User:Mujinga/essays/WWW

Willy Waggling on Wikipedia

I come and go on Wikipedia, since I am back in 2019 I am noticing a lot of hostility in the actions of fellow editors. That saddens me (although it's not true that there was a time on wikipedia without editing conflicts) and I wanted to jot down some thoughts here.

Edgelordism

I find Reddit an amazing and useful resource in so many ways. Raddle is the "anarchist" alternative setup after various Redditors got banned for various things. So i thought I'd try it out, but i quickly found it was a place for 30 or so kids from the USA to enforce their particular version of anarchism on everyone else. Who knows, maybe good things will come from it but I'm always a bit shocked when the central tenets of anarchism (such as mutual solidarity and thinking for yourself) are fragrantly disregarded.

Anyhoo, I only mention about Raddle to get me to the conversation i had with a friend about it IRL, since i was quite mystified as to why everyone on the site seemed to have attack mode as their default setting. It seemed obvious to him that the internet is so radge now that everyone comes with the feeling that they are about to be attacked so they get their jabs in first. He thought everyone stays in their own tribal identity and lashes out at anyone who doesn't fit the hivemind.

This seems a pretty assessment of the way things are, if that has percolated through into the wikipedia universe it would be a shame and it would seem the very idea of a collaboratively edited encyclopaedia has gone out of the window.

The above is not meant to claim that I am objective, of course not. Nobody is objective, no matter what they say. We are all subjective beings and it's an open question to me if true objectivity can exist from a philosophical standpoint.

A traditional problem is that it's easy to be a big man sitting in your armchair in the safety of your own home. I do wonder if people would behave in the same way if it was a real life conversation and the other person was standing in front of them. In addition, this is an interesting one since I know wikipedia editors were notoriously male in the past but perhaps that has now changed, I would need to research it to find out more.

Interlude - hmm no it's still pretty bad, see here and here

In any case I am not of the opinion that only male people can be macho, I think people of all genders and sexes can behave in macho ways, by which i mean things like:

• taking up too much space (figuratively as well as literally),
• being dismissive of other opinions without good reason,
• taking control of communal things for oneself

Assume Good Faith

One thing that editing on Wikipedia has really taught me as a useful lifelesson is to assume good faith. If i don't understand another person's (or bot's) edit, my first instinct is not to delete or to revert, rather it is to try to understand where they are coming from. If I can do that, I can then intervene based on some knowledge, not a kneejerk reaction. It may still appear to be the latter, but then hopefully the other person will also AGF and then understand me in turn. Unfortunately, I'm old enough now to see that in a dispute between two people, things only gets resolved if both people actually want that result.

To conclude this brief essay then, we can say that hope springs eternal, but willy wagglers are universal.