I do not understand how federation is going to solve the problems mentioned in the homepage. Surely it is going to make them 10x worse, right? The same incidents can happen, but it becomes impossible to moderate the content.
- jimbo making CoI edits. He got caught, and edits were reviewed for appropriateness. System worked as it was supposed to
- college drop out on arbcom (for those not in the know, arbcom is kind of like an internal court to solve user disputes. They are not allowed to solve content disputes or say what an article should say, only user behaviour problems). How is that a problem? You don't need a degree to mediate user disputes.
(In fairness, the Gibraltar thing they mention was pretty bad)
Wikipedia certainly isn't perfect, but for some reason they chose some of the silliest controversies.
There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of decent editors who have stopped contributing due to toxic, non-productive people. This could be a way for them to continue contributing in a less toxic environment.
The problem with Wikipedia is not consumption of content, but the contribution of content.
Wikipedia has a similar problem to Stackoverflow, though nowhere near as bad, where the active community members really care about rules and have a whole established process and tooling for efficiently dealing with new contributions that don't necessarily meet that bar.
It all sounds utterly reasonable from the point of view of the community, who is most exposed to very low-quality content, spam, and vandalism. But newcomers mostly see a big bureaucratic machine rejecting their first attempt, per compliance with some long established policy whose full printed details could threaten a rainforest.
The problem is the rules are often (not always) there for a reason, and everyone involved has good intentions (assume good faith! you can generally assume good faith!). But it's definitely not always a pleasant experience for new users, and that's not an easy problem.
The problem with this, with Wikipedia specifically is the good faith part.
It isn't adherence to strict rules that is the problem. It's the massively toxic little kingdoms that have become established among power users/moderators.
On the other hand, it is very democratic. With many of the flaws of a democracy,
If you see a kingdom, in principle and in practice the emperor has no clothes. No single person has any special power or ownership over articles. If someone acts that way, you get to tell them what you think of it, if you like, and you'll very much be in the right. And if you are, others should agree and side with you.
There aren't moderators as such, people are supposed to talk to each other, directly. If you don't like how someone seems to act like they own the place, it won't change unless you tell em how you feel!
The thing is people who aren't afraid to give their opinions tend to talk over quieter people. I'm afraid I don't have a very good cure to offer, but please don't feel like anyone's too big of a power-user to have a little respectful, civil chat with. Please, template the regulars! They either respond politely, or they lash out and make an ass of themselves in public.
The problem is the rules apply equally to everyone, but the power users know exactly where the line is and how the bureaucracy works. "The law, in its majestic equality, allows administrators and newcomers alike to revert edits per policy, report 3RR violations, and open AN/I threads about people they don't like"
Except you get mobs forming on AN/I and they allow toxic users to fester. BrownHairedGirl was allowed to fester on the project for years. Innumerable productive members left or were banned as a direct result of her and her supporters.
It's the ancient mass-internet-moderation problem. I have yet to see a system that, even with the best of intentions, is able to do both of the following:
1. Be sufficiently hardened and responsive to mass bad-faith attacks, from trolling to toxicity to coups.
2. Be gentle, welcoming, and patient with newcomers, making it easy to join the community and learn the norms.
Most systems fall somewhere imperfect on the spectrum between the two, with rare exceptions going almost entirely to one extreme or the other.
> There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of decent editors who have stopped contributing due to toxic, non-productive people.
While this is likely true (though not quantifiable), I would add there is also a pattern I've seen play out where somebody gets really into Wikipedia, starts stablishing turf on some subject, goes a little power mad, then gets knocked back by rules designed to keep such people out of power. Said editor then leaves Wikipedia in a huff, and a prolific contributor is lost -- but it's broadly a good thing.
To me the main argument for decentralized wikis is when a community wants to capture deep subject focused knowledge. It's why I created https://wiki.osdev.org. Wikipedia is great but at it's core it will always be an Encyclopedia with a large breadth of knowledge. Specialization in a field is best handled elsewhere with links out from Wikipedia if possible. Especially when there will be original content.
Hyperlinking is all the decentralization you need in some cases. Activitypub for wikis is of interest for people contributing to a collection of specialized knowledge. No one is going to subscribe to all the specialized wikis of the world except maybe search/aggregation systems.
Ultimately though, i still think the existing system works well here.
Wikipedia wants to be a specific thing with a specific scope. Where that line should be is debatable, but it will eventually be drawn somewhere. No matter where you draw it, someone will be on the other side of it.
However, mediawiki is open source. The licenses of content are cc-by-sa (similar to gpl). You can start your own wiki. Similarly licensed content can be moved back and forth if rules change.
Perhaps this is just manual "federation" in a sense, but the ecosystem supports it. I persinally believe this is one of the reasons why mediawiki as an open source project should be a core part of Wikimedia's mission.
Wikipedia's notability requirements in particular are quite arbitrary. It doesn't make sens for an online encyclopedia that isn't limited by physical space restrictions to not document everything. If you must, layer curation of what is notable on top of that.
The main concern Wikipedia has with notability is that if you don't have reputable secondary source writing about the topic, then you won't have references for any claims in the article. People just starting adding things that they know, or that "everyone knows".
When people disagree about content, Wikipedia always falls back to just reflecting what reliable sources says. And if they disagree, people can always collaborate to try to give due weight to both viewpoints.
But if there are no reputable sources that have already written about the subject, articles risk becoming someone's personal blog about their favorite topic. The notability criteria isn't a bar about what's important enough or 'deserves' a Wikipedia page, it's a super practical matter about verifiability, content disputes, and generally just being on solid ground if any claim is challenged.
There are many practical reasons to limit the scope:
* keeping at least minimum quality standards
* avoiding abuse by storing your files disguised as some "knowledge". At some scale the organization is not able to check even for a trivial instance of abuse.
* abuse legal problems by publishing illegal content (again, nobody will be able to do even basic checks if there's no limit)
* if anything goes, you get limited by physical needs like storage
> If you must, layer curation of what is notable on top of that.
Wikipedia is the curation. Store the non-curated data elsewhere.
It could be, in the same way that drinking a cup of tea every morning could make me make rich somehow. Why do you expect a federated system to be better in this respect?
Wikipedia has certainly not solved the problem of getting huge groups of people to get along (especially when the people aren't getting paid and are instead presumably motivated by ideology). However i don't think anyone else has either.
A decentralized wiki with little to no oversight sounds like a significantly more toxic environment to me. All those assholes and bad faith editors will be on your new decentralized network too.
Jimbo essentially moved the whole history of an article elsewhere, and rewrote it. So if you clicked the History on the article, you wouldn't see the prior edits.
It is not appropriate to advertise in most online spaces for much the same reasons it is not appropriate to barge into a restaurant and walk from table to table peddling your wares to the customers. Spam is not an acceptable "business", and discussion spaces are not a plaform for spam.
The problem is that if you get hit with hivemind moderation in M1, then you're likely to see it rated as fair in M2. This is encouraged by the "Troll" and "Flamebait" options which can be slapped on any dissenting opinion.
Moderation is fine, but it must not be confused with censorship.
Moderation is when stuff is filtered out for you, because you don't want to see it. If you got to see it by mistake, you would agree that you didn't want to see that - maybe because it was factually wrong, maybe because it was disgusting, maybe because it was just irrelevant. Doesn't matter. All moderation is justified in terms of what the user wants to see.
Censorship is when someone hides something for you, because they don't want you to see it. Maybe because they're afraid it'll turn you into a racist, or into an idiot, or into a slave of consumerism, whatever. Doesn't matter. All censorship is justified in terms of what it will do to the minds of the recipients.
Now, maybe there are some people who are afraid for their own minds. Who are afraid that they will turn into a racist, if exposed to racist propaganda, for instance. But it can't be many. So there's little actual overlap between moderation and censorship.
The distinction you are trying to make is impossible to make in practice.
I don't want to see holocaust denial bullshit. Others might not have a problem with seeing it. Every sufficiently large space will contain at least one person who wants to post it and is therefore OK with seeing it. Is it moderation or censorship when a space I share with those people decides not to carry such content? The mods may not want to see it, and as it happens I don't want to either, but I've not actually /told/ them I don't want to. They've simply assumed on my behalf.
The same applies to any subject you might pick, no matter how controversial.
There's no per-person per-subject way to opt-in or opt-out that can possibly scale. I don't want to have to supply every online space with an exhaustive list of horrible things I don't want to see; and flagging after the fact doesn't solve this either since I also don't want to see those things even once before I get a chance to express my desire to not see them. Those cookie opt-out boxes with giant lists of vendors that everyone loves to hate? Imagine that but everywhere and for every subject. That's what exhaustively expressing my preferences would look like.
One approach that does scale is to allow the owner of a space to make filtering decisions on my behalf, and if my preferences don't match theirs in a way that is important to me, well, I can go elsewhere or make my own space. This is what we have now. But it's still someone deciding for me what they do not want me to see; they may or may not have my best interests in mind, but in your proposed classification, this is censorship.
Worse, though, some people /really/ want to parade stuff I don't want to see in front of my eyeballs - they believe the problem is that they are simply not shouting loudly, frequently enough, and if they were just allowed to preach to me one more time, I would convert. Compare the person elsewhere in this comments thread arguing for their right do "do business" everywhere currently moderated. Those folk are strongly motivated to make arguments containing combinations of words that will result in their bullshit being paraded in front of my eyeballs yet again. They will try feeding different combinations of syllables to the owner, the moderation team and/or anyone who might exert pressure on them, in the hope of rules being relaxed. One such possible combination of syllables is "This is censorship! I am being censored!" It may even be true, for whatever definition you prefer! Regardless, it will be attempted. For some, it's their hobby and/or job. They devote all available time to doing this. Slow drips of water, given sufficient time, wear down stone. If I don't push back even a little, all spaces I frequent will become filled with content I do not want to see. Is this censorship? Am I a censor?
Personally I see the moderation/censorship divide as one of those irregular verbs English is so full of, conjugated approximately like so: I am making my preferences known; you are moderating; he/she/it is a censor. The "our glorious homeland / their barbarous wastes" image frequently seen on social media is another good analogy for what frequently happens.
At the end of the day, though, call the practice what you will, but despite our best wishes, entirely uncensored spaces do not look like a university agora filled with enlightened folk freely exchanging valuable ideas for the benefit of mankind. They look like 4chan's /b/. I am glad such spaces exist, but I would be very sad indeed if every place on the internet was like that.
In many cases it's easy to make the distinction. Many will not hesitate to admit that they suppress things because of the effect they fear it will have on the audience. Not just the effect it will have on the appeal of the venue, or the image of the company, or whatever.
And I'm not even saying all censorship is necessarily wrong. There's one very obvious case where you keep people from seeing things because you fear the effect it will have on them (which is censorship), but it's generally accepted, and that is when the people in question are children.
Yeah, it's hard to judge people's sincerity. Do you really just worry that your space will be overrun with nazis/terfs/communists because you don't want to see that shit yourself, or are you afraid that they'll convince others? But that doesn't mean the distinction isn't worthwhile. Most of all, it's necessary to apply to yourself. It's a critical question you have to ask yourself, if people trust you to moderate for their benefit.
> Most of all, it's necessary to apply to yourself.
Sure, that sounds like it could be a great principle. It's not what actually happens, though. The terms are loaded weapons, sticks to beat people over the head with; and discourse online trends weaponised. Cries of "censorship" are used as a battering ram to prise open an online space for invasion. When the only difference between an action that is morally acceptable and one that is not is the internal state of mind of the actor, with the case being tried in the court of public opinion, defense is all but impossible.
You did it yourself: "Censorship is when someone hides something for you, because they don't want you to see it." Someone. /They/. That's not a sentence about personal introspection. That's a statement tying a judgement to someone else's actions. He/she/it censors.
- jimbo making CoI edits. He got caught, and edits were reviewed for appropriateness. System worked as it was supposed to
- college drop out on arbcom (for those not in the know, arbcom is kind of like an internal court to solve user disputes. They are not allowed to solve content disputes or say what an article should say, only user behaviour problems). How is that a problem? You don't need a degree to mediate user disputes.
(In fairness, the Gibraltar thing they mention was pretty bad)
Wikipedia certainly isn't perfect, but for some reason they chose some of the silliest controversies.