<CPOV> The Affective Labor of Wikipedia by Michael Mandiberg

[Joseph Reagle]

Thanks for sharing this Geert. Mandiberg writes:

> The 260,000+ words of the ArbCom case pit two competing modes of 
> collaboration against each other. GamerGate, and those that organize
>  and collaborate on Reddit, 4chan, and other anonymous or
> pseudonymous message boards operate under a different social contract
> than those that aspire to the kind of peer-production theorized by
> Yochai Benkler. When Bernstein claims that “this is the end of the
> Wiki Way,” I understand that as: this is a clash of online
> civilizations, and it is unclear if peer production (e.g. the Wiki
> Way) can hold off the anonymous horde.

Reading it I can't help think of how I began *Good Faith Collaboration*
[1] with the plan by Stormfront (white supremacists) to take over
Wikipedia back in 2005. Where the racists
failed in 2005, the GamerGaters (at least partially) succeeded in 2015.

The two lessons I drew from the "neo-Nazi attack" was that it was useful
for Jimmy Wales to be able to step in and say *he'd intervene* because
WP's process is not good at resisting such coordinated efforts in the
short term. In general, I'm a supporter of the *open community with
benevolent dictator* model (what I call "authorial leadership") for this
reason. I heard mixed things about Wales in this issue (originally
ignorant, but then tried to constructively challenge them to write their
own article?). But he no longer has much power in any case.

The second was that even Stormfront counseled its members to be polite
and abide by WP's norms. That was novel then, but manipulators and
haters can be very good at that today. On another list the notion of
"Sea-Lioning" [2] came up which I likened to as a type of derailing and
a sibling of concern trolling. This is now part of the playbook of what
I call a "trollplex" in the new book [3].


[1]: http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/gfc/chapter-1.html
[2]: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning
[3]: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/reading-comments