| | |  Technology News | June 2009 
Wikipedia Has Rules
 Noam Cohen - The News
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June 10, 2009
It is an interesting twist about Wikipedia that the most controversial, most heavily trafficked articles are often the most accurate and vandalism-free. The frequent visits ensure that vandalism is quickly removed. Leave these high-traffic thoroughfares, however, and things can get a bit sketchier. Entrenched enemies engage in combat over the wording of topics so obscure that you may wonder: so much fighting over this?
But it is exactly the obscurity that makes these Wikipedia articles ripe for feuding, fighting and vandalism. A basic tenet of the online encyclopedia is that articles be written from a neutral point of view. And it can be hard to expect neutrality on some topics. For example, the 430 articles about Scientology represent a free-floating civil war, a "miasma," according to Ira Brad Matetsky, a corporate litigation lawyer in New York. He is a member of Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, which last month waded into the sniping over the Scientology entries.
In a sweeping ruling with little precedent, the committee blocked editing from "all IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates, broadly interpreted." The ruling did allow users from those addresses to appeal to be reinstated on a case-by-case basis. The decision has a range of sanctions for dozens of users, from mild chiding for poor behavior to bans on editing to total bans.
"One of the problems we keep bumping into is what I call core belief issues - politics, religion, nationalism," said Roger Davies, who wrote the report for the Arbitration Committee. "Fringe faiths, fringe nationalities."
The Scientology decision brought the Arbitration Committee, or ArbCom, to public view. Most users had no idea that there was a court of last resort for disputes on the site. Few users can say how or why it works. The two members of the committee I interviewed agreed that the committee was not vital to Wikipedia's continued operation, but they said that having a way to ban people of bad faith made the site more friendly, more efficient and more welcoming to new editors.
Wikipedia users elect the panel members, and Matetsky says he is the only active lawyer among them. He often is opposed to outright bans because "to a user who is banned, Wikipedia is 'the encyclopedia anyone can edit,' except for you."
The discovery that Wikipedia is not the anarchic paradise some might imagine can be a shock. Others see hypocrisy, evidence that there is a class of users who control what appears there, people who benefit from Wikipedia's huge public clout with little public scrutiny. But it is apparent that Wikipedia is quickly replicating the creation of society, from an Eden (no rules, no need for rules) to a modern entity.
"Bureaucracy is inevitable," said Joseph Reagle, whose Ph.D. thesis was about the history of Wikipedia and collaborative culture, crediting the German sociologist Max Weber. "Even if you have a supposed anarchy or collective, that doesn't mean the rules aren't there, just that they are implicit." |
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