted, plus more that he didn’t. Shall we call it the Roth effect?

♦ ♦ ♦

Look here on Monday for the thrilling conclusion to The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2012!

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Biographies of Living Persons, Edit wars, Wikigroaning, Wikipedia in the news

Rick Santorum’s Wikipedia Problem and its Discontents

Tagged as AfD, ArbCom, BLP, Coatracking, Dan Savage, Google bombing, Homosexuality, Jimmy Wales, Neologism, Notability, Presidential campaign, RfC, Rick Santorum, SEO, Slang, Something Awful, U.S. Senate, Wiktionary
on August 10, 2011 at 9:16 am

When former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum started gearing up to launch his presidential campaign earlier this year, there was one question he could not avoid. It had to do with the matter of alt-weekly editor and advice columnist Dan Savage, who has for years positioned himself as Santorum’s most prominent critic. Many politicians have fierce opponents, but few did what Savage did in 2003, and that was hold a contest to give an alternate meaning to the word “santorum”. I hope you’ll forgive me for declining to quote the winning definition, but you can find it here, and suffice to say that it has stuck. So much so, in fact, that eight years later Savage’s term has come to dominate the web search results for Rick Santorum’s name.

In news stories this year it was mostly described—by ABC News, Roll Call, Slate, and Huffington Post, among others—as Santorum’s “Google problem”. Indeed, one of the top three results for Santorum’s name is Dan Savage’s website promoting the campaign. But Google and Wikipedia are often joined at the hip, and one of the top results has been a Wikipedia article, not about Rick Santorum per se, but in fact about the campaign against him… or about the word itself… it hasn’t always been clear. And by mid-summer 2011, the article—then called Santorum (neologism)—had grown to several thousand words, and had itself become the focus of controversy among Wikipedians.

This blog post traces the history of the article’s evolution in some detail—not exhaustive, but getting there—because it’s an interesting window into how Wikipedia deals with controversial topics. Wikipedians can’t always agree, and in fact the article in question still remains a matter of dispute. But after 200,000 words and numerous debates in various forums around Wikipedia, the community has arrived at something approaching a satisfactory conclusion. Below, I aim to show how things got out of control, and how the Wikipedia community worked it out.

· · ·

August 2006—To start from the beginning, let’s start from the beginning. The first version of this article was created five years ago this week, simply as Santorum.

(I should take a moment here to point out that—spoiler alert—because the article today is called Campaign for “santorum” neologism that is what appears at the top of all historical versions of the article; generally speaking, for each version I’ll link here, I will boldface article’s name at the time upon each reference.)

At this point the article was just a few paragraphs, outlining the circumstances that led to Savage’s coinage and a few examples of the term’s usage in the U.S. media. Prior to becoming its own article, most of the relevant material had been contained in a sub-section of the article about Savage’s sex advice column: Savage Love#Santorum.

It didn’t take very long at all before editors questioned the article’s suitability for a standalone article—what Wikipedia calls “notability”. In fact, the same day the article was first created, it was nominated for deletion. The reason for the nomination is one that would be echoed many times over the next half-decade:

The neologism referred to, created by Savage Love, does not have any evidence of real currency as a neologism. It should be treated as a political act by Savage Love, and described under that article.

The nomination failed and the article remained, as it certainly had received some media attention, but it was decided a renaming was in order. The suggestion was made that it be called Santorum (neologism), or possibly Santorum (sexual slang). Recent followers of this controversy might assume that the former was selected, because that was the name of the article for a long while. However, it was the latter, with a large reason being that Wikipedia has an explicit policy against creating articles about neologisms.

But that hardly settled the matter; the next issue concerned which Wikipedia page readers should find when they search for the word “santorum”, which now was considered to have—and here you could say that Savage had already won—two legitimate meanings. So the question was taken to a “straw poll”. For now, the article was still called Santorum, but what would the average Internet user be looking for when they looked up that term? How should the ambiguity be handled—in Wikipedia terminology, “disambiguated”? And what exactly should they call the article about the coinage?

Related to the word “Santorum”, the options included, and I quote:

Santorum should be an article about Savage’s attempt to define the word “santorum”
Santorum should be a disambiguation page, with its “traditional” content
Santorum should be a disambiguation page, with some other content (explain)
Santorum should be a redirect to Rick Santorum, and Rick Santorum should have a dablink…
Santorum should be a redirect to Rick Santorum, with no reference to the Savage neologism in the Rick Santorum article

Related to the article about Savage’s coinage, the options included, and I quote:

The article on the Savage neologism should be titled Santorum (neologism)
The article on the Savage neologism should be titled Santorum (sexual slang)
The Savage neologism needs no article; sufficiently covered at Savage Love#Santorum

And the result was… inconclusive. Nevertheless, a proposal was made, and subsequently accepted, to keep Rick Santorum as it always was, to call the Savage Love-inspired article Santorum (neologism), and to make Santorum a disambiguation page with links to relevant pages, among other details. The best summary of the considerations involved was stated by User:Dpbsmith, a veteran and still-active editor, who wrote:

Frankly I’ll support anything meeting these criterion:
A user who types in “santorum” as the Go word intending to find information about the Senator can find it very easily.
A user who types in “santorum” as the Go word intending to find information about the neologism can find it easily.
A user who types in “santorum” as the Go word is not presented immediately with the details of the neologism, but must click on a link, and the link must have some kind of label that communicates that fact that they are about to read about a political attack on the the [sic] Senator.
There should be no implication that Wikipedia endorses the neologism as somehow being “the real meaning” of the word.

Oh, did I mention there was also then a page called Santorum controversy, which is now called Santorum controversy regarding homosexuality, that also came up in the discussion? Well, now I have. Just wanted to be clear about that.

· · ·

Late 2006-Early 2007—Although the matter seemed to have been handled appropriately, that didn’t stop editors from raising objections—even the very same objections—in the months following. In fact, someone had changed the article’s title back to Santorum (sexual slang) by the time the article came up for a second deletion debate in December 2006. The nominator focused on the fact that the media hits for the article were trivial—sure, The Daily Show and The Economist had used it, but neither had focused on it as a topic—while several less well-known sources appeared to be joining Savage’s campaign to popularize the term. Meanwhile, the nominator’s first argument was that the primary information was already covered in the Santorum controversy article (now you see why I mentioned it). Following a week’s worth of debate involving approximately two dozen Wikipedians and several thousand words…

The result was hopeless, hopeless lack of consensus.

(Emphasis in the original.) Lack of consensus to delete an article always means that it stays, and so it did. Some editors had suggested moving the article’s content to Wiktionary, Wikipedia’s dictionary sister project, where in fact the term had registered its own entry (without controversy) several months ahead of Wikipedia.

Later in December, one of the editors involved in the previous debate suggested moving the article from Santorum (sexual slang) to the oddly-titled Santorum (sexual slang activism), though the article stayed put. In January, a suggestion was made to merge the article back into the Savage Love entry, but that didn’t happen either.

· · ·

Late 2007—Debate continued. In September, someone renamed it to Santorum (fluid)—ugh—and it was returned to Santorum (neologism), as it was then called. By this point, the article had grown substantially, was attracting the efforts of serious Wikipedians, and was… well, it was actually getting pretty good. In September 2007, the article was nominated for “Good article” (GA) status, and it looked like this. Later that day, the reviewing editor failed the article for including unsourced and “poorly sourced” material—The Onion in particular was singled out, although it was really an interview with Savage in the sister publication, AV Club—and for being a “BLP liability”.

That is to say, the article skirted the line of Wikipedia’s Biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, which aims to keep out scurrilous and weakly-sourced material about living persons that could be damaging to a living person’s reputation. As you might imagine, that had long been an issue; one couldn’t write about this topic without it being an issue. One could argue that Savage’s campaign was all about damaging Santorum’s reputation—I presume Dan Savage would agree to that—and yet it was nonetheless notable. Many editors then, and to this day, wished it would simply go away. And yet some wanted to make it as “good” as possible.

· · ·

2008-2010—We can skip ahead, because after October 2007, fewer than 160 edits occurred in the three years intervening, and it was not changed substantially in that time. Santorum had lost his re-election bid in late 2006, re-entered private life in January 2007, and ceased to make headlines. In December 2007, the article looked like this. In January 2011, it looked like this. It was the same old back-and-forth, and not much happened.

· · ·

Early 2011—As Santorum started making moves to run for president, activity picked up. In mid-February, Roll Call was first to write about Santorum’s “Google problem”, and this was dutifully added. The article continued to draw attention (including from vandals) through the end of February, until it was put under temporary “semi-protection”. When Stephen Colbert mentioned the controversy on his show, a not-so-brief summary was added, then removed, with the point made that “not everything Colbert says needs to be repeated in Wikipedia”. (Imagine that!) March and April were months of relative calm before the proverbial storm: nearly 1,000 direct edits, from May to this writing, lay just ahead.

· · ·

May 2011—In early May, a very active and respected editor-administrator, User:Cirt, began a series of more than 300 edits to the article, starting with a long-overdue link to Wiktionary. By this point, the article contained some 1,600 words, excluding links and references. Cirt announced his intention to add “some research in additional secondary sources”, and four days later he had expanded the article to some 4,300 words. On the discussion page, one editor objected:

Expanding an article about a vile attack on a living person – it’s twice the size now and refs have gone from 33 to 95 – has got to be against the spirit of least of our BLP policy. My proposal, and my intention, stated right now, is to return this article to the content it had on May 9th.

This kicked off the first sustained debate in years—one that has arguably not yet come to a close. A proposal was made to “stub” the article, meaning to reduce the article’s length to a mere stub of an entry; the argument went, because the arguably unfair subject obviously met Wikipedia’s previously-determined standards for inclusion, a possible solution was to reduce it to the shortest possible version. This proposal quickly failed, with Cirt himself citing an earlier comment by veteran Wikipedian (and current Wikimedia Foundation fellow) Steven Walling:

The BLP policy is not a blank check for deleting anything negative related to a living individual. Criticism, commentary, and even base mockery of a public figure like a Senator is protected free speech in the United States. While it would be ridiculous for anyone to try and make Wikipedia a platform for creating the kind of meme Savage did, it is perfectly prudent for Wikipedia to neutrally report on the overwhelming amount of coverage given to the topic.

Remember that part about using Wikipedia as a platform—it will come up later. Meanwhile, Cirt continued to add significant information about media usage and analysis of the term and events surrounding Savage’s campaign, all backed up with acceptable references. In particular, he focused on adding uses of “santorum”, in slang dictionaries and even erotica, to support the article’s focus as legitimately about the neologism, and not Savage’s campaign per se.

For those who did not wish for Wikipedia to contribute to the so-called problem of making Savage’s campaign seem more important than it arguably was, it must have been more frustrating still to observe that the article was quite well-written and scrupulously followed Wikipedia’s style and sourcing guidelines. Cirt was nothing if not sophisticated. Many had the impression that the article itself was now an attack on Santorum, although that conclusion was only in the eye of the beholder. Cirt knew what he was doing and, for lack of a better phrase, Cirt knew exactly what he was doing. One editor objected:

I realize you will defend this bloated attack piece with all your skills (that is actually what I find most disturbing) but you have to realize or at least have noticed that many experienced editors disagree with your massive expansion of it and at some point it will require wider input and a community RFC.

By the end of May, the article had grown to more than five times the length of the article Santorum controversy regarding homosexuality and more than two-thirds the length of the primary Rick Santorum biographical article. Discrepancies of this sort have been well observed, most significantly on the Internet forum Something Awful, but no Wikipedia policy exists to require proportionality among articles.

At its greatest length, on May 31, the article surpassed 5,500 words, including headers but excluding photo captions, links and references—a total of over 77,000 bytes of data.

· · ·

June 2011-Present— Were I to adequately summarize the debates and discussions that occurred beginning in late May and continuing sustainedly—with most debate occurring in June—this blog post could be three times its already considerable length. Instead I will attempt to summarize, although “considerable length” is unavoidable still.

From early June, Cirt pretty much stopped editing the article. To a significant extent, he’d become part of the issue, not just regarding this article but others as well, as can be seen on the discussion page for Cirt’s user account.

Among the many solutions offered around this time, one focused not on the article content itself, but rather its visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). The editor offered, even if just for the sake of argument:

While I don’t really like the precedent, there’s nothing to say that every article needs to be indexed by search engines. … The majority of the concerns here seem to be focused on how people are coming across this article (via Google bombing, etc.), not necessarily that the article exists. … Both sides have legitimate points in their favor, so a compromise might be best here.

Other editors agreed it would set a bad precedent, and the suggestion did not go any further.

By now the topic had come to involve some of Wikipedia’s most influential editors, and a lengthy debate opened on Jimmy Wales’ discussion page. Wales’ take was as follows:

My only thought about the whole thing is that WP:COATRACK applies in spades. There is zero reason for this page to exist. It is arguable whether this nonsense even belongs in his biography at all, but at a bare minimum, a merger to his main article seems appropriate.

The “Coatrack” argument—one of many analogies Wikipedians have created over the years to illustrate key concepts—is not a policy or a guideline, but an informal essay, yet one with much currency. It states:

A coatrack article is a Wikipedia article that ostensibly discusses the nominal subject, but in reality is a cover for a tangentially related biased subject. The nominal subject is used as an empty coat-rack, which ends up being mostly obscured by the “coats”. The existence of a “hook” in a given article is not a good reason to “hang” irrelevant and biased material there.

In retrospect, it’s a little surprising that the “Coatrack” issue hadn’t been raised in any significant way before—and Wales is neither considered infallible nor is he always that involved in day-to-day Wikipedia issues—but this may yet have been a turning point. The next day, the highly respected User:SlimVirgin opened an RfC (Request for Comment) called “Proposal to rename, redirect, and merge content”. This led to the article being renamed, for a time, Santorum Google problem. Later, it was pointed out that “Google is not the only search engine in the world”, and so the search (as it were) continued.

The argument that the “neologism” had not evolved organically, but was the result of an organized campaign by Savage and his allies, had begun to exert some influence. For one thing, it was now quite clear that the majority of sources focused on the political campaign to bring relevance to the term, as opposed to the term’s relevance itself. In this way, one might say that Savage’s campaign had become a little too successful. Yes, the term was notable, but the controversy itself had become even more so.

Prior to the renaming mentioned above, editors in an adjacent thread had discussed several alternative names for the article. These included:

Santorum neologism controversy
Dan Savage santorum neologism controversy
Dan Savage santorum neologism campaign
Santorum neologism campaign
Spreading santorum (the name of Savage’s website)

Here one can start to see where the article’s current title would eventually emerge. Meanwhile, the article faced two more AfD (Articles for deletion) nominations, the first under its old name and the second under its current one. These were the fourth and fifth nominations overall, and surely the most futile.

As part of the ongoing RfC discussion in June, it had been strongly suggested that the article needed to be condensed, especially as Cirt’s expansion had contributed so significantly to the controversy. Besides the article expansion, in mid-May Cirt had created a new “footer” template, Template:Sexual slang, which further linked Rick Santorum’s name to dozens of NSFW topics. That template still exists, but on June 11 the link to Santorum (neologism) was removed. Again, it’s hard to say if this was another turning point, but a discussion about this template on Wales’ discussion page supports the notion that a consensus was coming into view: the article in its present form had itself become part of the campaign—that Wikipedia was being used as a platform for the campaign in the manner Walling had suggested.

A day later, a request for arbitration (RfAr)—a petition to the Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia’s equivalent of the Supreme Court—was opened against Cirt on the basis that his concerted efforts on the subject constituted “political activism”. On June 18 the request was rejected, but not before several dozen editors had contributed more than 28,000 words of opinion. One committee member wrote:

Decline for now, I’m inclined to think that this is more of a content dispute, and the community is able to cope with it.

On June 17, the community finally hit on a name that stuck: Campaign for “santorum” neologism. Initially, this was only intended as an interim move while further discussion took place. Among the names considered at this time, not all were serious, but most were:

Dan Savage santorum campaign
Dan Savage campaign
Dan Savage’s verbal attack on Rick Santorum
Santorum (sexual slang)
Santorum neologism campaign
Santorum neologism campaign
Santorum neologism controversy
Rick Santorum and homosexuality
Rick Santorum homosexuality controversy
Savage Santorum campaign
Dan Savage santorum neologism controversy
Dan Savage santorum neologism campaign
Spreading Santorum
Rick Santorum’s Google problem
Rick Santorum’s “Google problem”
Santorum Google problem
Rick Santorum Google problem
‘Spreading santorum’ campaign
Campaign for “santorum” neologism
Dan Savage campaign for “santorum” neologism
Savage–Santorum affair (a reply: “Oh Please God No.”)
Savage–Santorum controversy
santorum (neologism)
The problem Rick Santorum is facing because every search engine in the world’s top search results says santorum is an anal sex by-product
Santorum (googlebomb)
SEO Campaign for “santorum” neologism
Santorum (cyberattack)
Santorum (cyberbullying)
Santorm (SEO attack)
Dan Savage’s “spreading santorum” campaign against Rick Santorum’s anti-gay stance
Santorum Google ranking problem
Dan Savage Google-bomb Attack on Rick Santorum
Campaign to attack Santorum’s name
Campaign to create ‘santorum’ neologism
Campaign to associate Santorum to neologism

In the end, inertia and the current title’s inherent virtues won out. Of the eventual “winner”—Campaign for “santorum” neologism—a veteran Wikipedian commented:

This one is growing on me – neutral, correct, to-the-point, and succinctly informative to readers both familiar and unfamiliar with the subject as to what the article will be about.

All that was left was to whittle the article down from its extreme length to a shape that covered the topic adequately, balancing relevance with discretion. While many edits were to follow, the key edit was made on June 21, when SlimVirgin replaced a 4,800-word version of the article (minus links and references) with a 1,400-word version. This is substantially the version of the article that remains in place today.

· · ·

Comparing the late May version of the article, at its longest point, to the trimmed-down and refocused current version, here’s what we find:

The earlier version focused on the term in and of itself, with the opening sentence including a definition and describing its use. The current version focuses on the events, explaining the aim of Savage’s campaign—though the definition remains.
Excluding the lead section, references and external links, there are only three sections in the current version, compared with seven in the earlier (not including “See also” and “Further reading”, which were also removed).
The content of the “Background” section was almost entirely removed, leaving just the key facts about Rick Santorum’s statements in the 2003 Associated Press interview.
The section about the website “Spreading Santorum” was removed, details added into the “Campaign by Dan Savage” section.
Almost all of the “Recognition and usage” section was removed.
“Media analysis” and “Political impact” were combined into one, shorter, summarized section, focusing on the reception of the campaign in the media and its political impact.
Santorum’s response to the controversy was kept in the current article, however condensed.

Up to the present day, in the Talk page discussions alone (including the RfC discussion), more than 200,000 words have been written about the article. That is probably well short of the true number.

Perhaps surprisingly, the impact on Rick Santorum’s Wikipedia article was not that great—the article had long summarized the events in a short final paragraph concluding a heading relating to his statements about homosexuality—83 words at this count.

Meanwhile, Santorum’s “Google” problem continues. Conduct a logged-out search today, and here are the top three results:

And let’s not imagine the argument is completely over on Campaign for “santorum” neologism. Visit today, and one will find at the very top:

Images courtesy Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons. Additional research and analysis provided by Rhiannon Ruff.

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Wikipedia in the news

Thoughts on Wikipedia and Scientology

Tagged as ArbCom, Huffington Post, Scientology, The Register
on June 8, 2009 at 9:21 am

It’s unfortunate that The Wikipedian has been in suspended animation for the week or so, because it has been a big past week or so for Wikipedia in the news. On May 28, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee — the court of last resort for Wikipedia disputes — banned all IP addresses associated with the Church of Scientology from editing Wikipedia for repeated disruptive editing and the use of “sock puppet” accounts to tilt Wikipedia consensus on Scientology-related articles.

The decision has been all over the tech and mainstream press since, from The Register’s first report on May 29 to the New York Times finally covering the story this morning. In between, Google News shows hundreds of results about the subject.

I have not looked closely at the decision, but my own general take on it is about what you might expect: Wikipedia reserves the right to regulate its own community and, upon fair consideration, expel those who are determined to prevent Wikipedia from operating. This was certainly the case here, as the deliberations ran for more than six months, reportedly the longest in Wikipedia history. It is not the case, as one Huffington Post contributor erroneously imagined, that “all members” of Scientology were banned from editing. Instead, Wikipedia merely banned IP addresses known to be controlled by Scientology. Any Scientologist can still log on from home and, one expects, have their individual account banned if they too persist in deleting good information that the Church does not like.

This is not the first time Wikipedia has taken such an action, and I’d say it’s easily less controversial than the ban on an entire Utah neighborhood in 2007 for incredibly involved reasons that you can read about here.

If I had an objection it would be that an indefinite block, which is what the ArbCom imposed here, should be less desirable than a period of one year or perhaps even two. However, it is probably the case that a year or two from now Scientology would be just as interested in deleting critical information about their organization from Wikipedia as they are now. And to some extent it is likely to continue in any case.

After all, the flagship Scientology article has a long history as one of the most contentious on Wikipedia. Visit the discussion page, and you’ll find 27 archive pages of discussion stretching back to 2001. (Few articles are so active as to need their discussions archived; and the Roman Catholic Church, with vastly millions more adherents, has just 26 archived pages of discussions associated ith its article) The very first, undated, comment on the Scientology Talk page was this one:

As in entries on like organizations such as The Local Church of Witness Lee and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, no fair discussion can take place on this topic. If anyone dare edit this article, it will be swiftly and aggressively reverted to reflect only the official point of view of Scientology. Try it.

And in the week since, more than 6200 words have been expended on the Scientology Talk page, as veteran and newbie editors alike — some of them undoubtedly Scientologists — continue argue over what the article should say.

Scientology logo via Wikipedia, reused here with the same non-free use rationale.

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