Why Wikipedia was wrong to ban Scientology

Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee has taken probably the worst decision in its existence: they banned the IP addresses associated with the Church of Scientology from editing any scientology-related articles. To my knowledge, this is the first time that Wikipedia higher-ups have decided to exclude a particular social group from contributing to the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (that slogan should now probably carry an asterisk, stating “anyone but scientologists”).

I am no fan of Scientology, but I think that banning them from Wikipedia is going to be counterproductive. Unfortunately, it presents the Wikipedia admins/editors as a non-neutral group that opposes a particular set of ideas. In an ideal world, I don’t think that the Wikipedia editors should be making any value judgements on whether a particular idea is good or bad, for it undermines the trust that users place in an open encyclopedia, no matter how innovative it is. Their job is to make sense of competing claims and keep those claims that are well-documented and meet Wikipedia’s standards; banning scientologists from even making those claims to me indicates that the Wikipedia editors are of a firm opinion that no good ideas could ever come from the Scientology quarters.

However, bowing down to Scientology-bashers is almost guaranteed to trigger similar requests from people who hate satanism, fascism, or even pokemons. Granted it’s harder to identify and ban the more decentralized community of, say, satanists than that of scientologists (who have registered physical addresses), but I am sure that very soon somebody will request that another group is excluded from online deliberations over what kind of materials to publish about it. In a way, Wikipedia’s decision opens Pandora’s box : why allow Christians to edit articles on Christianity, for example? The ban on Scientology reveals that, at least on some subjects, the Wikipedia community is simply not going to tolerate any debate – perhaps, because they can’t do it physically (imagine a host of Scientologists engaging in perpetual debate with Wikipedia admins) or because they simply have a firm opinion on the subject.

I think that banning a social group simply because it aims to influence what’s written about it on Wikipedia is futile, for it takes a very naive view of why people actually contribute to Wikipedia. I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while and I think one of the reasons for Wikipedia’s tremendous success has been exactly the public desire to correct misconceptions or, more to the point, manipulate the truth in one’s favor. Of course, this may go against Wikipedia’s own rules but many people flock to edit Wikipedia simply because they want their competing version of events to prevail; it’s time for the Wikipedia community to accept this truth and live with it.

I am not even going to mention the fact that bans based on IP address are probably not going to be very effective; can’t the banned scientologists use an open Wi-Fi connection in their local cafe (or learn how to use proxy servers or tools like TOR?). I find it very unnerving that a tech-savvy community like Wikipedia would actually think that their sanctions would be effective; my prediction that they are only going to cause some very negative PR for their project.

So, what to expect now? I bet that in a few days (if not hours), we’ll see a dozen anti-Wikipedia web-sites set up by the Scientology to promote their own version of  “censored truth”. Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s decision would only make their claims of unjust persecution easier to believe; after all, how else to explain that they were banned from a web-site that “anyone can edit”?

So while the mainstream press would undoubtedly report on the unduly persecuted scientologists, more people are likely to visit their web-sites and, who knows, perhaps, even get converted. The banned scientologists would continue their guerrilla-editing work from different IP addresses. End result? Lots of bad PR for Wikipedia, lots of good PR for Scientology. The Wikipedia admins definitely need a primer on the Streisand effect.

photo:scragz/Flickr