Destructive Editing in the Imaginative Construction of WP

[HRIP7]

John Wallis: Destructive Editing and Habitus in the Imaginative Construction of Wikipedia

Abstract
The paper applies ethnographic methods to Wikipedia, a site of rich and varied social processes. Editors engage in intense and frequently conflicted interactions concerning, directly, the construction of the encyclopaedia proper, and, indirectly, the construction of certain forms of imaginative representation of the social fabric out of which the encyclopaedia emerges. Through analysis of common relations of power, forms of symbolic and cultural capital, and the ways that contestations are structured, the paper argues that the conflict and destruction wreaked on Wikipedia on a daily basis are key to the interactive processes that lead Wikipedia to be so robustly constructed as a social entity.The paper further argues that Bourdieu is a useful theorist for making sense of the ways that Wikipedian structures are reproduced through this kind of constructive destruction.

Much of the paper is heavy going, but there are well observed bits – unlikely to be news to anyone here, but still:

As Bourdieu has taught us, the appearance of rationality does not preclude the existence of self-interest or ideology. Humphrey shows how “political logic always implies the use of vocabulary that is laden with values and memories and inherently contentious” (in press: 5), an insight that is essential for understanding conversations on Wikipedia. Following Humphrey, we should note that the passion of those in discussion does not necessarily reveal itself in their words, which are subject to political tactics. In fact, the more excessive the feelings and passions behind the words, if the Russian case and Wikipedia are anything to go by, the more highly valued is the use of moderation and reason (Meyers 2010: 154). On Wikipedia, this is covered under the rubric and policies of “civility”. The violent and vitriolic are quickly excluded from discussion, while those who seem too opinionated or care too strongly are treated with suspicion at least. Many anti-social trolls have delighted in abusing Wikipedia’s culture of sterility and logic by finding inventive ways of being disruptive whilst presenting the veneer of acceptable civility. This kind of behaviour is especially despised, one suspects, because it threatens key distinctions and stereotypes that are linked to stylistic characteristics. Many a flagrantly destructive troll has been banned only to appeal in a calm, reasoned voice against his opponents on the grounds of rational Wikipedian policies such as abuse of good faith or unequal treatment by admins (just as extreme nationalists in Humphrey’s article at times tried to argue through formal channels that they were the victims). [...]

When confronted on grounds of neutrality, experienced and successful editors will make their language even more terse and calm than normal, and often resort to tactics such as appearing innocently helpful (patronising an editor to portray them as less experienced –e.g. Fig5 “Maybe I should remind you of…”) or haughtily dismissive (positioning oneself as the grand quasi-academic expert who need not respond to those who should not meddle). In Fig6 the editor responding to Maurice27 refuses to rise to the latter’s provocations and presents a super-detached and calm reply, simply repeating the link to the policy about civil discourse. The aim in such cases is to cast the adversary as more ardent about their opinion and oneself as disinterested, rational and neutral in comparison (“If you do so, the debate will remain in a professional level”). Humphrey calls this regress “hypercritical” and “radically cynical” (in press: 27), but in many respects it conforms to models (whether those of Douglas, Bauman or Bourdieu) of extreme cultural reactions tothreatened classificatory systems (see also Naguyen & Alexander 1996: 103).

Interactions on Wikipedia are typically characterised by terse, business-like communication and struggles between conflicting opinions, often leading to outright aggression and hostility.There is very little friendliness or light-heartedness, or even sustained relations of fellowship between any two editors. Editors tend to meet on discussion pages as strangers and make no effort to improve their relationship. Interaction is rarely even initiated unless by the necessity of having to agree a disputed course of action. My informants frequently described Wikipedian work as “solitary”. One told me “Wikipedia is a poor place to go if you are looking for internet friends; that's not how the site works.” Even the spaces on Wikipedia that sound sociable, such as the Community Portal and Village Pump, are actually little more than areas to discuss important technical details. There is almost no small talk in the daily dealings of Wikipedians.

Joseph Reagle posted a response to this paper here: The New Scholasticism

[eppur si muove]

I haven't yet read Wallis's dissertation but Reagle's response seems wierd. It seems that he wishes that Wikipedia, and Web 2.0 in general, were not amenable to analysis in terms of theories that apply to the historic world and that it were somehow not reflective of what social theorists have seen in real life.

The concept of habitus is about how people's acquired social knowledge allows them to understand and interact according to the tacit rules of a social setting. New arrivals have not acquired this knowledge and behave gauchely and are unable to utilise the power accessible to those in the know. (Bourdieu's theory has been used in contexts such as class power.)

In the wonderful world of Wikipedia the socially gauche are often subject experts. Those with the correct habitus can be the teen admins. The result is that academics and their ilk can be trounced at AN/I by those who are ignorant of everything but how to play the game.

[thekohser]

I haven't yet read Wallis's dissertation but Reagle's response seems wierd. It seems that he wishes that Wikipedia, and Web 2.0 in general, were not amenable to analysis in terms of theories that apply to the historic world and that it were somehow not reflective of what social theorists have seen in real life.

Well, Reagle does admit, "I'm not a very good academic". That should probably be added to his pitiful Wikipedia biography: Joseph Reagle (T-H-L).

[HRIP7]

I haven't yet read Wallis's dissertation but Reagle's response seems wierd. It seems that he wishes that Wikipedia, and Web 2.0 in general, were not amenable to analysis in terms of theories that apply to the historic world and that it were somehow not reflective of what social theorists have seen in real life.

The concept of habitus is about how people's acquired social knowledge allows them to understand and interact according to the tacit rules of a social setting. New arrivals have not acquired this knowledge and behave gauchely and are unable to utilise the power accessible to those in the know. (Bourdieu's theory has been used in contexts such as class power.)

Well, I know what Reagle means. Sometimes it seems as though academic authors try to fit the evidence to the theory rather than vice versa, or are happily collecting and pointing out matches between the predetermined theory and the facts: "And this conforms to what so-and-so wrote about ..." because they learned many years ago in university that this is what they have to do to get a good grade. (It can itself be a kind of "habitus", I guess.)

At the same time, I also suspect that it often merely seems that way to lay readers who are really ignorant of the authors and works being referred to (I include myself here). For example, I have not read Bourdieu, and hence the repeated references to Bourdieu in skimming the paper were tedious and jejune to me, because I lacked the education to understand them properly. Your comments above have immediately made sense of them.

In the wonderful world of Wikipedia the socially gauche are often subject experts. Those with the correct habitus can be the teen admins. The result is that academics and their ilk can be trounced at AN/I by those who are ignorant of everything but how to play the game.

This is eminently succinct and quotable.

[Poetlister]

Well, Reagle does admit, "I'm not a very good academic". That should probably be added to his pitiful Wikipedia biography: Joseph Reagle (T-H-L).

That would be a primary source. If yiou can find reliable second-party sources who don't have anything to do with Reagle agreeing with him, that would be worth adding.

[thekohser]

Well, Reagle does admit, "I'm not a very good academic". That should probably be added to his pitiful Wikipedia biography: Joseph Reagle (T-H-L).

That would be a primary source. If yiou can find reliable second-party sources who don't have anything to do with Reagle agreeing with him, that would be worth adding.

Outsider, I am beginning to question whether you know Wikipedia at all, or whether you are just here to be miserable. Per Wikipedia policy:

...in general there's no problem with producing a straightforward (i.e. not disturbed by subjective interpretation) summary or description of a primary source based on that source itself, in its own article.

It doesn't get much more straightforward and clear than that.

[Poetlister]

Outsider, I am beginning to question whether you know Wikipedia at all, or whether you are just here to be miserable.

Most people here seem to be miserable.

...in general there's no problem with producing a straightforward (i.e. not disturbed by subjective interpretation) summary or description of a primary source based on that source itself, in its own article.

Well, Reagle does admit, "I'm not a very good academic".

I'd call that a subjective opinion unless he has some hard objective data to back it up. Maybe we're just talking different languages.

[thekohser]

I'd call that a subjective opinion unless he has some hard objective data to back it up. Maybe we're just talking different languages.

I think it's just that you don't understand English. A "subjective interpretation" (what Wikipedia's policy asks us not to do with primary information) is quite different than a "subjective opinion". I don't see why you changed the word, but in so doing, you've altered the argument.

Let me dumb this down for you.

There would be nothing wrong in your adding to Reagle's Wikipedia biography, the statement:

On his blog, Reagle once wrote, "I'm not a very good academic".

Then provide a citation at the end of the sentence, and you would be done.

Instead, you dream up all sorts of manipulative ways to torture the language, to try to show that adding that sentence to Wikipedia's biography about Reagle would be disallowed according to "primary source" rules.

[Peter Damian]

A large proportion of the studies that have been specifically devoted to Wikipedia (and it has been particularly attractive to quantitative sociologists and communications theorists, because of the abundance of raw data) quote at some point a paradigmatic maxim known as the Zeroeth Law: "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work". Wikipedia is taken to be an impossible case, and its concrete materialisation therefore constitutes grounds for immediate and surprised investigation. Chieflythe factors most shocking to researchers are Wikipedia’s decentralised coordination, its attraction of willing participants, and its refusal to decline into mess of destructive in-fighting. Decentralised governance is hardly a cause for awe among anthropologists (perhaps this is why they have stayed away), and all of these points are not in truth the distressing anomalies they are made out to be. (Wallis2012deh, p. 32)

The Zero Law, which I call the 'Myth of Wikipedia', is a central theme of my book. The myth is that Wikipedia somehow defies our expectations about a well-advertised internet site that absolutely anyone can edit. I argue, by contrast, that Wikipedia is exactly what we would have expected. For example, if you had described Wikipedia's rules and principles to an economist or political scientist before the advent of the internet, they would probably anticipate problems about conflict of interest and paid editing. Exactly. Wikipedia pretty much meets our expectations. The myth about the bumblebee that cannot fly is exactly that - a myth.

I shall mention Wallis's paper.

I also note what I have seen before: that Joseph Reagle's mind is devoid of any kind of insight, or clear thinking.

[Peter Damian]

At the heart of this field are the essentialised figures of the vandal, the troll and the edit warrior. They are a core part of the overall ideological landscape of Wikipedia. It is against these figures that Wikipedian identity and positive qualities can form.
Wallis p.16

Genius. So far, one of the most insightful essays about Wikipedia I have read. So far, so good.

... the category of the ideal Wikipedian is constructed as the vandal’s Other. Both have become “naturalised”, and it is assumed that some editors have destructive intentions and will exhibit undesirable behaviour, while other, true Wikipedians, will stay faithful to their collaborative, constructive mission.Several informants told me that contributors who did not exhibit the correct qualities could not rightly be called Wikipedians.

In the religious “field”, distinctions between sacred and profane are, for Bourdieu, really expressions of the class binary of the dominant group who control the goods of salvation as against the dominated laity who require them (1991). In much the same way, notions of neutrality and vandalism on Wikipedia often correspond to editors that are able to position themselves on the side of NPOV and consensus –who have the “goods” of neutrality, we might say, such as appropriate references, knowledge of policy and the correct forms of stylistic expression –opposed to those who are perceived as opinionated and fringe.

[SB_Johnny]

Good to see an actual academic paper come out for once. I'm curious though: for me the fonts render in almost a capta-esque format with very irregular spacing between the letters (which seriously bothers the eyes). Are other people seeing that too?

[thekohser]

Are other people seeing that too?

Affirmative.

[Poetlister]

The Zero Law, which I call the 'Myth of Wikipedia', is a central theme of my book. The myth is that Wikipedia somehow defies our expectations about a well-advertised internet site that absolutely anyone can edit. I argue, by contrast, that Wikipedia is exactly what we would have expected. For example, if you had described Wikipedia's rules and principles to an economist or political scientist before the advent of the internet, they would probably anticipate problems about conflict of interest and paid editing. Exactly. Wikipedia pretty much meets our expectations. The myth about the bumblebee that cannot fly is exactly that - a myth.

Be careful how you use this argument. It's quite easy to find places where Wikipedia is a mess, with all these problems. It's also easy to find places where it has worked. Don't say it's always bad, because anyone who says "so-and-so is true 100% of the time without exception" can be debunked by finding a single counter-example.

[Cedric]

The Zero Law, which I call the 'Myth of Wikipedia', is a central theme of my book. The myth is that Wikipedia somehow defies our expectations about a well-advertised internet site that absolutely anyone can edit. I argue, by contrast, that Wikipedia is exactly what we would have expected. For example, if you had described Wikipedia's rules and principles to an economist or political scientist before the advent of the internet, they would probably anticipate problems about conflict of interest and paid editing. Exactly. Wikipedia pretty much meets our expectations. The myth about the bumblebee that cannot fly is exactly that - a myth.

I consider this to be a central truth about Wikipedia, although you express it here somewhat differently than I would. Essentially, there is nothing magical at all about Wikipedia or other wikis, certainly nothing that would cause any suspension of the usual rules and norms of human interaction. This is precisely why political and social scientists are in no way taken by surprise by the Wikipedia experience, such as it is. It is just another in a long line of utopian experiments that is doomed to fail because it did not take into proper account the realities of human behavior. Without understanding this, you cannot have a significant understanding of Wikipedia.

I also note what I have seen before: that Joseph Reagle's mind is devoid of any kind of insight, or clear thinking.

While I find so much of what Reagle writes about Wikipedia to be vapid, irritating and addle-pated, I still cannot quite agree with this assessment. His most recent paper demonstrates that he does at least grok onto the concept that Wikipedia is not sui generis, an observation that intellectually puts him miles ahead of practically every other Frei Kultur Kind. This is despite that he apparently does not understand the fuller significance of that fact, as demonstrated in part by his "I don't like it" response to the Wallis paper. Faint praise, I know, but some praise nonetheless.

[Peter Damian]

The Zero Law, which I call the 'Myth of Wikipedia', is a central theme of my book. The myth is that Wikipedia somehow defies our expectations about a well-advertised internet site that absolutely anyone can edit. I argue, by contrast, that Wikipedia is exactly what we would have expected. For example, if you had described Wikipedia's rules and principles to an economist or political scientist before the advent of the internet, they would probably anticipate problems about conflict of interest and paid editing. Exactly. Wikipedia pretty much meets our expectations. The myth about the bumblebee that cannot fly is exactly that - a myth.

Be careful how you use this argument. It's quite easy to find places where Wikipedia is a mess, with all these problems. It's also easy to find places where it has worked. Don't say it's always bad, because anyone who says "so-and-so is true 100% of the time without exception" can be debunked by finding a single counter-example.

I don't think I implied it was always a mess (I concede the example I gave was of a mess). Rather, Wikipedia is exactly what any reasonable intelligent person would have expected, pre-Internet. In the book I also give examples of where it has worked, also in line with expectations. For example, there are many examples of where well-qualified experts have worked on articles. You would expect these to be good, and they generally are. I.e. when Wikipedia works, it words despite crowdsourcing, not because of it.

[dogbiscuit]

I don't think I implied it was always a mess (I concede the example I gave was of a mess). Rather, Wikipedia is exactly what any reasonable intelligent person would have expected, pre-Internet. In the book I also give examples of where it has worked, also in line with expectations. For example, there are many examples of where well-qualified experts have worked on articles. You would expect these to be good, and they generally are. I.e. when Wikipedia works, it words despite crowdsourcing, not because of it.

It really depends what you mean by crowd-sourcing.

Wikipedia seems to have taken a meaning that if you gather enough ignorance, you can create wisdom. I had always assumed it was more a method of putting a request out far and wide and in the crowd you had contacted, someone with the appropriate skills would put themselves forward.

My understanding of crowd-sourcing can work but it does rely on being able to differentiate the truly helpful from the interfering. In the right environment that would normally happen, people can normally tell when someone is speaking with authority. However, human nature being what it is, there are always fraudsters around and crowd-sourcing will always be exposed to the problems of verification.

As an example, if a man collapses in the street, the response is crowd-sourcing, where people will call for help, and those who think that they know what to do will attempt to help. Some helpers may be willing but incompetent, but it is often likely that there will be someone with basic first aid skills. As the cry goes out, it will be ignored by those who cannot help, but those with first aid or medical skills will normally step forward.

Crowd-sourcing is nothing new or special but technology allows the call to be circulated amongst a wider audience. What is new about Wikipedia is the idea that people can acquire knowledge without learning simply by being part of a crowd. (The oft quoted statistical example of Guess Your Weight is not the acquisition of knowledge, but a special case - you cannot derive Newton's First Law by averaging answers).

[Peter Damian]

I don't think I implied it was always a mess (I concede the example I gave was of a mess). Rather, Wikipedia is exactly what any reasonable intelligent person would have expected, pre-Internet. In the book I also give examples of where it has worked, also in line with expectations. For example, there are many examples of where well-qualified experts have worked on articles. You would expect these to be good, and they generally are. I.e. when Wikipedia works, it words despite crowdsourcing, not because of it.

It really depends what you mean by crowd-sourcing.

Wikipedia seems to have taken a meaning that if you gather enough ignorance, you can create wisdom. I had always assumed it was more a method of putting a request out far and wide and in the crowd you had contacted, someone with the appropriate skills would put themselves forward.

My understanding of crowd-sourcing can work but it does rely on being able to differentiate the truly helpful from the interfering. In the right environment that would normally happen, people can normally tell when someone is speaking with authority. However, human nature being what it is, there are always fraudsters around and crowd-sourcing will always be exposed to the problems of verification.

As an example, if a man collapses in the street, the response is crowd-sourcing, where people will call for help, and those who think that they know what to do will attempt to help. Some helpers may be willing but incompetent, but it is often likely that there will be someone with basic first aid skills. As the cry goes out, it will be ignored by those who cannot help, but those with first aid or medical skills will normally step forward.

Crowd-sourcing is nothing new or special but technology allows the call to be circulated amongst a wider audience. What is new about Wikipedia is the idea that people can acquire knowledge without learning simply by being part of a crowd. (The oft quoted statistical example of Guess Your Weight is not the acquisition of knowledge, but a special case - you cannot derive Newton's First Law by averaging answers).

OK let's change 'crowdsourcing' to 'anyone can edit'. Of course, using the opinion of many people has been successful in the past in many different applications.

[Poetlister]

The oft quoted statistical example of Guess Your Weight is not the acquisition of knowledge, but a special case - you cannot derive Newton's First Law by averaging answers.

I suppose it depends on whether the views of the ignorant or less well-informed will be all over the place with the "truth" (whatever that means) in the middle. In that case, you might converge on the truth. If the ignorant are all wildly wrong in the same direction, that is where the article will end up.

[dogbiscuit]

The oft quoted statistical example of Guess Your Weight is not the acquisition of knowledge, but a special case - you cannot derive Newton's First Law by averaging answers.

I suppose it depends on whether the views of the ignorant or less well-informed will be all over the place with the "truth" (whatever that means) in the middle. In that case, you might converge on the truth. If the ignorant are all wildly wrong in the same direction, that is where the article will end up.

That's not the idea. There is nothing wrong with the concept of asking "the crowd" but if you are after knowledge that is not observable or guessable, what mechanism do you use for resolving the contradictory responses? Wikipedia has used referencing (in other words, the crowd-sourcing is simply scouring the library for books of knowledge, where the individual's benefit to the process is the knowledge of where to look or how to use Google). Once you see this underlying model, instead of crowd-sourcing, you simply have many pairs of hands making light work. It is a very different concept.

As an example, 7 years ago or so I contributed to an article on some IBM software. The manuals were useless and I worked out how to do certain things and noted these down in the Wikipedia article. It was there for other people to wrestle with, improve or object to. That was crowd-sourcing and was about using Wikipedia as a knowledge gathering receptacle. These days, all that work is supposed to be documented previously, no original research and so on, but actually the stuff I was writing about was not controversial, was generally helpful and so on. It was the sort of thing that 7 years ago seemed like a great use of Wikipedia. Now, all that can be done is the useless manual regurgitated unless someone decided to publish an alternative document and then Wikipedia could steal that work from the other person.

In other words, once you remove original research and the ability to just know what the answer is - tested by your peers - crowd-sourcing becomes a nonsense concept.

[Poetlister]

That's not the idea.

But what if it's something where the true answer, or some approximation to it, is available in the right place, but false "popular notion" ideas are to be found in newspapers, magazines and popular books? For example, why are the aristocracy called the "upper crust"? There is a widespread belief that it is something to do with serving the top of a loaf of bread to favoured guests. I believe that's nonsense, but it's probably what crowdsourcing would claim, complete with "reliable" sources.

[Malleus]

That's not the idea.

But what if it's something where the true answer, or some approximation to it, is available in the right place, but false "popular notion" ideas are to be found in newspapers, magazines and popular books? For example, why are the aristocracy called the "upper crust"? There is a widespread belief that it is something to do with serving the top of a loaf of bread to favoured guests. I believe that's nonsense, but it's probably what crowdsourcing would claim, complete with "reliable" sources.

There's an evident confusion here. Wikipedia in the large may be "crowdsourced" in a general sense, but if you look at pretty much any even half-decent article you'll see that it's written by rather few people, not really enough to call a "crowd".

[dogbiscuit]

That's not the idea.

But what if it's something where the true answer, or some approximation to it, is available in the right place, but false "popular notion" ideas are to be found in newspapers, magazines and popular books? For example, why are the aristocracy called the "upper crust"? There is a widespread belief that it is something to do with serving the top of a loaf of bread to favoured guests. I believe that's nonsense, but it's probably what crowdsourcing would claim, complete with "reliable" sources.

There are ways of challenging popular notions. The reality is that if a false notion gathers enough credence, then the general population will consider it to be true, and if it has no real impact on people's lives, then why would people worry? Lot's of people believe that 3.1415926 etc. is 22/7. They know that is pi, they do not need to worry about the detail and that it is not true will not change their lives.

For example, it became a popular notion that Captain Pugwash contained a number of characters who had double entendre names. Anyone who really could remember the series would know this was wrong (partly because there was a famous sign off line in every show "...and Tom said nothing." However, because the idea was so attractive, the false became nearly true. Me telling the world wouldn't fix it, and no doubt someone would claim that DVDs of the series had been doctored to cover up the past, in true conspiracy theory.

This is why crowd-sourcing is fundamentally flawed - it has no mechanism for resolving or even detecting the controversial or the deliberately planted untruth. Eventually, you have to depend on some form of recognised expertise, whether that is a subject matter expert who has earned his respect and has the authority granted by his peers, or someone who can attest to the veracity of source material who can be seen to have no reason to be deceptive. We then accept the relatively small risk that we have been duped (Hilter's Diaries come to mind - where there the idea that they were true was so attractive, and the person presenting them sounded plausible enough, that those who had an interest simply did not look hard enough). If someone in the crowd came forward with the original film stock of Captain Pugwash, perhaps then that would be a demonstration that crowd-sourcing of the form I envisaged worked, but it simply circles around the question of how anyone recognises fact from fiction in such a blurry world.

Crowd-sourcing is not just sourcing, it is the whole mechanism by which the crowd can find information and process that information in such a way that the end result is demonstrably more true than a point in time before the request was made. I'm sure it can work in some scenarios, "Crowd, find me a proof for Theorem X" and such a proof is returned, suitably qualified people test the proof and find that it is good, but much of knowledge is not solid, testable fact. We depend on scientists being trustworthy to believe that Richard III has turned up after 500 or so years, but as the man in the street we simply have to accept that it is certain he has been found. Crowd sourcing simply could not have found and identified Richard III with the certainty we have been presented with. Indeed, if the crowd was sent forth with the task of unearthing and identifying the body, imagine the carnage and the probability that some well-meaning amateur would have put a JCB through the evidence, leaving it a mystery for ever.

[Poetlister]

How about this one?

http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Zoo

Astronomers have crowdsourced the classification of galaxies. Obviously, it requires people with a certain intelligence and bent of mind, but few people totally unsuited to the task would bother, and their results would presumably so often be discordant with others' that they would be ignored.

[dogbiscuit]

How about this one?

http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Zoo

Astronomers have crowdsourced the classification of galaxies. Obviously, it requires people with a certain intelligence and bent of mind, but few people totally unsuited to the task would bother, and their results would presumably so often be discordant with others' that they would be ignored.

That is "many hands make light work" rather than crowd-sourcing - not that it is not interesting.

It is akin to the process of building an encyclopedia by scavenging sources rather than thoughtful and careful research.

[Poetlister]

It is akin to the process of building an encyclopedia by scavenging sources rather than thoughtful and careful research.

Surely that is what Wikipedia was always intended to be. That is precisely why we have WP:NOR and WP:RS. I'd argue that the galactic zoo isn't that, but that's tangential to the main argument.

[dogbiscuit]

It is akin to the process of building an encyclopedia by scavenging sources rather than thoughtful and careful research.

Surely that is what Wikipedia was always intended to be. That is precisely why we have WP:NOR and WP:RS. I'd argue that the galactic zoo isn't that, but that's tangential to the main argument.

I disagree. NOR and RS were introduced as solutions to a specific problem. Originally it was conceived that crowd sourcing was the solution: that there were many talented people out there who knew things, or didn't know things but knew how to write and so on so by magic a team would coalesce to create fine polished articles.

NOR was brought in to cope with the realisation that people were using Wikipedia to publish their own pet theories. Originally this wasn't seen as a problem. Similarly RS was brought in because it became apparent people were prepared to make things up. There was no way to resolve deadlock amongst anonymous buffoons, therefore the sourcing rule was brought in.

The problem is that these are blunt tools, and NOR and RS together obstruct careful and creative writing. You more or less have to paraphrase a source if you are to be able to cope with simpleton editors who cannot step back and look at an article as a whole. You end up with an academic writing where every little sentence is referenced, rather than a big picture summary with a general set of source references listed (which was much more how Wikipedia started out).

The point is, Wikipedia is sold under the anyone can edit/be bold banner still, when it has changed: anyone can edit, but don't expect your edit to be considered worthy of keeping until you have passed through the initiation rites. In its early form, it entirely depended on crowd sourcing to magic up articles out of the ether. Now, it is a Google screen scraper process. It is very different from its original conception.

[Poetlister]

It is very different from its original conception.

Wasn't the original conception that it would produce draft articles that would then be polished up by experts on another site?

[dogbiscuit]

It is very different from its original conception.

Wasn't the original conception that it would produce draft articles that would then be polished up by experts on another site?

Yes, and then it sort of evolved to missing that bit out. So I cheated and missed that prototype step out.

Anyone who has done any writing soon works out that a bodged up draft takes longer to fix than writing from scratch (which is often the problem of editing when you don't want to tread on other contributors' toes) so it is not surprising that step vanished, though it was still considered that a crowd-sourced equivalent step would happen as expert turd-polishers would step forward at the appropriate time.

If you look at Wikipedia pre-2005, it was very much driving to gain content and much less concerned about demonstrating its veracity. I'm not even sure when I discovered there was policy. The verification step was driven by the great wars over the Middle East and other controversies, not the general run of the mill Pokemon and Life in my Village content.

[Peter Damian]

That's not the idea.

But what if it's something where the true answer, or some approximation to it, is available in the right place, but false "popular notion" ideas are to be found in newspapers, magazines and popular books? For example, why are the aristocracy called the "upper crust"? There is a widespread belief that it is something to do with serving the top of a loaf of bread to favoured guests. I believe that's nonsense, but it's probably what crowdsourcing would claim, complete with "reliable" sources.

There's an evident confusion here. Wikipedia in the large may be "crowdsourced" in a general sense, but if you look at pretty much any even half-decent article you'll see that it's written by rather few people, not really enough to call a "crowd".

+1

Crowdsourcing is excellent for picking up or correcting little 'facts' - so long as the facts have already been determined by reliable sources. It is poor at

(a) presenting the big facts that are supervenient on the little ones (see the WW II parody below)

(b) discovering the little facts. Even something as prosaic as the birth date of a historical figure requires a lot of hard work, intelligence and deduction (and conjecture, frankly).

The following is a brief characterization of World War Two:

Japanese Imperial, German Nazi, and Italian Fascists, and others, formed an axis intent on taking over large areas of the world.
They were opposed by British, French, Soviets, American and others who formed an alliance.
The main part of the war, involving numerous military forces, lasted about five years, and the total death toll from fighting and ancillary strife reached tens of millions.
Notable was the attempt by the Nazis to systematically exterminate the Jews and some other groups, a project which resulted in the death of about six million people mainly in death camps.
The war changed the global map of nations, the world’s economy, and gave rise to movements and organizations intent on making sure that large scale war of this type would not happen again.
The allies won.

The following is a brief characterization of World War Two after the dweebs who write and edit Wikipedia get hold of it:

Nazi Germany, or the Third Reich, is the common name for the country of Germany while governed by Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) from 1933 to 1945.
Third Reich (German: Drittes Reich) denotes the Nazi state as a historical successor to the medieval Holy Roman Empire (962-1806) and to the modern German Empire (1871-1918).
A major part of the German military was the Schutzstaffel.
While a multitude of uniforms existed for the SS, often depending on the theatre of war where they were stationed, the all black SS uniform is the most well known.
The very first SA uniforms and insignia were paramilitary uniforms fashioned by early Nazis which incorporated parts from World War I uniforms to include such features used by other Freikorps formation such as high boots, daggers, and the kepi hat.
Nazi Germany had two official names, the Deutsches Reich (German Reich), from 1933 to 1943, when it became Großdeutsches Reich (Greater German Reich).
For the Japanese Army, the Type 3 Officers Uniform, was introduced in 1943 and was similar to the Type 98 but was made of cheaper materials.
There were many helmets
Adrian helmet – As with many countries, the IJA adopted and produced the French Adrian helmet.
There were war crimes.
Type 92 – The Adrian helmet was later replaced by a Japanese designed helmet called the Type 92 (1932).
Six million Jews and others were exterminated by the Nazis.
Type 90 – was like the cork helmet issued by the European imperial powers.
Up to nearly 80 million people died as a direct result of the war.
Type 92 – This was a cork version of the Type 92 steel helmet.
The US marines came to their own as a major military force during this war.
The Marine Corps dress uniform is an elaborate uniform worn for formal or ceremonial occasions.
The marines attacked Guadalcanal on August 7th 1942.
During the ensuing battle, over 10,000 marines were wounded.
The dress uniform for the US marines has used a single brass button on the sleeve since 1923.
And so on and so forth
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/ ... ne-encycl/

[Peter Damian]

The point is, Wikipedia is sold under the anyone can edit/be bold banner still, when it has changed: anyone can edit, but don't expect your edit to be considered worthy of keeping until you have passed through the initiation rites. In its early form, it entirely depended on crowd sourcing to magic up articles out of the ether. Now, it is a Google screen scraper process. It is very different from its original conception.

I beg to disagree on this (but not your other points). Because of the early domination of the project by IT types, screen scraping and aggregation was an important feature from early on. E.g. Derek Ramsey wrote a program in September 2002 to add US small towns, sourced from the US census database. It was the first large-scale bot. On March 14 2002, editor Mário Miranda noted that someone had published the 1911 version of Encyclopedia Britannica online. The Cunctator chipped in “All right, now we’re talking! Conversion scripts to the ready....”. And off they went. Even today, the historical articles mostly rely on 1911 Britannica - with amusing results http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/langua ... ?track=rss as I pointed out a while ago.

Scraping and aggregation was part of the culture from early on.

[Malleus]

It's certainly disappointing how many of Wikipedia's historical articles rely on the 1911 Britannica, ridiculous really. Someone said elsewhere in reference to the original conception of Wikipedia as a feeder for Nupedia that it's significantly more work to polish such an article into something decent than it would be to write it from scratch. Which of course is why hardly anyone bothers.

[dogbiscuit]

The point is, Wikipedia is sold under the anyone can edit/be bold banner still, when it has changed: anyone can edit, but don't expect your edit to be considered worthy of keeping until you have passed through the initiation rites. In its early form, it entirely depended on crowd sourcing to magic up articles out of the ether. Now, it is a Google screen scraper process. It is very different from its original conception.

I beg to disagree on this (but not your other points). Because of the early domination of the project by IT types, screen scraping and aggregation was an important feature from early on. E.g. Derek Ramsey wrote a program in September 2002 to add US small towns, sourced from the US census database. It was the first large-scale bot. On March 14 2002, editor Mário Miranda noted that someone had published the 1911 version of Encyclopedia Britannica online. The Cunctator chipped in “All right, now we’re talking! Conversion scripts to the ready....”. And off they went. Even today, the historical articles mostly rely on 1911 Britannica - with amusing results http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/langua ... ?track=rss as I pointed out a while ago.

Scraping and aggregation was part of the culture from early on.

You are right to point out the lack of clarity in my point.

What I was really alluding to the manual element of the process, the "editor experience". Originally, a pair of hands was free to write whatever ("Be bold!") and have that writing "ruthlessly edited!" in turn. Now those hands are not free to write, but essentially have to transcribe sources, typically Google, so even the supposedly non-screen scraping manual editing is effectively screen-scraping. Being bold has been deprecated.

[HRIP7]

The point is, Wikipedia is sold under the anyone can edit/be bold banner still, when it has changed: anyone can edit, but don't expect your edit to be considered worthy of keeping until you have passed through the initiation rites. In its early form, it entirely depended on crowd sourcing to magic up articles out of the ether. Now, it is a Google screen scraper process. It is very different from its original conception.

I beg to disagree on this (but not your other points). Because of the early domination of the project by IT types, screen scraping and aggregation was an important feature from early on. E.g. Derek Ramsey wrote a program in September 2002 to add US small towns, sourced from the US census database. It was the first large-scale bot. On March 14 2002, editor Mário Miranda noted that someone had published the 1911 version of Encyclopedia Britannica online. The Cunctator chipped in “All right, now we’re talking! Conversion scripts to the ready....”. And off they went. Even today, the historical articles mostly rely on 1911 Britannica - with amusing results http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/langua ... ?track=rss as I pointed out a while ago.

Scraping and aggregation was part of the culture from early on.

You are right to point out the lack of clarity in my point.

What I was really alluding to the manual element of the process, the "editor experience". Originally, a pair of hands was free to write whatever ("Be bold!") and have that writing "ruthlessly edited!" in turn. Now those hands are not free to write, but essentially have to transcribe sources, typically Google, so even the supposedly non-screen scraping manual editing is effectively screen-scraping. Being bold has been deprecated.

It's why Wikipedia is so bad at high-level articles on topics like Information technology (T-H-L). You cannot stitch a high-level overview together from multiple sources the way you can a timeline.

[Peter Damian]

It's certainly disappointing how many of Wikipedia's historical articles rely on the 1911 Britannica, ridiculous really. Someone said elsewhere in reference to the original conception of Wikipedia as a feeder for Nupedia that it's significantly more work to polish such an article into something decent than it would be to write it from scratch. Which of course is why hardly anyone bothers.

A very important point, and one of the main themes of the book. There is a myth that the Nupedia process was slow and painful and 'top down' and required elite fuddy-duddy academic types to steer an article through to completion, and it was a big bottleneck etc etc, and then Jimmy discovered the wiki and then everything was solved, presto. This is the Wikipedia 'creation myth', and like all creation myths it is the foundation of a whole ideology*.

The truth is more complex. The wiki enabled the collation of a manifold variety of facts into lists and categories. But (as Malleus says), polishing any of these into something decent, or writing them again from scratch, is a significant piece of work. Which is why the FA process takes about the same time as the original Nupedia one.


*Typically such myths are "a narrative intended to explain the tribe's favoured position on earth, often incorporating supernatural forces struggling for control, apocalypse, and millennium". As I have argued before, the wiki or the 'emergent phenomenon' of crowdsourcing is regarded by many in the 'movement' with supernatural awe. The whole is more than the sum of its parts etc. The favoured or chosen tribe are of course the 'community' of faithful. Wikipediocracy and all other detractors of the movement suchas Big Media occupy something like the position of Satan (or perhaps the Antichrist). Whether the Wikipedia mythology has room for an Apocalypse or a Millenimum, I don't know.

[Mason]

The point is, Wikipedia is sold under the anyone can edit/be bold banner still, when it has changed: anyone can edit, but don't expect your edit to be considered worthy of keeping until you have passed through the initiation rites. In its early form, it entirely depended on crowd sourcing to magic up articles out of the ether. Now, it is a Google screen scraper process. It is very different from its original conception.

There's a lot of truth to that, I think. There's always been a certain tension between the model of Wikipedia as sort of a "folk history" compendium, where ordinary people share what they know in the "anyone can edit" model, and the almost paranoid "every sentence must be referenced or we'll have no proof it's true" mindset that believes that the tiny inline bracketed numbers are some sort of talisman against untruths creeping in (even thought that's quite obviously not the case.)

An example I came across the other day was the three-way light bulb article. Someone took the time to explain what it was, and how it worked, complete with diagrams - without a single reference. That comports well with the "folk history" model, but terrifies the patrollers, so they "fix" it by slapping an unreferenced tag on it, which will just sit there looking ugly for a year, darkly implying that the whole thing might be just made up, because no one can be arsed to go hunt down "sources" for how a three-way light bulb works. Eventually another patroller will come along and gut most of the article (edit summary: "unsourced"), thus "improving" it more. Patrollers and bots will mindlessly fiddle with the categories and whitespace until it's eventually decimated by vandalism or deleted after a lazy deletionist slaps a "prod - not notable, unreferenced" template on it and a rubber-stamp admin dutifully deletes it a week later without reading it, feeling proud of themselves for "cleaning out the backlog" of articles that need deleting. This trajectory is the probable fate of this article and many like it, regardless of whether they're completely accurate or completely made up.

[HRIP7]

The point is, Wikipedia is sold under the anyone can edit/be bold banner still, when it has changed: anyone can edit, but don't expect your edit to be considered worthy of keeping until you have passed through the initiation rites. In its early form, it entirely depended on crowd sourcing to magic up articles out of the ether. Now, it is a Google screen scraper process. It is very different from its original conception.

There's a lot of truth to that, I think. There's always been a certain tension between the model of Wikipedia as sort of a "folk history" compendium, where ordinary people share what they know in the "anyone can edit" model, and the almost paranoid "every sentence must be referenced or we'll have no proof it's true" mindset that believes that the tiny inline bracketed numbers are some sort of talisman against untruths creeping in (even thought that's quite obviously not the case.)

An example I came across the other day was the three-way light bulb article. Someone took the time to explain what it was, and how it worked, complete with diagrams - without a single reference. That comports well with the "folk history" model, but terrifies the patrollers, so they "fix" it by slapping an unreferenced tag on it, which will just sit there looking ugly for a year, darkly implying that the whole thing might be just made up, because no one can be arsed to go hunt down "sources" for how a three-way light bulb works. Eventually another patroller will come along and gut most of the article (edit summary: "unsourced"), thus "improving" it more. Patrollers and bots will mindlessly fiddle with the categories and whitespace until it's eventually decimated by vandalism or deleted after a lazy deletionist slaps a "prod - not notable, unreferenced" template on it and a rubber-stamp admin dutifully deletes it a week later without reading it, feeling proud of themselves for "cleaning out the backlog" of articles that need deleting. This trajectory is the probable fate of this article and many like it, regardless of whether they're completely accurate or completely made up.

The thing is that unreferenced C-class articles like that are the ones most often of practical use to me. They give you an overview and some technical terms - it's often enough orientation to go find some other, independent web pages to verify whether the light bulb or whatever it is does work like that or not.

[dogbiscuit]

The thing is that unreferenced C-class articles like that are the ones most often of practical use to me. They give you an overview and some technical terms - it's often enough orientation to go find some other, independent web pages to verify whether the light bulb or whatever it is does work like that or not.

And of course they are exactly the sort of articles that are fun to write. I did one on some item of pop ephemera which I was quite pleased with: it was a little piece telling about something of minor interest to me which I thought was of general interest to the world. That article remains and actually, checking now, has been significantly expanded and is still a classic Wikipedia piece, barely referenced but, aside from some obvious nerdy irrelevant and repetitive detail, my original structure and editorialising remains.

Of course these days, there isn't the sense that this is what Wikipedia is for, it is too formal, studious. You aren't really encouraged to engage as we were in the early days where it was novel and exciting. That's why there is a problem with editor retention: it's no fun any more, it's just hard work.

[Malleus]

The point is, Wikipedia is sold under the anyone can edit/be bold banner still, when it has changed: anyone can edit, but don't expect your edit to be considered worthy of keeping until you have passed through the initiation rites. In its early form, it entirely depended on crowd sourcing to magic up articles out of the ether. Now, it is a Google screen scraper process. It is very different from its original conception.

I beg to disagree on this (but not your other points). Because of the early domination of the project by IT types, screen scraping and aggregation was an important feature from early on. E.g. Derek Ramsey wrote a program in September 2002 to add US small towns, sourced from the US census database. It was the first large-scale bot. On March 14 2002, editor Mário Miranda noted that someone had published the 1911 version of Encyclopedia Britannica online. The Cunctator chipped in “All right, now we’re talking! Conversion scripts to the ready....”. And off they went. Even today, the historical articles mostly rely on 1911 Britannica - with amusing results http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/langua ... ?track=rss as I pointed out a while ago.

Scraping and aggregation was part of the culture from early on.

You are right to point out the lack of clarity in my point.

What I was really alluding to the manual element of the process, the "editor experience". Originally, a pair of hands was free to write whatever ("Be bold!") and have that writing "ruthlessly edited!" in turn. Now those hands are not free to write, but essentially have to transcribe sources, typically Google, so even the supposedly non-screen scraping manual editing is effectively screen-scraping. Being bold has been deprecated.

It's why Wikipedia is so bad at high-level articles on topics like Information technology (T-H-L). You cannot stitch a high-level overview together from multiple sources the way you can a timeline.

I don't think that's quite true. I actually started on trying to improve the IT article last year, but very quickly got bogged down with the idiots who prefer to argue about capitalisation than substance, so I gave up on it.

[dogbiscuit]

I don't think that's quite true. I actually started on trying to improve the IT article last year, but very quickly got bogged down with the idiots who prefer to argue about capitalisation than substance, so I gave up on it.

Perhaps what is needed is a "This is supposed to be fun (Jimbo said so)" template.

[Malleus]

The point is, Wikipedia is sold under the anyone can edit/be bold banner still, when it has changed: anyone can edit, but don't expect your edit to be considered worthy of keeping until you have passed through the initiation rites. In its early form, it entirely depended on crowd sourcing to magic up articles out of the ether. Now, it is a Google screen scraper process. It is very different from its original conception.

There's a lot of truth to that, I think. There's always been a certain tension between the model of Wikipedia as sort of a "folk history" compendium, where ordinary people share what they know in the "anyone can edit" model, and the almost paranoid "every sentence must be referenced or we'll have no proof it's true" mindset that believes that the tiny inline bracketed numbers are some sort of talisman against untruths creeping in (even thought that's quite obviously not the case.)

An example I came across the other day was the three-way light bulb article. Someone took the time to explain what it was, and how it worked, complete with diagrams - without a single reference. That comports well with the "folk history" model, but terrifies the patrollers, so they "fix" it by slapping an unreferenced tag on it, which will just sit there looking ugly for a year, darkly implying that the whole thing might be just made up, because no one can be arsed to go hunt down "sources" for how a three-way light bulb works. Eventually another patroller will come along and gut most of the article (edit summary: "unsourced"), thus "improving" it more. Patrollers and bots will mindlessly fiddle with the categories and whitespace until it's eventually decimated by vandalism or deleted after a lazy deletionist slaps a "prod - not notable, unreferenced" template on it and a rubber-stamp admin dutifully deletes it a week later without reading it, feeling proud of themselves for "cleaning out the backlog" of articles that need deleting. This trajectory is the probable fate of this article and many like it, regardless of whether they're completely accurate or completely made up.

Those unreferenced tags, along with the orphan tags, irritate the Hell out of me. Back in the day I would search out and cite a single source just to justify getting rid of them. Tagging in most cases is just officious laziness.

[dogbiscuit]

Those unreferenced tags, along with the orphan tags, irritate the Hell out of me. Back in the day I would search out and cite a single source just to justify getting rid of them. Tagging in most cases is just officious laziness.

Could be worse, they might have geotagged it.

[Malleus]

Those unreferenced tags, along with the orphan tags, irritate the Hell out of me. Back in the day I would search out and cite a single source just to justify getting rid of them. Tagging in most cases is just officious laziness.

Could be worse, they might have geotagged it.

I'm reminded once again of the request for citation tag placed after "most humans have five fingers" in an article about polydactylism.

[HRIP7]

The point is, Wikipedia is sold under the anyone can edit/be bold banner still, when it has changed: anyone can edit, but don't expect your edit to be considered worthy of keeping until you have passed through the initiation rites. In its early form, it entirely depended on crowd sourcing to magic up articles out of the ether. Now, it is a Google screen scraper process. It is very different from its original conception.

I beg to disagree on this (but not your other points). Because of the early domination of the project by IT types, screen scraping and aggregation was an important feature from early on. E.g. Derek Ramsey wrote a program in September 2002 to add US small towns, sourced from the US census database. It was the first large-scale bot. On March 14 2002, editor Mário Miranda noted that someone had published the 1911 version of Encyclopedia Britannica online. The Cunctator chipped in “All right, now we’re talking! Conversion scripts to the ready....”. And off they went. Even today, the historical articles mostly rely on 1911 Britannica - with amusing results http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/langua ... ?track=rss as I pointed out a while ago.

Scraping and aggregation was part of the culture from early on.

You are right to point out the lack of clarity in my point.

What I was really alluding to the manual element of the process, the "editor experience". Originally, a pair of hands was free to write whatever ("Be bold!") and have that writing "ruthlessly edited!" in turn. Now those hands are not free to write, but essentially have to transcribe sources, typically Google, so even the supposedly non-screen scraping manual editing is effectively screen-scraping. Being bold has been deprecated.

It's why Wikipedia is so bad at high-level articles on topics like Information technology (T-H-L). You cannot stitch a high-level overview together from multiple sources the way you can a timeline.

I don't think that's quite true. I actually started on trying to improve the IT article last year, but very quickly got bogged down with the idiots who prefer to argue about capitalisation than substance, so I gave up on it.

I'm sure it can be done ... but when there are so many works giving a high-level overview it becomes really hard to decide which ones to pick. Plus they all tend to have their own narrative structure – you can follow one, but then you're plagiarising, and if you try to mix sources taking different approaches, citing a source for each sentence, it becomes messy ... the sources just don't gel, and it's hard to arrive at a pleasing, flowing structure that makes the text easy to read and follow.

At the micro level it is much easier to combine sources. If you are writing about a historic battle, say, or an industrial accident, or a biography, there is a timeline to follow which creates its own structure. If one source says in great detail what happened in March, and another is stronger on what happened in April, it's easy to aggregate them, and combining them works.

The IT article looks better than I remember it, but writing an article like that is still a daunting task if you're supposed to have a source for every sentence, but are not allowed to follow any one source to a significant degree.

[EricBarbour]

I don't think that's quite true. I actually started on trying to improve the IT article last year, but very quickly got bogged down with the idiots who prefer to argue about capitalisation than substance, so I gave up on it.

I'm sure it can be done ... but when there are so many works giving a high-level overview it becomes really hard to decide which ones to pick. Plus they all tend to have their own narrative structure – you can follow one, but then you're plagiarising, and if you try to mix sources taking different approaches, citing a source for each sentence, it becomes messy ... the sources just don't gel, and it's hard to arrive at a pleasing, flowing structure that makes the text easy to read and follow.

Do you guys realize how absurd you sound when trying to talk "reasonably" about this? You're essentially writing content, then handing it over
to a gang of psychiatric cases, and expecting them to be "reasonable". If there was even a shred of sanity in Wikipedia's governance,
they would have started by writing high-level subject articles in an organized manner, then worked down.

Instead, it was thrown together at literal random, often using plagiarized and auto-copied text. There's still nothing resembling a subject index
(don't wave that "category" crap at me), no way to determine the size or structure of the subject branches. Wikiprojects are worse than
useless (most are dead by now), and the administrators don't give a damn.

[Malleus]

Do you guys realize how absurd you sound when trying to talk "reasonably" about this? You're essentially writing content, then handing it over
to a gang of psychiatric cases, and expecting them to be "reasonable". If there was even a shred of sanity in Wikipedia's governance,
they would have started by writing high-level subject articles in an organized manner, then worked down.

Instead, it was thrown together at literal random, often using plagiarized and auto-copied text. There's still nothing resembling a subject index
(don't wave that "category" crap at me), no way to determine the size or structure of the subject branches. Wikiprojects are worse than
useless (most are dead by now), and the administrators don't give a damn.

Wikipedia's governance, such as it is, has no power to direct anyone to write anything, only to prevent someone from writing, as you know. So it's effect is entirely negative.

I disagree with your general point about it being easier to write top-level articles and then work down; sometimes it makes just as much or even more sense to work from the bottom up. HRIP7 makes a good point about the difficulty of establishing a structure for large general articles, but I would contend that there's almost always a chronology even with them, often more than one. To use the IT article as an example, the real difficulty there was to establish a generally acceptable definition of the term that could form the basis for a structure, without blethering on about all the management speak that's now so fashionable.

Perhaps one of Wikipedia's more serious unrecognised problems is that everyone pretty much works in isolated cells, and is distrustful of outsiders. There's basically no support structure for those interested in writing decent content as opposed to the single article about their band, company they work for, or town they live in, and nobody seems to care. The crowdsourcing nonsense is simply that, nonsense.