Copy of "Why Wikipedia Will Fail"

Why Wikipedia Will Fail
by E. A. Barbour

For months, Mr. Strelnikov has begged me to write a fully honest essay on where Wikipedia is going. Having just spent FOUR YEARS studying and taking notes on the internal culture of Wikipedia, as well as its content, and having helped to produce a website containing more than two million words of notes, I daresay that most people would likely conclude that I can actually sit in judgement of the Wiki-world with some accuracy. In fact, the only hard conclusion I can reach is rather simple: that Wikipedia as an active community is dying, and no one can stop it. Because it is based on lies. The content? Hell with that. It was just the "honeypot" to build the community.

In 2011 and 2012 I performed statistical analyses of editing patterns, administration actions, article content biases, and a variety of other quantifiable patterns. One thing that stood out was a repeated pattern of percentages of good work vs. bad work; in general, roughly 15% of Wikipedia work is valuable, and the other 85% is either of dubious value or is complete garbage. This percentage appears in all kinds of unrelated analytic areas. And yet, the Internet-using public sees absolutely nothing wrong with it. Least of all its alleged "founder", the ever-dubious Jimmy "Jimbooboo" Wales.

Understand the worst thing about the perception of Wikipedia: it is not one thing, it is many many things. It is a scattered gigantic mess of hundreds of websites, with tens of thousands of people editing bits of it every day. The general public does not see the massive and lumbering bureaucracy behind the scenes, nor do they see the mind-blowingly stupid fights on hundreds of noticeboards, arbitration boards, mediation boards, or special areas like the ever-broken "Manual of Style". For fools, perception is truth, and these ugly places are not perceived because they are not easy to find. Not to mention the considerable amount of traffic on private Wikipedia IRC channels, which only insiders see. This is an archaic Internet protocol that very few people use anymore -- even IT professionals. It is "invisible" to average folks, therefore it does not exist.

Another part of WP's warped public perception is that average users automatically assume the administration is "reliable" and "trustworthy". Because of course, in their ignorance, the hoi polloi deludes themselves into thinking "as above, so below". And what they see (all they see) is "loads of interesting and probably-reliable info". When in fact, Wikipedia is the same 85% dubious/rotten, above AND below. Some of the administrators are good and honest people, some of them are average, and some are deeply arrogant and incompetent. Some are completely crazy and should be medicated forcibly. But they aren't controlled in any way. Again, this returns to Jimbooboo's incompetent oversight of the people he installed. And their subsequent evolution into a kind of obsessive, intolerant cult organization.

No one else but Wales can be blamed for the presence of "The Cunctator". Or of David Gerard, or of Tony Sidaway, or of Mark "Raul654" Pellegrini, or of "Essjay", or of Fred Bauder, or of a litany of other early administrators. Incompetent or not, they licked Jimmy's ballsack, so he put them in and insisted they have power, whereupon they caused total chaos. Some of them were placed on the early Arbitration Committee, simply because "Jimbo Sez So". The early history of Arbcom is full of dirty tricks and favoritism done by these fine people, to protect their friends and whatever biased Wikipedia content was involved. Arbcom eventually became a little more egalitarian yet still suffers from bloviation and uselessness. The rot set in back in 2005-2007 and all the chlorine bleach in the world won't remove it. Their "Mediation" system, which was supposed to prevent arbitrations and editor restrictions, was a massive failure.

And because Jimmy was a lazy and cowardly dictator, adminship was assumed to be "for life". Until recently, when administrators started to be removed for inactivity, the only way to get rid of one was for proven and outrageous acts of abuse for years. Even this was often not enough; several high-ranking Wikipedians who stuck their noses into the Israel/Palestine editwarring and other areas have yet to be punished for playing favorites. (Ironically I found that the administrators who were quitting or being pushed out for inactivity tended to be content contributors. The remaining sysops are mostly bot-operating drones, vandalism patrollers, and nut cases. Drug addicts, in other words. Wikipedia is their cult and their heroin. For some of them, Wikipedia is a source of income. Of course, no one wants to talk about this or admit it.) Wikipedia was set up in a broken way, we know exactly who was responsible, and yet it is clear it can never be repaired.

Back in 2012 when the now-failed criticism website Wikipediocracy was started, the sysops started a companion wiki for use by journalists and outsiders, to be a repository of hard information about WP internal operations that were difficult to find or verify. I wrote an article about Wikipedia's "death spiral" for it, liberally punctuated with charts from my previous analyses. It was completely disturbing information. And yet it was completely ignored. The Wikipedians ignored it, Wikipediocracy ignored it, and the journalists Wikipediocracy tried to attract ignored it. I've since realized why journalists rarely run critiques of Wikipedia: they use it routinely for background information, themselves, without further checking of facts. In short, they love it, have assumed that it is "accurate", and are fearful of damaging their favorite online general reference with bad publicity. I suspect this is why real criticism of WP, no matter how well justified, falls on deaf ears and is forgotten. Wikipediocracy's asinine sysops have deleted the "death spiral" article, along with considerable other content on their wiki. So an archive.org copy will have to do.

One of the "best" things Jimbooboo ever did for the Wikimedia Foundation was to put Sue Gardner in charge. And the only important thing she accomplished was to make the WMF into an effective fundraising organization. Mostly by begging directly to the general public, and by ass-kissing wealthy people in the Internet industry such as Google's management and Craig Newmark of Craigslist. Otherwise, she hired incompetent lunatics from the insider corps, lied about Wikipedia's quality and value, and otherwise played along with the "cult". She grew the organization from a few paid workers into hundreds, many chosen from the cultic insider ranks. Thanks to their cultic intolerance of criticism or outsider commentary, they refused to admit that Wikipedia's editing community was deeply flawed and declining. Not until Gardner admitted they had a problem in 2010, and was subsequently replaced in 2014 by Lila Tretikov, did any major changes occur at the WMF, as Tretikov started to push out some of the organization's incompetent dead weight (Erik Möller, former "Deputy Director", widely rumored to have had an affair with his boss Gardner) and liars (Steven Walling, Sarah Stierch and others). But she can't fix the community's male bias, paid editing issues, copyright-problem backlogs, and large quantities of crackpots, and she doesn't appear to be trying. Possibly she realizes how hopeless it is.

There are many other disturbing aspects to the handling of WP's decline. The all-important number of articles, or "content pages" is rapidly approaching the 5 million mark, despite a large number of these articles being generated by bots that scrape other websites, or by obsessive nutcases. Or sometimes by paid editors; especially in corporate areas and biographies. That 5 million number is bandied about as if it were magic. There is no talk, no measure of the QUALITY of these articles. Plus, this listing of statistical figures about English Wikipedia  has numerous columns that stop in January 2010. No explanation. Are they so embarrassing? The "official page" about administrators  lists 1,343 of them (whoops, it dropped to 1,342 while I was writing this paragraph), yet if you dig a little deeper , you learn that only 582 of them are currently "active". It hasn't been this low since 2005. As I said, those vanished administrators tended to be content writers and most of them appear to be quite disgusted with the way Wikipedia is operating today. New-article quantities per month are declining, new editor accounts are declining (they now have 26 million of them, even though most are unused sockpuppets and only a tiny fraction do something regularly), and many other indicia of the "health" of Wikipedia editing are either declining or static. You won't see anything about this on the front page, nor in any Wikimedia promotional materials.

Next time I'll comment on Wikipedia's tiny and pseudo-effective community of critics. They enjoy similar levels of competence/incompetence and outright lunacy, and are also declining as Wikipedia declines. And will deny it just as strenuously as Jimbo denies any problems with his "great creation" -- because most of them are either maniac Wikipedian fans who want to "save" it, or are secretly making money editing it. I've got some really negative things to say about Wikipediocracy, in fact.

Copy of "The Battle Over Scientology: Part I"

Right off the bat I want to say that we aren't going to be talking about Xenu, body thetans, auditing, "sec checking", or L. Ron Hubbard's rotten teeth. This is all about the article on Scientology in en-Wikipedia, how it was biased from the beginning, fought over for nearly a decade, and became a relic of the Internet-Scientology wars of the 1990s-2000s while also being a guide for other New Age, "new religious movement" groups on how to dodge the e-mobs while keeping a presence on Wikipedia.

In the Beginning....

The first Scientology article was in October 10, 2001 by The Cunctator (Brad Johnson), and as you can see here it's a long, harsh stub with no section breaks, photos, or complicated layout of any kind. The next edit was in November 19, 2001 by an IP address (62.20.33.xxx) who stuck in all the "cult" references and then it was off to the races. The Cunctator only edited the article twice after creating it, with his last addition in September of 2002. When Larry Sanger resigned from Wikipedia on March 1, 2002 he told Johnson this: "I'm sure glad I don't have to deal with you anymore, Cunctator. You're a frigging piece of work."

Early editors of the article split into two camps very quickly; those who actually used their real names, and those who just used IP addresses, and the latter camp were thought to be Scientologists or PR flacks working for them. Lee Daniel Crocker (who called the article "the best carefully-polished, well-debated" one on Wikipedia in November of 2001), Dreamyshade (one of the first female Wikipedia editors), AxelBoldt, and Bryan Dirksen were some of the early "name" Wikipedians involved. By 2003 Modemac (Eric Walker) was watching over the page and the warring was in earnest. By that point the article had regulars. The anti-Scientologists were: Prioryman when he was ChrisO (Chris Owens, 2003); David Gerard joined in 2004; Tony Sidaway, Gerard's friend, that same year; Will Beback (William McWhinney), also in 2004, then banned in 2012; Antaeus_Feldspar (Joseph Crowley) also 2004, left Wikipedia in 2011; SchuminWeb (Ben Schumin) in 2005, he left in 2012: MartinPoulter in 2005; Cirt (name unknown) 2006, desysopped in 2012; and finally Wizardman (Daniel Tylicki) in 2006. The named pro-Scientologists were much smaller in numbers and they were: Misou (name unknown) 2006; COFS aka Shutterbug (same) in 2007; TaborG (same) also in 2007; Lyncs aka Justallofthem aka Justanother (also unknown name), joined in 2006 and survived blocking, still on Wikipedia today. Misou, COFS, and TaborG were all accused of being sockpuppets of each other and banned; Lyncs tried to be the voice of reason from the Scientology side and failed to make a dent. There were four "uncertains" whose "allegiance" and true names were unknown: Wikipediatrix, who joined in 2005;  GoodDamon in 2006; Republitarian joined that same year, was later blocked as a "meatpuppet or sockpuppet" (?); and Highfructosecornsyrup, also in 2006. That last account was blocked as a sockpuppet of Wikipediatrix. Beyond all the names listed there were a large number of IP addresses and alleged sockpuppets, so much so that a number of half-baked "sockpuppet investigations" were carried out and large numbers of people were banned, most probably innocent. And thanks to all the submissions, deletions, reinsertions it remained a biased wreck that only began having photographs of Scientology buildings attached to it in the summer of 2005, and even then it was just a shot of the long vertical sign of the Los Angeles "Scientology Information Center" on Hollywood Boulevard.

Why Kick Scientology?

There are a number of  reasons, all of them complicated. Since the 1970s, there have been a number of anti-cult movements fighting groups like the Unification Church ("Moonies") or the Hari Krishnas (ISKCON), but especially the cults which encouraged mainly young people to drop their previous lives and live in some sort of collective, and there have been a large number of those, copying the `60s "drop out" communes but sticking in their pet religious dogmas. I see a lot of this as a bourgeois  revenge at the time on the commune culture which allowed the Symbionese Liberation Army (1973-75) to form, the fear that "something worse" would emerge. Instead they got Jonestown and David Berg's "The Family"; while "revolutionary suicide" and the idea of religious prostitution are deeply unpalatable, they aren't the urban guerillas of the SLA nor the bombers of the Weather Underground, and neither of those were cults.

Scientology was different; it was run like a corporation, most of the members did not live in communes (group living was for poorer staff members and members of the "Sea Org" priesthood), it aimed itself at the aspirational middle-class, it was wealthy enough to have television ad campaigns, famous people were members. There had been small bits of criticism like Paulette Cooper's 1971 book The Scandal of Scientology, but the Church liked lawsuits, so the media stayed away. What changed everything was the rise of Usenet, then the early Internet; Scientology tried to attack anti-Scientology Usenet groups in 1994 (possibly because they felt invincible after forcing the IRS to declare Scientology a religion in 1992); they were trounced. Scientology asked members to put a modified version of Netscape Navigator in their computers in 1998 which critics dubbed "Sciento Sitter"; it blocked out a number of anti-Scientology websites. When YouTube started in 2005, that became another battleground as protesters would record their protests and post them, or video editors cut up Hubbard lectures and other material into anti-Church collages, or posted copies of private Scientology videotapes like the 1986 death of L. Ron Hubbard "briefing" or the Jon Zegel audiotapes. The last two examples were posted to "stick it" to the Church of Scientology, to prove that their secrets were no longer so, also Zegel (who was involved in dissident Scientology, mainly David Mayo's Advanced Ability Center) was forced by Church lawyers to make a "recanting tape" after three others laying out where Hubbard had been from 1967 to 1983 and other secrets the Church was hiding from parishioners and the US government. As with everything else Internet and Scientology, videos were pulled for "copyright", but copied and reposted. Some of the videos linked to above are copies of copies.

So this is what the Wikipedia Scientology war was about, continuing the older Usenet fight on another website while also being a sideshow of the mid-2000s "Project Chanology" protests (which started when the Church yanked that Tom Cruise video that wound up being relentlessly parodied anyway.) It really had nothing to do with sticking to Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" in article writing, it was all about protesting an unpopular group the oddest way possible.

***

In the next post on this subject, we will run through the insane 2009 Arbitration case, look at how sloppy Wikipedia is when dealing with the large number of Scientology spinoff cults, and examine a number of odd articles related to Scientology within Wikipedia.

Below is an interview the Lisa McPherson Trust made with Mike McClaughry in 2000. McClaughry was a former member of Scientology's Guardian Office which was a small intelligence organization within Scientology. These were the people who broke into US government offices in the 1970s ("Operation Snow White"); they are now called the Office of Special Affairs and allegedly less crazy.