I think it would require *not just throwing money* at it, but also *actually designing sensible political institutions* to help aggregate and focus people’s voluntary interest in creating valuable public goods that they (as well as everyone) can enjoy, after they are created.
For example, I would happily give Wikipedia $100 if I could have them switch to Inclusionism and end the rule of the “Deletionist” faction.
((Among other things, I think that anyone who ever runs for any elected political office, and anyone nominated or appointed by an elected official should be deemed Automatically Politically Notable on Wikipedia.
They should be allowed by Wikipedia (in a way that follows a named policy) to ADD material to their own article (to bulk it up from a stub or from non-existence), or to have at least ~25% of the text be written by themselves if the article is big, but not DELETE from their article.
Move their shit about themselves to the bottom, or into appendices, alongside the appendix of “their opinions about Star Wars (according to star wars autists)” and the appendix on “their likely percentage of neanderthal genes (according to racists)”, and flag what they write about themselves as possibly interested writing by a possibly interested party, or whatever… but don’t DELETE it.))
Now… clearly I cannot currently donate $100 to cause this to happen, but what if a “meta non-profit” existed that I could donate $100 to for three months (to pool with others making a similar demand), and then get the $100 back at the end of the three months if Wikipedia’s rulers say no to our offer?
The pooling process, itself, could be optimized. Set up a ranked ballot over all the options with “max payment” only to “my favorite option” and then do monetary stepdowns as one moves down the ballot until you hit the natural zero.
There is some non-trivial math lurking here, in the nooks and crannies, but I know a handful of mathematicians I could probably tempt into consulting on these early challenges, and I know enough to be able to verify their proofs, even if I might not be able to generate the right proofs and theorems myself.
If someone wants to start this non-profit with me, I’d probably be willing serve in exchange for a permanent seat on the board of directors, and I’d be willing to serve as the initial Chief Operating Officer for very little money (and for only a handshake agreement from the rest of the board that I’ll get back pay contingent on success after we raise money to financially stabilize things).
The really hard part is finding a good CEO. Such roles require a very stable genius (possibly with a short tenure, and a strong succession planning game), because they kinda drive people crazy by default, from what I’ve seen.
I don’t think “let’s outsiders who don’t understand why the processes within Wikipedia work the way they do” spend money to buy policy outcomes would improve anything about how Wikipedia runs.
If you take a decision about whether running for any elected political office should give someone notability in Wikipedia, there aren’t any rulers who decide whether or not to adopt that policy but it’s a democratic process where different people at Wikipedia voice their opinion about what’s good for Wikipedia.
Most people on Wikipedia would not like that, because there are plenty people who run for elected offices like a small town council where there are no trustworthy secondary sources for information about those people. Articles about them are thus not possible to policy for being correct the way that’s possible with other Wikipedia articles and it’s going to be hard to engage with those articles and false claims are not going to be effectively removed.
While I’m more inclusionist then the average person at Wikipedia, it’s worth noting that Wikipedia is a resource of high quality and that’s an achievement of the current system.
Quora used to be full of quality similarly to how StackExchange has answers of high quality. StackExchange has a firm policy of quality standards while Quora doesn’t. StackExchange managed to keep high quality levels while Quora didn’t.
People frequently complain about StackExchange being elitest and not friendly to people who don’t put effort into asking questions but the result is that they kept a high-quality level.
It might be that you can either get a constantly self-reinforncing sense of higher standards or a constantly self-reinforcing sense of lower standards.
I’m with Shankar and that meme: Stack Exchange used to be good, but isn’t any more.
Regarding Wikipedia, I’ve had similar thoughts, but they caused me to imagine how to deeply restructure Wikipedia so that it can collect and synthesize primary sources.
Perhaps it could contain a system for “internal primary sources” where people register as such, and start offering archived testimony (which could then be cited in “purely secondary articles”) similarly to the way random people hired by the NYT are trusted to offer archived testimony suitable for inclusion in current Wikipedia stuff?
This is the future. It runs on the Internet. Shall this future be democratic and flat, or full of silos and tribalism?
The thing I object to, Christian, is that “outsiders” are the people Wikipedia should properly be trying to serve but Wikipedia (like most public institutions eventually seem to do?) seems to have become insular and weird and uninterested in changing their mission to fulfill social duties that are currently being neglected by most institutions.
Wikipedia seem, to me, from the outside, as someone who they presumably are nominally “hoping to serve by summarizing all the world’s trustworthy knowledge” to not actually be very good at governance, or vetting people who can or can’t lock pages, or allocating power wisely, or choosing good operating policies.
Some of it I understand. “Fandom” used to be called “Wikia” and was (maybe still is?) run by Jimbo as a terrible and ugly “for profit, ad infested” system of wikis.
He naturally would have wanted wikipedia to have a narrow mandate so that “the rest of the psychic energy” could accumulate in his for-profit monstrosity, I think? But I don’t think it served the world for this breakup and division into subfields to occur.
And, indeed, I think it would be good for Wikipedia to import all the articles across all of Fandom that it can legally import as “part of RETVRNING to inclusionism” <3
Wikipedia seem, to me, from the outside, as someone who they presumably are nominally “hoping to serve by summarizing all the world’s trustworthy knowledge” to not actually be very good at governance, or vetting people who can or can’t lock pages, or allocating power wisely, or choosing good operating policies.
Given that by your own standards there are no big institutions that are “very good at governance” or “allocate power wisely”, is it any surprise that this is true for Wikipedia?
Even if Wikipedia’s institutions could be improved, just letting people who don’t understand the way the gears inside Wikipedia work buy policy changes isn’t going to lead to either good governance or wise decision making.
He naturally would have wanted wikipedia to have a narrow mandate so that “the rest of the psychic energy” could accumulate in his for-profit monstrosity, I think? But I don’t think it served the world for this breakup and division into subfields to occur.
While Jimmy Wales might have made decisions in the first decade of Wikipedia’s existence that were good for Wikia, Wikipedia’s guidelines on inclusion & exclusion are in a constant flux via RfCs and you have people arguing for both sides. Some RfCs get adopted while others rejected. Jimmy is neither voicing an opinion in most of these discussions nor would have a way to decide the outcome that goes beyond what anyone who writes well could achieve.
Decisions about those RfC’s are made in a democratic and flat way within Wikipedia. Your proposal about making them via people paying money, is not moving it into making them more democratic and flat.
Are you a wikipedian? Is there some way that I could find all the wikipedians and just appeal to them directly and fix the badness more simply? I like fixing things simply when simple fixes can work… :-)
(However, in my experience, most problems like this are caused by conflicts of interest, and it has seemed to me in the past that when pies are getting bigger, people are more receptive to ideas of fair and good justice, whereas when pies are getting smaller people’s fallenness becomes more prominent.
I’m not saying Jimbo is still ruining things. For all I know he’s not even on the board of directors of Wilkipedia anymore. I haven’t checked. I’m simply saying that there are clear choices that were made in the deep past that seem to have followed a logic that would naturally help his pocketbook and naturally hurt natural public interests, and these same choices seem to still be echoing all the way up to the present.
At the moment there for example a discussion about whether “Should all British National rail stations be presumed notable as an exception to WP:NTRAINSTATION”. If you think of it in terms of deletionism vs. inclusivism, the inclusivity position would be to grant notability to all the British National rail stations while the deletionist policy is to reject automatic notability of those rail stations.
There are constantly small decisions like that, where the border of what’s notable and what isn’t gets shifted. There are 81 sites worth of achieves at Wikipedia_talk:Notability that span a variety of proposals to change notability rules that have been accepted and rejected.
However, in my experience, most problems like this are caused by conflicts of interest
If that’s what you believe you have to understand the interests of the people who currently vote in the decisions about how the lines of notability shift and not just what interests might have existed twenty years ago.
What I’d prefer is to have someone do data science on all that content, and find the person inside of wikipedia who is least bad, and the most good, according to my preferences and ideals, and then I’d like to donate $50 to have all their votes count twice as much in every vote for a year.
Remember the OP?
The question is “How could a large number of venal idiots attacking The Internet cost more damage than all the GDP of all the people who create and run The Internet via market mechanisms?”
I’m claiming that the core issue is that The Internet is mostly a public good, and there is no known way to turn dollars into “more or better public goods” (not yet anyway) but there are ways to ruin public goods, and then charge for access to an unruined simulacrum of a public good.
All those votes… those are a cost (and one invisible to the market, mostly). And they are only good if they reliably “generate the right answer (as judged from far away by those who wish Wikipedia took its duties as a public goods institution more seriously and coherently)”.
Yes, there are a lot of people complaining about quality standards on StackExchange and don’t want to engage in the work it takes to write quality questions.
I think it would require *not just throwing money* at it, but also *actually designing sensible political institutions* to help aggregate and focus people’s voluntary interest in creating valuable public goods that they (as well as everyone) can enjoy, after they are created.
For example, I would happily give Wikipedia $100 if I could have them switch to Inclusionism and end the rule of the “Deletionist” faction.
((Among other things, I think that anyone who ever runs for any elected political office, and anyone nominated or appointed by an elected official should be deemed Automatically Politically Notable on Wikipedia.
They should be allowed by Wikipedia (in a way that follows a named policy) to ADD material to their own article (to bulk it up from a stub or from non-existence), or to have at least ~25% of the text be written by themselves if the article is big, but not DELETE from their article.
Move their shit about themselves to the bottom, or into appendices, alongside the appendix of “their opinions about Star Wars (according to star wars autists)” and the appendix on “their likely percentage of neanderthal genes (according to racists)”, and flag what they write about themselves as possibly interested writing by a possibly interested party, or whatever… but don’t DELETE it.))
Now… clearly I cannot currently donate $100 to cause this to happen, but what if a “meta non-profit” existed that I could donate $100 to for three months (to pool with others making a similar demand), and then get the $100 back at the end of the three months if Wikipedia’s rulers say no to our offer?
The pooling process, itself, could be optimized. Set up a ranked ballot over all the options with “max payment” only to “my favorite option” and then do monetary stepdowns as one moves down the ballot until you hit the natural zero.
There is some non-trivial math lurking here, in the nooks and crannies, but I know a handful of mathematicians I could probably tempt into consulting on these early challenges, and I know enough to be able to verify their proofs, even if I might not be able to generate the right proofs and theorems myself.
If someone wants to start this non-profit with me, I’d probably be willing serve in exchange for a permanent seat on the board of directors, and I’d be willing to serve as the initial Chief Operating Officer for very little money (and for only a handshake agreement from the rest of the board that I’ll get back pay contingent on success after we raise money to financially stabilize things).
The really hard part is finding a good CEO. Such roles require a very stable genius (possibly with a short tenure, and a strong succession planning game), because they kinda drive people crazy by default, from what I’ve seen.
I don’t think “let’s outsiders who don’t understand why the processes within Wikipedia work the way they do” spend money to buy policy outcomes would improve anything about how Wikipedia runs.
If you take a decision about whether running for any elected political office should give someone notability in Wikipedia, there aren’t any rulers who decide whether or not to adopt that policy but it’s a democratic process where different people at Wikipedia voice their opinion about what’s good for Wikipedia.
Most people on Wikipedia would not like that, because there are plenty people who run for elected offices like a small town council where there are no trustworthy secondary sources for information about those people. Articles about them are thus not possible to policy for being correct the way that’s possible with other Wikipedia articles and it’s going to be hard to engage with those articles and false claims are not going to be effectively removed.
While I’m more inclusionist then the average person at Wikipedia, it’s worth noting that Wikipedia is a resource of high quality and that’s an achievement of the current system.
Quora used to be full of quality similarly to how StackExchange has answers of high quality. StackExchange has a firm policy of quality standards while Quora doesn’t. StackExchange managed to keep high quality levels while Quora didn’t.
People frequently complain about StackExchange being elitest and not friendly to people who don’t put effort into asking questions but the result is that they kept a high-quality level.
It might be that you can either get a constantly self-reinforncing sense of higher standards or a constantly self-reinforcing sense of lower standards.
Meme about the experience of using StackExchange: link.
I’m with Shankar and that meme: Stack Exchange used to be good, but isn’t any more.
Regarding Wikipedia, I’ve had similar thoughts, but they caused me to imagine how to deeply restructure Wikipedia so that it can collect and synthesize primary sources.
Perhaps it could contain a system for “internal primary sources” where people register as such, and start offering archived testimony (which could then be cited in “purely secondary articles”) similarly to the way random people hired by the NYT are trusted to offer archived testimony suitable for inclusion in current Wikipedia stuff?
This is the future. It runs on the Internet. Shall this future be democratic and flat, or full of silos and tribalism?
The thing I object to, Christian, is that “outsiders” are the people Wikipedia should properly be trying to serve but Wikipedia (like most public institutions eventually seem to do?) seems to have become insular and weird and uninterested in changing their mission to fulfill social duties that are currently being neglected by most institutions.
Wikipedia seem, to me, from the outside, as someone who they presumably are nominally “hoping to serve by summarizing all the world’s trustworthy knowledge” to not actually be very good at governance, or vetting people who can or can’t lock pages, or allocating power wisely, or choosing good operating policies.
Some of it I understand. “Fandom” used to be called “Wikia” and was (maybe still is?) run by Jimbo as a terrible and ugly “for profit, ad infested” system of wikis.
He naturally would have wanted wikipedia to have a narrow mandate so that “the rest of the psychic energy” could accumulate in his for-profit monstrosity, I think? But I don’t think it served the world for this breakup and division into subfields to occur.
And, indeed, I think it would be good for Wikipedia to import all the articles across all of Fandom that it can legally import as “part of RETVRNING to inclusionism” <3
Given that by your own standards there are no big institutions that are “very good at governance” or “allocate power wisely”, is it any surprise that this is true for Wikipedia?
Even if Wikipedia’s institutions could be improved, just letting people who don’t understand the way the gears inside Wikipedia work buy policy changes isn’t going to lead to either good governance or wise decision making.
While Jimmy Wales might have made decisions in the first decade of Wikipedia’s existence that were good for Wikia, Wikipedia’s guidelines on inclusion & exclusion are in a constant flux via RfCs and you have people arguing for both sides. Some RfCs get adopted while others rejected. Jimmy is neither voicing an opinion in most of these discussions nor would have a way to decide the outcome that goes beyond what anyone who writes well could achieve.
Decisions about those RfC’s are made in a democratic and flat way within Wikipedia. Your proposal about making them via people paying money, is not moving it into making them more democratic and flat.
Are you a wikipedian? Is there some way that I could find all the wikipedians and just appeal to them directly and fix the badness more simply? I like fixing things simply when simple fixes can work… :-)
(However, in my experience, most problems like this are caused by conflicts of interest, and it has seemed to me in the past that when pies are getting bigger, people are more receptive to ideas of fair and good justice, whereas when pies are getting smaller people’s fallenness becomes more prominent.
I’m not saying Jimbo is still ruining things. For all I know he’s not even on the board of directors of Wilkipedia anymore. I haven’t checked. I’m simply saying that there are clear choices that were made in the deep past that seem to have followed a logic that would naturally help his pocketbook and naturally hurt natural public interests, and these same choices seem to still be echoing all the way up to the present.
I’m an admin at Wikidata and I have engaged some in the German and English Wikipedia.
On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment you have a general page that explains how RfCs get made and which also links to the individual categories.
At the moment there for example a discussion about whether “Should all British National rail stations be presumed notable as an exception to WP:NTRAINSTATION”. If you think of it in terms of deletionism vs. inclusivism, the inclusivity position would be to grant notability to all the British National rail stations while the deletionist policy is to reject automatic notability of those rail stations.
There are constantly small decisions like that, where the border of what’s notable and what isn’t gets shifted. There are 81 sites worth of achieves at Wikipedia_talk:Notability that span a variety of proposals to change notability rules that have been accepted and rejected.
If that’s what you believe you have to understand the interests of the people who currently vote in the decisions about how the lines of notability shift and not just what interests might have existed twenty years ago.
What I’d prefer is to have someone do data science on all that content, and find the person inside of wikipedia who is least bad, and the most good, according to my preferences and ideals, and then I’d like to donate $50 to have all their votes count twice as much in every vote for a year.
Remember the OP?
The question is “How could a large number of venal idiots attacking The Internet cost more damage than all the GDP of all the people who create and run The Internet via market mechanisms?”
I’m claiming that the core issue is that The Internet is mostly a public good, and there is no known way to turn dollars into “more or better public goods” (not yet anyway) but there are ways to ruin public goods, and then charge for access to an unruined simulacrum of a public good.
All those votes… those are a cost (and one invisible to the market, mostly). And they are only good if they reliably “generate the right answer (as judged from far away by those who wish Wikipedia took its duties as a public goods institution more seriously and coherently)”.
Yes, there are a lot of people complaining about quality standards on StackExchange and don’t want to engage in the work it takes to write quality questions.