Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-05-31/Op-Ed

← Back to Op-Ed

Discuss this story

• Excellent op-ed and observations. I echo many of your points and as a matter of fact, I have unwatched many pages in several topics because of what you describe. I also want to point out that someone has done an analysis of AE (and AN/ANI to a lesser extent) with regards to topic of the action, person bringing the action, accused and admins involved, and what the disposition was. I imagine most people won't be surprised when the end result was that those on the left fared far better than those on the right with regards to sanctions. Clearly something has to be done with how we deal with biases and behavior and disputes on Wikpedia. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 19:42, 31 May 2020 (UTC)
  • One might expect that if a person's political perspective is relevant to proposed sanctions then it's more likely than average to be a major deviation from the mainstream. If we compare the far-left to the far-right, we might find that the latter group is ideologically driven by racism, misogyny, queerphobia and all the rest of it, issues far more likely to cause personal friction with other editors than a far-left person's ideological motivation of counteracting perceived institutional biases. There are, of course, many other factors, such as pseudoscience as a side-effect of a far-right person's belief system in a way that isn't symmetric on the far-left. — Bilorv (talk) 22:38, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
    • Sadly, your comments prove we have a problem. If you caricature one side of the spectrum in such outlandish terms then you might have a real myopia regarding your own partisan beliefs. It's worth pointing out that the typical beliefs of editors here do not necessarily match the typical beliefs of the readership. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:26, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
      • Oh I'm fully aware of my own "partisan" beliefs—I've got a case of chronic left-wing-ness (though that doesn't mean I support a particular political party)—but I notice that you aren't acknowledging yours, nor was the person I replied to. It seems your partisan belief left you with some comprehension difficulties regarding the fact I was limiting my comments to the far-right, for reasons I clearly explained. Or have you really had a positive and pleasant experience with far-right editors on Wikipedia? — Bilorv (talk) 08:15, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
        • I didn't reply because it's not worth replying to. I posted about bias on Wikipedia and about AN/AE, and you wrote about the far-right, kind of implying that those of us who run afoul of the admins are far-right or far-left, maybe, I don't know? So your post really has no place here because either it's a thinly veriled personal attack or it's just silly. In any event it does kind of prove the bias of Wikipedia. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 14:13, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
• "Few editors have dared to speak up about the issues because of the chilling effects of having admins with unbridled power" - Alternatively, most editors simply don't care, and those that do care are happy with the status quo. If sanctions were never "discretionary" then admins wouldn't be needed at all, a robot could handle things. Being an admin always has and always will require judgment. It is possible that any one admin exhibits bad judgment at times, but this article seems to think that the solution is to never let admins assess the situation and respond as best they see fit, a policy that if seriously implemented would create 10x as many problems as the current one. I'm not familiar with the author's particular case; maybe they really were on the bad end of a rampaging admin. But the proper fix would be to rein in that admin and revoke their privileges in the very worst cases, not declare that admins have no authority to follow the spirit of the rules and must surrender to any Wikilawyering over quibbles. SnowFire (talk) 19:50, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

• I disagree, we all know there are some admins with more power than others and can get their way. I remember admins violating strict ARBCOM rules, and yet nothing happened because of status. There most certainly is a hierarchy and that is chilling and when those admins have absolute power to block and ban, then it makes people shut up in front of them. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 19:56, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

• "The number of active male editors in the political arena dwarfs the number of active females, and the same applies to real-world career politicians. Such an imbalance may contribute to the aggressiveness and bullying we occasionally encounter ...". - Unless the article suggests that male editors are engaged in intrasexual competition, I am at a loss as to how the sex imbalance contributes to "aggressiveness and bullying". -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 22:05, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

• BBC article Wikipedia sets new rule to combat “toxic behaviour”, Gender bias on Wikipedia - you'll find your answers in those 2 articles, Black Falcon. ^Atsme _Talk 📧 01:19, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

• Atsme, thank you for providing this context. The BBC article was, at various points, disturbing (e.g., the parts about harassment and death threats) and puzzling, or perhaps just written unclearly (e.g., the article appears to equate "fear[ing] for [one's] safety" and having one's work "contested"/receiving "negative feedback"). The article Gender bias on Wikipedia invokes images of a scrap pile—an unorganized collection of many potentially useful bits and pieces. If you're open to a suggestion: it may help to clarify to whom the "we" in "we occasionally encounter" refers. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 04:43, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

• You are quite welcome, Black Falcon. As for clarification, "we" would be any editor who edits political articles and happens to encounter such a discussion, hopefully not as the target of bullying or aggression. I set-up "us" and "we" in the lead sentence of that section. 😊 ^Atsme _Talk 📧 13:37, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

• Thank you for taking a stab at this. I immensely dislike the conservative news outlets in the US using Sanger's recent blog post about Wikipedia bias as a political football, but I do think he made some good points. I generally refrain from editing in modern day contentious political areas for a number of reasons (I prefer the historical stuff), but fear of admin action is not one of them. If anything, it's the mudslinging that gets dredged up to ANI by the regular participants who can't agree on something. I'd much rather avoid those kind of editors who take it upon themselves to police everything in those areas via battleground mentality, because it's just not that fun or productive. -Indy beetle (talk) 02:53, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

• You make a good point in that last sentence. "Not that fun" can be a death knell for something that's 100% volunteer driven. That noxious aroma could put off more and more people from more and more topics. ☆ Bri (talk) 03:15, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

• I find that one of the bigger flaws with the whole DS issue (that I've found myself engaging more with for harm reduction, despite hating the concept and not being a fan of the execution) is the difficult in overturning that you mention. Unilateral capability can be necessary, though certainly subject to major improvement. But AE is so reticent to overturn cases that don't have clear errors of judgement - appeals should succeed unless there's a clear demonstration the admin was correct. "Oppose change, per Admin discretion" where the price is the blocking of editors out of articles is too high a cost for me. Nosebagbear (talk) 12:50, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

• Thank you for mentioning the overturn issue, Nosebagbear. Disruption in one admin's eyes may not be disruption in another's, and the same applies to PAs, as exampled in this discussion. Another problem with difficulty in overturning, it handcuffs an editor to the actioning admin (apologies for using my case diffs but I cannot make bold statements without evidence and they're handy), and that simply doesn't work, especially when an admin wants/expects the editor to rethink their approach generally which I consider cognitive restructuring, and an attempt to modify an editor's thought process so that they fit into a particular mold in the homogenized utopian community built in the mind of the acting admin. That is not the job of our administrators, especially if the case was one where there was no disruption worthy of triggering an action in the first place, and it can and does happen. I think it does more harm than good to the project. Admins were elected to stop disruption, not prevent it based on their POV, political persuasion and/or prejudice against an editor, unknowing or otherwise. Prejudice and bias is hard to detect when you're the one wearing it. ^Atsme _Talk 📧 15:17, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

• "Spotting it is second nature to me." I've been practicing at it, and I've come up with a few tips. First, remove any adjectives or adverbs. Second, replace any non-neutral verb with one that has no connotations ("Trump fired back" becomes "Trump responded"). Third, remove any speculation/future tense material. This makes it easier to pick out parts that are editorial fluff and get down to bare facts. Doing this turns a surprising number of articles into either a copy of what they said yesterday, or reduces it to nothing. Argento Surfer (talk) 20:21, 1 June 2020 (UTC)
  • My experience in AP2 is that many times editors doing this ("this" meaning copyediting) are accused of "whitewashing", "gutting" an article, or some other variety of POV pushing. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 02:15, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
• Thanks for writing this. It's a conversation the community needs to have. I think AE, and really the entire DS system, needs wholesale reform, if not removal. I do have one very strong disagreement with the op-ed, though: "war of the worlds" is linked to War of the Worlds (2005 film) and not to the original, H. G. Wells's 1897 The War of the Worlds. I could forgive linking to Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds (1938 radio drama), but linking to the Tom Cruise movie? Outrageous. Levivich ^{[dubious – discuss]} 02:15, 2 June 2020 (UTC)
• Good article. I would like to add that political bias is also rampant in Indian politics on Wikipedia, sometimes to a harmful level (no wonder there are more stringent restrictions there). For example, here are some cases I have personally seen:

• IP editor, who registered to vandalise Paatal Lok by calling it "Hinduphobic" (basically a term used by right-wingers in India against movies, TV shows and their cast if the villain happens to be an "upper caste" Hindu) - Got banned immediately, no issues.
• Some Indian editors, requested in a half-polite half-rude manner on Talk:2020 Delhi riots that it be noted that Muslims started the violence (I personally believe both sides were acting out of hatred). This request was denied by other editors multiple times, because mainstream media showed the side on which Hindus were mainly committing crimes, while biased sites were showing what the right-wingers wanted.
• An experienced editor was editing the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (basically the Bharatiya Janata Party’s parent organisation) in ways suggesting that it was a Hindu supremacist organisation, but added sources. While adding sources is good, the issue lay in the type of sources, and in the fact that many of those sources seemed to be inherently biased.
• Not on Wikipedia, but an amateur journalist working for an Indian right-wing fake news outlet (technically, they do report real news, but they twist it to match their agenda) wrote an article about Wikipedia being a haven for leftists and all such nonsense, when he got banned for adding his reviews to movies and harassing other Wikipedians.
• The same media outlet above later doxed the experienced editor in the third case (they found his name, education, employer and some people demanded that he be fired and arrested for bias, and even filed a case with the police! Of course, I don’t know if he was fired or arrested but I guess multinational corporations and the police have better things to do than appease Indian jerkservatives who are hurt by what they read from some American servers).
• So to conclude, political bias is a bigger problem in some areas, and it has already reached serious levels. With these levels of harassment and misbehaviour, we may need stricter rules than before. RedBulbBlueBlood9911Talk 14:57, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

• We do not edit articles here for our fellow WPedians, but for the general public, whose views can be different from those that most of us hold. Of course, we wish to educate them. We will not convince them by arguing with them, nor will we enlighten them by presenting material the way a news source in sympathy with our opinions does. The only hope of educating them to see the real nature of the world is by presenting factual material about events and people's actions and beliefs, in the most carefully neutral manner possible. It must be presented so that they will accept that we write it because it is true and verifiable, not because it expresses our views. Many of those most active in Wikipedia feel free to express their bias: by slanting articles towards their views, by accepting disproportionately long and polemical articles on their views, and minimizing the number and length of articles on people who hold opposing views--and, where they cannot minimize them, lengthening them to include as much negative material as possible. This is foolish. It ruins our usefulness, and gives those who do not actually believe in the free expression of ideas weapons to attack us. There is no need to expand material on the stupid and dangerous behavior of a particular head of government, because the plainest presentation of the facts will make it clear enough. If we include the few instances he has accidentally been correct, at the same emphasis as the others, the contrast will be evident to even a reader initially biased in his favor. Long ago here I used the example, that it is not necessary to explicitly call Stalin a tyrant--his deeds make it obvious. The analogy holds.

(You will notice I have not argued why biased writing is wrong on the basic principles of NPOV, encyclopedic writing, and ethical behavior. I am arguing for what might convince editors who might be willing to change: strategy, tactics, and exposure to the real strength of the opposition.) DGG ( talk ) 01:10, 5 June 2020 (UTC)