Disputes Regarding Edits

Disputes Regarding Edits

There should be a (possibly more obvious) dispute resolution system built into MediaWiki. I don't know if this exists, but I can use my own situation as an example. When I first started to get into Wikipedia, I was classifying all these photographs I took, looking up the scientific name of the plant or animal in the photo, geotagging it, all that. I ran across a couple of articles that didn't have photos, or had very poor photos, and added my own.

One of the nicest of these was then removed by a seasoned editor with lots of contributions and replaced with his own, despite it being less picturesque, and despite it showcasing fewer of the plant's distinct features.

I posted on the Talk page wondering if we could get an objective third party to weigh in on the decision between the photographs, fairly content to rest with whatever someone else decided. Eventually, someone else just posted saying the equivalent of "don't know, they both look okay to me."

In the end, I just let it go because I didn't want to get into a revision war with an experienced editor, and seemed that neither or us could really be objective, given that we were both the photographers. The experience discouraged me a bit, and I just lost my enthusiasm for editing.

But if there were some very easy, intuitive way to get a third-party opinion on changes and alterations, it might make things more welcoming. The same way LiquidThreads is here being used to replace the Talk page, a GUI for dispute resolution, or even renaming it to "Third-Party Perspective" might improve new user's experience when it comes to their contributions and revisions.

Christophermluna07:57, 16 March 2011

Your experience seems to have been subject to unusually petty behaviour by someone who should know better. But it's hardly an isolated case.

Really pernicious here is the concept of getting consensus. What's the point of voting an incorrect assertion to be more palatable than a fact (referenced, multi-sourced, etc)? What's the point of voting on inelegant and ungrammatical language as being preferable to elegant, grammatical English? No one in their right mind is going to persist with this kind of sophistry, meaning that it is inevitable that editors/admins with an agenda will always win these wars of attrition.

Peterstrempel 11:32, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Peterstrempel11:32, 16 March 2011

I agree that the response Christophermluna got for replacing images was not the right one; far too often contributors in conflict with others on Wikipedia get their way by being an asshole. But C. reacted in the best possible manner, by moving on. People who act like assholes eventually are noticed & get banned from Wikipedia -- yes, it takes far too long, but it will happen -- & the rest of us can go back & fix the damage that person did, with a better degree of patience & objectivity than when the asshole was around to poison the atmosphere.

Rewriting or adding more rules don't work because people with an agenda are willing to make the effort to follow them, no matter how they're written, while experts who aren't familiar with them will be frustrated. In effect, causing the opposite effect intended.

As for getting a third opinion on a matter, there is a step so named in the dispute resolution process -- but good luck getting someone to offer their third opinion. One of the weakness of volunteer-run groups like Wikipedia is that people tend to "scratch their own inch"; offering opinions on matters which one knows little about doesn't appeal to very many sensible people.

And as a last note, I'm writing all of this based on taking Christophermluna at her/his word. No offense meant to anyone -- all I know about C. is what appears in that post -- but the ugly truth is that people lie, & lying about conflicts on Wikipedia is very common & not at all a new development. I remember emails to WikiEN-l over 2003 where one individual would complain that he was being attacked by an anti-Semite, only to read in the follow-ups that the complainer's edits were simply being reverted by someone who disagreed with him, & who never made a single comment about the original poster's religion. (FWIW, that person is no longer active on Wikipedia.)

Llywrch18:16, 16 March 2011

I have to beg to differ regarding people eventually getting banned for being assholes. On en.wikipedia at least, there may not be a cabal, but there is definitely a network and several editors have a seemingly infinite licence to be bloody rude.

Granted, I don't think the civility policy is the be all and end all of Wikipedia. I think better of one of these licensed gadflies since I saw on the Did You Know nominations page a damned good article s/he had written on a topic dear to my heart.

However, I believe the high level of rudeness on Wikipedia is far more important in driving people away - particularly women - than the existence of line drawings in some articles that resemble those in The Joy of Sex except the people in them are less hirsute. In fact I feel condescended to and belittled that the two are equated in importance.

Beyond which, it would be nice if the stated policies were actually those in effect. I can understand the occasional well reasoned exception, and I know one of the policies is "Ignore all Rules," but the bureaucracy can seem like a funhouse mirror.

(Since I don't respond well to instruction manuals, especially online, since I first decided to edit on en.wikipedia, I have spent hours reading the ANI noticeboard, to get a handle on the place. The links have been invaluable, but the lessons hair-raising.)

Yngvadottir20:47, 18 March 2011
 

Well, you don't have to take me at my word (since Wikipedia has page histories and my Wikipedia username as the same as here, you could do a search for my contribution history), and I'm not actually saying the editor that reverted my contribution was acting like an asshole. He wasn't rude, I just felt like I had nowhere to turn to to get an unbiased set of eyes on the two possible photos, both of which were added by the photographers.

I didn't feel mistreated, just discouraged, like I was the newbie and in the absence of a third party, I would just have to allow my edits or contributions to be reverted. I'm also saying that this might be one reflection of the retention data Wikipedia is seeing. I started out enthusiastic, and then lost steam after this experience.

I mean, what if there was just a simple page built into the MediaWiki code that could flag pages as asking for a third-party opinion? Similar to the "Recent Changes" or "Wanted Pages" Special pages, this page could just present you with a list of outstanding requests for a third-party opinion on an edit. It could be useful, and I imagine that it could be an interesting and useful way to contribute, just like proofreading, watching for vandalism, or evaluating new pages.

Christophermluna05:30, 19 March 2011

The Help desk should work for requesting eyeballs to do a simple image comparison.

Also see commons:COM:EIC#Gallery. You can make gallery pages on Wikimedia Commons, and link to them from articles on the English Wikipedia with en:Template:Commons. Commons has room for an unlimited number of photographs on any topic, and there are lots of different language Wikipedias. If the cabal on one Wikipedia does not use your image, some other Wikipedia might.

Teratornis05:35, 22 March 2011

I know now, and I'm sure that I could have done the research then to figure out how to use Wikipedia more fluently. And since then, I have become much more committed to the kinds of things Wikipedia and other collaborative media do. But if we're talking about why people leave, then my experience is an example. I'm not saying it's Wikipedia's fault, or the editor's fault, but it's true that volunteer organizations often have to go out of their way to make it easy to at least get started volunteering.

So, maybe the solution is better, or more user-friendly orientation to the possible issues that might come up as a new editor? Maybe that is already there, but I just didn't peruse it well enough. Again, not blaming Wikipedia for my experience, but trying to figure out what could have made the two-years-ago me reconnect after having contributions overwritten.

Christophermluna07:41, 22 March 2011

The new Wikipedia user faces the problem of unknown unknowns. For many types of negative or unproductive interactions a new user might have on Wikipedia, remedies are available somewhere on Wikipedia, but the new user doesn't know where to find them, or even that they exist. And the software is still too dumb to have any idea of what the new user is trying to do, much less advise the new user on the best way to go about it.

Instead, the Wikipedia interface is optimized for people who know what they are doing. We may not solve this problem until human-level intelligence is available in a personal computer. According to Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec, that might happen sometime between 2030 and 2040.

Editing on Wikipedia would be fun for the new user if an experienced user with vast knowledge of Wikipedia arcana was looking over his or her shoulder and offering timely advice at every step. It is very difficult for the new user to start with some arbitrary editing goal, and construct the optimal procedure for reaching that goal on Wikipedia, without any expert help. Once we can put the expertise into the software, instead of parking it in manuals that have to "run" on the user's brain, Wikipedia will effectively become simple again.

Teratornis05:54, 23 March 2011

We don't need to trust a computer to guide the user through unknown unknowns; really, Wikipedia doesn't stand out of the cognitive intelligence of its programming. The code itself is elegant, relatively simple, and well-designed. The intelligence of Wikipedia is in its collective editors and contributors.

What if we just set up some groups for new users? You could be added to a group of new users possibly based on a very short, optional questionnaire, and these groups could be assisted voluntarily by editors. The editors could act as mentors to these groups, possibly with a special page that tracked the changes made by their group members.

By making all of this voluntary, we could allow new users who want to get started on their own to do so, and only those editors interested in helping out new users would act as mentors. It seems then much less likely to get a conflict of interests between a voluntarily helpful mentor editor, and a new Wikipedian. By breaking these folks up into groups, veteran editors who are interested in helping newbies could be easily networked with a small group of newbies who want help, perhaps combating what would otherwise undoubtedly be an overwhelming sea of new faces.

Christophermluna04:46, 25 March 2011