Discouraging cliques

Cliques form readily in Wikipedia, primarily because editors dislike conflict, and tend to drift towards articles where like-minded editors are writing. Cliques can be good, especially in articles requiring some specialized knowledge, since they serve to keep incompetent editors at bay. But cliques are often undesirable, because they narrow the range of viewpoints expressed in an article, so that the article does not reflect a NPOV. This is an especially acute problem in articles relating, however tangentially, with some kind of ethnic conflict.

Much Wikipedia policy has evolved to discourage cliques. One interesting behavioral guideline is the rule against canvassing. When a community discussion occurs, editors are forbidden from recruiting allies. An editor may inform others of the discussion, but they are obligated to "keep the number of notifications small... , keep the message text neutral, and not preselect recipients according to their established opinions." As it happens, it is relatively easy to locate allies in Wikipedia, because of the custom of installing userboxes on userpages. These small icons may announce, for example, that the user is a "Libertarian", and will attach the category "User: Libertarian" to his userpage. An editor seeking libertarian allies need only go to the category page for "User: Libertarian" to find a long list of potential helpers. For this reason, political userboxes have recently been deprecated.

Here cliques are viewed as a problem because they disrupt community discussions, a realm populated by administrators, where important decisions should be made. At the level of the article, canvassing is not an issue. At the article level, perhaps the most important policy discouraging cliques is that about "ownership." Editors are admonished to avoid taking a proprietary interest in their articles; they are warned that, within reason, they should not prevent others from editing those articles. Thus a clique is not on firm ground when it seeks to discourage editors with dissenting views. Those editors can appeal to an administrator, who would cite the policy regarding ownership and caution the clique that they must not try to control the article. The exceptions would be, as mentioned in an earlier post, those cases where general cultural prejudices would cause the administrator to view the dissenting editor as a rogue with false or even despicable views. The general cultural prejudices most evident on Wikipedia appear to include ethnocentrism, political correctness, and secularism.

Discouraging ownership gives editors another reason to roam from article to article, making minor changes, rather than fully researching an article. No one enjoys the feeling of working weeks on putting an article together, only to see a stranger show up and, with all the right on his side, change the article's structure and meaning. A few experiences like this, and editors will adopt the style of putting only a little effort into many articles, rather than a lot of effort into one. So the policy of discouraging ownership actually tends to amplify the already existing tendency on Wikipedia for editors to make only minor edits--a tendency, as argued earlier, due to the desire of editors to avoid conflict.

Nevertheless, most articles do have owners, who will defend them. It seems even that most articles that manage to improve do so only because a editor has taken on the task of assembling the good edits into a coherent whole, and reverting the bad edits. The lesson from this might be that only some kinds of articles are capable of becoming good articles in Wikipedia: those where cliques are formed on the basis of specialized expertise, where the article content is not likely to be controversial to those with expertise, and where ownership fulfills the function of defending and improving the article.

Cliques

As mentioned in an earlier post, cliques form spontaneously in Wikipedia due to the desire of editors to avoid conflict. Editors will abandon articles where their edits are resisted or reverted and gravitate toward articles where their edits are accepted without much fuss. Thus, most active articles will be worked on by a relatively homogeneous clique of editors. On the one hand this is useful, since the editors are happy and a great deal of work can be done when there is not constant bickering about each contribution. On the other hand it is difficult to achieve a neutral point of view when all contributors are in such happy agreement with each other.

Cliques can form due to special expertise. For example, the editors of game theory articles are likely to be among that small group of people who know something about game theory. Arguably, nothing is served in such articles by bringing in outsiders who know nothing about game theory. So certain articles are well-served by clique structure, since it keeps out the incompetent and the ill-informed. A corollary of this is that, for articles requiring special expertise to edit, a tacit selection process ensures that only the most qualified Wikipedians edit. For one can imagine that if a widely recognized game theorist were to appear and edit on game theory articles, the graduate students and minor academics who had previously done the work would defer to her judgment. For these kinds of articles the model of open access editing is not really harmful: the most qualified editors will eventually form cliques and control editing.

Other kinds of cliques are obviously harmful. The most obvious of these in Wikipedia are ethnic cliques. As mentioned in an earlier post, the hatred of Armenians for Turks has led to some obvious cases of article bias. This bias tends to persist, in part, because Armenian editors receive substantial support from other editors, to the point that editors writing from the Turkish perspective are immediately branded as trolls. The support of editors with names like "John Smith" for Armenians is no doubt due to very deep anti-Turkish prejudices, persisting from Medieval times, prejudices that can be seen in many parts of Christian European culture, such as--for example--the geographical location of the land of Mordor in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings.

One lesson from this example is that cliques are most likely to maintain hegemony over articles when the worldview of the clique jibes well with the prejudices of the contemporary Anglophone world. What are those prejudices? The phrase "political correctness", though a pejorative, captures a broad swath of those prejudices, and one could well predict that cliques with politically correct perspectives are much more likely to maintain hegemony over articles than cliques without those perspectives. The article on Race and intelligence serves as a good example of how an article about politically incorrect scientific research is dominated by a politically correct clique. The point I'm trying to make is that in Wikipedia it is extremely unlikely that this kind of research would be presented except in a politically correct way.

Another group of prejudices center around Laïcité, Secularism, and Science. Many Wikipedians are proud skeptics, and consider themselves the enemy of all superstition. But, as Richard Dawkins notes in his magnificent The God Delusion, religion is privileged in our culture, protected from any criticism or analysis. Thus skeptics tend to avoid articles on recognized religions, and instead to form cliques around articles related to the paranormal. An example would be the article on Electronic voice phenomena, where one of the most notable researchers in that field, Tom Butler, was discouraged from editing by a skeptical clique. Again, the point is that only the skeptics would have the backing from general prejudices to form cliques dominating paranormal articles.

Edit conflict

Edit conflict is perhaps the most unpleasant feature of participating in Wikipedia. Even in the best circumstances--where those concerned try to behave civilly--a conflict can be extremely annoying, as the editors must discuss their actions on a talk page. Back and forth they go, pointing out each other's errors and explaining the fundamental correctness of their own positions. At the end, if an agreement is reached, the number of words and the amount of energy expended on the talk page is many times more than the words and energy expended on the article page. A whole day or two can be spent just to get another sentence into the article. Edit conflict is emotionally draining, it wastes time, and very few editors seem to enjoy it.

Several mechanisms have evolved to help editors avoid edit conflict. First and foremost, there is the effort in Wikipedia to set the cultural environment so that discussions are civil, and to encourage editors to assume good faith. The three-revert rule allows an editor to revert another editor on a given article only three times with 24 hours, and serves to push conflicts to the talk pages. These policies serve to reduce conflict between editors, mostly by forcing discussion on talk pages, and focusing discussion on the article, rather than on the personalities of the editors. But beyond these official policies (which like almost everything in Wikipedia evolved spontaneously from the joint work of editors), several unofficial and largely unrecognized mechanisms have evolved.

One of these mechanisms is the tendency to form cliques. A cluster of related articles will typically be edited by a group of editors with similar interests, who have accepted each other as valid contributors. Even though they may not always agree, they have developed a tolerance and respect towards each other that allows editing to proceed without constant reversion. If an outsider wanders into this cluster of articles and begins to make edits that go against the prevailing norm, he will immediately find himself in conflict with, not one, but a whole clique of editors. The outsider will soon give up in disgust, and go elsewhere, where he fits in better and can himself become a part of a prevailing clique. Cliques are therefore the result of a sorting mechanism, an emergent property created by the desire of individual editors to avoid edit conflict.

While cliques solve one problem, they create another: the informational cascade. The homogeneity of clique members can create a very fragile consensus--fragile because based on a narrow set of information--which would be overturned were other viewpoints considered. In other words, clique control causes articles to be biased. A good example of clique-created bias is the article on the Armenian genocide: the article is entirely from the perspective of the Armenians, and any editor who attempts to explain the Turkish perspective will eventually give up in frustration.

A second unofficial and unrecognized mechanism to avoid edit conflict is the tendency of editors to avoid substantial edits, instead devoting themselves to reverting vandalism, fixing typos, and making minor changes for readability. Very few editors are willing to spend time on research, finding new sources, filling in the untold parts of the story. Even within a clique, big changes in an article require a lot of explaining.

A third mechanism to avoid edit conflict would be creating articles: rather than work on an existing article, create an entirely new one. New articles typically have empty talk pages for many months. So rather than work on that obviously unfinished article about a major figure, create a new article on a minor figure. New articles have the great advantage that they have yet to acquire a clique.

The desire of editors to avoid conflict with other editors can therefore explain many of the features of Wikipedia. It explains the terrific pace at which articles have been created, and it also explains why so many important articles lie about unfinished. It explains why so many good editors have given up writing articles and instead engage in more routine activities such as clearing up vandalism. And, most importantly, it explains why cliques form and take control of certain articles.

Who edits?

One problem with Wikipedia is that editors often know little or nothing about the articles they edit. So even if, ceteris paribus, the collective judgment is superior to an individual judgment, a collective judgment from the completely clueless will not be superior to a judgment from an expert. What one needs is a collective judgment from experts or near-experts.

This is not such a problem on articles that attract little popular attention and that require some relatively rare technical competence for an editor to make any contribution. Articles in mathematics and statistics, and in the hard sciences, generally have few editors, and these are generally quite knowledgeable. But articles on current events, on pop culture, on the softer sciences and history--these articles attract the modal Wikipedia editor, who feels free to make any "improvement" and move on.

Who is the modal Wikipedia editor? Someone who finds life on Wikipedia more fulfilling than life in the real world: someone for whom anonymity and egalitarianism offers an increase in status, someone for whom interaction with other Wikipedians offers an increase in the quality of human relationships--someone whose real life is characterized by subordination and loneliness. The modal Wikipedian is a teenager, alone in his room after school.

To most academics Wikipedia doesn't look like an attractive place to "publish." Journal referees may often make stupid comments, but they are vastly more knowledgeable than the swarm of random editors that snipe at articles in Wikipedia. Dealing with other editors feels a bit like dealing with students, but with the big difference that students are almost always respectful, while Wikipedians, even the really dumb ones (maybe especially the dumb ones), all think they are just as good as anyone else. Anonymity and egalitarianism, for academics, means a loss in status; it is only those with no reputation and of low status who will see status improvement in Wikipedia.

Thus only those with no reputation and low status will have an incentive to participate heavily in Wikipedia. Teenagers, because of their unfortunate position in the life cycle, fall into this group. And teenagers, because of their youth, lack both the experience and the education to have near-expert knowledge in any domain (except, perhaps, popular culture).