User:Tom harrison/concerns

An automated abuse machine

Raymond Smullyan wrote somewhere about Johnnie, who brings a pie to school. Billy snatches it away, Johnnie tries to take it back; Teacher intervenes, cutting the pie and giving half to each. Naive misapplication of the presumption of good faith leads people to mistake one person abusing another, for two parties in a dispute.

Sometimes a man may help an abuser, or may choose not to defend some particular person, because he bears a grudge, or wants to exploit the situation. More often, it is the abuser manipulating someone's good intentions. Abusers tell reasonable people what they want to hear, urging them to assume good faith; investigate; decide for themselves. Next the victim is being called to answer charges on the noticeboard, and the troll has won big. He has created an abuse machine that will keep running even after the accusations are shown to be nonsense and the abuser is banned. If the harasser gets blocked, so what? He has no reputation to lose, and can always come back with a new identity and all the newbie protections.

As an unintended consequence of our policies, procedures, and values, we maintain an environment where particular kinds of abuse thrive. This lets men use the project to stalk women, makes the project unattractive to women and to many men, hinders our work, and impairs the quality of our product. How much time do we spend dealing with problems around the biographies of non-notable porn stars? If we had a more balanced community, fewer of these would get kept at AfD and we would have a higher standard of notability.

We are not going to have a neutral encyclopedia as long as women are in practice discouraged from contributing. Our core policies include no personal attacks and civility not because we are nice people, but because they are essential for maintaining the community necessary to write a neutral and complete encyclopedia. Yet, these policies are not enforced in practice, because enough of the community does not want them enforced.

Experienced volunteers who have left and who tell people why are a growing group. I don't know what others would tell their friends, but I'd be surprised if it was "Jump in and contribute! A free encyclopedia is a noble goal; Plus it's great fun, and rewarding too." Someone saying that is what brought me here in 2004. Over the past year the community has become increasingly hostile and unpleasant, and even dangerous. For some time I have advised women I know not to edit at all, because of the abuse and the risk of having online harassment bleed over into real life. Men I tell to provide no personal or identifying information, and avoid articles that would reveal a pattern of interest. Everyone should use a carefully chosen pseudonym to avoid harassment in the real world, and should probably discard the account after a few hundred edits.

Working against ourselves

The community has built a system that accommodates people whose net contribution is negative, while alienating some of our best volunteers. I do not blame this on anyone in particular, or include myself among the best. Most experienced users do a fine job; a majority write more and better than I do. Many admins, foundation employees, and OTRS volunteers work hard for the project.

It happens more and more that some loudmouth jackass causes enough trouble that it seems easier to accommodate him. This is short-sighted. It lets the fraction of jerks grow and causes the fraction of women to shrink. (Loudmouth jackasses are disproportionately male. Who would have thought, eh?) It drives everyone to use a pseudonym, further dehumanizing the project and removing another mechanism of accountability.

What should we do instead? Keep people who help the project, quickly dump those who do not, and protect each other from harassment. We could do that if we only had to deal with opposition by trolls and vandals. We cannot do it against the opposition of established members of the community. There are dozens of apparently respected users who are either not here to write an encyclopedia, are actively working against the goals of the project, or are pursuing vendettas against others. Everyone knows it, but we must Assume Good Faith.

Good volunteers are routinely harassed in real life and eventually driven from the project, or abused on-site until it becomes intolerable, while the rest of us bend over backwards to be fair to the harassers, urging the victims to grow a thicker skin, vigorously condemning any admin who blocks an established user. And God forbid we should tell people not to link sites that attack our volunteers.

Of course I am an administrator. Why do I not just block these jerks and delete the nonsense they post? That's my job, right? Some people are effectively untouchable (It would be easier if we would just maintain a list). There are far more people who will critique or undo an admin action than will do almost anything else. The magic word to summon that hoard is 'IRC.' In practice, we do not enforce any policies but 3rr and blp, and sometimes I wonder about blp. Personal attacks and harassment are forbidden? No, they are not. They are allowed, and repeated. Civility is official policy? No; incivility and even threats are as often as not rewarded with special accommodations. Neutrality and original research are whatever the majority says they are. BLP applies to some people who edit here, but not to others, and it is enforced unevenly otherwise.

Until the community wants to change these things, there are better places to spend time and less annoying places to volunteer. This probably sounds like I am leaving the project with a curse. I'm not. I will still be here off and on, cleaning up csd, reverting vandalism, removing the latest brain-dead conspiracy theory, adding the odd copy-edit or citation. Ultimately what work is done will be by people who choose to work in the environment we all maintain here.

An automated abuse machine

Working against ourselves

See also