Wikipedia's Awkward Adolescence
Like a startup maturing into a real business, Wikipedia's corporate culture seems conflicted between its role as a harmless nouveau-digital experiment and its broader ambitions.
Wed, September 26, 2007
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As Wikipedia ages, its editors increasingly write in a bureaucratic patois thick with internal jargon and acronyms, making it difficult to decipher the rationale for their decisions. The webpage discussing the suitability of Salon as a source for Wikipedia articles tosses around terms such as BLP (Biographies of Living Persons), WP:RS (Wikipedia: Reliable Sources), WP:AGF (Wikipedia: Assume Good Faith), or WP:RfAr—the ominous-sounding "Wikipedia: Requests for Arbitration," also described as "the last step of dispute resolution on Wikipedia."
WP:RfAr turns out to be a misnomer, because articles can go on probation. When this happens, Wikipedia cautions that "[Editors] of such articles should be ESPECIALLY mindful of content policies, such as WP:NPOV, etc. and interaction policies, like WP:CIVIL and WP:NPA" (respectively, Neutral Point of View, Civility, and [Personal] Attacks). Perhaps Carr had this acronym soup in mind when he said, "For the best management analogy to the current model [of management for Wikipedia], you'd probably have to go to Kafka."
The power to edit has also led some editors to abuse that power through sockpuppetry—assuming a second, clandestine identity—which they then use to support their own point of view on a page. Wikipedia's incidents page lists some sock puppet incidents. The discussions of these incidents tend to devolve into fine-grained disputes on the details, leaving an outsider wondering if the real-world implications of such abuse of power are lost on Wikipedia's administrators.
Sock puppets, spy-versus-spy hijinks, and super-secret-vocabularies may be fine for a short-term experiment in information management; but Wikipedia positions itself not as a free encyclopedia, but the free encyclopedia. A FAQ claims, "We want Wikipedia to be around at least a hundred years from now, if it does not turn into something even more significant," and Wikipedia's fundraising page asks potential donors to "Imagine a world in which every single person can share freely in the sum of human knowledge." (They accept PayPal, all major credit cards and personal checks.)
The significance of Wikipedia and its role as the encyclopedia was not lost on Turkish historian Taner Akcam, who according to news reports was detained at the Trudeau Airport in Montreal for more than three hours in February 2007 because security officers suspected him of terrorism based on a vandalized biographical page on Wikipedia, now "semi-protected from editing."
