Cliques, bullying, use of "policies" as a weapon, and the tyranny of the administration system

Cliques, bullying, use of "policies" as a weapon, and the tyranny of the administration system

I have been an editor/reviewer since 2005 and in the early days helped create hundreds of articles.

However, I have found the main problem for me has been, frankly, BULLYING by a clique of administrators who want to enforce their own hypotheses on others.

Editors who research and add information (and by this I mean properly sourced information) which adds to the content of an article find their work is routinely deleted by what I call "non-contributory editors" (who are often acting in cahoots with Administrators) who never or rarely ADD content to the site but only edit what others add. These self appointed guardians of the truth often hold their own views on subjects and seek to impose these views using powers given to them and their knowledge of the many "policies" that exist that can be used to justify just about any amount of unreasonableness if you know how.

One such dispute has been going on in the category of British/Welsh history for a long time. Certain individuals have managed to ingratiate themselves with the bigwigs in charge and have become "administrators" and the like. They share a common "revisionist" hypothesis that basically says any discussion of Welsh history before a certain date is by definition flawed, made up and bogus. I wont go into the details, but based on this opinion they destroy, delete and revoke any content added by editors, new and old, on this subject however well it is resourced. Anyone who attempts to resist their edits is usually hounded off the site because they can bring up any number of Wikipedia "policies" to support their actions. And these people are the same people who create these "policies".

I myself have been dragged before various kangaroo courts to answer charges of "etiquette" and other such nonsense by these bullies purely for complaining that I was being persecuted and victimised by certain individuals. It has become circular and I and many others have given up.

Wikipedia has become a war of attrition between those who still want to develop and expand the site, and those who have carved out their own realms of power within the site (as administrators etc) and seek to control access and decide what should be in and what should be out.

I have not had the energy to play their games and hence I - and many others I know from the early days - hardly ever edit or contribute anymore. Aetheling1125 15:58, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Aetheling112515:58, 11 May 2011

Whomever has the most time, energy, and can quote the most WP:BS using the most pedantic chain of logic will win at wikipedia, and those are the ones policing the pages. New editors do not have the time or inclination to get into edit wars with people living in seclusion with nothing to occupy their time other than to protect their turf.

75.53.128.14620:07, 11 May 2011

I know of three very qualified possible editors who were unable to make any change to the Oxyhydrogen page....the two dominant editors systematically blocked everybody else using the excuse of sock puppet, disruption, legal threats. They called me kook, stupid, fringe, out of whack etc...Who needs this type of treatment? They never read what other people said, except for disparaging, at the end....who cares???. These two guys, RKLawton and SteveBaker said that they were going to say whatever they wanted since it was difficult in USA to demonstrate or win libel suit or defamation suit. Everybody ran away from the article which is sad and pitiful and full of incivility.

PRGiusi22:00, 12 May 2011
 

Basically. Well said.

71.84.52.5208:10, 12 May 2011
 

My attempt to edit have been frustrated , like yours...my experience is very recent and I see that I am not the only one that is running away from editing because of the behavior of the so called "administrators' who love their power and probably, some of them, vicariously live their experience in Wikipedia as powerful individuals, since their life is different. I hope that this exercise of receiving input and comment is getting somewhere. I see that great charts have been created, statistic are cited, powerful data inserted in this report but the substance of the reason of the decline of the quality of Wikipedia is in these comments. I see that there is a lot of agreement on the topic of the civility and the abuse of the editors administrators. Maybe we are venting our frustration and, personally, I am writing only because I hope that this time RKLawton and SteveBaker will have no power to shut me down and say to each other "Ignore the OP, keep the article on track. If he continues to be disruptive, we can block him from further editing......." and the " tut...tut....he is gone, good bye". Then remove immediately my long , sourced and well researched discussion without even replying.

PRGiusi13:42, 13 May 2011

I took a minute to look into this, and this is what i found:

  • Your account was registered at 12:03, 10 May 2011 ([1])
  • Less then 20 minutes after you registered [2], you make a long comment on the talk:oxygen page.
  • In this comment you are supporting a users statement who had been blocked, and who had threatened to create sockpuppets right before he was blocked [3]

Now, what is the chance an entirely new user without previous experience register, and find himself involved in a discussion on a talk page, fully knowing what is happening on that specific page? I'd say that chance is slim to none, and I equally say that this is simply not in line with the sockpuppetry rules. I am not saying admin abuse does not exist, but in your case a block was definitely warranted, as you quite clearly and knowingly went over the line.

Excirial15:06, 13 May 2011

I was following Verderosso discussion and I was not planning to log in until SteveBaker and Lawton said that nobody was writing in support of Verderosso and I thought they gave no space to any type of discussion and only threatened to block so i decided to log in.... is there a rule against that? Where did I cross the line? Hope you had the chance to read everything that was erased. There are several people who are stockholders of companies where Santilli is involved and know Santilli peer-reviewed work and books . One is a public company with 3,000 stockholders. Are they all sock puppets and banned from writing in Wikipedia ? Also there are a couple of dozens of people attending workshop, organizing conferences and publishing with Santilli and about Santilli in peer-reviewed journals. Are they all banned from participating? There are also people self-publishing with Santilli. What is wrong with that, as long as it is not cited in Wikipedia as published work..Glad you are admitting that there could be some irregularities in that page and in the absolute power of the editors there. If everything were perfect in Wikipedia editing we will not have had these discussions.

PRGiusi15:49, 13 May 2011

Editors should not edit Wikipedia when they have conflicts of interest (as in promoting shares of a certain company through editing Wikipedia articles).

Tgeorgescu21:46, 13 May 2011

THis is not promoting shares.....they do not need promotion. I am simply presenting who I am and Santilli does not need promotion as you well know. Please say now who you are! And this discussion is not editing but replying to a real problem of Wikipedia identified by many. ! I have not been bloked yet....so I can write Also there is no violation when there is a description of possible linkage. Are you saying that 3,000 shareholders cannot ask to be editors? What kind of interest do you have in calling Santilli fringe? Now is your turn.Interesting also that like some other editors you are not engaging in discussion, just some brief sentences that do not reply to the messages... common technique.

PRGiusi19:01, 14 May 2011

I'm going to step in here. This ends now. Personal attacks and innuendo have no place in this discussion. Please, gentle-people, take it to talk... or better yet, don't do it anywhere on this wiki.

~Philippe (WMF)17:20, 15 May 2011

It is hard to avoid angry words and angry feelings when there is nobody policing editors/administrators who write as below "Now as for the previous arguments regarding your friend's support of fringe science and his propensity to attribute conspiracies by his peers to suppress his work - how shall we best describe this? Words that come to mind are: quack, nutter, lunatic, paranoid, delusional, and so on. I think "fringe scientist" would be the more reasonable, and more polite term. The one thing we don't want to do is mislead our readers into believing this fellow is credible. If you would like to suggest alternative wording appropriated for an encyclopedia, please share. Rklawton (talk) 14:41, 16 May 2011 (UTC) These editors/administrators set the tone. I have tried to intervene, but I was blocked, insulted while the two editors where allowed to make everybody run away from the page. Now, it is a very solitary article, very poorly referenced and poorly written.

PRGiusi15:53, 16 May 2011
 
 
 
 
 
 

On en.wikipedia, I have essentially the same observation. I edited for many years. Then I edited pages that people were protecting as if Wikipedia was another advertising mouthpiece. My edits were accurate, supported by many, and resulted in the pages becoming more Wiki compliant. But enough individuals who opposed my edits worked together to get me indefinately blocked. Even people who spoke out in my favor simply gave up when the individuals simply repeated the same arguments again and again and wore people down, and some were even directly involved in restricting my ability to edit, even on my own Talk page. So I no longer edit, simply because a few people worked together to make it happen. Wikipedia is wonderful, but there is nothing stopping politically motivated people from ganging together to remove people they view as inimical to the interests they promote. To this day I am not editing as a direct result of a few politically motivated people who always claims it has nothing to do with any political motivation. But a review of my work shows quite a number of pages that used to be advertising pieces, even including wholesale copying from certain web pages, that are now more Wiki complaint as a result of my being willing to try to stand against the protection racket to apply Wiki policy. I simply annoyed too many people in being successful in doing that, and they got me indefinitely blocked. So there's one problem for Wikipedia to resolve. --LegitimateAndEvenCompelling 02:03, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

LegitimateAndEvenCompelling02:03, 16 May 2011
 

I have tried to create an article once but was scared away by the editing police. To summarize my experiences: 1. I used facts reported in another story (not on wikipedia). Question comes up : who owns historical facts? I think noone does as long as sources are mentioned. 2. my attempt to do something for Wikipedia was smuthered and my story was removed without having the decency to mail me a copy of the source, so I was not able to re-edit it. 3. I think it is hyprocrite to think one can always be authentic. Isn't it more important that articles contain true facts than that they are authentic? AV

82.169.82.20310:58, 17 May 2011
 

I agree with this comment. I have written articles on the subject and one of them is posted at my own user page. See: "what is Wikipedia" here: [1]

Another artcile i wrote about this issue is here[2]

Many, many of us who used to volunteer at Wikipedia more than once a week, such as myself, have cut our volunteer time down considerably or departed for months at a time, frustrated by the wiki-lawyering, the "kangaroo courts" and the run-arounds that we are given by hand-in-glove editor-admin tag-teams who believe that they "own" certain topics.

The gist of these articles, should you not wish to look them up, is summed in this paragraph, which i wrote in 2009:

"The 'democratic experiment' inherent in WP is going to continue to run its full and entropic course. Like Usenet, and like the ODP/DMOZ, Wikipedia has peaked as a social network for intellectuals and is on the downward slide. Bandwidth is now so cheap that any author worth his or her salt can create a relevant domain name and host essays and topical articles that will easily be found by google's search engine. Why would any writer donate writing to WP, where writing is called 'editing" and bozos can abort an entire page and admins can "own" a topic and destroy content at whim?" 64.142.90.33 05:03, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

64.142.90.3305:03, 18 May 2011

Wikipedia is a collaborative project. If you cannot collaborate with others, you do not belong here. It is like in If by Kipling: "But make allowance for their doubting too". This is especially relevant since quoting reliable sources does prove that a certain viewpoint is at least minority opinion, when there is no consensus (I am not speaking of fringe theories). Of course, it takes some critical judgment and some education in order to recognize a reliable source, especially when it is not published in peer-reviewed, print-published mainstream scientific journals. E.g. a Time interview with prof. Michael Coogan about his recent book summarizes the results of sound scholarship, although the interview is not itself peer-reviewed. This is due to the fact that Coogan is a respectable academic, and he can be trusted to render sound scholarship during interviews, debates, conferences and so on.

Tgeorgescu12:59, 19 May 2011

Collaboration is a two-way road. The complain here seems to be about poor desire to collaborate from the side of old-timers. Therefore, without judging the merits of the complaining person, I would suggest Tgeorgescu not use phrases like "if you cannot collaborate". Although I understand that "you" here is a placeholder, synonymous to "one", but the post reads more like turning tables than addressing the grievances.

The complaining person actually says that he did produce references. And here is the crux of the problem: while the facts come into wikipedia from sources published by experts, it is wikipedia community who has a power to decide who is expert and who is not. Of course, there is a policy/guideline w:WP:RS, but again, its implementation is by wikipedians.

That recognized, a human factor comes into play. Certain topics are of permanent controversy. There are millions of potential newcomers. And "old guard" becomes tired to repeat the same arguments again and again, becomes frustrated, speaks in terse bordering with brisk language, and thus antagonizes the likes of PRGuisi instead of educating them.

The solution is already known in wikipedia. I've seen that some (but unfortulately a woeful minority) talk pages briefly summarize major decisions about the content, sources, and counterarguments. However most of them simply store mile-length archives of bickering only dedicated pedantic historian would want to read. So when a newcomer sees the reply "We already discussed this and decided that...", it is just a hearsay difficult to verify, and since "wikipedia... anyone can edit", the newcomer even does not have to question the authority, since an individual opponent has none.

The only authority is the community w:WP:Consensus based on arguments. The consensus is supposed to be reconsidered when new arguments arrive, but the problem is that very often it is very difficult to verify that the new argument is new.

Therefore I would suggest to make it a policy to summarize arguments in controversial article talk pages. Once a summary is in place, it becomes a very simple touchstone to decide whether the new editor is worth of a new discussion or of a simple reference "see Section 3.1.7b of 'Decisions and Amendments, Part 4' ".

Altenmann03:23, 9 June 2011
 
 

I realised the same thing happening to articles referring to war crimes committed by israel and terrorism committed by israel. I remember there once was an article about state terrorism, all "controversial" information has been removed from it, even if sourced.

Helohe14:21, 19 May 2011
 

Reduce the sandcastle-stomping actions: Some hostile editors seem to delight in destroying article contributions, just as a bully enjoys stomping on w:sandcastles at the beach. There needs to be some type of automatic per-article editing restrictions, where a long-term editor must get a forced delay of "3 months" (or similar duration), after 6 (or more?) continuous months of editing the article, or talk-page. The article (and related talk-page) would simply display "view source" mode, rather than the "edit" tab, and a long-term editor would be given a break (from editing that article) to allow time to think, and allow other editors to act, if changes to the article are warranted. Some cliques, of user gangs, seem to collaborate, among themselves, but they are more likely colluding to prevent other editors from joining the effort to truly change an article. Force them to take a 3-month timeout, denying them edit-access to that article or talk-page, and if changes really need to be stopped, then other editors will step in, to prevent changes which are truly a negative impact to the article. However, more likely, other editors would be allowed to improve an article, formerly held stagnant by a clique which refused to allow others to play in their "keep-away" game with the article. A 3-month break can seem an eternity to editors who are more interested in gaming the article than in considering the options to improve the text.

Wikid7711:24, 8 June 2011