VolnJC
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- Feb 26, 2012
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Seems there is some confusion as to how Wiki works, I thought I would post this from an insider
In his new book, Common Knowledge, Jemielniak provides a wry, brave analysis of his adventures since November 2006, when he decided to infiltrate Wikipedias editor/administrator communities. Much of the time, he was a star, rising to become a steward (top dog) within the Polish Wikipedia community, and winning significant status in the English-speaking version of Wikipedia, too. But he also got in some nasty spats with other Wikipedians. One those disputes led to him being banned from his administrative duties for 24 hours.
This is hilarious...
Jemielniak also chronicles the dark side of Wikipedias preference for trust in procedures, given that most people post under pseudonyms and cant be fully identified. As he portrays it, Wikipedia has a rule for everything, totaling 150,000 words in the English-language version. Even though one of the rules is to use common sense instead of being an unbearable stickler, the thicket of rules big and small can make it surprisingly tiresome to get even simple things done.
A famous case in point: author Philip Roth in 2012 published an open letter to Wikipedia in The New Yorker, chronicling his fruitless efforts to fix a Wikipedia passage regarding the origins of one of his own books. A Wikipedia editor refused to allow Roths changes, because authors arent permitted to revise their own entries without having secondary sources to back them up. Only after Roths open letter was published in The New Yorker could the error be fixed under Wikipedias rules.
