Wikipedia: The untimely rise and expected fall

Guest Blogger: Asad Asif at My Chronicles….

Wikipedia… When one hears this name, one thinks of one of the world’s largest encyclopaedia which relies on community members contributing articles.

Being a student, I have been a huge, though passive, supporter of this project. I say passive, because I have used it for finding information but rarely have put in any information myself. However, my primary interest in Wikipedia articles lies with topics relating to computers and various other non-political topics. I have looked at political and controversial articles on Wikipedia before now but that has happened infrequently.

During the last few days, I have been taking a look at various political articles. My interest in such articles relates primarily with articles on South Asian political topics. On one of the forums I frequent, some members complained about some administrative abuse issues with Wikipedia in a thread titled “Indians bragging on Wikipedia”. I first thought of this to be the usual case of vitriol, and to find the truth for my own self, I spent a couple of hours browsing various Wikipedia articles, reading user pages of various community members and administrators and looking at article histories to see when and what editing was done.

What I found was slightly shocking and depressing for me. My findings from these couple of hours spent browsing Wikipedia are plain and simple.

There exist extensive lobbies and groups of people of like minded interest literally waging an online war by editing Wikipedia articles to favour their own point of view. These groups have members in the Wikipedia administration team who have considerable influence and power to quiet any opposition.

Looking at article histories, I found a constant revert war by certain users. Wikipedia has a ‘3 revert rule’ as part of its policy according to which users can’t revert an article more than 3 times in a fixed amount of time. Members of any particular group abuse this rule by individually reverting any particular article the allowed number of times round the clock. Obviously, the group having more members wins this childish game.

My primary concern in this regard is the role of the administrators, in particular Rama’s Arrow and his flagrant abuse of administrative powers. For the record, this person is of Indian origin and a follower of Hinduism. While this should, in an ideal world, have little consequence on the matters discussed below, in the real world this gives an insight to Rama’s Arrow’s motives.

I found out that just this month, the Wikipedia arbitration committee banned four Pakistani editors for a period of one year at the behest of Rama’s Arrow. Admittedly, I also found that two of the editors were in violation of Wikipedia policies multiple times but the other two were banned for no particular reason other than that they were there at a convenient time for being targeted. These Pakistani editors were banned, all while fellow cohorts of Rama’s Arrow were openly violating the same policies that the now banned editors were violating. This particular administrator has been suspending members who disagree with his point of view and has his own band of supporters. I am, frankly speaking, disgusted by this abuse of power and deliberate biasing of Wikipedia articles.

I no longer trust Wikipedia articles, particularly those of a political nature. This weakness of the Wikipedia architecture has been its downfall. If anyone can come in to edit any article, how are the site’s visitors to know that Wikipedia is presenting factual data? After all, the reference to any assertion can be a random rag which has no credibility. Neutral administrators who are not in the know about the topic of the article might think of it as a valid reference which is particularly damaging to the quality and reliability of any information in the article. When one administrator is fooling a bunch of other administrators, who’s the actual fool for even allowing this to happen?

Just yesterday, Wikipedia lost a lot of reputation when one of its most prolific contributors who claimed to be a professor of religion having advanced degrees in theology and canon law was exposed to be a 24 year old college drop-out. His name on Wikipedia was Essjay. His true name is Ryan Jordan and he is from Kentucky. He was a Wikipedia administrator (a member of the arbitration committee). This fake person contributed to 20,000 Wikipedia articles using texts such as Catholicism for Dummies!

This stands testament to my observations mentioned above. If this is the actual standard of Wikipedia administrators, it is hardly surprising that the site is going to the dogs!

As of now, the Wikipedia arbitration committee page lists him as retired. So much for credibility of the arbitration committee which banned the Pakistani editors!

Here are some excerpts from Nadir Ali’s user page, who is one of the editors who were banned:

I follow Unblock-en-l and your case appeared in it, hi. Anyone who belongs to the dominant block of opinion on any subject can get anyone else blocked. Wikipedia has no policies, applied consistently.

All the admins who talk on Wiki-en-l (Unblock-en-l was set up separately from it summer 2006) openly admit counting any shred of personal fairness as mattering less than developing Wikipedia as they wish. Blocking of only 1 side when 2 sides have done exactly the same thing that the block is supposed to have been for, is routine. It’s what happened to me, and claiming to have any rights against a biased 2-day block actually was the offence that got me permablocked, after only 5 weeks’ membership. Look at all these:

A voice from within Wikipedia’s own system describes how the ArbCom and dispute resolution systems are rigged with discretionary catch-alls that always enable admin to win, on how force of group numbers dictates Wikipedia pages’s content. This is actually called “don’t bother reporting abusive admins“.

I was wary of how the umpiring of pages the whole world can fight over could possibly work well, but I was drawn into Wikipedia by a friend who was briefly (and no longer is, already!) having good experiences with sharing his medical concerns on a couple of pages on medical subjects. My Wiki name was Tern, and here are 2 administrators saying to me [ Link – Link ] “You are not entitled to anything” and “Wikipedia is not a democracy.”

On the nature of Wikipedia:
SHOWCASING Abuses of Admin Power
Wikipedia is controlled by group bullying and hatefulness – Tern

Another recipient of this message contributed: Being unfairly branded a target in the midst of Arbitration, with the Committee turning a blind eye:
User Talk: Nobs02
User Talk:Dmcdevit

A former admin, leaving Wikipedia on 6 Oct 06 says, “Too many admins whose first course is to insult a new user in order to see if they get a “reaction” so that they can spank the new user for talking back to an admin. I’ve seen too many admins block accounts for infinite duration on flimsy evidence or mere whim.

I’ve seen more accusations thrown around of someone being a “sockpuppet” of another user. Time and again, I looked through the edits, and I didn’t see it. Instead, what I saw were users who were systematically hounded until they finally broke down and broke the civility rules, and then as an afterthought someone came up and said “oh, it doesn’t matter, they were a sockpuppet of X anyways”, thereby removing all culpability on the part of the abusive users who had spent time hounding and abusing the newbie…

The Wiki is broken. … We, the admins of wikipedia, broke it. We broke it by being stuck-up jerks. We broke it by thinking we are better than normal editors, by getting full of ourselves.”

I encourage you to read the linked web pages in the above excerpts. They give a good insight into the current system and its pitfalls.

I am wondering on what note I should end this article. Wikipedia has definitely disappointed me. On top of that, the negligence of the top level administration is bordering on being criminal. People have tried complaining and trying to change the system to no avail. I personally feel that if I complain directly to anyone, I would be yet another addition in the list of those banned from the site or those ignored outright. Wikipedia has, in my view, lost a lot of credibility. Unless the administration seriously starts taking notice of their fallacies and the increasingly biased nature of Wikipedia articles, in a few years, Wikipedia will be just another mouthpiece for propaganda machinery of the groups which dominate the site. I just hope this does not happens, for if it happens, the academic world will lose a truly valuable resource.

This entry was originally posted at My Chronicles.