Thursday, August 30, 2007

On Ignoring All Rules

One of Wikipedia's most important, and most embattled, policies is the infamous "Ignore All Rules". It's been there for a very long time, and in that time has changed quite a good deal from the original "If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the Wiki, then ignore them and go about your business" (which is the same form it had when I joined up in 2004, although more bits of it were wikilinked then than in the original). Today's "If the rules prevent you from working with others to improve or maintain Wikipedia, ignore them" is different from this in a very subtle and pernicious way: you are only permitted to ignore the rules if you are supported by a clique. Sadly, IAR has been subjected to constant attacks of this sort, almost entirely by people who either fail to understand IAR, or understand it but object to the principle behind it.

I admit that I don't pay a lot of attention to what IAR (or any other policy on Wikipedia) actually says. My experience is that Wikipedia policy documents are edited mainly by "policy wonks": people who seem to have a fetish for generate huge reams of policy without necessarily contemplating whether the policies they write either reflect actual practice or are actually calculated to benefit the encyclopedia. (There are also quite a few people who are constantly manipulating policy for "nefarious" purposes, but I don't want to dwell on that.) These people mean well, but that doesn't mean that their efforts yield positive results. The road to hell, after all, is paved with good intentions.

IAR is especially problematic to policy wonks. By and large, these are people who would prefer that everything be governed by well-defined, clear rules that anyone can understand so there is no excuse for not following them. The problem with IAR is that it gives explicit license to not follow the rules: anathema! Their preference would be to get rid of IAR, but Jimbo won't let them. Since they can't get rid of it, they spend a great deal of energy trying to find a way to write it that narrows its scope as much as possible while not offending the Jimbo-God by actually deleting the policy. The two thousand edits IAR has experienced in the past two years are the collective papercuts of these editors circling about, seeking to find the chink in IAR's armor that allows them to stab it dead, and never understanding that IAR reflects a attitude of the "old core" Wikipedia community that cannot be killed without killing that core.

The real problem here is that IAR is the "Zen koan" of Wikipedia policy: if you understand it, you don't need the words, and if you don't understand it the words (no matter what they are) won't help. Unfortunately, the proportion of Wikipedia's editor base today that understand what Zen is, or more generally understand how to balance opposing tensions, is small and shrinking fast. Many of Wikipedia's policies are in opposition to one another, and it is necessary to strike a balance between two extremes in order to move forward in a reasonable way. (This is not the sum total of IAR, but it is a significant part of it.) Unfortunately, the "follow the rules at all expenses" crowd (many of whom are Aspies, or so it seems) doesn't tolerate balancing tests well: they want hard, immutable, objective, brightline rules, not multifactor tests that evaluate competing interests in what is inevitably a subjective way.

I don't have a solution to this problem. We can't ban all the Aspies, or even exclude them from editing policy. The best we can hope for is that people will make more of an effort to try to teach new editors what things like IAR really mean. But we've been trying to do that for the past two years and it hasn't helped worth a damn.

18 comments:

  1. You hit the nail on the head with the zen of IAR. If you need to read it to know what it means, you cannot know what it means.

    As for the aspies, that deserves a post of its own.

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  2. At the moment the rules of Wikipedia seem to be just there as a bunch of handy excuses which bullies can use to whack people with. I know of one editor who's wont to quote chapter and verse of Wikipedia policy against other people, and then turn around to violate the very same policy. As Jonathan Swift said, "Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through."

    Well, I don't have a solution to this either, and I don't intend to formulate one -- since it's getting quite obvious that the Powers That Be aren't really that interested in improving Wikipedia's processes anyway.

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  3. To me, "ignore all rules" is what caused the Founding Fathers to say "fuck it all", abandon the Articles of Confederation, and create a federal union under a constitution. On Wikipedia, it means to throw out a policy when it's full of fail. All it is is a safety valve, really, that allows people to say "fuck it all" when you *truly have to*.

    I'm not sure how many people have abused IAR, but it's a shame that such an inherently good principle is knocked down a peg because someone was being a selfish asshole and decided that they need to ignore rules.

    Also, isn't the very idea of wiki that it's lawless? No procedure, no regulation, just make an edit? I know that the very first wiki made had none of the regulatory prestige MediaWiki claims -- all it really had was the viewing page, the edit page, and probably some more things, but that's it. I'm not saying regulatory mechanisms are bad for Wikipedia (in fact they are crucial to any wiki's survival), but the idea of the first wiki being so unregulated really makes you think of why IAR is -- it simply is wiki.

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  4. Messedrocker got it right, IAR is basically Wikipedia's sanity check. If a rule makes no sense or is contrary to the purposes of wikipedia, ignore it. 9 times out of 10, no one will even notice.

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  5. And the 10% of the time someone *does* notice, you're screwed.

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  6. It would be a real breakthrough, I think, if someone who has participated in any of the sub rosa conspiracies of the various cliques of Wikipedia would break rank, and publish all of the secret correspondences he has received that are geared toward gaming the system. (Any takers?)

    This would at once show those directly involved for what they are, and cast a chill on those not directly involved that their wickedness might not forever be concealed.

    Any takers?

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  7. IMO, there are no big conspiracies. Nothing that exciting, I'm afraid.

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  8. There certainly are off-Wiki discussions about concerting effort to control content. And they probably work most of the time.

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  9. The pace of the off-wiki conspiracies has dropped off ever since the price of dog blood skyrocketed during the Halloween shortage of 2005. Without it, our ceremonies just don't have the same kick.

    Sorry.

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  10. I'm guessing that you're not as much of a choirboy as you say. Care to break rank?

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  11. Okay, anonymous, you've convinced me to break ranks & share some of the correspondence these secret cabals exchange with me. Unfortunately, unless you have the proper decryption software (like rot-26), this message will appear to be a badly-typed letter from Nigeria asking for my help to get several million dollars of ill-gotten gains out of that country.

    Those cabals are just darned sneaky!

    Geoff

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  12. Received your letter, Geoff; thanks.

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  13. It is interesting that chairboy and llywrch, if we take their ridicule of the notion that there are off-Wiki conspiracies to be denial of the same, have mastered the negative empirical truth, something of which they ought to inform the philosophy community.

    Or maybe they have some reason to want to deflect attention from something that they believe does not exist.

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  14. I expect many people engaging in off-Wiki conspiratorial activities do not realize they are doing so, because it is never or almost never at all nefarious. There's no secret meetings with a password, people just talk to eachother about problems off the Wiki and then, because they agree (or because they are friends) this contacted user joins in. Rinse, repeat. The new user, meanwhile, has no way of gaining such support, while the old user barely realizes they're doing anything wrong.

    Of course, this has nothing to do with what this particular blog posting is about.

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  15. And that was not the same anonymous user, sorry.

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  16. Probably, indeed, they feel perfectly innocent about it, even vindicated in it. They are fighting the good fight, and they are certain that those on the other side are committing every imaginable transgression, so naturally if good is to triumph ...

    Yes, this does not directly relate to the current blog post. Google brought up one from March or May on one of my recent searches for Kelly's blog, and I was starting to craft a response before I realized it was dated. Appy Polly Loggies.

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  17. You are thoroughly entertaining, anonymous. Just remember: "When you start accusing everyone of being in on a conspiracy, you shouldn't be surprised if they decide to confirm your paranoia by banding together against you."

    In the meantime, keep going, your wanking is thoroughly amusing. Here, have some peanuts for being such an amazing troll.

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