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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Seems like the story of Stackoverflow.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

I am going to use this at work!

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.

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

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.

BOLD, revert, discuss, for those unfamiliar:

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

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

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.

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

"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.

> 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.