Wikilawyering and the bureaucratisation of Wikipedia

Excerpted from Alex Roshuk:

“The problem that I see with the dispute resolution process is not that it weeds out problematic users, but that it does not function to teach these users how to be good volunteers. While I originally suggested in the fall of 2003 that Wikipedia have a structured dispute resolution process, instead of making this process simple and straightforward, ADR at Wikipedia has become a complex system that has all kinds of hard to understand rules.

Perhaps it is the management of this dispute resolution process (or lack thereof) is what has caused or contributed to a lot of Wikipedia users leaving the project and the ripple effect this system has on the general behavior of editors and administrators whose behavior is mediated by this process. As a recent article in the Wall Street Journal has shown there are many individual editors who are leaving Wikipedia. Felipe Ortega, a researcher working at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, feels “Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment … Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again.”

Another study by a group of researchers known as The Augmented Social Cognition Research Group at the Xerox founded PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, which is known for inventing laser printing, the ethernet and the graphical user interface – GUI) suggest that the slowdown in volunteers at Wikipedia may be due to “wiki-lawyering barriers” which have generally been linked to the development of the dispute resolution process. Today in order to be a successful volunteer editor at Wikipedia one must master numerous principles. There are even books available to assist the newbie in this quest.

After seeing the discussion develop at Wikipedia in the fall of 2003 I saw that there were a lot of people who misunderstood the idea of arbitration, They wanted to make it something formal, like a Wikipedia court system, the ArbCom, as it was called became a place where someone could obtain status in the Wikipedia community, originally by being appointed by Mr. James “Jimbo” Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, and later by election. When I suggested this kind of system my intention was to get people to talk, mostly through mediation by a neutral third party, to come to a mutual understanding that editors were all contributing knowledge, not fighting against each other to be “right” or “wrong”. Even though I was given the opportunity to participate in the formal dispute resolution system I opted to remain apart from it and instead to start a voluntary association within Wikipedia called the Association of Members Advocates.

The original idea of this Association was to get volunteers who understood the complexities of the system to help individuals who had disputes and to help them understand the dispute resolution system and assist them to get through these disputes so that they could remain valuable contributors. Our belief was that all volunteers should be encouraged to learn how to contribute and not be driven away from Wikipedia by legalities. As a Wikipedia group were were the first group to have a democratic election amongst our members that actually occurred on the Wikipedia talk pages. The organization existed for several years and I tried to help it continue, and I felt it did assist users in understanding dispute resolution at Wikipedia but finally a group of administrators “deleted” the organization, i.e. refused to allow Wikipedians to use the talk pages to help people understand the dispute resolution process!!! There were people who criticized it and wrongly stated, in my opinion, that the organization was bureaucratic, unhelpful and prone to wikilawyering. I couldn’t disagree more, we had very little structure, many of the people who used our services stated they were significantly helped in understanding dispute resolution better and most of our volunteers were not involved in arbitration, but mostly mediation, as most disputes were solved on that level. I think the reason it was closed was because it was a threat to those who wanted the dispute resolution system to be complex and difficult to navigate so that newbies would lose and long time contributors could use it to buttress their position within the community. Today there are dozens of “associations” that have copied the basic structure that I first established for having a group within Wikimedia and they debate all kinds of issues such as “inclusionism” and “exclusionism” but do little to change the difficulties that have developed in editing Wikipedia or provide support for people who wish to contribute by find the rules to daunting and complex to the point of absurdity.

After starting the Association of Members Advocates and trying to develop a group of volunteers I left the organization to allow others to run it, and partly because the volunteers could not find anyone else to run the organization it shut down — there was no one left to defend it. I also left Wikipedia and Wikimedia at the end of 2006 after a decision was made to change the organization from a membership to an elite organization run by people mostly appointed by those who started it and continued to control it. I personally became frustrated by the cult-like jargon of Wikipedians, the trite slogans that would be repeated by people who disagreed with someone and refused to discuss real issues, the lack of basic common sense on many levels that I repeatedly experienced, and the obvious wish to use the money that I and other Wikipedians helped raise to fuel staff who were not interested in working with volunteers since they were “professionals” being paid to “run” the Wikimedia Foundation. How ironic that the one thing of value that Wikipedia has, volunteers, are being driven away by institutional forces. I seen this before Wikipedia in other successful organizations, it is easy for people with money to loose sight of their origins.”

3 Comments Wikilawyering and the bureaucratisation of Wikipedia

  1. AvatarFred Bauder

    I was one of the original arbitrators. Our experience with members advocates is that they were seldom helpful in developing evidence, framing issues, or even assisting their clients. Whether that was lack of skill or uncooperative clients is not clear, but typically the advocate only argued in a sterile way that what their client was obviously doing should not be considered a problem, essentially, that we should not decide the case or impose any effective remedy. Pretty much a nonstarter as we would not have accepted the case if there was not a problem.

    We try to not multiply rules, in fact, there really is only rule: Build an information resource. From that all else follows.

  2. AvatarMarkusPetz

    Wikipedia is a large project with many humans involved. As a human construct it is not the most efficient. there will be mistakes and cultural aspects that are not particularly nice nor favorable. In my experience these are getting in the way of people expressing what they know.

    For example when I know from original research something is not right I am not allowed to say that!!!
    published resources seem to always be the most uptodate reference. Why not original sources? Also it varies between articles if popular press or academic journals are the preferred source.

    It seems that in the English and French and Finnish wikipedia – those who write stuff with references not in those languages have their work dismissed – a stupid policy that academia and newspapers don’t follow so why should wikipedia?

    Lastly something I have found particularly problematic is that we have to say what we are aiming at and what our bias is. Now I am aiming at adding casual facts that I come across that are missing or are wrong. And when researching or I know about something familiar to me that I can add the info in. Yet the cultural assumption is taht I have an agenda, without one I cannot fit the angle they want and so do not register.

  3. AvatarAlex Roshuk

    A lot of what goes on at Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation today is not about volunteer editors creating an useful website, it is about politics, power and influence. I was offered one of those arbitrator positions by Jimbo Wales that Mr. Bauder accepted and I turned it down. Why? Because I saw the real need as trying to help people understand a process that quickly went out of control. The “advocates” were supposed to help people understand the dispute process, not become wikilawyers which is what many of the arbitrators became. They were not trained legally like Mr. Fred Bauder or myself. Some of them might have acted like lawyers, but that was not within their role as advocates, which was to help an individual editor facing arbitration behind the scenes assistance to understand the process better.

    I do not think Mr. Bauder or his arbitration committee ever systematically examined what advocates did. Why did so many editors thank us for the help we gave them in resolving their cases? The arbitration committee never “liked” the Members Advocates association because it was not “official” i.e. blessed by Jimbo Wales. We never sought such blessing nor wanted it. We were a freely organized association that had fundamental democratic principles, something that threatened a lot of people at Wikipedia and Wikimedia.

    The reason the advocates association was closed down, in my opinion, was because we refused to be part of the “gang”. We, as a group, wanted to be independent of all the Wikipedian hierarchy, that was something that threatened a lot of people. The reality is that Wikipedia is mostly controlled by people who have agendas and not just individuals who are interested in contributing information. The rhetoric of “all the world’s knowledge for free” is just that, rhetoric. No encyclopedia can be all embracing, any conversion of knowledge to information will be incomplete, it is always a rendering of opinions about what is important and what is not.

    It is easy for Mr. Bauder to suggest advocates did not help their “clients” at the end point of the dispute resolution process. He only saw the hard cases, the ones that could not get resolved. He is also imposing a lawyers model on dispute resolution, one that I feel is erroneous. Our whole focus at the Members’ Advocates association was to foster dialogue, conciliation, and advocacy not to try and create a legal system within Wikipedia which is what I feel most, of not all of the arbitrators within Wikipedia have been trying to do. Why? Because it is their little part of history, their link to the famous “God-King” Jimbo Wales, the ascendence of the great wiki encyclopedia that will one day be looked upon as the greatest encyclopedia project ever undertaken by the human race (this is where you get teary eyed and start coughing). Really if you look through Wikipedia projects today you see a lot of misinformation and opinions in Wikipedia entries that have not been challenged through the dispute resolution process. The “superstructure” of Wikipedian volunteerism has become too overbearing, too confusing and in some cases just stupid because of many volunteers who are not contributing knowledge to Wikipedia but are involved in “creating” a non-existent community. There is no Wikipedia community, it is just a public relations ploy by the corporate types (yes even the non-profit world has corporatism) that have taken over the organization as a means to obtain money and fame. Today Wikipedia is more about fund raising, public relations and repeating the party platform that about an open source collaboration between people. I would say it has become an open source collaboration against people of all kinds for them benefit of certain groups. This is a reason a lot of women and elderly people refuse to participate.

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