[WikiEN-l] On Transparency

Tue Dec 27 23:35:08 UTC 2005

On 12/27/05, Steven Ericsson Zenith <steven at semeiosis.com> wrote:
> That is, every admin must necessarily have their identity exposed and it
> surprises me somewhat to see the resistance here - and I find it hard to
> justify.

If that were the case, I would not be an admin. I value my online
privacy and as someone who is not yet secure in an academic career I
would loathe if people could Google my real name and come up with
results of me bickering with cranks online about any of the various
subjects I end up bickering with cranks over. Adminship is supposed to
be "no big deal" -- a broom and mop -- and there's no reason for good
editors to give up their anonymous status, if they should desire to
keep it, in order to take on a few more janitorial abilities.

> Authority (in the sense of an encyclopedia) comes because the
> individuals involved are transparent and respected in some conventional
> sense.

That isn't how Wikipedia has ever established its authority. That is
in part why it is such a unique and wonderfully problematic entity. We
don't rely on the reputations of our experts, we don't even require a
full name. The authority stems from the belief that with enough eyes,
any factual error is shallow. In practice it doesn't work out
perfectly, as we all well know, but that's all part of the game. I
don't think throwing around normalizing statements about how
encyclopedias in general establish authority is going to be very
applicable to a project whose entire modus operandi is subvert the
traditional information model of an encyclopedia.

> Hidden identity provides no basis for authority since the
> landscape of individuals is unknown and the changes to that landscape
> impossible to track.

Again, Wikipedia's authority has never and should never be laid in
individuals. The entire point was to make it so that anyone, no matter
how uncredentialed or autodidactic or even generally ignorant, can
take a stab at increasing the world's knowledge. And be reverted by
people of greater or even lesser knowledge. With the hope that it will
all work out well in the end.

Our authority, in an ideal system, comes from our ability to cite our
sources, to fact check, and to trust one another on the basis of long
and continued contributions.

> Such that, even if a group of anonymous admins is
> able to command respect for a period, there is no guarantee, no way to
> judge, that a group of admins have the same capacity in the future.

That's a problem? Perhaps it would be a more ideal world if people who
formerly had trust and respect were occasionally audited.

> Indeed, if the current group of admins do manage to establish public
> confidence then the public is immediately at risk since that group can
> be opaquely usurped.

"Public confidence"? What public? What confidence?

> The short end is that for the long term welfare of Wikipedia admins -
> all contributors - need to be transparent - otherwise Wikipedia is
> simply a propaganda engine.

Joseph Goebbels happily gave his full name whenever he delivered
nonsense. What you are talking about is identification, not
transparency. Wikipedia is one of the most transparent enterprises on
the entire internet -- it is easy to see in an instant everything a
contributor has done, everything they have ever squabbled about, every
time they change their mind and any place they might have been
discussing a change before it was actually made. It is an easy task to
show ever omission, every purposefully false addition, every bit of
slander, as it went down, who did it, at what time, at what place.

Encyclopedia Brittanica, by contrast, is a system with no transparency
whatsoever. Oh, you can match names to articles. But that doesn't get
you very much, in the end. And when EB's errors were pointed out by
Nature, did they blame those individual authors? No. They blamed the
encyclopedia as a whole. The same as they did with us. In the end,
knowing the authors didn't change a thing.

> That the journal Nature should give any support to the scientific
> articles in Wikipedia is a cause of great concern - since Wikipedia is
> not a specialist encyclopedia they have by inference given unfounded
> credence to the whole.

I don't think anybody made the mistake to think that Nature's review
gave a completely clean bill of health to the entire encyclopedia, and
the articles they covered were not strictly scientific, but included
historical and biographical entries as well reviewed by academic
historians, not scientists. (The difference between a historian's and
a scientist's approach is quite apparent if you look at the error
checklist for the Mendeleev article, done by a well-respected
biographer of Mendeleev who currently teaches history at Princeton.)

FF