What I've learned from Wikipedia user pages

"Wikipedia is not a social network like Twitter or Facebook."

You may be surprised to hear that this quote is not representative of what I've learned from user pages.  In fact, it's quite the opposite.  Wikipedians reveal an abundance of personal information about themselves, and their companion talk pages look an awful lot like a Wiki-themed facebook wall - complete with awards to show off your editing skill.

So, why does Wikipedia claim that it's not a social networking site?  Well, mostly because it strives to meet the level of professionalism you'd see if you were in a room with a bunch of, say, Encyclopedia Britannica (RIP) writers.  Excessive social interaction is, at best, distracting; at worst hazardous as editors focus attacks on each other and argue based on associations and relationships rather than content.

It's incredibly easy to get caught up with 'who' rather than 'what', especially when significant information on that 'who' is literally just a click away (and their complete editing history one or two clicks from that).  Even better: when not in 'mission statement' form, the information is often displayed conveniently in user boxes - small colored frames that claim affiliations and spout platitudes.*  I've devised a bit of an experiment for myself here.  I'd read through every user page I would happen upon, and draw the conclusions I'd naturally draw based on the information available.  Let's just say that it was quite an interesting insight into how you think about someone simply based on how they choose to present themselves; unlike most other social networking sites, on Wikipedia you usually aren't assaulted with pictures before you know anything about the person.

Here are just a few random ones for you to mull over.  Remember, all of this stuff is right out in front of you every time you visit someone's user page.  This is hardly difficult research.


We'll start simple.  User:Balloonman is a Roman Catholic with an MBA who has worked for one of the big four and supports the US Republican party.

See the idea?  Most of these others offer quite a bit more to work with, too.

User:Apjohns54
  - "subscribes to a Marxian interpretation of economics."
  - "wants a world government."
  - "opposes gun control."
  - "supports Julian Assange and Wikileaks."
  - "is a fan of Noam Chomsky."
  - "believes that capitalism is an inherently unjust system, and that humans can do better."

User:Ruby2010
  - "is opposed to communism in both theory and practice."  which might explain why she...
  - "is a monarchist." who "supports the restoration of the Tsar and the Russian Empire as a Constitutional Monarchy."
  - "is fiscally conservative."
  - "does not trust politicians who condemn CEOs while living like one with other people's money."
  - "prefers that the death penalty be used far more often."

User:Colilace5 apparently put way more work into this page than he did the rest of Wikipedia... 
  - "is a libertarian." and "is a capitalist."
  - "knows that tax cuts increase freedom and growth"
  - "identifies as a Social Darwinist."
  - "knows that genetically modified food has saved over a billion lives, and that all agriculture is "genetic modification", what we do today is just faster."
  - "thinks Ronald Reagan was an excellent president."
  - "opposes gun control."
  - "believes that life begins at conception"
  - "is an agnostic."

User:Orangemike has quite a little biography going, but in addition to that:
  - "is a Quaker."
  - "believes that evolution doesn't have to conflict with Christianity."
  - "wants to tax the rich to provide health care, education and welfare for everyone."
  - "is a Hippie."
  - "opposes George W. Bush and supports his prosecution."
  - "believes the world is a happier, safer and saner place because of religion."
  - " supports heterosexual and homosexual marriages"
  - and of course, his "favorite color is orange."

 User:Mzk1
  - "is an Orthodox Jew."
  - "believes the world is a happier, safer and saner place because of religion."
  - "is against universal health care."
  - "believes that the death penalty should be used for certain crimes."
  - "does NOT support euthanasia and is strongly opposed to all forms of eugenics."
  - "is proud to be an American." and "is proud to be an Israeli."
  - "does NOT support the United Nations."
  - "knows that tax cuts increase freedom and growth"
  - and wants to let us know that "Communism killed 100,000,000 people and all I got was this lousy user box."

User:Trust_Is_All_You_Need
  - "is an atheist."
  - "is a socialist."
  - "believes that communism is an ideal system of government - in theory."
  - "recognizes the Palestinian Right of Return."

User:Phoenician_Patriot
  - "is a capitalist." and, go figure "is against communism"
  - "is a citizen of the United States and is a Patriot", "supports the troops.", "Proud American", etc
  - "supports the Tea Party movement."
  - "believes that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi ran the worst Congress ever."
  - "does not hug trees."
  - "supports concealed carry laws."
  - "listens to talk radio and is a Dittohead"

User:JohnChrysostom
  - "is male."
  - "identifies as asexual." and "wants nothing to do with "the S-word"." (sex)
  - wants to let us know that "Marriage is between one man and one woman. No amount of legal redefining can change that."
  - "didn’t finish high school."
  - "is an advanced mathematician."
  - "is a traditionalist Roman Catholic."
  - "is repulsed by most forms of body modification."
  - "understands biological evolution." and "understands the premise of theistic evolution, but finds it inadequate."
  - "is interested in young-earth creationism, and is seriously considering converting."
  - "believes that atheism is harmful to society."
  - "knows that atheists can be either ethical or rational, but not both."

User:JohnAlbertRigali starts out with a political statement using quotes from Isaiah 5:20 and Feelin' from Van Halen's Balance album.  He does separate his userboxes onto another page, interestingly enough:
  - "supports the U.S. Republican Party."
  - "is thoroughly against divorce, except in a few cases."
  - "is Pro-Life."
  - "believes in intelligent design or creationism."
  - "believes that only articles need reflect a NPOV, and that displaying political, religious, or other beliefs using userboxes and user categories should not be banned."


That last one's interesting and relevant!

You have to think that most people feel pretty strongly about these things, given that adding any personal information at all is completely optional.  So just imagine an opposite couple of these editors interested in the same article.  Is it possible to stay neutral toward each other when knowing you're diametrically opposed on fundamental issues?  Sure it is.  But doesn't it make it that much more difficult?  Even for the most professional among us, it can be really tough to take someone's arguments at face value when you're keenly aware of the potential advocacy behind them.

Maybe I'm crazy for drawing this conclusion, but I think this level of social contact is just another aspect of the site that, while unintended, is core to its very nature (this is the internet, after all).  To me, Wikipedia is a social networking site where human beings find friends and fight the same ideological battles they fight elsewhere in life.  It just so happens that they manage to create a pretty damn good encyclopedia in the meantime.  Maybe it's despite all of this, or maybe it's because of it.  Either way, it's here to stay.



* - I have to be fair here and note that some editors use them simply to show what languages they're fluent in, for humor, or to show their interests.  For example, User:Cs-wolves has ones that range anywhere from "drinks water" to "wishes they had a girlfriend" to "is a NASCAR Camping World Truck Series fan".

Does the nature of Wikipedia drive long term editors crazy?

This is a question I've often been forced to ask myself when noting the departure (or banning) of a prominent Wiki editor.  It's very easy to become "too involved", and it seems that doing so drives one to resent the very thing they loved so much in the first place.  Apt then, that many Wikipedians joke about the site's addictive qualities, even comparing it to an MMORPG.  And just like many MMORPG players, Wiki editors often leave their 'game' with a strong disclaimer describing the perils that befell them, warning new users to avoid sharing in this fate by getting far, far away.

It's important to note that for years it was almost expected that any prominent, well-mannered editor would eventually become an administrator on the site.  As such, Wikipedia has a lot of admins.  The vetting process has changed the past few years, but there are still a substantial number of admins out there, and typically the most involved users still make it through.

Unlike how the term is used on most other sites, Wiki admins are more like moderators than anything.  The lowest level of moderators, at that.  They mostly protect pages from becoming war zones, temporarily blocking users from editing them until civility can be restored.  When things are calm, they tend to edit and contribute to the site as they would have otherwise.  Because of this, you end up with more or less a second class of editors who have increased power and responsibility.

As we'll see, it's often by examining the interactions between admins and normal users that offer the most insight into why many wide-eyed editors end up so melodramatically bitter in the end.


 Leniency and Assuming Good Faith (AGF)

One of the most important principles behind Wikipedia is the assumption of good faith between Wiki users of all stripes.  Unfortunately, this rule is too often stretched beyond its limits.  While most editors are indeed interested in making "positive contributions" to Wikipedia, they can at the same time be relentlessly pushing their point of view to the detriment of the project. 

Claiming in self-defense that your opponent is breaking AGF is a common occurrence, and a classic technique to derail arguments and defer blame.  Even when years of conduct prove this to be nothing but wikilawyering, this obfuscation continues.  Co-founder Jimmy Wales is not immune himself, and offered this response when accused of assuming bad faith:

"It's not an assumption. It's a fact proven multiple times over a long period of time."

If anything illustrates the problem with AGF, it's this.  Even if someone is found by the community to be consistently acting in bad faith and against Wikipedia policies (and even when the most powerful person on the site recognizes it), it can be extremely hard to stop them from continuing.  Justice on Wikipedia is abundantly lenient most of the time.  Warnings and temporary blocks from editing are most commonplace, and many of those don't even happen until long in-depth cases are concluded.  Bans happen in the more extreme cases, but even those are regularly circumvented.

As you'd expect, dealing with disruptive editors who manage to avoid punishment can be hazardous to admins over a long period of time.  The tale of User:Will_Beback is one of the best examples of this.  Recently publicized for a surprisingly harsh judgment he received from ArbCom (the high court of Wikipedia), he was for years a sane and generally helpful admin.  Over time, though, his tactics became more heavy-handed, and his attitude toward people he perceived to be working to the detriment of the project much more aggressive.  A good portion of that stems just from what ends up being the most effective behavior on Wikipedia in general.  Taking what is commonly thought of as the most constructive approach - trying to find consensus for ideas by discussing them on talk pages - ends up instead being by far the least effective and most time consuming.  All editors quickly learn that in order to impact anything significantly, you have to physically add or remove things from the articles themselves.  Then, because even seemingly benign edits often start edit wars on contentious articles, it helps to get friends involved (canvassing) to avoid the three revert rule (3RR).  Admins, naturally, have even more underhanded tricks they can use whenever they're able to rationalize doing so.  All in all, the harsher the tactic, the more effective the result.

Our friend Will knew this well.  For quite some time, he had been dealing with various members of new religious movements who were not only advancing the positions of those movements, but deleting criticism of them wherever they could.  Some of these users were rightly warned, blocked and temporarily banned.  Over time, they learned their lessons, right?

Well, not in the way you'd hope.  Unlike the leniency in many real world justice systems which provides for healthy rehabilitation, punishment on Wikipedia doesn't bring about a change in philosophy; it only teaches problematic, single-purpose editors how to game the system the next time around.  It never addresses the core issue: that their primary motivation for editing Wikipedia is to advocate a certain point of view.  When they return to 'society' they repeat the same 'crimes' they did before - only this time they make sure to do a damn good job of covering them up.

So, by the time Will ended up in trouble for battleground conduct toward and harassment of various members of new religious movements, these same editors had become adept enough to escape any sort of new sanctions.  In fact, they even started to look more sane in their behavior than Will, who had now become so involved in trying to defeat their menace that he began taking more and more drastic measures.  Eventually, he found evidence that of one them was being paid to advocate for a specific movement (Transcendental Meditation) and took it to Jimmy Wales, who promptly banned the editor in question (User:TimidGuy).  TimidGuy's eventual appeal ended up raising just as many questions than it answered, but served the purpose of formalizing Will's Wikipedian descent.


Too Involved, or Not Involved Enough?

One significant aspect of the previously mentioned ArbCom case was the question of how involved in a discussion you should be when at the same time wielding power over it.  On one hand, Will Beback clearly became so involved with certain users that he ended up taking things personally, and compromising his position.  In the end, it seemed almost like he had as much of a conflict of interest as the editors he battled.  On the other hand, there is a serious concern that ArbCom was not involved enough to understand the intricacies of the debates going on - especially when many of the key sources on the topic are written for experts familiar with medical terminology.  Where do you draw the line?  Should you draw the line?  It gets more and more complicated.

Enter another 'Will', User:William_M._Connolley (WMC for short).  WMC came onto Wikipedia already being involved in his area of expertise - climate change.  Having worked as a climate modeller, he quickly became well-known as one of the better writers in the area.  He also became public enemy #1 among climate change denialists, rewriting many articles to give a much more due amount of weight (read: a whole lot less) to climate 'skepticism'.

It should come as little surprise that climate change is one of the most contentious and troublesome areas on Wikipedia.  There's been constant warring over the content, including sockpuppetry to the extreme, and nearly every related article has had to be protected from editing at some time or another.  Just as in the real world debate, the talk page arguments don't amount to much at their face value.  The debate itself is rarely over the substance, and instead is deeply seeded in concerns over the roles of science and government in our lives.  The science is questioned only to put into doubt its implications.

And that brings up the issue of involvement.  This is a topic where it's nearly impossible not to have a strong point of view.  And if you are one of the few without one, you aren't involved enough to really understand what is going on in the first place.  It's not something you can easily say 'Oh well' to.  To stretch it all even further, it is a deeply scientific topic with intricacies that can become very difficult for the layman to understand.  It's very easy to make mistakes when you're thinking in terms of bouncing cosmic rays getting trapped and such.

So, while WMC was interested in using his expertise to improve the science in the articles, his opponents were usually more apt to obstruct and needlessly complicate things.   Eventually, his productive editing earned him an admin position, which only made discussion more heated behind the scenes of the climate change articles.  His opponents believed that Wikipedia, by making him an admin, was officially adopting the position that anthropogenic global warming was a reality.  Moreover, WMC had developed a bit of a heavy hand in dealing with these critics, using his admin tools against Wiki policy.  After some time, he was desysopped and his Wiki-career never recovered (see the relevant case for a history of some of this).  His application for ArbCom shortly thereafter was shot down pretty hard, for that matter.


In the end, when you carefully examine cases like these, the conclusion is often that they're casualties of the system.  The leniency of Wikijustice allows disruptive editors to stick around as long as they game the system, while at the same time the fact that only harsh tactics get much accomplished causes admins to turn to them more readily.  This is all complicated by other Wiki policies - especially those regarding involvement on particular topics.  When you're forced to spend an abundance of time every day dealing with wolves in sheep's clothing (and worse), it's easy to see why you might lose it now and then.

Motivations for editing Wikipedia

I love to take jabs at the ever-present (on Wikipedia) statement "Wikipedia is not a battleground.", simply because of how silly it sounds when you become truly acquainted with things.  All in all though, the battleground policy itself is mostly a good one.  The idea is to steer users away from getting so involved in arguments and personal grudges that they lose sight of the purpose of Wikipedia and why they started editing in the first place.  But that makes you wonder: what is it that motivates people to edit anyway?

There actually have been a few studies done on the subject (by the Wikimedia Foundation itself, and by outside groups as well), which tend to agree with the idea that there are a wide variety of motivators involved for every single editor.  Generally speaking though, most editors believe in the core principles of Wikipedia, and view their contributions as improvements - to the site and often to the world as a whole.  The Wikimedia survey in particular showed the most popular answer to be: "I like the idea of sharing knowledge and want to contribute to it", a statement that speaks to the very idea of Wikipedia itself.  So clearly there's some consensus here.  What's the problem?  That is, what turns the site into the battleground it undeniably is?

Well, one significant factor is that the underlying values of Wikipedia are, for the most part, extremely vague; any two warring editors tend to both believe they are the one 'improving' Wikipedia.  While agreeing on the mission and purpose, they disagree on the substance.  On controversial subjects, this escalates to the point where it can be nearly impossible to keep the original goals in mind.

It also doesn't help that there are so many grey areas involved in every single content dispute.  Are these claims verifiable?  Is this or that a reliable source?  Are you giving something undue weight?  Is the tone neutral or does it push a point of view?  Editors' opinions on these ideas vary endlessly, and this difference in opinion commonly leads to each party assuming the other isn't acting in good faith - a serious Wikicrime in itself.  The preferred attitude to have on Wikipedia is one that understands, again: while you may disagree on the substance, you agree on the idea of moving forward.  And so, calling someone's motivation into question is often a quick way to earn yourself a block.


Regardless, if there's one thing everyone will identify with, it's the idea that someone out there is pushing their own agenda to the detriment of the site.  Consider this quote, part an an outraged plea against paid advocacy:

"Wikipedia has become the go-to website for spammers: for every goddamned shameless corporate publicist (pardon me, "public relations professional"), self-published author, "social media director", manager of unsigned rappers, unscrupulous campaign consultant for obscure local politicians, hoaxster, Search Engine "Optimization" mercenary, and egotistical 11-year-old who wants to publicize his YouTube video so it will go viral and he'll get on Tosh 2.0."

Brutal, and true.  But it seems like users editing under each of these motivations would be easy to spot.  Certainly, many of them will create new pages that obviously have no place in an encyclopedia; there's a special speedy deletion service for those.  And in the early days of Wikipedia, there wasn't much effort put into this sort of thing.  Usually those editors misunderstood policies and guidelines (or never took the chance to read them in the first place), and so their advocacy was easily spotted and taken care of.  Nowadays, however, they fight back using Wiki policy against itself.  This person isn't relevant enough for an article?  Here are a bunch of sources that mention them.  Those aren't notable or reliable sources?  I'll argue you on that point too.  Why?  Because every moment this page stays online, I'm advancing my point.

Of course these dubious motivations will never be willingly revealed.  We're in a sea of grey here, and if an editor is clever enough you'll never be able to tell if they're a member of the group they seem to be advocating for, or just a sympathetic bystander who happened along.  That sea continues even further than you might think though, because even it's discovered they are a member of that group, it's still legitimate for them to edit - as long as they do it in a "neutral" way and follow the other Wikipedia guidelines.  (Editing with an open conflict of interest like this can attract extra scrutiny, so is generally avoided - even when the editor in question arguably has nothing to hide.)

Most significant contributors to Wikipedia aren't "spammers" or blatant advocates, though.  Instead, they tend to be the ones who agree with: "I like the idea of sharing knowledge and want to contribute to it".  The disagreement is with their secondary motivations, and so it can be even more troublesome to figure out what is really going on in their even-more-subtle arguments.  I've often found myself having to go through pages upon pages of banter before I can understand what the implications of a particular debate even are.  Sometimes you're honestly better off ignoring the idea of focusing on the content, and just heading over to specific user pages to see if they let you know what their biases are themselves!

But hell, the more I try the more I continue to see why the true nature of Wikipedia is so difficult to uncover.  You have battles going on everywhere, but Wikipedia is not a battleground.  Everyone has a motivation for editing, which often is one of advocacy, but you still have to assume they're editing in good faith.  Everyone also has a point of view, but must maintain the facade of being neutral with what they contribute (or, alternatively, just believe their point of view is the neutral one).  Every guideline seems to be in place to obscure the debate and blend reality into one amorphous grey mass of questionable morality that makes you just want to forget everything and ignore all the rules.

Wait, that's a policy too?

Group warfare

There's been a lot of talk on Wikipedia about "groups" lately.  Whether the term refers to coordinated editing by teams of like-minded individuals, outside organizations attempting to discredit Wikipedia as a whole, or the PR firms that are now attempting to coordinate a cease-fire type deal with the site, this recent quote by one wiki user sums up what most editors are feeling:

"The hijacking of Wikipedia by groups is horrifying to us all."

Once Wikipedia became one of the more popular sites on the internet, people started to understand just how important and influential the information on-site could become.  It didn't take long for many of them to realize that the best way to ensure their idea of what should be written was to find others who agreed with that idea and were willing to aid the cause.  Grouping up on Wikipedia is especially effective given two key facets of the site:  edit warring and consensus.

Because it's against policy to personally revert a page to a previous form more than a few times a day, it helps to have other editors on your side.  If you're in danger of breaking this stipulation against edit warring, you can just call in a friend or two to continue in your stead.  If your opposition is a single editor than either your version will stay up for at the very least the next day, or that editor will break the rule themselves allowing you to report them for edit warring.

Better yet, having the illusion of a neutral consensus on an issue can dissuade opponents from even attempting to edit war in the first place.  Consensus is the driving force behind Wikipedia - both that of sources and that of editors involved with articles.  Manufacturing consensus is the most reliable way to actually change contentious and controversial articles.  Users have done this for years using sockpuppets, but the facade can be difficult to maintain.  Meanwhile, group warfare has the dual benefits of being much easier to utilize, and much more difficult to prosecute against.  Even in cases where mounds of evidence overwhelmingly show collaboration (tag teaming, canvassing, etc), groups have managed to escape with only simple admonishments, and gone on their merry way.


WikiProjects


Even though Wikipedia does make some effort to curtail these practices, many aspects of the site seem to almost encourage the idea.  There are, after all, groupings of editors with "similar interests" nearly everywhere you look.  Every single country (and just about every large city) seems to have a group, called a WikiProject, which focuses on improving areas of Wikipedia related to it.  As expected, many topical issues have projects as well.

The official stance on WikiProjects seems to be that they are helpful when promoting ideas which don't receive enough weight on the site, while unhelpful when popular but regional ideas become even more prominent.  Note, for example, this prominent US-based editor bemoaning the apparent distaste for the American WikiProject:

"Based on community consensus against supporting WikiProject United States and a growing consensus that my editing is no longer needed or wanted here I have decided to end my activities on Wikipedia. I have changed my life priorities to spend less time editing and spending more time with my kids. I have removed my email address and I will be scrambling my password so I cannot log in."

The argument being, of course, that Wikipedia is already too Anglo-American centric as it is.

Usually this is all quite innocuous, but on more controversial topics - and especially nationalistic ones - you tend to see the same exact same type of behavior as mentioned above.  In fact, many editors who are parts of these groups have regularly and openly canvassed on their project pages, disturbing fellow members enough to file reports themselves.  This type of activity has promoted the use of terms like 'cabal' and 'mafia' to refer to various groups editors believe to be acting with malicious intent.


PR campaigning

"This seems like honest people allowing baddies into a party with the plan of keeping an eye on them, fixing what they break, prosecuting them, booting them after they're caught, and keeping the door open for more."

The most recent outcry over groups belongs to the subject of public relations groups and their involvement in Wikipedia.  This was mostly in reaction to the creation of a facebook group named Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement, or CREWE for short, and specifically the fact that Wiki founder Jimbo Wales actually gave them the time of day.  CREWE's mission is to provide a forum for cooperation between corporate PR representatives who are paid to edit Wikipedia, and the site itself.  I'm sure you wouldn't be able to guess that there's some history here with PR reps not being trusted to neutrally edit Wiki articles they may have a conflict of interest (COI) in.  I'm sure you also can't imagine why that is.

The official wiki policy is surprising to many, as they learn that having a COI does not actually prevent one from editing those articles.  It can certainly dissuade doing so from an ethical user's point of view, but usually it only serves the purpose of editors who admit a COI being watched more closely when they make edits or suggest ideas.  As you can imagine, this makes announcing you have a COI, well, a conflict of interest.  So instead of doing that, these paid PR reps typically did what any other user with a similar modus operandi would do - stay anonymous and push for their point of view to be adopted the best they could.

In another twist, it turns out some Wikipedia regulars actually support this idea of collaboration.  Enough that they've made - you guessed it - a WikiProject based on the idea.  It's called WikiProject Cooperation, and I do have to admit that the overview of the project is written out quite nicely.  There's even a current peer review project going on with an employee of Cracker Barrel working to improve that particular Wiki page here.  It all may seem sudden, but this type of thing has been a long time coming, given the power Wikipedia holds.  For just a minor example, consider when your average netizen happens upon the Ben and Jerry's article and reads the very first sentence: "Ben & Jerry's is an American ice cream company, a division of the British-Dutch Unilever conglomerate, that manufactures ice cream, frozen yogurt, sorbet, and ice cream novelty products." (emphasis mine).  If you still thought the company was owned by Ben and Jerry, the guys who started it in 1978 with only a $12,000 investment, your entire perception of the brand has changed before even getting to the grit of the article.  This is exactly the type of thing the actual owners of the company are trying to avoid when they market the product the same way it was marketed before they bought it out.

The example of market branding is a common one, and something I would not hesitate to suggest might be contested in the future by corporate representatives playing nice.  When all is said and done though, the question of whether this new type of 'ethical' approach is better or worse than what previously occurred on Wikipedia is a difficult one to answer.  Notably, separate Wiki groups like PAIDWATCH (interestingly enough not a WikiProject) have stepped up to voice heavy opposition.  Which side public support rallies behind remains to be seen.  At the very least, all of this brings up some very troubling issues given the role of money and lobbying in nearly every area of public life these days.  Wikipedia long believed it could bring information, and power, to the average person, but the power it holds in its own hands is daring to become an obstacle to that very idea.

World War

I was initially skeptical about User:Paul_Siebert, but I'm starting to think it likely that he's one of the users out there looking to improve the project rather than enforce any particular point of view.  His scope seems to be focused on articles related to WWII in a strictly historical sense, and he doesn't appear to come into any of it with any goals other than to improve the areas that need it most.

That doesn't mean that he doesn't face heavy opposition, though.  He's had quite a long standing war going with User:Vecrumba, User:Nug, and a few other strong advocates from the Baltic States.  The main points of contention are over the extent of Soviet involvement in those countries, and over Soviet abuses related to the WWII era.  The Baltic advocates want to make sure Soviet crimes are represented 'accurately' on Wikipedia, and perceive their opposition to be Russian-based users who are just "repeating communist propaganda" (for an... interesting look at that claim, check out the mission statement on User:Vecrumba's user page).  This type of approach might help explain why so many articles on Russian/Estonian issues are tagged for not abiding to a neutral point of view (one way or the other).  Even ones that aren't are suspect.  Just look at a page like Russian influence operations in Estonia, which literally leads with "According to the Estonian Security Police, Russian influence operations in Estonia...", something akin to starting a similar topic with "According to the CIA, Iranian...". 

To be fair, many of the issues involved are very problematic.   The fallout from Soviet control over Eastern Europe is severe in places, and drastic changes have come well within the lifetimes of many of these editors.  Most participants have, on rare occasion, referenced a personal or familial story to bolster their position.  Emotions run high, even if the facade of a clear minded argument is almost always maintained. 

It's hard to pass any real judgment here.  The backlash in Eastern Europe over Soviet rule has been extreme, and in the place of that Soviet propaganda you often have a rush to the other fringe.  Freedom fighters who fought against the USSR are elevated to heroic levels in some sectors, regardless of whether or not they were fighting on the side of Nazi Germany in the process.  There is also a notable movement to equate Soviet crimes with those of the Holocaust; the gulag with the death camp.  This doesn't make the proponents of these ideas Nazis, of course - not any more than those they battle against are actually Stalinists.  But I'll say it like it is: there is a concerted effort on Wikipedia to present these type of ideas as mainstream.  From what I can tell, the majority of the time Paul has spent on the site for the past few years has been specifically combating this when trying to improve articles.  The main theatre moves from page to page (check user edit history to see), but the same editors are always there.


In fact, many of the users involved in these battles right now have been subject to significant edit bans for collaborating to 'game' Wikipedia with other members of a mailing list focused on these very issues.  I'll post more about this Eastern European 'cabal' at a later time.