[lbo-talk] Wacko/Sherman (was Re: Brit general says . . . .)

Chuck chuck at mutualaid.org
Tue May 8 09:13:58 PDT 2007


Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:


> It struck me your Wikipedia experiences were extremely unusual.
> Perhaps owing more to the way you wished to interact with that
> community. I mean, there's certainly problems with Wikipedia, but the
> discussion page under your name is far more contentious than many
> controversial political pages.

My Wikipedia experiences are unfortunately not *extremely unusual.* They are more unusual than the typical Wikipedia editor--someone who makes a few minor edits here and there--but my experience is more typical for hardcore Wikipedia editors. Revert wars, edit wars, flaming and so on are common to many harcore users (who do most of the Wikipedia editing and writing). More so for editors involved with controversial topics.

The user known as "anarcho-capitalist" was edit-warring with me for months over several anarchism entries. He kept insisting that Murray Rothbard is a major American anarchist and he persisted even after I confronted him with citations and arguments. This user was a headache for other editors on these topics.

It turns out that he was banned by Wikipedia for a year after a lengthy investigation discovered that he had created at least 6 aliases and was antagonizing many Wikipedia editors.

My presence on Wikipedia has attracted the attention of just about every wingnut in the radical movements. They think that that Wikipedia is the proper forum to engage in personal defamation against me, for arguments that have happened years ago! Wingnuts tend to be very single-minded in their petty obsessions.

Other people we know have had similar experiences. Chip Berlet, for example.


> But the space of wikis is large. For instance, you can have accounts
> which restrict access while still allowing a decent level peer review.

True. And Wikipedia has slowly moved towards a system which rewards positive contributions and burns the trolls.

Thud!


> That anarchist FAQ was last updated in late 2000. When I look at major
> anarchist online resources, I tend to think they're ironically
> non-participatory (relative to many sites I visit), though I usually
> assume that's due to lack of time and resources.

Actually, I updated the Infoshop mirror of the FAQ yesterday. The FAQ has been updated numerous times since 2000, which has even led me to complain to Iain because it takes time for me to update our mirror every time a revision comes out. Iain is making changes currently to get the FAQ ready for publication next year by AK Press.

By the way, it's "AN Anarchist FAQ." The editors consciously adopted that title over ten years ago in the anarchist sense that the FAQ was the opinion of the authors and not "THE" definitive text.

The major anarchist resources are fairly participatory and we've been ahead of the curve when it comes to open participation.

Libcom.org not only has an lively discussion board, they now have a content management system which allows people to add articles and content to the site.

Infoshop has been a participatory site for many years. In May 2001, Infoshop News (news.infoshop.org) moved to software that allows people to post news stories and make comments about those stories. We were ahead of the curve among leftist sites in allowing users to comment on stories, the exception being Indymedia, which became an interactive set of sites six months before us. Since 2001, Infoshop users have posted over 26,000 stories and over 112,000 comments.

It's been my goal for the past 4-5 years to make Infoshop a more open and participatory site. Before that time, the technology wasn't cheaply and easily available to allow open participation. I know this because I looked for years and spent some time learning programming in hopes of cobbling together our own CMS system. In the early 00s, the first generation of weblog and open CMS software started becoming available. In 2001, Infoshop News started using something called phpWeblog (it now uses Geeklog). A few years later we started using PostNuke, mostly for our non-English sites. We started using Wiki software around 3 years ago. Infoshop runs four wiki-based services: the Infoshop Library, the OpenWiki (our anarchist encyclopedia and Wikipedia alternative) http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page, the Matrix (anti-corporate wiki) http://www.infoshop.org/octo/matrix/index.php/Main_Page, and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Wiki (http://www.infoshop.org/sf/index.php/Main_Page).

We also run a blogging service (http://blogs.infoshop.org/) and we're currently testing Drupal as our sitewide content management system.

Our anti-corporate wiki is an interesting example of how it take technology a while to catch up with good ideas. Our project, which allows people to openly post information on corporations, is based on an idea I developed with somebody else back in the mid-90s. Our idea was to create an open anti-capitalist database on corporations which would rely on citations for accuracy. The tech really didn't exist at the time and then Wikipedia came along and gave the world MediaWiki, which is the perfect software for this project.

You've touched on a few reasons why these participatory services aren't used more on anarchist and radical websites. The technology is free to use, but it takes time to maintain the software. It's a headache to install updates. This week our sysadmin spent several hours upgrading our server software and PHP. I'll need to spend several hours next week upgrading the wiki software for the four site.

I've spent countless hours deleting spam generated by spambots. More than anything else, dealing with this shit has prevented me from adding more content to the site.

You can create a participatory project, but only a small fraction of your readers will participate. This is a problem endemic to all wikis, as research has recently found. Only a few people produce the content on wikis. On the other hand, a few people can do an amazing amount of work together. But you simply can't make most of your readers "participate." I think this is related to the challenge of getting people to volunteer for brick and mortar projects. The other big hurdle is that even if you get volunteers, somebody has to take the time to coordinate them. Infoshop even paid one of our collective members a few dollars to coordinate volunteers. If we had the organization and structure of a regular non-profit, we would have retained more of the many would be volunteers who fell through the cracks over the years.

Chuck



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list