It really is worthwhile.

I've been on WP nearly five years, and I remember how much I struggled when I first arrived not to spend too much time here. Editors would joke about how easy it was to get sucked into this world, and how one could even end up editing even while sitting on the toilet.

I avoided the obsession, though I had a few weeks where I checked my watchlist more often than I should have. But I wonder if it was really right to have avoided the obsession. What I mean is, if I had given in to the obsession, what would that have done to me? I would have known a lot more, about many topics, than I know now. I would have had a lot more encounters with a diverse crowd of people (more diverse than those I meet in the real world), who would have exposed themselves more fully than most people I meet in the real world. In other words, I would have lived more fully.

This place really is worthwhile.

Real Estate

Wikipedia is an old, upscale neighborhood, and everyone wants in. When I look at the quality of the editors on topics that formerly languished, such as Race and Intelligence, I'm amazed--these are very well-read people, with good judgment, and with the determination to fight back against those who disagree with them.

I think this shows WP's maturity. Previously, political correctness was enough for articles such as Race and Intelligence, but now something more is required--a sensitivity to the arguments from all sides, an ability to discern who is making the most cogent arguments, and a willingness to let the other side express itself even when one fully disagrees.

The change is most likely due to a change in personnel. WP has become so solid and well-established that it has attracted some very solid and well-established people. Some of these are probably academics, but most are intelligent dilettantes. Bien venidos!!

My students use WP more than ever, and their presentations/papers are much better than they were three years ago. When I look at WP articles that I haven't edited, I am almost always struck by the high quality of those articles. Of course, when I look at articles where I've fought over content, I'm always disappointed. Allowing for my personal biases, I have to concede that progress has occurred. To the whole WP team (or maybe "swarm" would be the better word): keep it up!

Lots of problems

Lots of problems; all recognized, many times, by others:

1. Administrators think they are better than everyone else (you ever hear an admin apologize?). But most of them are just unemployed people with lots of time on their hands.
   
2. With today's tools, even a moron can make a huge number of edits each day. Problem is, the morons do exactly that.
3. The mass of editors are unsophisticated, unable to understand that the worldview they and their friends hold is pretty much limited to newspaper readers in Anglo-America.
   
4. The policy on sources is absurd: journalists are considered good sources, but they use much lower quality sources than what would be accepted on WP. As if the average journalist is a good filter for information quality!
5. The average editor thinks of WP as a mass of weeds that needs to be hacked, not as a garden that should be grown.

This last one seems especially important. When WP first started out, the emphasis was on creating content. Over time, lots of content appeared, and problems with some of that content became obvious (some was created by self-interested editors, some was not really notable, etc.). As new editors came in, they were not confronted with a wonderful blank space to be filled, but with an enormous mass of articles that--according to prevailing wisdom--contained problems. So, as is only natural, they approached WP with an attitude entirely disrespectful of the work that had been done by the first wave of editors. This second wave of editors might perform a valuable role, but I doubt it--a critical attitude is only legitimately adopted by superior people, and the second wave does not appear to be superior in any important way to the first.

Speeding up

There's been a bit of discussion lately about why so many editors are leaving the project. Here's one possible reason: the editing tools have become too powerful. Many of the more inferior editors appear to pride themselves on the number of edits they make, and these powerful tools allow them to vastly increase their rate of "productivity." What kind of quality can one expect from an editor who dashes madly about, making hundreds of edits a day? What kind of edit can one expect from an editor who is just spending seconds on each "contribution"? Mostly what one sees are reverts or deletions, since adding content takes a fair amount of time.

By and large, deletionists don't write articles--their primary activity is to delete the work of other people, and they do this not out of principle, but simply because this is the fastest way they can increase their edit count. Deletion is not in itself bad, but it is bad when done without sufficient thought. In most cases, thinking over a bad piece of text will enable an editor to rewrite it. WP's improvement requires thoughtful rewriting, not frantic deletion.

It would be nice to see a change in attitude toward edit counts--if there were a bit of a stigma to generating hundreds of edits a day, the deletionists would become a much weaker force on WP.

It belongs to everyone

Wikipedia is a commons, the property of us all. It's like the city park that, as Jane Jacobs observed, because it belongs to everyone, belongs to no one. People who have nothing better to do drift into the park: the unemployed, the drunk, the homeless. Respectable people scurry quickly through, and because they don't feel a sense of ownership, they don't speak up and reprimand those who behave in antisocial ways.

Wikipedia is like that city park, in that anyone can show up, but most people have something better to do. Editors who spend all day long at Wikipedia, accumulating hundreds of edits a day, are fairly common. These cannot have jobs, cannot have families, cannot even have many dates. Try to visualize these editors and an image appears of a middle-aged guy living in his parents' garage.

Not a problem, except victory in Wikipedia always belongs to the most persistent. In a dispute, people with real responsibilities will state their case and then give up if it looks like a long struggle is ahead. People with a lot of time on their hands can thus often get their way, and can easily manage to become a real pest without actually falling afoul of the rules.

Academic Freedom

Most Wikipedia editors are clueless about academic freedom. Like the common run of folks, they believe that an academic should be busy producing insights that confirm what all of us already know. Their reaction to an academic whose work has unveiled uncomfortable truths is one of distaste, repulsion, condemnation. Perhaps the best example would be that of historians specializing in the late Ottoman Empire, historians such as Justin McCarthy. McCarthy, a demographer able to read the Ottoman archives, has examined changes in local populations during the last years of the empire, and has supplied substantive numbers to the claims and counterclaims of ethnic cleansing and massacres during that period. His conclusions are not to the taste of those who maintain that there was an "Armenian Genocide." How is McCarthy treated on Wikipedia? By being formally categorized as an "Armenian Genocide Denier." I'm not making this up, take a look.

The Ottoman historians are not alone. Hostile editors edit articles on other academics working on controversial issues. A good example is Richard Lynn, an IQ researcher who has become a leading expert on between-group IQ differences. His work is extremely politically incorrect, but its quality compares favorably with that of his more politically correct peers. A decent article on Lynn has eventually emerged on Wikipedia, but it took a long time, and lots of struggle.

A final example would be that of Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who spent his career examining cases of children who appear to remember details of past lives. His findings give mild support to the existence of reincarnation, a result not at all to the liking of skeptics, who are imbued with the unshakable faith that reincarnation can not possibly exist. Stevenson's article, as well as the related article on "reincarnation research", have been turned into pages where obscure journalists are cited to buttress claims that this research is "pseudo-science". Problem is, Stevenson's team has produced the only scientific work on reincarnation, so it boggles the imagination how those defenders of science--the skeptics--are able to announce that science disagrees with his findings.

In the long run, we are all dead

The Classical school of political economy holds the view that recessions are short-lived and self-correcting. When a recession occurs, some labor and capital falls idle. According to the Classicals, these idle factors of production react by accepting employment at a lower price; factor prices continue to fall until firms have willingly hired all "surplus" factors. Thus, unemployment (of capital and labor) automatically ends, through the mechanism of falling factor prices--a mechanism requiring no government intervention.
John Maynard Keynes famously disagreed with the Classical view, arguing that factor prices are "downwardly rigid"--they do fall when factors are idle, but reluctantly and slowly. "In the long run," Keynes acknowledged, falling factor prices would eliminate the recession, "but in the long run, we are all dead." In other words, the self-correcting mechanism works too slowly to be useful.
This is also the problem with the eventualist view of Wikipedia. Sure, given enough editors, articles will eventually evolve toward something fair and balanced, but the problem is that eventually can be a very long time. Too long to be useful.
Some parts of Wikipedia move towards excellence much faster than others. A sophisticated user of Wikipedia understands this, and has learned which parts are worthy of trust and which parts should best be avoided. The problem is that the average user of Wikipedia is not sophisticated--she is a high school student or college student, looking up a topic about which she knows next to nothing. That the topic may eventually have a good article is not much consolation to the student who is imbibing misinformation today. And it is certainly no consolation to her teacher, who will continue to ban Wikipedia as a legitimate source for research papers.

Clique cohesion requires an enemy

Wikipedia editors are by and large too individualistic to stick together in cliques. Even in situations where several editors work together on an article, there is not likely to be full agreement and editors must learn to accept that others approach the topic differently. It's not much fun to make big compromises, and most editors prefer to work on articles where they can make edits unhindered by the need to accommodate others.

Cohesion in a clique requires a force to counteract the friction of working with others. That force is usually ideological, though personal ties reinforce the ideological. A clique will form with the intent of protecting territory from an enemy. A sense of in-group and out-group develops. The out-group is seen to have reprehensible beliefs or to belong to a reprehensible segment of the population. The clique requires an enemy, and will assign that role to almost any editor who enters their territory, imputing to this stray editor the worst of motives.

In such cliques, there is not likely to be much agreement beyond the agreement that the enemy must be kept from the territory. The pages protected by a clique will be badly written and full of erroneous information. The reason for the low quality is not the constant attacks of the enemy, but rather that the clique controlling the territory is unable to organize itself for the task of article writing. In fact, the members of the clique might not know much about the subject of the pages they are defending, since ideological fervor is often a sign that one does not understand the full complexity of an issue (an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect).

The ability of the clique to control territory is based upon the willingness of clique members to back each other up in an edit dispute. In Wikipedia, of course, edit disputes are over content, so there is always an argument about content at the surface of a dispute. Clique members have the illusion that they have won a dispute because they were correct about content, when in fact they have only won because of their numbers and their cohesiveness. Arguments over content are likely to be repeated whenever a new editor wanders into their territory, and the clique finds its arguments more compelling each time they are repeated (an "availability cascade"). Trust simultaneously strengthens among the members, as each sees that the others, again and again, back them up. Cliques thus can become stronger over time.

Cliques can usually stay within the boundaries of the rules. A numerical advantage allows it to out-revert the solitary editors who oppose them, and the ease with which the clique wins content disputes helps its members stay calm and civil. Solitary editors in conflict with the clique are more likely to run afoul of the rules, reverting too often or exploding with frustration and saying uncivil things. As the rules currently stand, cliques are not often threatened by administrators.

Cliques are a special form of the "ownership" problem on Wikipedia. One proposal I've seen is that all of the editors active on an article or its talk pages can be asked to leave (for several months), opening up the article to a new set of editors. For this to work, a rule must determine when an article hits a state that all of the active editors must go elsewhere. It must be a simple rule, requiring little research on the part of the administrator, so that it cannot be contested--like the 3RR rule.

Free riding in Wikipedia

Axelrod and Hamilton (1981) showed that a winning strategy in prisoner's dilemma games is tit-for-tat; that is, one should start out behaving cooperatively, and then on every subsequent move simply match what the other agent did in her previous move. This strategy, however, describes only 2-person, repeated games. In games where multiple agents interact with each other, even a small number of defectors will prompt the conditional cooperators to also defect, so that the game moves to an equilibrium of no cooperation. Thus, the model cannot explain how cooperation persists in groups with multi-agent interactions.

Experimental games have shown that cooperation can be maintained when defectors are punished. But since punishment is costly to the punisher, it would be rational for a player to let others punish the defectors--these rational players are called second-order free riders (since they are free riding by letting others punish free riders). Without rewards for the punishers, or punishment for the second-order free riders, no punishment of defectors will occur.

Panchanathan and Boyd (2003) have shown that reputation works well in models as the reward sought by punishers, who gain in reputation by helping the deserving (those with good reputations) and punishing the undeserving (those with bad reputations--i.e., persistent defectors). The ultimate reward of reputation is that others willingly cooperate with them. The reputation model requires that agents know each other's reputations, which is only realistic in small groups.

Second-order free riding is a common problem on Wikipedia. One often encounters editors who appear to be doing something wrong: inserting a strange point-of-view; moving pages without discussion; deleting good work done by others. But it is costly to battle these people. Conflict itself is unpleasant, and one is likely to break some rules when in a conflict. If an administrator observes the broken rule she is unlikely to have the time to look back at the history of the conflicting parties and figure out who is the rogue and who is the guardian, and she will simply punish whoever broke the rules. What she lacks is ready access to information on the reputations of the parties in conflict.

A mechanism to record and update reputation would encourage good editors to oppose the actions of bad editors--it would reduce the problem of second-order free riding, and make it more difficult for rogue editors to get their way.

1. Axelrod, Robert, and William D. Hamilton. 1981. “The Evolution of Cooperation.” Science 211: 1390-1396.
2. Panchanathan, K., and R. Boyd. 2003. “A tale of two defectors: the importance of standing for evolution of indirect reciprocity.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 224:115-126.

Tempers boiling!

Disputes are easy to enter. One can very easily lose sight of Wikipedia as a place one writes an encyclopedia, and instead view Wikipedia as the place one fights back against aquel pendejo. There are two psychological phenomena apparently responsible for this problem.

Tit for tat: Game theory has established that the strategy most likely to help a social organism pass on its genes is one of tit-for tat. Start out cooperating with other people, but if they fail to cooperate then immediately switch to their behavior. In Wikipedia, when an editor refuses to hear our comments, we respond by refusing to hear their comments. After a few exchanges, there is no longer any realistic chance for dialog, since the initial exchanges have created a pair of editors who don't want to cooperate with each other.

A major problem with tit-for-tat is that the anger and hostility created by one non-cooperative encounter is likely to be carried on to the next encounter. If an editor has proved to be a real pain, then we are primed to consider that the next editor we meet will also prove to be a big pain. We are ready to drop into non-cooperative behavior at the first provocation.

Self-serving assessments: We are fairly accurate at determining the biases and errors of others, but much less accurate at identifying our own biases (Epley and Dunning 2000). Each editor in a dispute will be very conscious of the misbehaviors and errors of the others, but not conscious of her own. This has an evolutionary advantage in that we can convincingly present ourselves to other people as virtuous, and gain their acceptance as desirable partners in reciprocal relationships--we are convincing because we believe the story ourselves. At the same time, it is also to our advantage to assess correctly the suitability of others as partners, so we are not so biased when it comes to looking at other people.

The problem here is that few editors have the insight to understand that they are partially at fault: most will perceive that the fault lies overwhelmingly on the other side. And even if both have this insight, confessing that one is at fault is a good example of the prisoners' dilemma. If both editors can admit that they are at fault, then the conflict can quickly end and cooperation begin. If only one editor admits that she is at fault, then the other will emerge victorious in the conflict, so the one who admits fault is in a bad situation. To avoid this bad situation, both editors will deny that they are at fault.

• Epley, and Dunning. 2000. Feeling "holier than thou": Are self-serving assessments produced by errors in self- or social prediction? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 79(6): 861-875.

Laziness

Lots of editors are just plain lazy. The last thing they intend to do is to look up sources. If they look up sources, they use Google and find something on-line. But even that is usually too much trouble. Even writing is too much trouble. Even reading is too much trouble. So what's left? Opinions, expressed on a talk page. Deletions of someone else's work. Pasting tags: POV, DELETE, whatever. These editors aren't trolls, but they are slackers. And like slackers in a college class, you just want to give them an F and send them home. But you can't, of course, and you have to waste your own energy countering their opinions, reverting their edits, and teaching them policy.

Wikipedia is full of friction. This is not a gang of enthusiastic boy scouts eagerly working together to put up camp. This is a bunch of eccentric strangers each trying to do things their own way. Interaction between editors is seldom efficient team work. One seldom hears, "I'll take care of this, and you do that!" Instead one hears, "What exactly do you think you are doing?", followed by a day of exchanges on a talk page. It's best to avoid other editors, they are either trolls or slackers, they just slow you down, they just cause friction.

But who would want to be here if there were no other editors? Isn't the problem with Citizendium that it's just too lonely? Other editors are friction, sure, but they are also the reason we come here, to participate with a community doing something worthwhile. And since we are all eccentric strangers, we don't pull together in harness in the same direction. Friction is inevitable.

The evolved rules help reduce friction. Trolls are beasts that generate way too much friction, and the rules have evolved to force out the incorrigibly trollish, and to make the rest of us suppress our trollish natures. Slackers generate friction too, but the rules don't appear to touch them.

I would like to see, not a formal rule, but a norm, that anyone who complains that an article is unbalanced has the obligation to do something about it. This wouldn't apply so much to someone who notices an objectively evident problem (for example, that the article lacks citations), but would apply full force to people who delete large sections of an article because they object to its POV, or paste POV tags on an article. A norm like this would reduce the friction caused by slackers.

Irrational exuberance

Stock markets are one of the most obvious examples of the "Wisdom of Crowds." The efficient market hypothesis holds that the current price of a stock reflects all available information, that any changes in a stock's price can only come from information that is unavailable, and that therefore no one can predict changes in a stock's price from available information. The most important piece of information, of course, is the current and future earnings of the stock-issuing firm.

In the 1990s, stock investors became markedly more optimistic about stocks, without really encountering much in the way of new information. Alan Greenspan famously described this a a period of "irrational exuberance". The crowd--not as wise as one would have hoped--succeeded in creating a stock bubble, which eventually popped.

In Wikipedia, one can encounter editors who are possessed with what may be described as "irrational exuberance." For example, an editor who engages in a months-long battle with other editors over something as trivial as the renaming of a page, writing hundreds of talk page comments, provoking other editors to respond with even more comments, and eventually winning, because the other editors have finally given up waging such a pointless battle.

Monomania can be rewarded in Wikipedia, in that someone absurdly devoted to a particular issue can get his way. Nevertheless, the monomaniac can only win if the issue has no devoted partisans on the other side, and in practice this means that he can win only if the issue is relatively trivial. And the monomaniac can only win for a short time. As soon as he grows tired of Wikipedia and leaves for other interests, his work will be reverted, since new editors will find it so out of tune with the prevailing view.

Telling the teacher

In elementary school the teacher is an all-powerful enforcer, who interprets the rules of the school, and metes out reward and punishment. When children encounter conflict they turn to this enforcer, they "tell the teacher." There is some opprobrium associated with tattling, so it is considered only a last resort, and chosen only by the loser in a conflict, after peers have refused to rally to his side.

Wikipedia is celebrated as an anarchy, where it is possible to ignore rules, and where everything should be settled by consensus among reasonable editors. Nevertheless, these editors all came up through elementary schools, and all have learned the tactic of telling the teacher when they feel unfairly used. The analogue of the teacher in Wikipedia is the administrator, and these must constantly lend an ear to the complaints of the insecure and the marginalized.

In fact, administrators can't do much. A conflict takes time to develop, and may be spread over many pages; the users all have a background, providing context for the conflict, spreading over many more pages. A just appraisal of a conflict requires too much work, and no one is interested in a conflict to which they have not been a party.

But, on the other hand, users appeal regularly to administrators, and it seems wrong to simply ignore the appeal. There are a few rules that provide a clean way to assign guilt to a user, without requiring an administrator to study background material: the three-revert rule, and rules against threats, especially legal threats. Violate one of these rules, and the case is immediately decided; otherwise, the case is more murky, and the administrator's most sensible response is to say, in diplomatic terms, "don't be a crybaby, learn to get along with other children."

A system like Wikipedia needs a few rules whose violation leads to near-certain punishment. A good system of rules relies on a very narrow set of information: detection of violators should require reading only a small amount of text, and should require no effort to interpret what the user really meant. Violating these rules should function as a tripwire, leading to automatic punishment. Most of the worst species of trolls are weeded out with these tripwire rules.

Such rules create an environment in which a certain kind of troll has evolved: a troll who appears to be polite, but who edits aggressively, who is a master of subtle tactics of obfuscation and obstruction, and whose polite comments often appear to their recipients as thinly veiled taunts. Never in violation of the tripwire rules, this kind of troll flourishes in Wikipedia, and can only be detected by the subjective and laborious task of reading his posts and interpreting his meaning--a task that no administrator is willing to take on.

Gresham's Law

"Bad money drives out good," is an adage ascribed to Sir Thomas Gresham, who pointed out that valuable coins were hoarded by anyone so lucky as to receive them, while debased coins were spent, so that only the debased coins remained in circulation.

The adage applies also to any kind of intellectual exchange, such as academic email lists or Wikipedia, and can be expressed in this context as "bad contributors drive out good." I once participated on an email list populated by radical economists, some quite famous. For the first year or so, lurking on the list was one of the highlights of my life, much like sitting in a conference and listening to what those really shaping the field really thought. But very soon, some less famous people began to post, and post frequently. By the second year, it seemed that every third post was from the same graduate student, who had an opinion about everything and couldn't wait to share it. The famous economists fell silent, and then the less-famous but still lucid ones began to disappear, and finally the graduate student had the list all to himself.

My local newspaper allows its online readers to write comments on its articles, a feature that it calls a readers' forum. Very few of the readers are gentlemen or scholars, though, and the average contribution is an angry vent about illegal aliens, government officials, Muslims, or other people's children. Much of the commentary, perhaps the majority of it, takes as its target other commentators, rather than the content of the news article. The comments do have some value, in that they show how some people think in private, and there is also the rare post where someone actually adds information to the article, or provides a lucid analysis. But these rare posts are rare precisely because of Gresham's Law: the bad contributors drive out the good. Why are they driven out? Partly, no doubt, because the audience of other contributors is so obviously indifferent to intelligent discourse, but also because the usual standards of civility do not prevail here--one is in the world of the mob, where barbaric insult is piled on barbaric insult for no other reason than to get a rise out of another commentator. These commentators are trolls, and trolls drive out people looking for intelligent discourse.

Wikipedia has problems of bad editors driving out good. In the first of his laws, Raul maintains that, of the "...highly dedicated users who have left, the vast majority left as a result of trolls, vandals, and/or POV warriors." Since dedicated users are Wikipedia's main resource, he concludes that "...such problem users should be viewed as Wikipedia's biggest handicap." But compared to the anarchy of the newspaper forum, Wikipedia is a highly structured environment, replete with rules designed to ensure that all editors behave civilly, and avoid any personal attacks. As part of this effort, there is a rule that the talk pages focus on the articles rather than on the personalities of the editors. When followed, these rules guarantee that the level of discourse will stay high enough to attract intelligent contributors. When the rules are not followed, there are real sanctions--the violator is banned, at least temporarily.

Nevertheless, Wikipedia will always suffer from problems with trolls, because of two of its features: unrestricted entry of contributors, and contributor anonymity. Unrestricted entry brings in unworthy people--those who are uninformed, uncivil, or both--and anonymity emboldens people to behave in ways they would never behave were they using their real name. Citizendium has sought to remove these two features, and therefore provides a better environment for the highly qualified contributor, but has run into a different problem. That is that the rate of progress (in terms of article creation and improvement) is much higher with unrestricted entry. Perhaps Citizendium is too lonely a place, and therefore not attractive, even to the highly qualified. But perhaps the swarm of random Wikipedia editors does manage to do some good, as long as their work is shaped a bit by a smaller core group of competent editors.

It seems, then, that the best wiki structure is one in which large numbers of people edit, but rules are structured so as to readily identify and discourage troll-like behavior, and a core group of dedicated editors are able to exert a great deal of influence. Wikipedia has all of these features: anonymity and free entry help bring in large numbers of users; rules have evolved to drive out trolls; and a Wikipedia elite, both formally designated and informally acknowledged, shapes policy and content.

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).

The evolution of Wikipedia

On my Wikipedia user page, I have a short statement of faith in the veracity and usefulness of Wikipedia:

James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds, begins with Francis Galton's anecdote about an ox-weighing contest at a country fair: for a half-shilling, one could purchase a ticket on which to write an estimate of the slaughtered and dressed weight of a displayed living ox. The ticket with the guess closest to the actual weight would win a prize. Galton found that the mean of all guesses was in fact more accurate than the best guess, even though the guessers included livestock experts. This is a good illustration of the fact that a collective judgment may often be more correct than the judgment of any individual expert — something which appears to be true in financial markets, for example.
Wikipedia is a mechanism for producing collective judgments about the accuracy and importance of factual statements. I think this makes Wikipedia very exciting — any statement placed in Wikipedia is immediately subject to review and revision, and if everyone is animated by the same sense of trying to achieve truth, the text can quite rapidly evolve to something accurate and balanced.

But is this faith well-placed? Do articles always or even usually "evolve to something accurate and balanced"? What are some of the mechanisms skewing articles toward falsehood and bias? What institutions (policies, traditions) have spontaneously emerged to mitigate these problems of falsehood and bias? I hope to address questions such as these in this blog.