User:Joe Roe/The Wall

In Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed, the protagonist leaves his isolated anarchist society and returns to a propertarian world much like our own. He is driven to do so by "the Wall", a metaphor for the invisible constraints and power structures that have crept into his otherwise utopian homeworld, which he comes to recognise also rules the capitalists. The Wall is unobtrusive, built of many uncut rocks roughly mortared: the natural human desire to do what society asks of you, a deference to the "way things are done" that ossifies into bureaucracy, cliques that accumulate power because others allow them to, and above all the fear of the disapproval of your neighbours. Ultimately, the protagonist concludes that his society can only fully realise its founding principles if its members actively and consciously resist the Wall.

We don't like to admit it, but Wikipedia is an anarchist project. Starting with a fundamental commitment to individual autonomy and disavowal of formal power structures, we make collective decisions by consensus and coordinate our activities through the free association of syndicates, begrudgingly allowing an elected enforcement cadre and limited emergency bureaucracy to exist only because we insist that, really, there are no rules. And like Le Guin's 'ambiguous utopia', Wikipedia is suffocated by the Wall. Consensus becomes binding expectation, conventions become rules, authority pools in the hands of those willing to hoard it. Behind it all is the fear of ostracism. To maintain the founding principles of Wikipedia—the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit—we have to actively and consciously resist the Wall.

A machine, a power machine, controlled by bureaucrats!

“ "He has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn’t any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn’t any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That’s the power structure he’s part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind. ” — Bedap, The Dispossessed

Wikipedia has a bewildering number of rules, which we don't call rules. New Wikipedia editors are socialised by memorising these rules. They do this because it gives them an advantage in editing disputes and access to political offices, both tightly controlled by editors who have already achieved mastery. If a neophyte editor is good at memorising and politically savvy, they might be able to pass a competitive examination and be admitted into the formal enforcement cadre. But even if they don't, long-term acceptance in the Wikipedia community is dependent on a thorough knowledge of the rules; those that refuse to learn them are ostracised, sooner or later.

This repeated exposure to rules tends to erode your sense of perspective. Where you might have first approached them with a sense that it's all a bit silly, really (seemingly encouraged by pithy mantras like ignore all rules and we're not a bureaucracy), after a while they start to seem more... real. You start to believe implicitly that the rules must be good rules, rules that should be followed, otherwise why would you have spent so much time learning them? Why would you have spent so much time forcing others to learn them? Counter-intuitively, the pretense that we don't really have rules accelerates this process of oversocialisation, because if everything written on a policy or guideline page is equally not-real, that means they're also all equally valid.

In reality, Wikipedia has many good rules: foresighted principles from our founding editorship, sharpened by two decades of use, refinement and debate. It also has reams of terrible rules: hastily tossed out ideas that happened to stick to the wall because nobody was paying much attention. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell the difference between them. As a result, any attempt to change the rules faces tremendous inertia in favour of the status quo, as (over)socialised editors default to their instinct to protect "the way things are done". Unsurprisingly, this means that very little has changed for many years now.

A practical way to resist this tendency towards bureaucracy is to disrespect the status quo. That is, consciously adopt the opposite stance to that of the oversocialised editor and, when asked "should we change this?", say "yes" until you're convinced otherwise. After all, if we can ignore all rules, how much harm can changing them do?

Resisting the Wall

To summarise, to resist the tendency of anarchistic systems to backslide:

1. Respect nonconformity
2. Disrespect the status quo
3. Shun cliques
4. Embrace outsiders (don't circle the wagons)
5. Treat ostracism as a last resort

See also

• Wikipedia:Don't knit beside the guillotine