Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-10-31/Book review

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Well, I didn't like the offered online presentation (fed up with talking heads like that) but appreciated the book review text very much. Ian Ramjohn's statements about the gap between "policy as designed and as interpreted" are realistic, unpretentious and fair. I'm also an experienced wikipedian so I actually wasn't surprised by anything he described. BTW with one exception I have to point to: it isn't at all desirable to mislead any naive people to confuse an online encyclopedia with a place to edit willful private nonsense. Which misunderstanding is daily matter of procedure of our recent changes observers. Well, nothing new to any experienced people but nevertheless our policy texts don't communicate it down-to-earth.
The marketing formula phrase "Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is not really a truthful communication. No, not everyone can do (and remain uncanceled), not everybody has learnt enough skills to easily adapt to the new situations. Just try to remember the difference between going through a situation when all school students together were new or else when you have been the only new one to enter a group situation. In social life as psychology and own experience alike have found out any newcomers have to adapt gradually to the established group structures. Stranding is always possible! Some frustration is almost always part of it. The only real difference you can shift/soften a little bit is the degree of frustrations. The online scenario of Wikipedia editing is a little bit more complicated than real life newbie conflicts because the persons involved aren't present (have no faces, no smiles, no facial warning signs). --Just N. (talk) 21:15, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Go back 13 years, and I was busy writing How Wikipedia Works with User:Phoebe. This work looks more like a sequel than anything I've seen in the meantime. Early on there is a heading "How Wikipedia Actually Works", which seems fair: the old joke being that WP only works in practice, not in theory. The authors make no bones about the amount of unpacking required to bridge those two, so +1 to them for that.

That said, this is a deliberately discursive work, not the "primer" people often and hopefully request. It is based on teaching experience, and that is a good thing on which to draw. Whether you call the main WP activity "production of knowledge", "construction of reality", or simply "wiki work" which gets my vote, it is inherently messy (and at least intermittently frustrating, divisive and a time-sink). Readers of the book will probably get why, fairly soon. I didn't read further than to see that this basic point, related to the apocryphal Bismarck-on-legislation-and-sausages quote, comes through.

I once gave a pub talk on online communities and WP, in which I introduced a point made by Jacob Bronowski about art. You should ask not only what is done, and how it is done, but why it is done that way. If you applied it to WP, you might get a book like this; we need books plural, in fact. Charles Matthews (talk) 10:16, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

While I haven't read the book, I really appreciate the emphasis on the difference between the rules - or the way things are officially supposed to be done - and the application or interpretation of these official norms. These difference occur in all organizations, but it seems to me that they are particularly obvious on Wikipedia. Much of the time it seems like our rules don't determine the outcome in contentious cases, they only determine the starting point for the debate.

I certainly agree with Charles Matthews that we need more books like this - and more books about Wikipedia in general. But ultimately newbies are only going to learn by diving in, learning by experience. It would be nice if there were short learning aids for newbies organized along the path from newby to established editor. Much of that path should cover material covered in this book.

As a Signposter I ask that if anybody sees another book about Wikipedia, please bring it to our attention or just go ahead and submit a book review! Even if the book is only about the Internet ecosystem with Wikipedia's place in it - I'd love to see those reviews. Thanks! Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:00, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

Or in other words, the guidelines have some wiggle room. The pedagogic point, I suppose, in line with what I said above, is to ask "why wiggle room?" Because (I suppose) it is clear enough, when the question is posed, that there should be discretion and negotiation in our mix. In any case, that kind of teaching is not the same as basic Wikipedia training, along the lines of "what you type to get what you want on the page." The endless pressure to deliver such tutorials, with their clear value, should not mean that nobody addresses higher-order issues, and supports understanding that does not come from being on the wrong end of a case study. Charles Matthews (talk) 16:14, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

On to reading Chapter 3 of the book, What Counts as Knowledge: Notability, Knowledge Gaps and Exclusionary Practices. On p. 46 it leads off with the Donna Strickland speedy deletion case study. A surprise here. Much indeed has been made of this event of March 2014. Looking at the nomination, it was for deletion under CSD G12, i.e. copyvio. Now, I can see that as an admin. But under "reliable sources", it seems that reportage has relied on hearsay. If perceived lack of notability had an impact on Strickland's inclusion in Wikipedia, and who can say that it didn't, it was not on the surface the reason for the deletion. Charles Matthews (talk) 08:22, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

Gosh, such a notorious case, and it was a G12. It's a real pity that couldn't have been said some years back, indeed that it wasn't clearly displayed on the talk page. I don't know that it's actually damaged Wikipedia but it certainly didn't do the reputation any favours. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:13, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

• Yes, an academic work but highly readable - for Wiki insiders. For anyone who has been around a long time and focused on the issues of notability, sources, and gender gaps, it offers an intellectual insight, but the average editor even if a mature adult with a reasonable education might already put it down after the lengthy preface. Somewhat repetitive yawn-inducing inside-baseball coverage of the Wikipedia back office, the authors frequently rephrase themselves in the manner of one delivering a paper at an conference to keep the audience awake - it is only a one hour speech; their own meta could be reduced by a few hundred words, making this work even less than its 100 pages of content. Indeed, the phrase 'throughout his book' occurs no less than eleven times but fortunately the book falls short of being inherently ‘meta’.

In a way that is not quite preaching to the choir, McDowell and Vetter present a refreshing reminder to those of us editors who think we know it all, and that despite its enormous cargo of bureaucracy Wikipedia is still afloat and far from on the rocks - thousands of pages of policies, rules, guidelines and essays that would already require a lifetime to read them all and which would immediately scare away any newbie editors if they knew about them. I don't regret reading the 'book' - so thank you for the review, Ian - but personally, apart from a few recent statistics, which one can get any time, I didn't really learn anything new. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:16, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

• Seems to be a reasonably fair commentary, but also seems to skirt around the problem of how to remain reliable if there are no published reliable sources in the calls for wider inclusivity of content. As for "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", "terms and conditions apply". Perhaps this should be made clearer. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:49, 9 November 2021 (UTC)