The white paper request is just a different take on an age old problem - Wikipedia wants the world to dance to its tune, and be insulated from the real world consequences of its actions, or lack thereof.
Amusing for its apparent admission that the sovereign state of Wikipedia needs Mommy and Daddy to step in and help it be seen as a grown up, but nothing more. No reason the community could not author this mooted Roolz For Researchers guidance itself, other than them knowing it would carry all the gravitas among academics of a child's drawing of a cat.
One wonders where ArbCom even got the fanciful notion that the WMF carries any weight amongst the academic community. While a lot of what the WMF and Wikipedia editors do has the trappings of academia, and they clearly fancy themselves as a new breed of Intelligencia, as any actual researcher of Wikipedia finds out on Day 1 of their investigations, formal Peer Review of their primary product, articles, ceased to be a thing for the Wikipedia community a very long time ago.
Right about the time Wikipedia editors realised they were really shit at writing an encyclopedia that anybody would actually respect, but since nobody thought they would achieve the goal if their primary resource was Joe Fuckwit and Professor Google, they might as well stop trying. Which they have done. They're now focusing on the basics.
And not even doing that very well either. Hence the fact the "brand" is less and less respected by the very demographic who were supposed to fall hardest for the con-trick that is FREE KNOWLEDGE YAY.
I would suggest to ArbCom and anyone else whose life worth rests on Wikipedia having a long and trouble free existence, do not tempt academics to look more closely at what Wikipedia is, and stop loudly protesting at every researcher's minor mistake they make in how they write about your fucked up enterprise. You deliberately made Wikipedia hard to understand, remember, up to and including having your own language and your own cultural norms. You are a cult, remember? These are features, not bugs.
The VERY LAST THING a Wikipedia editor should want if they know what is good for them, is having academic researchers understanding Wikipedia on a more fundamental level. Understanding things like why they started out caring about Peer Review, and now they don't. Because that is the inevitable consequence of them getting in academia's face and telling them how they should and should not be writing about their hobby. You will pique their interest. You will spark their curiosity. You will have them wondering what you are trying to hide from them.
Why is "ANI flu" a thing, and who does it benefit, they might ask. Toxic actors like Serial offender 52149, for example, who contracted a bad case on 14 May. As every die hard Wikipedia editor knows, their dirty laundry stinks to high heaven, in large part because their whole lives are built around a rotten stinking pile of toxic sludge, which aptly describes both the content and the community.
Imagine a proposed study that saught to determine the evident bias of Wikipedia editors. Imagine it found that, say, from their edits alone, it was possible to say that up to 95% of Wikipedia editors have an identifiable agenda. That they edit Wikipedia to, for example, persuade people Beyonce rocks, or Jay Z sucks, or a Pole never so much as looked at a Jew in a negative way in their entire lives.
Imagine if they then unearthed the policy documents that state quite clearly that while it is OK for Wikipedia editors to have a bias, they are humans after all, it really shouldnt be possible to determine it from their editing alone, since that would be proof they were guilty of POV pushing. Which means that in extremis, they should be banned as being fundamentally in opposition to the mission and the core values of the movement. Pause for vomiting. Puking is the natural human impulse whenever one has the perceived reality of Wikipedia and their stated values in the same part of your brain at the same time. Horizon error. POISON!
Then they discover that even people like Volunteer Marek are never banned by Wikipedia, there being no real difference between taking fifteen years to ban someone and never banning them at all. If on!y because a Wikipedia deprived of 95% of its most prolific editors faster than they can be replaced, is surely a dead Wikipedia. They also discover that, in full awareness that their original model of having sober neutrality aware academically minded editors write Wikipedia failed, some time ago Wikipedia actually conned the world's media and wholeheartedly embraced the surprising research that sort of shows some Wikipedia articles trend almost but not quite to neutrality precisely by facilitating two warring factions to fight bloody murder over every word, as if this had been the grand plan all along.
Computer says no. Computer knows original Wikipedia model. Computer detects no official Change Log. Computer sees ArbCom still waffling about civilised cooperation toward the "mutual understanding of an issue" being an inherent part of Wikipedia's model. Computer detects abject failure of ArbCom (as the Priesthood of the Cult) to direct their touching of the faithful toward this enlightenment. Computer sees Priesthood avoiding and even rewarding bad behaviour. Computer estimates flaw has been present for one thousand billion years (in Wikipedia time, since Wikipedia is of course by design a very malleable and responsive culture, unlike those fuddy duddies with their laws and trials and jails).
And lastly the academics connect the dots and realise it is this toxic and frankly absurd environment that plays a big part in persuading the saints among us, the exceedingly smart neutrality minded collaboration inclined, to steer well clear of Wikipedia and find a more rewarding hobby (like hitting Wikipedia with a stick). And that ArbCom have been ineffective in combating this toxicity for years in large part precisely because many of them are toxic themselves, and ArbCom is of course the only aspect of Wikipedia governance where the views of the 95% matter, since it is a simple anonymous vote. So of course they vote for the people that look, act and speak like them, albeit with a veneer of political savvy. Some of them not even bothering with that (something that is becoming more noticeable over time, as Wikipedia slowly dissolves as a result of its own toxicity).
Do you people seriously want academics to start becoming so familiar with Wikipedia they understand terms like ANI flu intimately and know exactly what affect it has on the quality of the Wikipedia environment and thus the quality of the Wikipedia product?
You want them to
study that shit? Analyse it. Find patterns. Draw conclusions?
Are you that fucking stupid, ArbCom?
Mystery solved, they'll conclude, this time without any errors in understanding. Wikipedia is and always will be shit because ordinary humans on their own are too selfish, tribal, cowardly and yet prone to emotion to produce quality reference material through a collaborative process all by themselves, or with oversight that barely ranks above Lord Of The Flies bullshit.
You need a controlling mechanism, like, say, a system where you financially reward people for bringing their more evolved selves to the work space, and by extension, a means to expel those not meeting the contractual terms of your engagement of their labours. You could call it "pay" and "getting fired". And you could fund this Administrative expense by "selling" your knowledge as a "product" whose eminent value to the "customer" was its inherent trustworthiness because of how it was produced.
Aside from the comedy value and the opportunity to remind Wikipedia editors they are living in a house of sand while chucking rocks at people armed with sand dissolving bazuka cannons, the call for a white paper is eminently ignorable by all, including the Foundation. Who are after all making staff cuts and refocusing the priorities of those who remain, on survival issues, like how to turn sand into glass. So are even less likely than they have always been to jump right on the latest in a long line of demands from the people who barely show an ounce of gratitude as it is for the immensely powerful position they are in courtesy of the WMF's decision to put manchildren in charge of knowledge and their own governance.
This whole issue is after all predicated on the idea Wikipedia can, has or ever will influence how the civilised world views the finer details of the Holocaust. Ridiculous to even suggest it.
The arrow of influence only goes one way, name!y from academia into Wikipedia. Hence Wikipedia governance's first instinct, literally Remedy 1, on being shown that bad actors on Wikipedia find it incredibly easy to set aside quality research and replace it with Polish nationalist POV pushing, is to demand academia stop looking into the real world identifies of Wikipedia editors who look, sound and act like Polish nationalist POV pushers.
Lest we forget, Volunteer Marek's entire obsession with Icewhiz stems from this belief.....
the overwhelming majority of Icewhiz’s edits in this topic area attempt to portray Poland in a negative light
....leading him to state with absolutely no sense of irony, that.....
If Icewhiz has no shame in showing up here and lying about other editors, then how do you think he approaches Wikipedia editing in general? He misrepresents what editors said. He misrepresents sources. He misrepresents Wikipedia policies. Etc.
Of course, courtesy of NewYorkBrad and his (presumably very expensive) lobbying services, we now know this was all a figment of everyone's imagination, and where you may think you saw Volunteer Marek do something the looks incredibly like what he says Icewhiz does, but just for the opposite motive, you were mistaken.
No amount of academic research can or ever will be enough to prove NewYorkBrad is mistaken in his assessment of an editor's worth to Wikipedia. Hence why this white paper could so easily be reduced to two simple instructions....
1. Is your proposed paper in conflict with the thoughts of Professor Emiratus NewYorkBrad of the Wikipedia University?
2. If you answered yes to question 1., kindly retract your paper, report yourself to your University for academic misconduct, and never write a single word about Wikipedia ever again (unless it is a public apology)
