Wikipedia Works Because It Focuses on Process

Over the ensuing two decades, editors amended policies to cope with conspiracy theorists, revisionist historians, militant fandoms, and other perennial goblins of the open web. There were the three core content guidelines of Neutral Point of View, Verifiability, and No Original Research; the five pillars of Wikipedia; and a host of rules around editor conduct, like the injunction to avoid ad hominem attacks and assume good faith of others, defined and refined in interlinked articles and essays. There are specialized forums and noticeboards where editors can turn for help making an article more neutral, figuring out whether a source was reliable, or deciding whether a certain view was fringe or mainstream. By 2005, the pages where editors stipulated policy and debated articles were found to be growing faster than the articles themselves. Today, this administrative backend is at least five times the size of the encyclopedia it supports.

The most important thing to know about this system is that, like the neutrality principle from which it arose, it largely ignores content to focus on process. If editors disagree about, for example, whether the article for the uninhabited islands claimed by both Japan and China should be titled “Senkaku Islands,” “Diaoyu Islands,” or “Pinnacle Islands,” they first try to reach an agreement on the article’s Talk page, not by arguing who is correct, but by arguing which side’s position better accords with specific Wikipedia policies. If they can’t agree, they can summon an uninvolved editor to weigh in, or file a “request for comment” and open the issue to wider debate for 30 days.

If this fails and editors begin to quarrel, they might get called before the Arbitration Committee, but this elected panel of editors will also not decide who is right. Instead, they will examine the reams of material generated by the debate and rule only on who has violated Wikipedia process. They might ban an editor for 30 days for conspiring off-Wiki to sway debate, or forbid another editor from working on articles about Pacific islands over repeated ad hominem attacks, or in extreme cases ban someone for life. Everyone else can go back to debating, following the process this time.

As a result, explosive political controversies and ethnic conflicts are reduced to questions of formatting consistency. But because process decides all, process itself can be a source of intense strife. The topics of “gun control” and “the Balkans” are officially designated as “contentious” due to recurring edit wars, where people keep reverting each other’s edits without attempting to build consensus; so, too, are the Wikipedia manual of style and the question of what information belongs in sidebars. In one infamous battle, debate over whether to capitalize “into” in the film title Star Trek Into Darkness raged for more than 40,000 words.