User:OrenBochman/WGT/Further Work

Behavioural Paradoxes to Consider

Gaming the systems like many pieces of Wikipedia jargon means different things to different people. Gaming The System is about subverting the goals of the project to an individual's own interests by manipulating the rules. In this section, however, the discussion is centered about using game theoretic thinking to understand better understand the interplay of community, content and governance.

1. What are the paradoxes of the Community?
2. Which Wikipedia policies are in contradiction with its license?
3. Which Wikipedia policies are in contradiction with its other polices?
4. Which Wikipedia practices are in contradiction with its self-interest?
5. What are the main points of view of these people?

• Organic editor loss - The average user has a limited amount of information he is best suited to contribute. Once these are done he or she will leave the project or transition into non-editorial roles.
• Editing Cost - Over time the cost of becoming a new user increases, have increasing difficulties to succeed contributing a single article - however these new users are the project's future.
• Policing Cost - As they gain experience users, in the name of preserve a communal "status quo" end up increasingly police each other, rehashing policy, engaging in increasingly political conflicts over personal stakes and end up hazing the weakest victims, the new users.

The contradiction of Community and Anonymity

• Community means that users can expect to meet each other down the road. It also means that they will have to pay penalties for their actions against the group.
• Anonymity means that users can cheat - and avoid the penalties that would be the part of a known individual.
• Wikipedia lacks and resists policy about qualifications.
• Wikipedia discourages companies to use their employees (AKA COI editors) to contribute content to Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia also does not allow superstars to benefit from their work since it hides the level of contribution of the users.
• Community engagement is the most crucial element for the success of a Goal Centric Projects such as Wikipedia. Other Projects sharing this property are open source projects. These like many virtual communities of yore have implicit social aspects. It is been in the mismanagement of society that such projects have
• Wikipedia matured before social media came of age. This places it into the special category. One of the most interesting aspects of social networks today is that the more an individual partakes of social activities the harder it is to conduct in deceptive activities. A second aspect Which is the reason why it suffers from many social This It has in the days prior to There are many penalties for revealing an individual on-line. As one's roles becomes more central - especially if someone appears to be a superstar it is very likely that this will attract hateful backlash.

The Dilemma of Elites and their Accountability

• An elite in the sense of a group of the community which exerts a disproportionate influence for which it is unaccountable
• Elites can have both positive and negative effects. But a lack of accountability has a corrupting effect. History also shows how these groups can become radicalized by foreign interests.
• In communities lacking formal structure elites are placed strategically to wield influence far greater than their numbers in the group.
• Elites often coordinate using alternative communication networks to those used by the community. E.g. their own
• It is possible that one elite will be balanced by another. However is this status cannot formalized it is an unstable power structure. Over time and once an elite becomes dominant it will have tactically superiority over a newcomer group.
• The long-term effect is to transform a community into either a tyranny of the masses or a type of ad hoc dictatorship. which in many sense if where things stand in many ways.

• Q. Are there elites in Wikipedia community?
• A. There surely must be - Ramsey Theory assures us such structures exists. A passing knowledge of policy on accountability assures us that such groups exist.

• Q. Do such elites pursue their own agendas such as: influence editorial decisions; policy; rules of the society ?
• A. Since Wikipedia works on consensus rather than majority decision there is a herd mentality in decisions which would

benefit from independent thinking.

• Q. Is it possible to detect an Elite in action?
• A. In discussion members of such an elite will behave different. People in the elite will support each other and avoid contradicting one another. Thus elites can be uncovered by applying sentiment analysis, discourse analysis of other methodologies to their communications and collective action.

• Q. How can an elite's influence be countered.
• A e.g.

1. Identify the elite - anonymity is the elite's greatest assets, private communication circles is the second.
2. Form a watchdog group that enforce accountability. (Could be subverted by the elite)
3. Replace informal with a formal structure that guarantees user rights equally.
4. Create an opposing group to provide an counter-force competition.
5. Divide and Conquer - Needs an opposition that can divide.

Paradox of Deletion & Notability

Each edit to Wikipedia is done under CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL. Which places them into the commons. When an article is deleted the loss is to all Wikipedia users and syndicates. Unless the edit is illeagal (CPVIO), deleting it from public history is in conflict with GPL. There are many reasons supplied for deletion, but outside of breaking a law such as copyright, plagiarism, libel, violations of privacy, or upploading reckless and endangering information there is good room for debate about deleting content.

There debate begins with spam, to inadequate edits and so on.

Tyranny of the commons - free riders against the workers.

Increasingly I take an issue with the statement that someone is an expert in some area. It would be best not to label anyone an expert. In the Black Swan, Nassim Taleb makes a case against most so-called experts. Yet another popular book called w:number crunchers make calls for using data based methods and statistics to replace experts.

• Authority - a person to whose opinion, other people will acknowledge and often defer to. I.E. someone whose influence and knowledge within a given domain exceeds his peers. However it proves little. Hilbert program's dramatic failure.
• Expert - a person whose knowledge in a field allows can actually be demonstrated objectively. For example by consistently making predictions that come true. At one time an expert astronomer could predict a lunar eclipse in a certain place at a certain time in the future. (Today the calculations are easier)

Dilemma - Consensus V.S. Truth:

• Contradiction in policy goals.

• Look as policy as a mirror into deeper underlying problems

"a needs for reaching a consensus vs. editorial integrity."

Governance & Invasion cost

Confirmation Bias?

Most likely nobody is planning to take over Wikipedia. Yet the costs of subverting the organization or the community in some scenarios is significant to asses the stability of the governance. It is quite likely that by now Wikipedia has developed an immune system.

• Assessment of the cost and strategy of subversion of an organization.
• strategic weaknesses

some issues to look at

• consensus - what is it.
  • how good is it against manipulation by voters.
  • how good is it against divergent candidates.
• cost of coordinating large discussions.
• cost of coordinating coalitions. (elite cliques with hidden communication channels).
  • would providing evidence of covert (off wiki) communication be cause for administrative action.

Memes

• Decline and fall of Virtual Empires/Communities

reasons for thier fall in dual lens of society and meia.

• Authority over Expert.
• Stylometric Editor Fingerprinting.

• Social Media Meme:
  • The Long Tail (In sales and information marketing )
  • The Wisdom of Crowds
  • Amazon's Mechanical Turk
  • Optimal Crowd Sourcing
  • Product Placement in Social Space
  • Social Media Convergence

• Paid Editing in the The Gift Economy.

analyse paid an unpaid editing done side by side.

e.g. paid and unpaid docents

e.g. paid and unpaid developers at wmf.

MediaWiki Governance Memes

• Leadership roles of The Board, WMF employees & Volunteers, Chapter, devteam, stewards, Bureaucrats, administrators, etc in day to day activities.
• Two Hat Paradox - Leaders needs to operate visibly at a higher moral level showing the community they respect and uphold the policies from which their authority spring. Many people in leadership roles, pretend to wear two hats
  • Leader's hat - for collecting accolades.
  • Simple Joe's hat - acting less then stellar and wishing to doge accountability.(e.g. "Administrators are really Janitors" pretending that have no cliques, lack influence, access to better information, or real power and thus addressing their shortcomings).

• Policies in action:
  • Real world - Legal stuff like open licenses and charters, nonprofit, tax, accounting etc. (Buffered by WMF and Chapters)
  • Formal Hard - Built into the software.
  • Formal Soft - Extensions, Bots, Tools, run by the community.
  • Semi-formal - Policy enforced by the core community. (undeletion,arbitration).
  • Informal - Policy enforced by the core community. (speedy,deletion,status approval,COI).
  • Informal - Policy pages - to be followed by editorial community.

Notability Memes

• Prescriptive vs. Descriptive - Wikipedia
  • As society grows more open prescriptive (lexicon/encyclopedias/databases) will be superseded by descriptive ones.
  • Webster's 3rd. vs. Wikipedia.

So what do we do when we do want to reject materials? One way to go about it is to request higher standards. Request citations for all fact. Reject unsourced conclusions. Reject low quality citations. Point out low authority of materials. Place things in a hierarchy - Oscars are more important than Cannes which is more important than the Razzies which are more important than the AVN. By having a multidimensional paradigm instead of notability we can better specify what should be rejected out of hand (not notable) and what should be rejected procedural (local editorial issues).

Content NameSpaces - Partition Main space - Make a space for bio of living person. One for obscene material and one for marginal content. By automatically moving articles to these locations we can reduce the cost associated with owning these medias. Making a We could make obscene name space available only to credit card owners. This would knock down the interest to almost nothing. Such built-in penalties would not need so much work to maintain and would generate less contention.

• Draw a spectrum Diagram

Lets start with what is not notable:

• Future events (they may not happen thus are speculative and non notable). Because of their speculative nature they are likely to be in the hype to paid spectrum. While their citations may support speculative statements they are poisoned roots. Even if the event takes and article is changed to reflect said fact the article cannot be said to follow from these facts and using them is an a posteriori fallacy.

• Fads are not notable. The majority of Greek plays written, as well as most early Italian operas composed that were great sensation - made the artist rich and famous stars. But these did not stand the test of time for various reasons. Most Hollywood movies do not become classics - their only chance of making a return is through media saturation. This is a reason why it is better to wait with such subjects. However we are an open society and our encyclopedia is inclusive. We should accept fads for what they are, and once they pass we should take due note of the fact. Fads are indicated by a rapid spike of interest and citations of short life span. The sources should be clustered too.
• Offensive and controversial material like Pornography related Porn Stars 'Porn Movies' and 'Sexual Subjects' are in a different category.
  • Theirs is not only a limited audience but their very presence may offend a large class of viewers.
  • They make Wikipedia access problematic for children.
  • They also likely to be non-encyclopedic (commercial,pr,vanity) agendas behind them.
  • They also require resources such as review, patrolling, copyright oversight etc which many would find objectionable. (e.g. large masses of obscene pictures being introduced into commons)

Thus there is a vested interest in reducing their presence downgrading their importance. An effort should be made to send them elsewhere. Note: there are now external wikis which are better suited to hosting such material.

• Obsolete Video Games are also in a much larger category - without the negative

Cooperation

• Iterated Prisoner's Dillema

Inefficiencies

• Copyright Policy
  • DMCA protocols vs. Self Policing.
• AstroTurfing

Non Wiki Games

The academic model:

• The subjects need not be notable or novel, though the work should contribute new information.
• The publication work is developed by one or more individual based on a research.
• The results are submitted for publication at different journals - coordination
• The results are reviewed by anonymous peers
• The paper is improved rechecked
• The paper is accepted or rejected for publication if it is sufficently notable and still novel.

Peer Review Game

this is a game which uses

Academic Coordination Game

this is a game of coordination

Print Encyclopedia

to make a print encyclopedia the following are needed

1. list of subjects (based on a notability cireria)
2. coordinating article creators and reviewers
3. single or multiple editor collaboration using full document iteration.
4. coordinating article style
5. coordinaing fact checking to fix mistakes + republication.