You are not only allowed to use your brain when editing Wikipedia, it's your job

[dubious - discuss]

I could not find the original source for this, but I will include it if anyone finds it.

A recent article about Wikipedia from

TracingWoodgrains

has received a lot of attention, and rightly so. Trace’s article is a unique and ambitious work, a gripping saga with many facets. I would like to talk about one of those facets today, Wikipedia’s policies on reliable sources.

An unavoidable takeaway from the article is that Wikipedia is vulnerable to rules-lawyering. This is when an editorial faction unilaterally imposes their vision on an article by erasing edits from anyone who disagrees, justifying this with a legalistic¹ interpretation of Wikipedia policy that obstructs Wikipedia’s goal of being a great encyclopedia. The reliable sources policy is a key battleground, since all Wikipedia content is expected to “summarize accepted knowledge” by “citing reliable sources”.

It should surprise no one that rules-lawyering happens and affects Wikipedia negatively. The site is near the top of Google search results on countless topics, making it the most powerful institutional supplier of knowledge online. Knowledge is power and people like power, so many people are extremely interested in influencing the Wikipedian knowledge supply. Often their interest outruns their scrupulous adherence to optimal social epistemology, which is itself not a matter of widespread agreement.² I have personally experienced rules-lawyering on a few occasions, and seen it as a third party on many more.

I. The things we love need rules

However, criticism of rules-lawyering needs to be balanced with acknowledgment of the obvious. Wikipedia is a battleground because people love it, and people love Wikipedia because it is interesting and useful. Wikipedia is what God wanted us to do with the internet. I’ve learned a lot of math, and probably the majority of what I know about statistics, either from Wikipedia or from texts it pointed me towards. It gives you an instant starter kit for any reasonably notable topic you suddenly need to know or randomly get curious about. The bibliography on important articles can outstrip landmark scholarly works and is often much more helpful for tracking down specific points. As a twenty-something, falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes was one of my favorite activities. It was one of our favorite activities — me, you, and everyone we know.³

Unfortunately, as it turns out, the more you love someone, the more you want to kill them sometimes,⁴ and the same passionate volatility applies to our relationship with Wikipedia. We criticize because it matters to us, because we want it to reflect our deeply held personal ideals about what knowledge is and what qualifies as knowledge. Have you noticed that not everyone has the same deeply held personal ideals? I have. It’s super annoying. I know, right? Yeah, it is. This causes many problems in society, and not only on the knowledge front. We can’t agree on anything involving privileged access to valued resources — land, money, the supply of knowledge, you name it.

Our solution to conflict over valued resources is rules that everyone has to follow. Humans have loved (or at least grudgingly accepted) rules since long before The Oresteia, which pointed out how useful they are for forcing people to stop murdering each other in an endless cycle of vengeance for some ancient wrong. Our most favorite rules, the ones we really really agree are necessary, get called laws. And laws need people to determine how they should be interpreted and applied, so we have lawyers. Thus, lawyering is both necessary and a tool, like any other, that can be used for good or evil. Law is a human-created plane of reality that is both necessary and an inevitable nexus of power struggle. And since people need rules to be forced to stop misbehaving in any such plane, the practice of law itself is subject to a thicket of professional regulations, with penalties up to and including disbarment.

II. Wikipedia’s rules work

By now you can probably guess where I’m going with this. As the world’s most convenient knowledge supplier, Wikipedia is another inevitable nexus of power struggle, and the misbehavior of humans there must therefore be regulated by yet more rules. What’s special and fascinating about Wikipedia is that it’s a regulated island in the Wild West of open-source, amateurs-welcome knowledge supply.⁵ While people agree on banning violence and fraud, we don’t yet agree on whether or how to ban things like misusing statistics, even though these things may be at least as harmful to society as the things we do ban. We may never be able to ban certain types of harmful behaviors because it is either impossible or very costly, in time and cognitive effort, to reliably distinguish them from good faith actions. Thus, in any given hour of any given day, someone has most likely just written something that will be widely shared and mislead others despicably without anything resembling legal consequences,⁶ often because powerful people pay them to do it.

Unlike professionalized knowledge occupations, which require enormous expenditures of time and money to gain participation rights, Wikipedia is open to editing by anyone with a laptop or even a smartphone. This means the policies have to be easily accessible and understandable by the average person. And Wikipedia’s are! I mean, nothing’s perfect, but these are beautiful, thoughtful documents designed for both war and peace. Many policies can be quickly linked with a tag, such as [[WP:RS]] for the reliable sources policy. WP:RS says dreadfully obvious things like

The reliability of a source depends on context. Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made in the Wikipedia article and is an appropriate source for that content.

In general, the more people engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication.

and

The very same source may be reliable for one fact and not for another. Evaluation of reliability of a source considers the fact for which the source is cited, the context of the fact and cite in the article, incentives of the source to be reliable, the general tone of credibility of the source for the specific fact, etc.

The point is not that anyone needs to be told this. People don’t have to be told not to murder either, but they still do to this day. The point is that anyone who wants to carefully weigh a specific fact in a specific source, but is being obstructed from doing so by misguided or malicious editors, can link to e.g. WP:CONTEXTMATTERS with a tone ranging cheerful to grave, as appropriate to the situation. These policies have community support as strong as laws against murder and fraud. When used charitably (and sometimes forcefully), they encourage productive consensus very powerfully.

III. Why Wikipedia’s rules don’t always work

Are you still mad about that guy Trace wrote about? About all the powerful people who backed him when they shouldn’t have? You should be. I totally get it. BUT:

1. Some of the things Trace justly criticizes, like categorizing entire sources as Reliable or Unreliable without consideration of the accuracy or credibility of the content, are glaringly against the policies cited above.

2. Trace’s story also contains Wikipedians standing up for what’s right. It was ordinary Wikipedians who passionately criticized the corruption in the halls of power. They didn’t need Trace to tell them to do it. They didn’t fix everything, and I think Trace’s article is going to help fix what’s left to be fixed, but Trace’s story is in some essential ways a Wikipedian triumph.

What do you, fellow America lover, think of people who hate the United States because it still hasn’t fixed all of its problems — despite declaring in its Official Founding Documents that all men are created equal, firing the shot heard round the world for that ideal, going to war against its own failure to live up to that ideal in permitting slavery, and implementing at least two landmark Civil Rights Acts when it still wasn’t enough? Doesn’t it seem a little ungrateful? Exactly.

Wikipedia may have failed as an institution in this instance, but all institutions sometimes fail, and if we want to make things better, we need to ask why that happened. Is it because the rules are flawed, or is it because the people who participated didn’t follow the rules? Probably both, but given how much of the story revolves around an editor with a simplistic, glaringly non-compliant concept of reliable sourcing, it seems like people not following policy must have been a big part of it.

And that doesn’t necessarily make them bad people. Wikipedia’s policies are not all simple, easy-to-follow rules like don’t murder people. Wikipedia is a call to action. It demands that you do things, and do them right. It not only allows you to use your brain, but demands that you use it. In their full depth, Wikipedia’s policies demand intellectual, emotional, and spiritual engagement akin to Jesus’s call to love your neighbor as yourself.

We all fall short.

IV. Physician, heal thyself. Or Wikipedia.

If Wikipedia is so great, why does it have articles that are biased against what you think they should say? At the risk of oversimplifying, logic suggests two major possibilities:

1. Wikipedia is wrong.

2. You are wrong.

I put them in that order for tact, but to be honest, I think it’s more often going to be the second one than the first. Nothing personal, it’s as true for me as it is for you, and it’s only proper spiritual hygiene to remove first the beam from your own eye. So the first thing you should do is fight against your own confirmation bias and trapped priors. Do Google searches like “is [horrible obviously wrong thing they’re saying] really true” and “why might [thing I believe with every fiber of my being] not be true”. Use the information you get back to do even more focused searches. Sometimes asking ChatGPT can even help, especially since you can literally ask it those kinds of questions and it’ll give you hints on where your knowledge gaps are.⁷ Be a heat-seeking missile aimed at your own shitty epistemic paradigms, rather than those of the people you now hold in unearned contempt. Learn to be delighted to be wrong. It can be humiliating, but it makes you stronger and healthier and better equipped to live a life worth living, just like any other human activity that requires real skill. It’s the skill of rationality, and we all could do with some gainz.

If you do this as well as you can, taking notes along the way, and you still think Wikipedia is wrong, you are now equipped to fix Wikipedia. So sign up, click that Edit Source button, and fix it. Wikipedia is begging you to fix it. If someone tries to stop you, hear them out, ask if you’re wrong again, and if you still think you’re not wrong, go to the Talk page, link them by name, and use that Dennett 4-step magic:

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”

2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

If they don’t engage with you in equally good faith, consult the policies. They’re on your side.

When you do all of this well on a topic you care about, it can be fun as hell. You can feel yourself leveling up. Have you ever been pinned in the first round of a wrestling match and never felt more alive? I have. Even when you lose, you win. Do it for the gainz.

V. There’s never a substitute for showing up

Like many of the comforts of civilization, law has made people soft. We expect everything to be automated these days. We assume that tweaks to rules can make the automated system run smoothly and produce the desired output. When things aren’t going our way, we complain about sophisticated, abstract things like misaligned incentives that seem like applying our intelligence and helping. But you should apply the same heat-seeking skepticism to that unearned sense of sophistication as you should to everything else. What if you’re wrong? What if the solution to this problem is for you to get off your ass and show up?

In the case of Wikipedia, I think the solution is for you to show up and improve one of humanity’s greatest achievements. That’s what I’m doing, when I have the time and energy. It’s incredibly time- and effort-consuming, infuriating, despair-inducing, and fun as hell. A lot like everything else that’s truly worth doing.

Good luck out there. I look forward to reading your unique contributions.

1. It’s important to note here that legalistic is not the same as bad faith. People can have good reasons for wanting a law or policy to be interpreted simplistically, because that is easy for everyone to understand. If you’re a programmer, consider coding style guides. It’s well-known that consistency is the most important reason to have a style guide, and this may appropriately lead to “better” coding styles being banned because adherence is not sustainable within a community. Wikipedia faces similar trade-offs, and they likely play an important role in the less satisfactory aspects of Wikipedia’s articles and talk pages.

Trace’s piece suggests that the modern climate of legalism may have started with the banning of the Daily Mail. This could be read as an exceptional, desperate act of low-cost bright-line-ism which opened the floodgates to an entire unwritten, exploitative culture of banning sources for ideological advantage.

2. Cue laugh track for extreme understatement.

3. No shade if this is not true for you! But it has often been a theme of my best friendships at least.

4. Except my wife, who is perfect and I have only loved infinitely since the moment I met her. This is true and 100% unironic. If I kill her, it’s because I’ve accidentally destroyed the planet in a horrible accident.

5. Many knowledge occupations from academia to law have professional norms with teeth, but anyone who has worked in these occupations can attest that rules-lawyering is also a problem where they live.

6. Do not take me to be saying that there should be legal consequences. For the foreseeable future, free speech in the public square will remain an incredibly important value. But the flip side of that is the answer to bad speech is more speech. Steve Milloy gets to mislead people about climate change, and I get to call him despicable for doing that.

7. The knowledge gaps you should care about are not just factual or analytical in nature. They’re not just about things. Expand your knowledge of how the people you disagree with think. Read their articles and books. Learn to think and speak on their terms. Truly appreciate why they feel the way they feel, and ideally, how you could feel in your guts that their perceived shortcomings are forgivable. This is hard and you will not be willing to do it for every conceivable topic. Do it for a topic you care enough about to force yourself to do it for.