I’m going to guess there are at least a few people who have come across a Wikipedia article they wanted to edit. Maybe there was a your/you’re mistake, maybe the article hadn’t been updated in some time, maybe there was a blatantly false statement about your favorite singer-songwriter that you wanted to delete. But then you came across a page that looked like this,
and you changed your mind.
It looks terrifying, right? All those [ ] and /\, not to mention the = * and <>. When I first saw this, I was irked. I thought Wikipedia was for everybody! I thought editing an article would be as easy as changing my “About Me” on Facebook. I wasn’t aware I needed to know some secret digital-code. Who on earth knows how to handle this?
Well, they’re called Wikipedians, and the good news is, you can be one too! I mean, yeah, you’ll have to read through the tutorial and figure out the lexicon, but that’s it!
Okay, that’s not it. The Wikipedia community is slightly more complicated than I previously thought. After that big controversy a few years ago, I remembered reading about new measures Wikipedia took that would ostensibly reduce the risk of vandalism and misinformation, but I never knew what they were.
The specific details of how the hierarchy is organized are pretty confusing, but I’ll give you a more simplified explanation here: There are some articles on Wikipedia that anyone can edit, and I do mean a-n-y-o-n-e. There are some articles that only registered users can edit. Within that category, there are users who are autoconfirmed, administrators, bureaucrats, and finally, stewards.
Is this significant? Well, I’d say yes and no. The fact of hierarchies on Wikipedia does not take away from their mission statement, that “anyone can edit.” Being an administrator is, in their own words, no big deal.
But what is significant is the fact that this online community is mirroring the structure of real-life communities–specifically, I would argue, small, tight-knit communities. In order to move from registered to autoconfirmed or autoconfirmed to admin or admin to bureaucrat, you need to exhibit responsibility and trustworthiness. You need to prove that you are dedicated to the project and that you uphold the community standards. And, really, how much different is that from real life?
2 Comments
interesting take.
You mentioned you expected the interface to be more accessible. Do you think it can? For example, do you think our blog editing interface is more accessible than Wikipedia’s syntax? If it is, then why wouldn’t they use such a thing?
Whoa! That’s really fascinating. I had no idea about this hierarchy of Wikipedians. I think it’s good that they have some articles that certain people just can’t edit.
With an incident such as that of Seigenthaler’s Wikipedia entry, how can anyone even learn to trust what they read on the internet? OK, maybe that’s going too far, but how can we ensure that we won’t be…tricked…to passively intake erroneous material?
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