Talk:Do banned users even matter that much?

We lack enough information to answer these questions, so all we can do is cut through the Gordian knot by creating Inclupedia and seeing how it works. Users currently banned from enwiki won't be (at least initially) banned at eninclu, and eninclu will apply the standard offer to all banned users, so it'll be evident soon enough whether that's a workable system. Leucosticte (talk) 14:14, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Why banned users matter

The number of banned users does not tell us the true extent of the impact. Users who hold popular opinions and who take popular points of view are far less likely to be banned. So banning can affect, far out of proportion to the numbers, the representation of minority opinion in the negotiation of consensus on Wikipedia. Does this harm the project?

Well, the project is dedicated to NPOV, neutral point of view. There is no neutral point of view, as such, neutrality is not a point of view. Underneath the hood of neutrality is genuine consensus among good-faith participants of various points of view. If a faction holding a point of view that is seemingly acceptable to enough users, and particularly enough administrators, and acts to exclude opposing opinion, Wikipedia consensus is warped, and the more that this occurs, the impact is not only on banned users, but on others, not banned, who simply give up.

Further, "banned" is only the tip of the iceberg. Many users are blocked and not banned. This used to be called, in fact, a 'defacto ban,' i.e., nobody was willing to unblock, but when "banned users" are considered, it's only those who have been declared banned through some community process. The distinction is made, clearly, in the prerequisite for Global bans.

But a blocked user cannot participate in consensus formation. In terms of the damage cause, it is quite the same as if they are banned; it is merely easier for them to return.

So there are far more than 600 users who have effectively been banned. It's unclear how many of these are the same user. One user who was not banned, but who was simply blocked, but who kept defying the block with sock puppets is up to probably well over 1000 socks. Now, what is the impact of that? Consider the wasted time that does not improve the project. The user was treated as if banned without the necessity of that having been considered by the community. And of, course, every time he created a sock, this was new proof that he was disruptive. Supposedly a cooperative user would comply with a block. Those who expect this behavior, of someone abused, do not live on planet Earth, but in some strange warped region of Wikiland.

The belief is apparently common that such bans are inevitable. However, this takes no responsibility for the effect of community behavior. How others treat Wikipedia is related to how Wikipedia treats others. Wikipedia is caught in a collective delusion where held belief is constantly confirmed by evidence created by the belief.

Many users have seen this. If they are not banned, they leave in frustration anyway. Few remain, and those left think that they represent the community. In fact, most users pay no attention to central processes. it is obvious.

It's only a self-selected and small minority that even watches the Noticeboards, or Arbitration Committee Proceedings, and particular sets of articles grabbed by, say, w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Skepticism. Funny that few seem to notice that this WikiProject is dedicated to a point of view. These are people who are literally pushing that point of view, very often.

Those who don't know real science may tolerate this, thinking that this is the "Scientific point of view," but it's not. Were this genuine scientific skepticism, that might be okay, but it isn't. It is what Truzzi called pseudoskepticism, which is skepticism that forgets to be skeptical of self. Scientific skepticism starts with self, not with others. w:Richard P. Feynman wrote: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."

That ease of fooling yourself is because we select evidence for plausibility, and we determine plausibility through our existing beliefs. In my training, that is called a vicious circle.

Genuine skeptics test everything, including and especially their own beliefs.

Feynman also wrote: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." This concept -- quite clear to anyone who understands real science -- may be abused by fringe believers. "Ignorance" merely refers to the fact that expert knowledge -- like all knowledge -- is incomplete, not that it is necessarily wrong.

However, with anything new, experts can be found who will state that it's impossible. And they will state this in Reliable Source. Other experts may express different opinions. With my Favorite Topic, w:Cold fusion, but also see v:Cold fusion, there was a wave of rejection of "cold fusion," but what was "cold fusion." The name was quite unfortunate, because it was not known at the time of discovery of the "Fleischmann-Pons Heat Effect" what reaction was behind the unexplained heat observed by the chemists who found it. They thought it might be fusion, but the only evidence for that was artifact, experimental error. They were not nuclear physicists and they were not accustomed to working with reactions that produce nuclear radiation. But they were expert chemists, the top chemists in their field in the world, and they knew how to measure heat.

Nevertheless, because the Effect was extremely difficult to reproduce, it was chaotic and erratic, most scientists considered that "there must be some mistake," and that is where it stood for a few years. However, more was found, very strong evidence was found that, indeed, a nuclear reaction was involved, but obviously an unknown one. And it is still not known what the reaction actually is. Some think that it is a form of fusion, but there are theories, but according to a long list of peer-reviewed reviews of the field in mainstream journals, over the last ten years, the effect is real, and, yes, it's a nuclear reaction.

Many have attempted to insert this in the Wikipedia article. The Arbitration Committee ruled, that, with Fringe Science, the gold standard was peer-reviewed review of the literature. However, the "debunkers" explain that Cold fusion is so bogus that "real scientists" don't bother to write refutations of the "nonsense" being published. They made that up, they don't generally put it in the article, but it can be found on talk pages. It's the background position, a belief in bogosity, based on what they heard from so and so, or what they read in Skeptical Inquirer or on The Amazing Randy's web site.

This is a small example among what must be hundreds or more of such examples, it's merely a field that I came to know about. I started as a Wikipedia editor, not as any kind of "believer" in cold fusion. I thought it had been found to be artifact, error, way back. It as only when I saw an abusive blacklisting of a major archive of papers on the field that I wondered what was happening and started to read the sources. I did not form a belief, at least not at that point, that cold fusion was "real." I attempted to bring the article into conformance with sources. The article said many things that might have been reasonable twenty years ago, that were no longer so. The article claimed -- and still claims -- that necessary evidence to show that cold fusion was nuclear in nature was missing, when, in fact, that evidence was first claimed over twenty years ago, was covered by Huizenga (the major skeptical writer on cold fusion), and has been widely confirmed, and, of course, is studied in Status of cold fusion (2010), published in Naturwissenschaften, a thoroughly mainstream multidisciplinary journal (at the time, it has since restricted content to topics related to Life Sciences), a review of the field. And you still won't read about it in the article, only about what denies that it exists.

(And you'd have to search for the article, because, though I got many papers whitelisted -- the web site with legal copies for free access was blacklisted --, and it took quite a bit of work to do that, and tried to then add convenience links to the article, they were removed. The faction does not want readers to have easy access to the files. And they gave arguments that were rejected again and again when I went through whitelisting, and later when I got that web site delisted. They make up argument after argument to prevent the simplest improvement in access to verification. [1] is the article. They claimed that if these were really legal, they could be put on wikisource. Nope. These are not "free content," they are preprints, hosted by permission. They made one argument after another, each one bogus. And then, when the arguments were rejected, by administrators or, in a few cases, by the community, they simply raised the arguments again in a new place. That's the behavior that they accuse POV-pushers of.

I gave up on Wikipedia, because I found that policy made no difference. The structure is impossible. Basically, to get a small change made could take weeks of work, negotiation, RfC, a complete mess, utterly inefficient. And then, for going to all that trouble, you could get banned, because there are those who dislike the trouble. I get it! If you are willing to go through what dispute resolution process requires, you must be a bit crazy, obsessed. Must be a POV-pusher, who else would bother?

In other words, w:WP:DR is a trap for the unwary, if one is facing an entrenched faction. They sit back, watch their articles, tag-team revert, and if anyone revert wars with them, they get him or her blocked. If they go through DR, they then go to Arbitration Enforcement or AN or AN/I and get them banned for tendentious argument. What was remarkable with my case was that I went through those processes many times, was successful far more often than not, and still was banned.

When I was preparing to file the RfC on that original abusive blacklisting, I was told by the long-term, highly experienced Wikipedian who cosigned, that if I went ahead, I'd be banned on cold fusion. I didn't mind, because I didn't have any attachment to cold fusion, and to me, the neutrality of the project was what was important. What was actually amazing was that I wasn't banned, at first. It took a few months, and it cost the faction a very popular administrator.

This is not a sign of Bad Users. It's a sign of deficient structure. The structure creates roles which people then naturally fill. Wikipedia was very successful, in certain ways. As to the declared mission though, and neutrality, and as to reliability, it remains a failure. Wikipedia cannot be trusted. It's often been advised to students never to take Wikipedia as an authority, but as a place to start research. But it is failing even at that, because what is allowed as external links and as sources is warped. Ultimately, Wikiversity will become much more useful, where a Wikiversity resource exists on a topic, and where it has substantial participation. Wikiversity practices neutrality-by-inclusion. We rarely delete stuff, rather, we categorize and frame it.

While Wikiversity can suffer from the same structural defects that are basic to common wiki process, the lack of a need to fight over scarce page space (one page per topic on Wikipedia, one article), makes pages far less likely to turn into battlegrounds. It almost never happens. I even managed to work with Cirt, there. The result was a deeper resource. I debated cold fusion topics with a skeptic, and the result was a deeper resource, and even some new research, a study by a well-known scientist was prepared to answer a question raised. --Abd (talk) 02:17, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

I agree with some of this. There are plenty of people who get sanctioned for what side they're on in a conflict rather than what actions they performed. That sort of thing builds up over time and damages neutrality.

Let's say that 85% of reliable sources on widgets say "widgets are blue," 5% say "widgets are red" and 10% talk about widgets but don't say what color widgets are. Say the article "Widgets" was started by a small number of users who firmly and sincerely believe all widgets are red. Other users who also believe widgets are red will find a welcoming community of people who share their belief and they are likely to hang out and stay. A user who believes widgets are blue is less likely to be welcomed and may leave for social reasons. Others may stick around despite the lower level of friendly feelings, but they will have to work harder. It is reasonably likely that there will be only one or two widgets-are-blue contributors working on a page at a time, solely because that's the way social systems work. It would be easy for the widgets-are-red crowd to point and say, "This person is making a disruption by saying the sources don't match the article!! WP:DEADHORSE! WP:SNOWBALL!" They can get widgets-are-blue contributors sanctioned even if their actions (whether there's name-calling, whether there's battlegrounding) are exactly the same as everyone else working on the page. This happens a lot on the English Wikipedia. When two editors match each other post for post and punch for punch, the one with the less popular point of view is blocked or banned and the one with the more popular point of view is not even told not to do it again. Admins are also less likely to check up on lies ("User Bluewidget has been calling people names!" "No, I never did that. You're making it up!") on people with less popular opinions and to just assume they are at fault.

The fact that the widgets-are-blue contributors are in the right with respect to verifiability does not usually help. It makes things worse because the widgets-are-red contributors know deep down that they should have sources and feel insecure. Admins tend to take proof, such as "I wasn't lying about widgets. Here's my source!" as an attack on them personally.

It's my belief that no sanction on any Wikiproject should be without an expiration date. That way, no admin has to admit that they made a mistake and no one has to prove their innocence. They can all just wait it out. Darkfrog24 (talk) 14:43, 23 April 2020 (UTC)