[diversity-talk] Article about Wikipedia's dysfunctional culture

Sun Dec 14 16:26:16 UTC 2014

That tweet chain is indeed a great illustration of culture clashes, of what happens when newcomers and old-timers meet. Thank you very much for the link, and the anecdotes. 

It appears any initiative that aims to embrace newcomers also needs to spend significant effort on promoting that “internally” (to the existing community), and prepare the community to invest some patience into training these newcomers.

An uncomfortable practicality is that all of this work happens in a shared commons, which means it’s up to all community members to negotiate contributions. There’s no “buffer” where newcomers could get trained up sufficiently to get them up to a level where all experts will also be happy with their contributions. This means experienced OSM members will inevitably become part of the process of training newcomers. Some oldtimers may not be prepared to have sufficient patience.

In order to avoid culture clashes it might be necessary to foster a general expectation within OSM that more newcomers *will* join, but also that it’ll be worth it to be patient with their contributions, and to help them in the process. That this is in fact an inevitable requirement of any initiative to broaden the scope of OSM. But also that the cost is worth it, in the long run.

(Should there be a CoC on the decision-making around map contributions? “Just start mapping” is already a core value.)

(An alternative approach could be to create support structures around OSM quality reviews. In the current form some oldtimers may otherwise burn out over what they perceive as a flood of “bad” contributions. But a discussion about such structures is likely off-topic on this list :)

I think HOT is in a situation to introduce all kinds of new practice and perspective to OSM, and that may include such a general perspective shift, an expectation of patience. I liked an observation in the HOT paper by Robert Soden and Leysia Palen. They discuss the Influence of Haiti on HOT and OSM, and suggest that as one outcome "there has been a shift in the overall conception of OSM by its more traditional community members to see it as now including humanitarian and development efforts” (page 13).

m.

> On 13 Dec 2014, at 01:59, Kate Chapman <kate at maploser.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> Drew, Wikipedia does have local chapters and meet-ups they vary in scope. HOT shares in office with Wikimedia Indonesia and the Web Foundation in Jakarta. The vibe is very different from the cultural described at the international wikipedia level. Clearly people in Indonesia are aware of it, but I am curious with the smaller communities around languages such as Indonesian if as they grow they will develop similar problems to the larger communities of languages such as English. 
> 
> Martin, yes HOT certainly is attracting different people with different motivators. The message is very different from traditional OSM especially in projects such as Missing Maps where we are encouraging people to map to help others. Versus a lot of traditional inroads to OSM are mapping to help yourself. The countries where we physically go and teach OSM workshops and provide technical assistance are very different as well. I do worry about the clash of the new OSM versus the old. Here is a recent example of it on twitter(1), there was also an instance where I talked to an Indonesian student who asked why the OSM community on IRC hates Indonesians. At that time an instructor was giving students OSM related tasks to do such as setting up map rendering without much instruction and people were not very tolerant of those no familiar with OSM. 
> 
> -Kate
> 
> 
> (1) https://twitter.com/wonderchook/status/543044091362041857
> 
> On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 12:57 AM, Martin Dittus <martin at dekstop.de> wrote:
> In these respects I’m personally very curious about the long-term effects HOT will have on OSM. In several ways it’s a more accessible presentation of OSM: always friendly, with an explicit focus on supporting newcomers, steadily improving documentation, an explicit focus on the social experience, and offering safe spaces to make early mistakes and learn from each other.
> 
> And maybe more importantly HOT speaks to very different motivations, not to the historically dominant mapping/ideology/tech motivations of OSM proper. Demographically HOT mapping parties look very different from the usual OSM crowd. (At least here in London.)
> 
> m.
> 
> 
> > On 12 Dec 2014, at 16:34, Drew Dara-Abrams <dda at dara-abrams.com> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks for the pointer, Alan. That's an interesting--and disappointing--read.
> >
> > In theory, OSM has an advantage of collecting data of a more grounded reality than Wikipedia. It's not necessarily objective. Contributors' decisions about what features to contribute, how to tag, what authoritative bulk imports to consider (and which to argue/fight against), and of course the personal relationships behind all of those--those are just some of many subjective factors. Still, OSM contributors are mapping, editing, and discussing an external world in its present state, and those who care most about their local surroundings do have the potential to get together in person (unlike Wikipedia, where I imagine those who care about cultural Marxist are more distributed than those who care about, say, New York building imports).
> >
> > I'm not sure if Wikipedia has local chapters/meet-ups/etc., but I do think that the better parts of the OSM community shine through at mapping parties, meet-ups, Maptime's, local chapters, and "regional" conferences like SOTM-US.
> >
> > Drew
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Darrell Fuhriman <darrell at garnix.org> wrote:
> > It was a good article, and while OSM certainly isn’t as bad as Wikipedia, I think it has more to do with scale than any inherently better structure. The organizational problems sound extremely familiar.
> >
> > Tell me how this doesn’t also describe OSM?
> >
> > “The encyclopedia that anyone can edit” is at risk of becoming, in computer scientist Aaron Halfaker’s words, “the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semiautomated rejection and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit.” An entrenched, stubborn elite of old-timers, a high bar to entry, and a persistent 90/10 gender gap among editors all point to the possibility that Wikipedia is going adrift.”
> >
> > If anything, Wikipedia should serve as a cautionary tale.
> >
> > Though I would add, that one huge difference is that Wikipedia has a foundation that actually sees this as a problem, and is working to do something about it. I’m not sure I see the same will in OSM — in fact, we have a foundation that has traditionally tried to do as little as possible.
> >
> > d.
> >
> >
> > On Dec 11, 2014, at 21:04, Alan McConchie <alan.mcconchie at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> There are certainly some parallels with OpenStreetMap in this article, but overall it really puts things in perspective: OSM's culture could be a lot worse. A fascinating read.
> >>
> >> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/12/wikipedia_editing_disputes_the_crowdsourced_encyclopedia_has_become_a_rancorous.html
> >>
> >>
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