Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-11-20/Recent research

• Some interesting machine learning research utilising Wikipedia as dataset there!.--Vulcan❯❯❯Sphere! 10:12, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I find it puzzling that Grisel's ArbCom paper cites my old not particularly relevant research from 2010 but omits much more relevant 2017 paper ([1]). I do not want to toot my own's horn, but I think my 2017 paper was the first and until now only serious piece dedicated to researching ArbCom. It's great to see a follow up - but it's weird how that follow up totally ignores the work that went before it. It does not inspire a ton of confidence in that paper, I fear. Well, either that, or my 2017 piece is just so bad it is not worth citing :> --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:14, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
• I read a preprint of the Cancelling Disputes paper (and haven't read the final so if there were large changes this comment won't reflect them) and found it reasonably true. ArbCom has an obligation to solve disputes the community can't and figuring out how to do that would include considering the social aspects of the community. But I would also note that its data set ends in 2020 and I think FRAM marked a major turning point in the committee and since then social capital seems to have meant less for better and worse (and in a more private setting I'd give examples of both). Barkeep49 (talk) 18:33, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Bri, Barkeep49, and Piotrus: I too have noticed some changes in ArbCom since about 2020, or a bit before. In general, I think the changes are positive, but the jury is still out. But first I have to say that I consider the situation described by the author is absolutely horrendous. The ideal is - correct me if I'm wrong - "equality for all under the law (rules)" and "just follow what the policies and guidelines say, nothing else is needed". What the author describes seems to be the exact opposite of that. I do have some sympathy for the idea that there's "obligation to solve disputes the community can't and figuring out how to do that would include considering the social aspects of the community." But what I see described is a free-for-all for finding favor (ffafff). What I'm starting to worry about is that ffafff is inherently the only thing that works. Much like the US legal system, where nobody anymore really believes that a poor black person will get the same result in a criminal trial as a rich white person (all else equal). We've got to try to be better than that. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:34, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    I should have made clear in my initial comments, that I think the "problem solving" focus of arbcom carries with it benefits and drawbacks and we should decide how much we're willing to live with those drawbacks or if we want to trade them for other ones. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 20:01, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    • I understand that ArbCom does not have an easy job and that there are some tradeoffs involved. I hope that if we diverge from our stated policies (and ideals) then this would be discussed in an RfC. But please do consider what would happen if we had to honestly tell new- and non-Wikipedians that they don't have to worry about all our detailed rules, because ... it's all just window dressing, or (maybe) it's all decided by who is in favor this month. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:17, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

    @Smallbones One of my to-do projects is to survey what parties of ArbCom think. It should shed some light. In either case, we all know that comparisons are not idea. The quivalent of "poor blacks in US", i.e. new editors or IPs, don't even make it to ArbCom, they can blocked early on, and the odds are their appeals will be simply ignored with no recourse. But that's not an ArbCom failing, just an admin-level or community-level one. That said, this drives the point of "editors are not equal" even further. Prior contributions and position in the community, which are related, matter. There is some relation to real world mitigating factor or aggravation (law) (NOTHERE, for example). It's complicated. Frankly, I don't think Arbitrators or AE admins are doing a great job, but at the same time, I think they are doing the best job possible (while I have my views on how to reform the system, who knows if this would actually help...). The Worst Form of Government adage comes to mind (and I guess another topic goes on my to do list for article creation :P...). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 23:55, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • I've always had the impression that arbitration on Wikipedia has nothing to do with fairness. It's just about reaching some stable state where people waste a bit less of their own and everyone else's time quarrelling and return to hopefully more productive activities like fixing typos. The articles will always be wrong anyway, it doesn't matter who actually held the WP:TRUTH in their pockets. An ArbCom reaches stability by beating people into submission, while the alternative is that people fight each other until exhaustion. Nemo 20:04, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • I hope nobody agrees with you that ArbCom is about "beating people into submission," or even that this might be better than the alternative of letting "people fight each other until exhaustion." Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:17, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      • What Smallbones said. It's too bad that one of our major institutions has an aura of combat/violence attached to it, even if jokingly. Really, when I think about institutions deliberately built around peace and nonviolence, I can only think of one: the Teahouse. I think, when writing this article, it dawned on me that I've gradually accepted a general background that is more oriented around the former and less the latter, and both resent that that was imposed on me, and am upset that I didn't see my own involvement in it sooner. I used to be quite active at WP:COIN which is probably one of our most combative fora, if not the most. But back to Arbcom, there are a lot of models for conflict resolution, and I wonder now if they would have been a better starting point than something aligned with something explicitly set up to denote a winner and a loser: the U.S. legal system. ☆ Bri (talk) 23:28, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

      Unfortunately, I do agree with Nemo that ArbCom is about "beating people into submission" until they don't care anymore or are banned. I've never been there myself, but I've read through some cases (I've not kept track of any, so no examples), and that is the exact impression I got. No ones bothers de-escalating, or actually listening to each "party". Ciridae (talk) 08:08, 21 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

      You may want to consider the source here... The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:39, 22 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

      What do you mean? Ciridae (talk) 10:12, 24 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

      There's a fairly long history of people who hang around meta having serious personality clashes with en.wiki editors, what touched it off in this case was a long time ago but is clearly still lingering. The user rights logs at meta should point you in the right direction. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 22:28, 26 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

      I assume you're talking about the incident which involved some en.wiki admin. Honestly I had forgotten it had to do with ArbCom, I won't check now. I think en.wiki has its own peculiarities and has developed its own ways to handle them, which are imperfect but may be the best we can come up with. It's ok as long as such practices aren't forcefully or mindlessly exported where they make less sense. Nemo 07:35, 28 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

      If anything, that’s an understatement. Volunteer Marek 01:45, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

      Back in the pre-ArbCom Stone Age of Wikipedia, the preferred approach was to use de-escalation & moderation; very few, if any, were outright banned from editing back then. Unfortunately, this was abused by (if I may call them) troublemakers. (I can think of 2 or 3 notorious troublemakers from that period who could only be handled with a ban.) Jimmy Wales tried to step in to deal with these troublemakers, but "Jimbo doesn't scale" led to the creation of the ArbCom & the Mediation Committee. The latter never proved useful for one reason or another; an attempted revival was the "Mediation Cabal" of a few years ago, which also failed. I believe what happens for those cases where some form of de-escalation is possible, they are handled long before they come to the ArbCom -- just my opinion, not based on any cases -- & the ArbCom is left with the cases where there is grounds to use the banhammer. Firmly. (Some people are simply not here to create an encyclopedia, & need to be encouraged to find another hobby.) -- llywrch (talk) 17:05, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

      That timeline seems a bit off. WP:MEDCOM was 2003–2015ish (officially closed in 2018 after being largely inactive for a while), while WP:MEDCAB was active from 2005–2012 rather than following MedCom. Anomie⚔ 23:13, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

      I'm relying on my memory here, as a former member of MedCom. I don't remember MedCom being active after 2005; if it was, it was in a very minimal way, I regret to say. -- llywrch (talk) 23:51, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• Although "social capital" is linked to our article Social capital, I suspect that this research's use of the term corresponds instead to our Political capital. —2d37 (talk) 02:38, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Like Piotrus and Barkeep49 I also read a preprint of the Grisel paper and provided a substantial review. I skimmed through the published version, and to the author's credit a number of issues were resolved with only a month lag between my comments and publication. However I still find the article lacking, and would say that the omission of Piotrus' work isn't the only gap in the bibliography. I went back to my notes on reading the preprint and referenced them with the present version. Below are some of the issues which I think remain.

I'm confused by the appeal to social capital, and I think the article would be improved by one of two interventions. The authors should either eliminate that discussion (in favor of an analysis of discourse and power a la Foucault which I think they do a good job of elsewhere in the paper) or engage more deeply with their analysis of social capital. On the assumption they do the latter, the authors would benefit from a deeper engagement with Bourdieu's social theory. The authors do not adequately define "social capital", and they seem to use it as a theory of everything even where Bourdieu's Forms of Capital points to better analytical descriptions for the phenomenon they describe. For example:

• "the 'administrator rights removed' remedy is applied to parties who by definition possess high levels of social capital." Administrator rights are obviously a form of institutionalized cultural capital; as social capital is used to mobilize resources for particular actions, we actually would expect to see administrators with low social capital be more susceptible to desysopping. That this was not seen points to a methodological flaw, namely...
• "I focus here on specific edit counts called 'Wikipedia' and 'Wikipedia Talk,' which provide an estimate for the number of edits made by a given editor on topics associated with the Wikipedia project itself, specifically its norms, policies, and governance" what is being operationalized is better understood in terms of Bourdieu's habitus and field w.r.t. embodied cultural capital. WP and WT namespaces constitute a particular field in which cultural capital is contested, and number of edits in those namespaces more clearly map onto how effectively an actor has embodied the intellectual dispositions of those within that particular field. Viewed from this lens, we can see that editors who make a lot of project-space edits are more likely to align with the intellectual dispositions of those in power eventually developing a habitus which embodies the cultural capital required for advanced participation in the field. Those in power, recognizing the embodied cultural capital, move to institutionalize that cultural capital through sysop rights. Social capital may mediate how quickly these things occur and how effectively one can mobilize support to ward of challenges, but it is an orthogonal process which is why the operationalization produces the strange result in the previous bullet point.
• "Indeed, this remedy exclusively targets 'administrators' who, due to their very functions, have high 'Wikipedia' and 'Wikipedia Talk' counts." This is an empirical claim that, from the above perspective of fields, needs more motivation. Project governance is only one field in which administrators work, and while there are many administrators who participate in the field defined by 'Wikipedia (Talk)', there are fields such as anti-vandalism and technical infrastructure that would actually privilege very different namespace distributions. For example, anti-vandalism would privilege mainspace (reverts) and user talk (warnings) while technical infrastructure would privilege Template and MediaWiki namespaces.
• "According to the same arbitrator, one 'accumulates social capital by being a good contributive editor.'[...]One editor who was banned by the Arbitration Committee put it bluntly: 'Social capital is the basic currency for getting things done on Wikipedia.' When using these words, this editor signals the fact that a 'positive' contribution on Wikipedia crucially depends on one’s ability to gather troops in support of a version of the truth[...]." This section points to how the authors seem to be playing fast-and-loose with "social capital". The authors already point out that Bourdieu and Coleman have different definitions of social capital---which one we're using in the article isn't clear to me---and the use of the term by interviewees is accepted uncritically without establishing that they are using a term of art rather than a colloquialism. Take the first quote for example. Under both Bourdieu's and Coleman's definitions of social capital, that description of how social capital accumulates doesn't make much sense. Social capital is the network of relations one establishes and calls upon in order to achieve particular goals; the critical aspect being a network of social relationships. We have many editors who make positive contributions but who do not engage in the more social aspects of the website---the accumulation of social capital is definitionally through socializing. The quintessential counterexample being IP editors who make many helpful edits but because of their transience leads to lacking a "durable network of [...] mutual acquaintance and recognition" they do not accumulate social capital despite their edits. What the quoted editor means when they say "social capital" is different from "social capital" as a term of art, and the author does not disentangle this linguistic confusion. Even if we were to accept the first quote uncritically, the second quote (and the authors' interpretation) set up a paradox: if you get social capital by making good edits, but you need social capital to make good edits, how do any edits get made at all? There are various ways out of this paradox, but they require we assume that these editors are talking about different things despite both using the words "social capital". The paradox arises here because the authors seem to have forgotten that interviews are data and can't be treated as a coherent theory out-of-the-box.
• The authors' selection of papers from the linguistic anthropology of verbal disputes is puzzling. It's not clear what the discussion of Berber or Eskimo song duels have to do with social capital. [this seems to have been clarified but the following point remains] The authors also seem to take a very narrow view of that wider literature. The selection seems to be in support of a somewhat rosy view of verbal duels, when the wider literature points to this genre of verbal duel being quite dangerous. In Irvine 1993: "Insult and responsibility: verbal abuse in a Wolof village", the ritualized insults achieve their effect of social cohesion through marginalization of those who transgress norms. The capital of the performers is mobilized to punish those who transgress social norms, and the fear of being insulted in these practices leads to compliance with social norms. Irvine points out that her participants recount one particular member who was insulted so frequently and so harshly that he died by suicide, and participants in the ritual blamed him for (1) breaking the social norms and (2) being unable to take the insults. Further, a major purpose of these performances is not simply to adjudicate disputes but to serve as a model and warning for the audience. The participants in these verbal duels are, to some degree, unimportant beyond how their treatment sets an example for the rest of the community. All that said, the review on pages 28-9 seems to treat these rituals as more benign than we know them to be cross-culturally, and focuses too closely on the individuals, neglecting why and how these performances operate in the wider context of a social structure. I'd strongly recommend browsing the 2010 special issue of J. Linguistic Anthropology which has a collection of articles dealing with cross-cultural methods of dispute and the contemporary literature around "verbal duels"; the introduction to the special issue---Pagliai 2010: "Introduction: Performing Disputes"---may be particularly helpful. Also consider Irvine 1974: "Strategies of Status Manipulation in Wolof Greetings" which may help connect this literature to theories of capital.
• The paper engages with the role of bans and other sanctions but does not engage with the wider literature on the effects of bans on Wikipedia. For example, the authors discuss how the Committee might modify its behavior when restricting individuals, but does not engage with Ciampaglia 2011: "A bounded confidence approach to understanding user participation in peer production systems" or Rudas and Török 2018: "Modeling the Wikipedia to Understand the Dynamics of Long Disputes and Biased Articles" which develop agent-based computational models of Wikipedia to investigate and predict how individual interventions affect the wider system of production. Rudas and Török (2018) specifically investigate how particular methods of banning affect content bias. Engaging with this literature (especially since agent-based computational modeling is well suited to a Bourieuian analysis) might provide empirical support for claims about the consequences of particular actions or inactions related to the role of capital at the Arbitration Committee.

— Wug·a·po·des 01:03, 21 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Wugapodes A very solid review & critique, if I say so myself. It's a shame public reviews/discussions and like are not clearly linked to the paper in most models of publishing. Oh well. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:59, 21 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid that the pernicious element of habitus in making class-based hierarchies of privilege perennial has been underestimated in the defanged version of Bourdieu's notion:

translation into everyday English: contributors see that if they want to get anything done in the politics channel (namespaces #4 and #5) they have to be sure not to be seen as posing a threat to the long-standing "pecking" order. Those who seek power, one cannot help but observe, are quick to pose behind the quirky linguistic conventions of, for example, calling copyists "editors", or of calling challenges to their way of seeing "unhelpful", "disruptive", or even (in some cases) "batshit insane" (though such utterances were only permitted the reportedly-now-neutered god kings of yore).

In short, if noticeboards seem to have always been "thataway", perhaps it is because class-habitus reproduces "clueful" speech even unto Dr. Tarr, in the war-room, with a feather. ♫ -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 13:32, 21 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I assume you are comparing Wikipedia's system of governance to The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:40, 22 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm impressed that you picked up the allusion, but be careful not to conflate creative misuse of names with comparison (which would be far more pointful or playless than what I intend). Had there been a cool song like "The System of Mr. Cirt and WifiOner" I probably would have referenced that instead. For an easy to understand example of Bourdieusian class-habitus, Google offers up the Dictionary of Sports Studies (§) as its first link. As for the Wobblies, not only does Jah have a fun new CD out, but there's also a fun related piece about Wikipedia and the problem of hysterical memory in this month's Harper's (§). Be careful not to approach it as if it were prose. -- SashiRolls ^{🌿 · 🍥} 03:47, 22 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know just how much lasting value Ben Lerner's essay about Wikipedia has. My impression having (admittedly hastily) read it is that if one sucks up to the right people, get admitted to the right colleges & other prestigious institutions, then one can spend ones day sharing ones "profound" thoughts, instead of spending the majority of one's time as Yet Another technology drudge to pay the bills & having only the outlet of editing Wikipedia in ones scattered spare time to express any intellectual ability. In other words, the function of "social capital" (as seems to be the designated label for this immeasurable parameter) functions in the academic/intellectual world as it does on Wikipedia. Nonetheless, almost any Wikipedian could write an essay like Lerner's, & probably with more insight. (COI admission: many years before Wikipedia started I submitted some poetry to Harpers for publication, & those poems were rejected. Yes, they were bad poems, but some animus has likely remained.) -- llywrch (talk) 08:14, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Fun find...I've uploaded Lerner's Harper page to my Apple Books where it is now recursive. — Neonorange (talk to Phil) (he, they) 17:56, 25 November 2023 (UTC) —[reply]

@SashiRolls, Bri, Wugapodes, Piotrus, and JPxG: - Happy Thanksgiving to all. I doubt that I'll be here tomorrow, so I better get my ideas out now.

A. I don't really thing of the Grisel paper as an academic paper, at least not like anything I've read before - I guess I haven't read many sociology or law or history papers. The lack of any meaningful stats has a lot to do with this. Using participants quotes to judge what's happening falls into "journalism" in my experience. So I think we need to concentrate on the quotes if anybody wants to take this further.

B. Sashi (immediately above) brings up the Harper's [(§) short story] - which is yet another way to view the world. You may want to download the available PDF which I found much easier to read. In any case it should be required reading for admins, arbs, etc. Like Sashi suggests it is much more poetic and symbolic than the usual prose short story, but strip this off and it becomes an extraordinary document that's 95% about Wikipedia (and its place in the world). And it's by an extraordinary author Ben Lerner, a genuine certified MacArthur grant "genius" with half-a-dozen award-winning books, a Distinguished Professorship at Brooklyn CUNY, poetry editor at Harper's, so I think we need to take it seriously, but not literally. Stripped to the basics, it's just an ordinary story of a master with hundreds of socks, a few meatpuppets, two adminships, with their 1st employer being a liberal thinktank and the second being a billionaire. Normal stuff like that. All I can say is that you should read it. JPxG - you should definitely read the very end about the end of Wikipedia and Chatbots, and I don't think the Signpost has ever done a short-story review before, but would you mind such a submission for the next issue? Smallbones_(smalltalk) 19:06, 22 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Smallbones Playing devil's advocate - that's qualitative research for you. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:05, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Piotrus: Yes, of course. I've even heard of it before! I was just saying that this version of it is nothing like anything I've seen before. The closest form to this that I'm comfortable dealing with is journalism. BTW something else in this month's Recent research that caught my eye was "Kimchi information" a term which I totally misinterpreted! Happy Thanksgiving. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:21, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't think it is particualrly insightful to state that the purpose of the committee is to end diputes. That's not a secret. WP:ARBGUIDE is quite clear about this and is often quoted in decisions: "Arbitration aims to "break the back" of the dispute. It has never been actual arbitration, but cultural inertia, or ennui, or whatever, makes it near-impossible to rename an institution on this website, so "Dispute-Ending Committee" doesn't really have a chance. I'm pretty sure we're also the only WMF website that still uses the term "oversight" instead of "supression". I get that supression has some really negative connotations, but the word oversight does not describe what the team does at all. Just Step Sideways ^{from this world ..... today} 22:32, 29 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

• If Google Search changes were so huge for Wiktionary, shouldn't the impact on pageviews be rather obvious? I sure can't see any obvious pattern in the pageview (unique devices) statistics for the English Wiktionary. Nemo 19:59, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]