Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention. Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.

Why is their editor so awful to use?

I always wonder why certain topics are locked.

I created a page, it got declined because the guy who two films have been made about didn't count as important enough. I kind of get it, but still, did kill the energy slightly.

For most things the talk pages will explain why it is restricted, but if someone forgot to put a notice there, there's also a giant list of "the following topic areas reliably attract disruptive editing and get people angry, so admins move much more quickly to restrict editing than they would otherwise." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions#Ac...

I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now;

Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected.

There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia about a cameras development process simply deleted. Maybe it is truly for the better, but it is not really that easy to add to the meat of the project, without someone else's approval.

Third, the begging banners really feel a bit gross; I know the size of the endowment, and how long it would be able to sustain the project (forever essentially)... It really feels like the foundation is using the Wikipedia brand to funnel money to irrelevant pet causes. This really puts me off contributing.

I tried volunteering and contributed a few thousand edits, and ended up brigaded into hours of silly reviews by sock puppets and their crony admins. The bureaucracy is nuttier than a Monty python sketch. Endless futile debates on talk pages.

It’s not supposed to have many rules (according to the Jimbo gospel), but admins apply policy pages as law , and given how many inane and convoluted policies there are, you can be censured for practically anything with the right quote. You can see these sockpuppet brigades watching and pouncing on the edit history of any semi controversial page.

It’s a pathetic monoculture that lacks any self awareness or sense of introspection. Critical discussions are quickly shut down and the authors are put into a penalty box.

Leadership needs to address the power dynamics, and come up with a better self regulating structure. Editors need to identify themselves and their agenda. Networks & brigades need to be monitored and shutdown using activity tracking.

Wikipedia’s social network is operating with 1990s era protocols but their influence via syndication on every common news surface means they are way too influential. Google, Alexa, LLMs and mainstream media all syndicate Wikipedia content as gospel. But the content is completely unregulated.

And don’t get me started on Wikimedia Foundation.

It really feels that way because that's what they're doing. There's a legit non-profit internet encyclopedia barnacled with a bunch of generic left wing political stuff, except the barnacle is bigger than the boat.

Why? Bots reverse every edit.

Tried many times, nothing sticks. Lots of resistance.

Yeah I stopped donating to Wikipedia once I learned where the money goes.

Even if it ends up supporting causes I agree with, why would I need the Wikimedia Foundation as an intermediary? I could just give money directly to the causes!

I don't know, but it's definitely not a lack of funding.

I made an edit last year, it immediately got reverted and I got a banner on my user page for vandalism. I complained about that, other people agreed with me but the person who reverted my edits never responded. So there it sits.

Please do not edit, write for, read, or cite Wikipedia. If you care about or know about a topic, consider writing a book or article about it.

I tried on a completely uncontroversial page that documented a certain idiom and examples of where it was used.

My edit was reverted, twice, because apparently there is no such thing as a notable source for lines from a 1980s British TV episode, not even a fan website that has a transcript for all of them. Gave up after that.

If you care about a topic and want to edit Wikipedia but do not want to deal with the process, you can simply talk about what you want to change on the discussion page. Is there an equivalent workaround when it comes to creating new pages?

I've also edited random things in the past. Like inaccuracies in Comp.Sci. topics.

I used to like Wikipedia but I'm changing my mind. One thing amongst many others was seeing some company that competed with the startup I worked in basically introduce marketing material into the site. It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.

I'd need some serious convincing to restore my trust in it. There are still some good technical/science articles I guess. It kind of sucks that instead of getting more reliable information on the Internet we're trending towards not being to trust anything. It's not clear how we fix this since reliability can not be equal to popularity.

> please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think!

Last time I tried to do that, I flagged a citation that went to a book saying the opposite of what wikipedia was citing it in support of as "failed verification".

This attracted the attention of an editor, who showed up to revert my flag, explaining that as long as the book exists, that's good enough.

Wikipedia could improve noticeably by just preventing the existing editors from making edits.

> It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.

In fairness, this does mean the system is working.

I suppose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... is the closest equivalent but not really the same thing.

You can create a page as an anonymous user. The content and subject is much, more more important than the fact of being created as an anonymous user. If that's the process you want to avoid, there's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... but that one is more geared towards people who are already engaged with Wikipedia. An outsider saying "well, someone, but not me, should do something about this problem," is just as welcome on Wikipedia as it is anywhere else.

I’ve tried, but every article even the most inconsequential seems to have an angry bird in the roost enforcing whatever their particular vision of the article is.

Yeah- Maybe it's "eventually working". It's hard to trust when it seems so fluid. Maybe there needs to be some mechanics to make it harder to change. Something like being able to suggest changes/corrections but having those come out on some schedule after a review? (thinking software release process here). Quarterly Wikipedia releases? Creating some "core" of Wikipedia that is subject to tougher editorial standards?

Not sure.

It's even worse when you add a source and you get reverted for reasons quite clearly disproven in your source. I had to make a single edit three times because it got undone twice by two separate administrators. A less stubborn person would've just given up on the first baseless revert and never edited Wikipedia again.

Edits are public so other members of the community can eventually make a case against or for the actions of a dedicated maintainer. Keep trying.

Seems like the story of Stackoverflow.

I've been an editor since 2004. It's getting really, really hard now. Like, it is really off-putting and no longer enjoyable.

I don't want to contribute to this giant propaganda machine by making it more valuable. Structural problems must be fixed first.

"If your solution consists of 'everyone should just X', you don't have a solution"

Sounds like stackoverflow defenders. I'm another person who tried about 5-7 times over the years to do larger improvements all for it to go to waste. Minor edits many times survive but even those I stopped doing because of the sour effect of the larger ones getting denied.

I used to edit Wikipedia actively. I was was active on the conflict of interest notice board and involved in pushing back against a few self-promotional scams. The worst one involved the "binary options" industry, before it was shut down. "Better Place", a hype-based electric car startup that went bankrupt, was another.

A few years previous, most heavy promotion on Wikipedia was music-related. Then business hype dominated. Then political hype took over. Trying to push back in the "post truth" era is valuable but painful.

It was worth doing for a while. But not for too long. It's wearing.

Harder to change doesn't make it more or less correct, just means wrong information sticks around longer. Because revision history is kept and changes are instant, it's easy to fix bad changes. For topics that see extensive astroturfing, they can be restricted.

The notability requirement is a real bane, but it also kind of makes sense when there's really insufficient manpower for the articles they already have. But then, maybe they'd have more manpower if they loosened the notability requirement.

Its definitely an eventual consistency kind of model.

There was some attempts at change review (called "pending changes") that is used on very continous articles, but it never really scaled that well. I think its more popular on german wikipedia.

Wikipedia is so dominant that it has kind of smoothered all alternative models. Personally i feel like its kind of like democracy: the worst system except for all the other systems. All things are transient though, i'm sure eventually someone will come up with something superior that will take over, just like wikipedia took over from encyclopedia briticana.

Would be curious to learn what you edited.

Honestly I have more valuable things to do with my time.

I'll add: please edit in areas where you are an expect. Over the last 20 years I have racked up a few thoudand edits, rewrites, new articles, etc.. Don't contribute to the low effort noise everyone is screaming about. In a century an edit in transcendental number theory with a citation is going to be a lot more important than whatever the current culture war is.

Years ago I tried adding a weblink directing to a community, to an article about a game, where there were already weblinks to other communities, which were in no way any more official or proper than the community I linked to, but this edit never made it into the page, because someone played gatekeeper there, probably a person of the already linked communities. Since then I don't even bother editing wiki any longer. It is gatekeeping by people with their own agenda. What else I read about edit wars did not inspire confidence either.

Curious, as a longtime editor, what's gotten harder for you recently?

As a casual, very infrequent editor, I echo everyone else's complaints that it's intimidating to have your additions reverted by the old guard who seem to have an increasingly particular vision of the site.

Since so many commenters here have bad experiences, I'll provide a counterweight. I've made numerous edits and have run into little to no resistance. I'm sure asking people on a forum does not evoke a representative response.

Mechanics like that exist for when warring over a page escalates. See the old essay (20 years old now!) "The Wrong Version": https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Version

To offer a counter-example to the many anecdotes about being gatekept(?) by veteran Wikipedia editors: I have the opposite experience.

I occasionally contribute to various topics, and in many cases experienced editors silently fixed formatting errors I made, allowing me to focus on contributing to Wikipedia without having to keep up with the best practices.

I also participated in a deletion discussion once, and - despite being inexperienced and in the minority position (keep) - the experienced editors considered my arguments and responded to them.

> Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.

Wise that you omit adding other credible sources that do not agree with the main editor's views. What you're describing sounds like already preserving their work, no matter if it happens to be provide info based on multiple convergent sources or not.

It’s worth remembering that the entire point of a wiki is that it’s quick and easy to make a change (the name means “quick” in Hawaiian). Being quick and easy to change was the defining quality of Wikipedia and its advantage over more rigid traditional encyclopaedias. These days editing Wikipedia seems like you have to fight bureaucracy and rules lawyering, and doesn’t seem very wiki-like at all.

If there's a dispute and the person you're having a dispute with never materialises to argue their side of the argument, you're fine to just revert the banner.

Sounds like that might have been a copyright issue? In the UK a transcript of a show would need permission of the writers/owners to be reproduced. I can see Wikipedia would be sensible to disallow infringing works as being bad sources.

Ironically an excerpt of the script/transcript would be allowed by UK copyright - but a site with only excerpts would probably but be a good source for Wikipedia's purposes.

That's an error, because episodes can be cited directly, and the template "cite episode" exists for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_episode

It can be seen in use for instance on the Beavis and Butt-head article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beavis_and_Butt-Head where the citation looks like this:

"Werewolves of Highland". Beavis and Butt-Head. Season 8. Episode 1. October 27, 2011. MTV.

Designers happened.

I edited mostly a single page many years ago. It wasn't a controversial subject really, just one where there is a lot of garbage popular history and some light revisionism that made it a bit of an effort to remove unreliable sources and add some better sources. Never any issues or fights over it, but I got bored eventually and just let it be.

Recently I edited a page or two, then tried to edit more, but everything is so complex now. All the special markup and stuff to consider is really off-putting. Took me forever to figure out how to properly fix the year of death of a person and some other data I just ignored because it was too much red tape. Wish it was more simple plain text. Makes quick drive-by edits too much work.

The only few times I tried to make small edits, typo corrections, or similar, they just got immediately reverted as vandalism. So when I found a page that is largely wrong about a relatively obscure historical figure that I actually know a lot about and have plenty of source material for, I didn't really feel motivated to put the work in to clean it up.

With how hostile userbase is on wikipedia, no - i would rather not. especially in my native tongue.

I made a small edit to fix a mistake once and it didn’t get called vandalism but I sort of got a harsh message telling I did it wrong and didn’t follow processes

There must be some admin-level expectations of how things should be done but the editor flow gives you zero warning or indication. This was a while back so maybe they changed the flow

I think the "deletionist" tendency is one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia. At least it's the main thing that prevents me from making significant contributions. I say tendency, but maybe it really is more of a crusade. Deletion and rejection definitely seem to be the default "predisposition." I've seen a lot of examples of apparently well meaning contributors being pushed away by the need to establish "notability" for a subject and the expectation that all information must be referenced to a fairly limited number of approved reliable sources. These are norms which have been built over a long period of time so it would be incredibly difficult to change them now.

I spent like 30 minutes trying to fix a busted citation link a while ago before giving up. I write code and markdown for a living. :shrug:

Exactly. It makes it basically impossible to get niche industry/trade information and history onto wikipedia unless it was so newsworthy it's covered everywhere.

I've tried this but my edit is either auto reverted for some bureaucracy violation, or the article requires extended confirmed status to edit at all.

How are people supposed to understand these hard to follow and shifting rules?

It will unnerve you to know, that this is the state of the art, and the information environment we run in, is incredibly fragile at the speeds at which it is moving.

It may also hearten you to know, that small, consistent actions like yours, make these collective systems run.

Understand the sentiment. Less reasonable people that edit Wikipedia will continue to make it a hellscape for the rest. Please try to edit and create.

You can usually just revert the revert if your edit was legitimate. I think the bot will say this too in the message it sends you.

21 years of editing, that's awesome! I'm curious though, what's changed? If I were to maybe guess, I'd imagine it coincides with the rising temperature of the online culture war?

I've done a fair bit of editing over almost 20 years. Some of my photos are featured in small articles, and I've only had a few of my edits reverted, always for sensible reasons. It's easy to get started, and the pitfalls (chiefly, adding commentary without a source) are well documented.

So on that basis, I agree. Please edit. It's easy. Start small.

That said, I've watched entire articles vanish under the banner of non-notability, which were clearly notable if one bothered to find some citations. The deletionists have a process and a timeline, while the contributions come slowly and sporadically. This asymmetry is a cancer. If there's a treadmill belt pushing articles off the site which fail to run fast enough, then it's impossible for small articles, which are just learning to crawl, to survive long enough to survive. It's not a test of notability, it's a test of Wiki-savvy among an article's supporters.

The best way to make a new article actually stick around, is to basically build the whole thing elsewhere, which takes weeks or months of effort for a single person since it's not collaborative, then plonk it into Wikipedia fully formed, and maybe, just maybe, it might have enough citations to pass the test of notability. But this means that, from the outset, it represents a single author's viewpoint.

Deletionists eviscerate what makes Wikipedia interesting, and they're the main reason I haven't edited more.

Yet when I (or others) are trying to raise the issue on certain Reddit communities in addition to Lemmy people there still prefer to bury their heads in the sand. Often they'll simply resort to personal attacks and so on just to avoid facing the fact that Wikipedia is not as infalliable as they think at all.

Example:

https://lemmy.world/comment/14158030

This needs to be talked by a lot! However per my experiences and those of others if you go to either the "front page of the internet" or Lemmy the competitor you'll get side-eyed and harassed by people who thinks that you're a "far-right obscurantist" for simply criticizing Wikipedia.

I tried to get interested in Wikipedia and the crazy level of gatekeeping over topics these editors had no clue about was frustrating to me. They don’t know what is notable and they have no business telling people what to do in many instances (esp with more obscure topics).

I've had my edits similarly mass reverted with an unkind message.

For reasons unknown, I am much better than many at navigating this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989

https://x.com/arjie/status/1847046183342297498?s=46

If you share with me what your change is I might be able to get it done.

I've had basic facts about mathematics which are wrong deleted in revisions by editors with no knowledge of the subject beyond having asked ChatGPT (which repeats the wrong shit on Wikipedia). It's hard to be worth it. Wikipedia's biggest problem is the editors.

Every time I've tried to edit Wikipedia I've been called names and bullied off the platform.

It’s not easy to do at all. They have extensive blacklists to reputable conservative papers, and I’ve been cussed out for trying to link things. There are a lot of topics that can’t even be discussed because the pro-left bias is too strong that any reputable source is banned, and many non-political pages which are monitored so tightly by a single individual it’s impossible to edit.

Have you tried using sources that aren't explicitly "conservative papers"? And if so, have you considered the lack of evidence found outside of overtly biased sources might indicate the position you are defending is not defensible outside of a strictly partisan perspective and worldview, and is buoyed only by other strictly partisan sources?

They block VPN use that makes editing impossible for people from some of big countries with so called "firewalls".

Interesting how so many people are answering that they've had trouble!

How about I look at some of those cases? Especially if it's relatively recent, I can take a look. Leave me a message here, or at my email address (see my HN info) , or on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kim_Bruning

I'm not very active anymore, but I'll check in the next couple of days and see what I can do. Really to be able to help I generally need links to revisions, but if you have a username, a page, and a reasonably short time frame (a concrete date) I might be able to figure out the relevant revisions from there.

To onlookers: When I investigate cases like this, there's often a "catch." Sometimes contributors really did break Wikipedia policies — and just don’t mention that part when telling their side of the story.

Now I'm certainly not saying every case is like that, so I will look, and if you don't get what the issue was, I'll try to explain. In some cases if it was recent and it somehow wasn't fair, I might even be able to'fix' it within the bounds of Wikipedia policy.

That's a feature. Each article requires future attention and adds load.

Most of the important articles were in the first 100,000.

> It's hard to trust when it seems so fluid.

Perhaps we should trust it more because it is fluid and that fluidity is documented (see the history and talk tabs for any given article). Historically, reputable sources depended upon, to a very large degree, the authority of the author. The reader typically had little to no insight into what was generally agreed upon and where there was some debate. How the Wikipedia exposes that may be imperfect, but it is better than nothing.

I used to edit wikipedia until I got permanently "community banned" because of some poor choices of words and even my apologies were ignored. The site is full of people who are chronically online and like to witch hunt and destroy people's lives. That wasn't the case almost two decades ago when I started using the site, but now it's full of the type of people that passionately use reddit and bluesky and that were formerly on twitter. (It's worth noting that a "community ban" is a special type of ban that's basically a lynch mob where a bunch of people dog pile and if there's enough "consensus" you get banned, which can happen by the person proposing it simply calling forth all their friends. And this type of ban is considered "stronger" than an actual administrator ban so cannot be overturned by an administrator. It's mob violence at its finest.)

I was a very active editor who'd been using the site for a very long time, but they don't care. One major mistake and you're gone forever.

The site also has a huge bias toward "media" sources rather than actual scientific content or primary sources in general. They treat the media as vetters of the truth and ignore all of the group-think/mass delusion that is common among mainstream media where they all re-report each others stories. That causes a huge blind spot. It didn't used to be that way too, it used to be that most notable sources were books, but nowaydays with everything online and the quality of media reporting going down and down it's caused Wikipedia itself to decline in quality.

I used to encourage people to edit Wikipedia like you, no longer. The site needs a hard fork, at least for the english speaking site.

I've seen such bad editing lately. Basic grammar rules being missed/capitalization issues, personal opinions and hearsay cited as "fact", lack of references. Seemingly unrelated topics except in whoever made an edits eyes.

So yeah, you don't even have to be an expert. What's weird is that there IS a lot of edits by ideologues of many kind. And it doesn't have to be "foreign agents" and this Trump attack reeks so hard of yet another attempt at authoritarian control and NewSpeak. Biden gave in with the TikTok to Trumps initial games, and now it just feeds the game. We have to resist this sort of thing from below.

I wish people had a good "sniffer" for bullshit. I'm not saying I'm perfect (we all have our blind spots) but after a while you can tell when certain things are trying to put a spin on something... It's especially odious when it comes to national identities trying to put a spin or tie either themselves or their enemies to a particular view point. The worst part is it's not necessarily obvious, to a lot of people if you don't have the knowledge, or the ability to critique and ask questions.

So we need people to keep asking questions for sure, and sniffing out this sort of thing. But it has to not be "IN THE NAME OF NATIONAL SECURITY" but rather "IN THE NAME OF OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL". Otherwise you just become a front or spokesthing for a given state, and that's no better than fucking Pravda.

The base rules are actually not very complicated.

But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction. That's a people problem, to some extent, not purely a Wikipedia problem.

(BRD is my favorite pet-peeve)

> How about I look at some of those cases?

Please note that, although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them. It’s always like this with Wikipedia detractors; I don’t know why, but it is. Complaints and horror stories galore, but nobody will link to any of it, preventing anybody from investigating what actually happened.

I am going to use this at work!

Because we/they have detached from the issue. It was a bad experience and thus it gets pushed aside. I also have my wikipedia deletionist story - the German wikipedia is among the worst there, way worse than the us-american - but it's not like I will keep an account active on a project with those awful people. So linking it isn't even all that easy.

Wikipedia is really, really bad at mathematics. The tone is all over the place, from “plagiarized from an undergrad textbook” to “crackpot with an axe to grind against Cantor.”

> The base rules are actually not very complicated.

> But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction.

I think this a feature/bug of a (litigious) society that works on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.

You're not wrong, per-se.

I'm still going to ask though! We might get lucky. Want to help out?

wikipedia means different things depending where you are. Content in English looks a lot better than browsing content in other languages like Spanish, French, Italian, ... Especially when it is about non Tech subjects in these languages, there seems to be a strong difference in quality, and the utility you get from Wikipedia varies with how many languages you speak.

My biggest beef is that any contributions volunteers make will be stolen by sama and similar scam artists & SV dweebs so they can improve their AI (and while Wikipedia is free AI which requires login/authentication and maybe even paid subscription in future).

In the past, I have done so, and won't, again.

First, my (quite correct) edits in existing pages have been reversed within minutes. No explanation as to why (I assume because I was not "known" enough). I have heard this complaint numerous times.

Second, when I tried to create a page about a system that I had originally authored, has become a well-known, worldwide tool, managed by a large team that does not include me, the page was rejected. I think it was because I had been involved in the creation of the tool.

I decided that it wasn't worth it. I didn't get upset, but it was clear that my input wasn't wanted.

If that's the intention, fine. But don't be surprised when no one but the most committed politicians want to bother trying to contribute to the project.

Basically every other complaint in this thread is that editing is impossible because everything is reverted. Your issue seems like an impossible one to cleanly solve

On many occasions, right-wing Internet acquaintances have given me a link to a story in a conservative news source; I would try to look up other coverage with a search engine, and I would find exclusively conservative sources discussing what happened, even though it was clearly verifiable fact that the the thing in question had in fact happened.

During the Rittenhouse trial, I watched trial coverage live, then evaluated what various news outlets were saying about what happened. Unironically, Fox News was objectively far more truthful and accurate than every left-wing source. I caught left-wing sources trying to push disproven and dubious narratives - in particular, the "taking an illegal firearm across state lines" bit - long after anyone had an excuse, even after the basic issues with that story had already been debunked by other left-wing sources. Shortly after the verdict dropped, Al Jazeera Plus put out an absurd, naked propaganda piece trying to paint the DA as a hero unjustly thwarted, with imagery showing complete ignorance to and/or resistance of the proven facts of the case.

(As a reminder: this is a DA who didn't check a firearm personally before pointing it at the jury, in order to try to make a ridiculous point about how Rittenhouse might possibly have been holding the weapon, while clearly having no actual idea how to hold and aim it properly. Who then made a closing statement baldly asserting falsehoods about the basics of how firearms work that had been disproved immediately prior. Who had previously made repeated, blatant attempts to violate Rittenhouse's Fifth Amendment rights and introduce evidence that had been very clearly excluded from consideration in pre-trial hearings.)

I have witnessed supposedly respected, mainstream sources (with a rarely acknowledged left-wing bias and an axe to grind) smear people I've personally met, and movements and groups that include people I personally know and care about (especially movements that have nothing to do with the traditional left-right axis but which certain leftists have decided to label as "right-wing" for their own reasons).

The bias built in to Wikipedia's "reliable sources" policy is self-reinforcing. You can't get conservative sources added even if what they're saying is provably true, or "liberal" (an absurd abuse of the term, but that's the American jargon now) sources excluded even if what they're saying is provably false, because a) the latter agree with each other; b) a new source needs vetting, which generally involves agreeing with existing sources; c) there is no objective standard for accuracy or reliability.

You present your comment as though you imagine that "sources that aren't explicitly conservative" are, thereby, not also "overtly biased". A lot of people seem to believe this, but it's not at all true. The fact that you frame this in terms of "defending positions" is also telling, for me.

See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

>although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them

In the past, when I've tried to keep receipts on this sort of thing (which requires an extraordinary amount of effort, and is often only possible if you've anticipated that there would be a need to do so - since content is often deleted or archived without warning, and nobody ever enters an argument on the Internet with the expectation of talking about that specific argument years later) and actually presented evidence, I've been accused being "creepy" or various other forms of misconduct, and the argument is still not taken any more seriously. I've given up on presenting evidence of this sort of thing because the people who ask for it are not being intellectually honest, in my extensive experience. They don't care if you can actually prove what you're saying; they will ignore you anyway.

You actually highlight the problem very well. Any group of people can make their own websites, publish their own papers, produce their own films, cross-refencing each other all along the way, thereby creating the illusion their their alternate reality, though largely fabricated, is as true as the real world we all live in. But it isn't. The "facts" within that sphere are only supported by other "facts" within that same sphere, and they fail to connect to the larger, long-standing and global web of data, research and opinion that are far more diverse, well-documented and debated. And by failing to connect, or only tenuously connecting, to the larger conversation they are rendered irrelevant, except for their use as a weapon towards personal or political ends.

There are multiple entire websites out there criticizing Wikipedia and what they have to say tends to revolve around the editing process, specifically the social/cultural aspects. Have you attempted to research this yourself?

Are you familiar with what Larry Sanger himself had to say about the bias that has emerged in Wikipedia (https://unherd.com/newsroom/wikipedia-co-founder-i-no-longer...)?

e: another comment elsewhere on this post brought up another source: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... . I've read a bit of it and can generally endorse what's being said there. In particular, some specific usernames are cited and I recognize most of them, which in itself is telling. Other comments here suggested that Sanger's personal views are less than scientific, to say the least. I have not looked into this personally, but I don't think this in any way negates the argument about bias. (Nor is any political camp immune to pseudoscience.)

{{Citation needed}}

/s

The problem is that you tried to attribute this behaviour to conservative sources specifically, in order to rebuke someone else here, but in reality this is not a specific trait of conservative sources.

They could maybe explain it better with some short youtube videos?

For citations you an usually delete the old stuff and then click 'Templates' to insert a new one. For "cite web" you can just enter the url and click the magnifying glass symbol and it automatically fills the rest.

People say "propaganda machine" but I have yet to see much example of that. The Trumpists don't like it because it fact checks their lies but I'm not sure it's fair to call that propaganda? Any examples like a link to an article or section that you feel is propaganda?

Why revert edits in the first place then? Do they think people are editing Wikipedia by accident?

A new layer of Citogenesis? ( https://xkcd.com/978/ )

Interesting. Do you have an example? I'll go look!

Control theory (among others) says that a more rapid cycle actually often improves reliability and accuracy of a system. (If on average an iteration will converge on a set point/objective, then more/faster iterations will converge more rapidly, or become stable past some threshold). People keep trying to slow Wikipedia down though. They do succeed somewhat, and that actually hurts accuracy and engagement.

When it finally got through, were they nice to you at least? (They'd better have been!)

And, it probably wasn't administrators, unless you specifically looked. You do sometimes have to be a bit insistent, you're quite right. If someone reverts you, it's often not personal. Ask on the talk page why they reverted, and if no one says anything for 24 hours (definitely wait this long), just try your edit (or a better one!) again.

I wrote an essay on this once that still gets used a lot on wiki (misquoted even more often). The original version of the essay had a few more tricks up its sleeve -but- if you do it this way you're not likely to get in trouble at least. And otherwise now you know someone you can ask for help.

I just fucking said that. Any sphere, if sufficiently disconnected from or contradictory to the mass of human knowledge, is highly suspect at best. Most likely it's complete garbage. Pollution that hinders the healthy advancement of human knowledge.

The general notability guideline is another thing that's effectively downstream of "there's not enough editor time to keep everything up to basic standards." If Wikipedia had 10x the editor-hours it does now, notability requirements would de facto loosen, because there would be enough editor-hours to keep the extra articles useful. Seriously, editor time is the major bottleneck of Wikipedia.

BOLD, revert, discuss, for those unfamiliar:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...>

You tend to have to get all your ducks 100% in a row before you edit or create. It used to be I could author a new article with some decent solid sources and there would be no argument. Then someone later would come and fix any deficiencies and maybe switch out the sources for better ones.

Basically, it's become "perfect is the enemy of good."

If the evidence has merely been “archived”, it would still be possible to find and link to, no?

And even if, as you say, all the evidence has been completely deleted, an honest critique would at least point out the exact article in question, and summarize the details of the attempted changes.

But all the criticism in this thread (and elsewhere) always lack this. It is a mystery.

I think it's an antispam bot, just rerevert.

That's a strange choice of words. Divergence from human beliefs is perfectly legal, because beliefs are fallible. How can you possibly be ignorant about this when you just now described an echo chamber yourself?

I've tried to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects but they block Tor, e-mailing admins to get an account manually created always results in them telling you to follow some other process, but that process is only for "established editors", so it seems there's no realistic way for me to contribute.

>When it finally got through, were they nice to you at least?

Not really. They continued to grumble about being "stuck" with the data on the talk page because they couldn't find any source to refute it, and the last edit one of them made about it was "Since I can't find any source to refute this (everyone seems to use it without question), let's at least sort the data correctly".

>And, it probably wasn't administrators, unless you specifically looked.

I did look! One of them is still an administrator and the other one is currently a "former administrator". I think I remember the other one being an admin back then too, but I could be misremembering.

Oh dear. If you want to point me at the talk page in question, I'll take a look!

What's the issue with naming the person if you think there should be an encyclopedic article about said person?

If it's about anonymity / not wanting to publicly link your HN and Wikipedia profiles, well fine, but the fact that there are two films about a person does not say much.

People can make films about themselves, too.

I tried making some contributions and ended up getting totally put off by passive-aggressive rules-lawyering and BS. There is a certain sort of person who edit-squats pages and fights remorselessly over every change and it just wasn’t worth the time and emotional energy to try to get over that hump.

I agree with this as well ( I wrote a critical comment above). I’ve had the most enjoyment fixing typography & typos (aka copy editing). It feels more like a casual (video) game that way.

Some of my edits to technical articles were well received.

You’re right it’s good to highlight the good and bad, but given the amount of goodwill that was burned , the bad did outweigh the good for me.

Many people here decry Wikipedia as biased, impossible to edit and other bad things.

But none of the comments point out the actual article that they wanted to edit.

Ironically, presumably to remain anonymous. Anonymity and pseudonymity are directly attacked in the letter this article is about.

Wikipedia sure isn't perfect, but so far, when commenters attack it with fundamental vitriol, I've always found these people to have a political agenda.

There are a couple of legitimate reasons. Raising the issue internally only brings ire and attention by admins and shadow groups. I tried doing this via the WMF village pump , technical pumps, admin pages and only drew more attacks.

Raising the issues externally comes off as petty, because the “evidence” consists of 50+ pages of inane bickering on talk pages, community post , etc with no clear narrative or verdict. It’s a unique community that leans heavily on hyper-bureaucratic and bespoke debates.

I could share > 5 severe cases that required weeks of effort to “resolve” . It would require nearly as much effort for anyone to draw conclusions from.

There are some index pages of some of the more notable conflicts & debates. If you can indicate that digging that up would be worth my time to help you understand more, I may be willing to help you out.

If you revert someone's malicious reverts three times, you'll be forced into arbitration. They rarely bother with that though.

Finding things again is a lot of work. There's similarly "always" this selective demand for rigor that faces complainants such as myself. I don't owe you my time. Often these complaints are motivated by recollections of years-old incidents - sometimes by many such incidents.

I was mostly looking for specific interactions to dig in to, but if you have a link or two for me to take a peek, we'll both know if it's worth it soon enough. You don't have to dig deep straight away.

"hard to trust when it seems to fluid"

This has nothing to do with the information itself, it has to do with human emotions and resistance to change.

But a review process can make it both harder to change and more correct. A delay in impacting the official version makes it harder for people to vandalize.

We do this in software all the time.

In software if there's a critical bug sometimes we accelerate a fix. We can have a process like that for "wrong information". But you'd think most articles about established topics should not see a lot of churn. Yes- Sometimes they find a new fossil that calls some preexisting science into question, but these are relatively rare events and we can deal with that e.g. by putting a note on the relevant topic while the new article gets worked on.

Not everything meets Wikipedia editorial goals, but you still have a lot more of latitude in Wikibooks and Wikiversity, the latter also admitting original researches.

I think the ongoing hosting cost of any given article is incredibly close to zero with the exception of a very tiny fraction of popular articles. The popular ones obviously deserve to be there as evidenced by their popularity alone. Maybe there is something I'm not taking into account but I have a hard time seeing the meaningful cost of some obscure wiki page merely existing.

I used to, until entire notable topics within a certain culture were deleted as "not notable" by editors unfamiliar with the topics.

"not notable" is the cancer within wikipedia. You can't claim to be the sum of human knowledge but also arbitrarily remove articles to meet some imaginary criteria.

Oh, it was just because it didn't matter to the conversation. It was about Bernie Jordan who left his nursing home to attend a D-Day event. I created the article because both films imply the nursing home prevented him, but in actuality they went to great lengths to help him.

> Maybe there is something I'm not taking into account but I have a hard time seeing the meaningful cost of some obscure wiki page merely existing.

The thing you're not taking into account is that every article that exists takes up some amount of editor time, which is why it's good when more people participate in Wikipedia. You are correct that the server/bandwidth cost of almost all articles rounds off to zero. That leaves just the cost in "an actual human looked at this and okayed it," which has different scaling characteristics.

> Personally i feel like its kind of like democracy: the worst system except for all the other systems.

It's exactly this, in large part because Wikipedia happens to also be a large-scale exercise in direct democracy.

I see, thanks!

Reading the article about the movie, I can kind of see both sides here.

Probably a veteran Wikipedia contributor could draw the lines best, but it seems reasonable to say that the incident itself would not be relevant enough unless it had been made into a movie.

The article about the movie clearly states that it's a true story.

i mean, there are often "curiosity" stories reported by multiple newspapers that are still not really historical events warranting their own article.

I'd draw the line depending on the volume of coverage and publicity in such cases.

And this case doesn't appear to me as if it was a major cultural thing that everyone knew about when it happened (unless they were interested in the movie).

I'm not in the US though, so I can only tell what I see in search results and that the story hasn't really crossed the atlantic into any notable publicity here.

How do we rate biases, and what’s the rank of Wikipedia along the diverse methodologies to do so?

Also note that the issue is biases in there whole generality. Most data produced by the universe will just not attract interest of most human beings. Or at least, as finite beings, we have to pounder where we put our attention and can’t afford to study every single topic with the same level of scrutiny.

i just got pinged with this being archived. It was regarding abuse of USERTALKSTOP to block any criticism on user talk pages. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3A...

There's no such policy , but it's abused as a way to censor criticism over behavior, which itself is a policy (RUCD)

There were a couple instances where user conduct concerns were raised on their talk page (in accordance with RUCD), and that user used USERTALKSTOP to censor the concerns. The outcome is that me and the other users who were raising concerns received a temporary ban (one permanent), instead of the concerns themselves being attended to and addressed.

Worse than the ban was the hours and hours of inane dialog on admin pages, defending your edit history, account history, intentions, etc. And the UI is clumsier and noisier than the worst 1990s web BBs

You can see how a seemingly benign non-policy can be abused to censor even well-intended volunteers.

see what i mean.

It's quite an old discussion at this point and is now archived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_best-selling_vide......

Did that help