Who could the Wikipedia movement send to Congress?

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Jake Is A Sellout
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Who could the Wikipedia movement send to Congress?

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Fri Apr 16, 2021 5:35 pm

Hiw hilarious to see Guerillero, a former Wikipedia Arbitrator, post this to the chuckle heads of Wikipediocracy.....
If congress wanted to conduct a hearing on Wikipedia who would they invite? The answer to that question is harder than it sounds. Wikipedia and the WMF have no billionaire founder to yell at. The people that you could yell at make for bad TV and campaign ads.

Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia, but his role in the community is closer to that of the Queen of England than Mark Zuckerberg. Jimmy has no formal power. He is free to suggest things, but there is a high likelihood that they would be rejected because they came from him. He has the tools to block users, but they would be taken away if he used them. I have more formal power in the community than Jimmy does. I’ve met Jimmy and he comes across as a regular middle-aged guy. Not the kind of person to scream at on TV.

Katherine Maher is the Executive Director of the WMF, but she and the rest of the WMF keep the community at arms length. This is for section 230 reasons, but also for social ones. For reasons I will get into later, Wikipedians hate being told what to do. Anything she, or her successor, agreed to on the community’s behalf would be rejected out of hand by the community. A lot like Jimmy, she is an ordinary person. I do not think that any member of congress would gain anything from dragging her in front of a committee.

You could ask the Wikipedia community to send a representative or two, but you would probably get nobody since the community would reject the idea out of hand or be unable to come to an agreement on who to send. If the community did come to an agreement, you would most likely get one of these people or one of these people. Most all of these names are pseudonyms. None of the listed people are smarmy enough to make for good TV and it would probably backfire. Yelling at a middle-aged New York City lawyer who works mostly on property cases, thinking of the most likely candidate, would not be a great look.
What the fuck?

It probably won't occur to the chuckleheads to point out to this former Arbitrator, thet the CURRENT ARBITRATION COMMITTEE are the people who, if Congress are looking for answers/promises from the Wikipedia community, should be in the hot seat.

If fifteen seats is too many to fit in a congressional hearing, they can elect a spokesman. Hopefully they have the sense to choose the only woman on their body.

The Committee are directly elected by the community, on the understanding these people exist to uphold, interpet and evolve, the PRINCIPLES by which they all supposedly live by.

Here's a few that might be of interest to Congress....

* An editor must not engage in a pattern of editing that focuses on a specific racial, religious, or ethnic group and can reasonably be perceived as gratuitously endorsing or promoting stereotypes, or as evincing invidious bias and prejudice against the members of the group.

* Wikipedia articles that present material about living people can affect their subjects' lives. Wikipedia editors who deal with these articles have a responsibility to consider the legal and ethical implications of their actions when doing so. Adding unreliable, unsourced, or unduly weighted negative material or vandalising these pages displays particularly poor conduct.

* It is prohibited by policy to disrupt an editor's participation on Wikipedia by making threats, making repeated unwanted contacts, making repeat personal attacks, engaging in intimidation, or posting personal information. 

It is expected that the Wikipedia Administrators who are nominally trusted by the community, uphold these principles, with force if necessary, with the Committee tasked with demoting them if they are shown to have lost that trust.

Now, obviously, there is a problem sending these people to Congress under these assumptions, and that is the existence of Administrators like Bishonen and Iridescent, who are not shy in expressing their contempt for ArbCom.

The internal dysfunction of the mandated system of governance of Wikipedia is no reason however, to deny the American people the chance to interrogate the people who could conceivably be largely blamed for major faults with legal implications their shoddy outfit has, such as what Bbb23 was doing with people's private data.

It's an absolute joke that the likes of Guerillero are getting away with pretending to the world that there's really nobody with any standing or influence with the community to be called before Congress, if you, for the reasons stated, decide Jimmy or [Situation Vacant], are not it. But such is the state of Wikipediocracy. Fucking useless. Run by a complete sellout.

Oh, and on a point of fact. Jimmy is not powerless. He is a lifetime member of the Board, which is about the same size as the Committee, and which, as seen in the Fram affair, can and does tell the Committee, on certain matters that the naive community genuinely seem to think is their sole purview, to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, and listen to what they say, because this is how it's gonna be.

Guerillero wishes he had that kind of power.

Wikipedia does have principles, and their application can be tested by Congress asking the people who write them, a few well chosen questions.

They will not go to Congress, because they know the whole thing is a complete farce, and Wikipedia is essentially the digital wild west, where the biggest asshole with the biggest amount of Moxy, always wins.

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