The eight major categories of study for maladaptive organizational
behavior as they apply to maintaining and supporting Wikipedia are:
- (1) Counterproductive work behavior,
or CWB, consisting of behavior by editors that harms or is intended to
harm Wikipedia or its editors' constructive contributions – usually
identified as "edit warring" or "disruptive editing";[19]
- (2) Mistreatment of the people who edit and maintain Wikipedia.
There are several types of mistreatment that editors endure – along with
a large contingent of corrective measures and norms of editing policy
available as countermeasures;
- (3) Abusive supervision; that is, in most organizations, the extent to which a supervisor
engages in a pattern of behavior that harms subordinates: In Wikipedia
this term would be applied to abusive editors who are entrusted with
corrective procedures or referrals to others for correction;[20]
- (4) Bullying. Although definitions of bullying
vary, it involves a repeated pattern of harmful behaviors directed
towards individuals, and in Wikipedia this would mean any individual
editor;[21]
- (5) Incivility,
or low-intensity discourteous and rude behavior with ambiguous intent
to detract from productivity and violate norms for appropriate behavior
in the workplace, such as that which may be found while editing
contributions;[22]
- (6) Gender bias,
behavior that denigrates or mistreats a worker because of his or her
gender, that creates an offensive workplace or that interferes with
anybody being able to do the job. The gender gap at Wikipedia
is well recognized as an issue deserving of attention, as discussed in
the subsection above. Although an effective counter-measure to this
gender gap has yet to be fully identified at Wikipedia, several programs
have been examined for their potential in moving towards achieving
gender equality;[23]
- (7) Occupational stress,
or the imbalance between the demands of a job and the resources that
help cope with them. In Wikipedia, this term would cover the editing
process, which requires mental and physical effort;[24] and
- (8) Maladaptive standards and practices, in which the accumulation
of piecemeal standards adopted over time begin to show a cumulative
negative effect.[25] In Wikipedia these dimensions would include WP:Instruction creep.
Countering systemic bias task forces
Some task forces that focus on particular aspects of systemic bias are linked below:
Tasks
There are many things you may do, listed roughly from least to most intensive:
- Sign up as a participant and mention any interests you may have related to "Countering systemic bias" (CSB).
- Add the Open Tasks box ({{WikiProjectCSBTasks}}) to your User or User talk page to let other people know about the issue.
- Read news articles in as many languages as you know, from as many
news sources as you can find, from as many political view points as you
can find (especially those that you would normally not read) when
examining a topical or recent event or editing an existing article
related to a particular subject.
- Don't overlook the official news outlets of a country. Certainly
they will be more one sided than Wikipedians may like, but they may
provide a different way of thinking about an article. They may also be
useful as a primary source of information about why
the government of that particular country has its opinion on a subject
and why it acts the way it does. The readers of Wikipedia could benefit
from this, regardless of whether they agree with that view or not (if
they don't, they may use it to find errors in its logic or thinking).
For example, official news outlets may be useful indicators of how
Mainland China thinks about Tibet or Taiwan.
Secondly, they may provide relevant non-controversial information about
the country or its leaders which could help in improving the article on
that topic, for instance, date and place of birth, occupation of
leaders, cultural heritage of, links to and other tidbits which may not
be available elsewhere.
- See if there are web pages on a particular subject which were
written by people from other countries or cultures. It may provide you
other places to look or other points of view to consider.
- Be more conscious of your own biases in the course of normal
editing. Look at the articles you work on usually and think about
whether they are written from an international perspective. If not, you
might be able to learn a lot about a subject you thought you knew by
adding content with a different perspective.
- Occasionally edit a subject that is systemically biased against the
pages of your natural interests. The net effect of consciously changing
one out of every twenty of your edits to something outside your "comfort
zone" would be substantial.
- Create or edit one of the articles listed on the CSB template.
- If you don't particularly like any of the subjects on the template, our open tasks list has a wide array of articles in need of attention.
- Add to the open tasks list. No one person can fix a system-wide problem, so be sure to tell people when you find needy articles.
- Rotate articles from the open tasks list to the template, and other helpful tidying tasks.
- Check articles to see if they still need work, and if they've been improved move them to the right section or leave a note.
- Give feedback on this WikiProject on the talk page.
- If you're multilingual, add information from Wikipedia articles in other languages to their English Wikipedia counterparts.
- Contribute to articles on under-represented topics that you are familiar with.
- Be careful not to worsen the bias with your deletion nominations. If
you are not familiar with a subject area, or it has meaning outside
your experience base, discuss your concerns on the talk page or another
appropriate forum before making an AfD nomination.
- Change the demographic of Wikipedia. Encourage friends and
acquaintances that you know have interests that are not well-represented
on Wikipedia to edit. If you are at high school or university, contact a
professor in minority, women's, or critical studies, explain the
problem, and ask if they would be willing to encourage students to write
for Wikipedia. Contact minority or immigrant organizations in your area
to see if they would be interested in encouraging their members to
contribute. The worst they could say is, "No". But keep in mind that
immigrant organizations may well have a different point of view than the
majority of people in the countries they emigrated from (their members
may, for example, be members of a minority themselves or may have
emigrated because of a disagreement with the government not shared by
the majority of the populatio
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