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  On the Radar:  An Occasional Newsletter on Wikipedia's Challenges

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"Comments?" links go to OtR's own talk page, not those of the original news-item sources.

Archive of older stories

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See User:SMcCandlish/On the Radar for current items.
  • Wikipedia co-founder on WP's flaws – and potential replacement? (SMcCandlish, 2 June 2018)
Update: Larry Sanger, who helped start Wikipedia (as Nupedia in 2000) but left the project in 2002, has elaborated quite a bit on his earlier examination of WP's flaws. They're laid out, as background material, in an April 2018 announcement of a blockchain-based encyclopedia project, provisionally named Everipedia, which would subsume WP's own content as well as introduce lots more. Read the detailed whitepaper version or the short summary version – or both, since they're not 100% consistent.

This is an idea that could actually grow legs (even accounting for all the blockchain hype that's going around). The idea is to open-source online encyclopedia writing even further, with a real-value reward structure, expert and public review, directly competing articles in a marketplace of content, and the writing/publishing process decoupled from the centralized control of a single community and its rules. The primary question to my mind is: How could quality be ensured, if no particular policies applied? A truly unfettered marketplace of ideas and "information" produces populist, falsehood-mired dreck (e.g., fake news, everything you see on 4Chan and Facebook, the History Channel converting into an aliens and ghosts conspiracy network, and that planet-sized morass of bullshit we call the blogosphere, as just a few obvious examples). Still, I'm curious where this is supposed to be heading. And, since there's to be a compensation mechanism, do I get paid out by Everipedia's blockchain for my 100,000+ WP edits here when they get imported into Everipedia, or does some script kiddie cash in on more than a decade of my work when she runs a few lines of code to copy a zillion WP articles into the new system? Kinda matters. Also: calling it anything-pedia is likely to fail; that namespace is already glutted. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:50, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

  • Original 11 November 2015 story ("Wikipedia's Co-founder Is Its Biggest Critic", Zach Schwartz, Vice magazine): Sanger said in a [then-]recent interview, "I think Wikipedia never solved the problem of how to organize itself in a way that didn't lead to mob rule", and that since he left the project, "People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum." Not an idle concern?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  09:07, 19 November 2015‎ (UTC)  
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Far-right billionaire investors the Koch brothers – who have a long history of media manipulation – have been using sockpuppets (via an intermediary PR firm, Meredith Corporation, to whitewash on Wikipedia. Koch, through Meredith, is now buying out Time Inc., publisher of Time magazine and other major publications. This may ultimately impact the reliability (or perception of reliability) of them as sources.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  03:02, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
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"Wikipedia:Nations and Wikipedia" is a new meta page to accumulate and help organize ways nations/governments and Wikipedia interact and for the Wikipedia community to establish relevant policies and guidelines."
This may be a good place to keep track of evidence of organized tampering with Wikipedia content by governments and those doing their bidding (see Pakistan article, below). Or at least a place to formulate a community response to this problem.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  03:57, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
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I'm not privy to all the goings-on over at, and inside, WMF, though I was at the 15th Anniversary Party and the mini-conference the day after, at WFM's offices, in January. None of the senior staff were present, and while the attendees were all in good cheer, the employees did not seem to be. One can understand why, in retrospect, given all the recent managerial resignations over the last week or so, and the statements that went with them. I'm not certain what's happening over there, but I have a pretty good idea, having been through several similar shakeups at other organizations. Wikipedia (and, necessarily, WMF) are at an organizational lifecycle juncture point. This is a critical time for the entire organization to re-evaluate and reinvent itself in multiple ways, starting at the top. I would strongly urge the board to take a hands-on role in filling all the top slots in the staff. Take pains to preserve the institutional memory still left in longer-term employees, and for new blood, look for community people – not necessarily Wikimedians, but people with deep online culture and open society roots. (See also Wikipedia Signpost coverage.)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:47, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
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It's not news to WP:AFD regulars that citation of the WP:BOGOF essay there has led to some controversy (see, e.g., WP:Articles for deletion/The Next Internet Millionaire (2nd nomination), with a result of Delete, though the article is back). But recently, reliance upon and advocacy of this approach to protecting Wikipedia from promotional content was central to the narrow failure of WP:Requests for adminship/Brianhe (5 February). The BOGOF position is that a spammy article created by someone with a conflict of interest (especially a paid editor) on a topic that is arguably notable and should have some article here, should be rewritten from a clean slate, not tweaked bit-by-bit by neutral editors in attempts to get it to comply with WP's core content policies. The theory is that reworking rather than clean-slating such articles may simply reward promoters, at the cost of diverting our volunteer editors into providing free labor for encyclopedia-abusing marketing campaigns, and preserving too much of the biased wording. Given the generally dim view in the editorial community toward conflict-of-interest editing, both the spotty AfD track record and new, negative RfA one (to date) of the BOGOF wiki-philosophy may be surprising, even troubling. It smells like a long game being played against Wikipedia's fundamental principles by external PR forces, playing upon Wikipedia's innate assumption of good faith and trend toward inclusionism in the presence of even minimal sourcing. Is WP:BOGOF actually extreme, or will it play a key role in bolstering WP's immune system?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  15:09, 6 February 2016 (UTC); rev. 22:25, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
Note: The author of the WP:BOGOF essay raised some issues with this mini-story. I tried to re-write it to satisfy them, but don't seem to have succeeded, so I'm "retiring" this story the archive a bit early.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  12:06, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
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This is just one example in a years-long pattern of various forms of sport vandalism (i.e. vandalism for sport), which just happens to be about sports. This kind of spontaneous mob behavior is a different wrinkle on the "traditional" sort of mass vandalism, e.g. some celebrity encouraging (often as a joke) their fans to go do disinformational things here. This particular sort isn't even new. What I find more interesting is the rapidity and spread of the mainstream-press coverage of this non-event, which was already dealt with on WP before even online editions of any newspapers could run their stories. Over 1,500 ran them anyway, even though they were reporting on already-resolved trivia. This tells us that, while the press will sometimes grudgingly report good things about WP, they all feel threatened by it and will continue to make it look bad to their circulation if they can get away with it. This means we need to not treat as inconsequential any real-world perceptions of problems with or on WP, because they will probably be called out publicly and exaggerated.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  21:05, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
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Almost 400 undisclosed paid-editor accounts and their IP sockpuppets rooted out. But how many more are there? These ones were found out because they were stupid, creating new, obviously promotional articles without sources and with easily discernible copy-pasted text. What about the crafty ones skewing already-existing articles more cautiously?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  05:31, 3 February 2016 (UTC)
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At least we know it's happening for certain. I've been warning for years that the #1 problem WP will face in the long run isn't vandals, or its own internal squabbles among editors, or an administrative crisis (though that is #2), but well-organized, secretly funded, professional editing to programmatically distort the truth to advance socio-political agendas. I'm sad to be proven correct so quickly. Pakistan's government being engaged in a pattern of "civil PoV-pushing" to slowly turn all Pakistan-related articles into material that is at the level of Pakistani-nationalist elementary school indoctrination textbooks is just the tip of the iceberg. Pakistan simply got caught because they pushed it a hair too far too fast. This real-world-cabal factor is chief among the reasons we need to rethink wikiprojects, and (in the short term, not "eventually") rein them in from the "article-owning", isolationist fiefdom behavior so many of them are increasingly engaged in, pushing out conscientious editors and turning entire topic areas into editorial factions, while filibustering changes to those articles unless "approved" by the inner wikiproject circle's "membership". The levels-of-consensus policy is being ignored with increasing impunity, and this will prove disastrous to the whole project if it is not rectified quickly, since it's obviously leading to root-level fractures in the enforceability of core policies like WP:Neutral point of view. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 17:10, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
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