Conservative Donnybrook

The Register reports on a controversy among Wikipedians that has caused a continuing kerfuffle among the online encyclopedia’s community of editors. Apparently the site that purports to “democratize knowledge” is increasingly dominated by an insider group whose decisionmaking process utilizes the not-so-transparent method of the secret e-mail list.

Controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia’s core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.

I don’t wish to engage in indiscriminate Wikipedia-bashing; despite its many flaws it’s an immensely useful tool that I refer to often. But its quality will surely be compromised if current and potential editors are deterred by the behavior of a secret cabal of elite Wikipedians.

Does it matter? Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has claimed (as reported by Aaron Swartz) that the vast majority of the encyclopedia’s content is produced by a tiny minority of its users:

“[I]t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”

If so, then the encyclopedia isn’t so dependent on occasional or anonymous editors after all. But is that really plausible, given its thousands of detailed articles on every conceivable subject? Aaron Swartz did his own analysis of Wikipedia’s editing statistics and persuasively argues that, in fact, Wales got it exactly backwards: most content comes from anonymous or occasional users, while the most active editors engage mostly in cleanup and housekeeping.

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site–the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

If Swartz is right, then the actions of this secret insider clique are even more imperious and arbitrary, given that Wikipedia is so dependent on “outsiders” for its content.

After we kick Iran’s ass, it is past time to address the grave and gathering threat of Vanuatu. Clearly, the John Frum-ofascists are agitating for their messianic fundamentalist vision of a future without Guam. The leader of this fanatical fringe sect of the larger, peaceful tradition of white-man-who-will-come religion has called for Guamanians to be “washed off the surface of the plate that is the world” when he was invited to speak at Columbia.

 The Vanuatuese are split between linguistically moderate English Vanuatu and the rabid French-speaking… er, French Vanuatu. Especially troubling is the recent trend of Vanuatu’s moving away from the support of the international community via World Bank loans toward acceptance of Chinese support and investments. This increasing isolationism is a harbinger of doom unparalleled since the U.S. created Hitler in 1939.

Even the coat of arms of Vanuatu, with its militaristic bent, should be proof enough of the clear and present danger of this rogue state, which can overthrow its democratically elected unicameral government by holding a special election. Liberty is clearly threatened, and if liberty is threatened anywhere, it is threatened everywhere. The verbiage at the bottom of this jihadistic battle-cry has been translated “We Stand On God!” Others, likely appeasers, point out that the phrase should be rendered “In God We Stand,” due to the disputed meaning of the preposition, but when coupled with the worship of Prince Philip, father of Prince Charles, the man who directly caused St. Diana Princess of Wales’ untimely death, it is clear that these people must be exposed before they spread their rabid, white t-shirt-clad military parades to Main Street, London, Haifa and Agana.