A few years of work (10k edits) and a few years of dwindling participation on my side someone noticed that quite a few of those early admins never faced a vote at all. The process had re-elections when 25 wikipedians asked for a vote, took them almost three weeks, I got that treatment as well in 2009. Indeed someone had enough time to dig through and find a discussion where I wasn't the nicest person (at the same time writing and discussing on Wikipedia help me a lot to develop a healthy social skill). Well, I didn't use the admin rights anymore so I rather resigned before someone dug even deeper ;)
For security reasons those admin rights should be time limited anyways.
The primary goal of the admins seemed to be to gatekeep, in particular to keep “unencyclopedic” content out at all cost, e.g. by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one.
“Just because it’s relevant on en.wikipedia.org doesn’t mean it’s relevant over here” is a sentence I heard frequently. Keeping the number of articles down was seen as an active ideal.
For me, it was a great motivator to improve my English, and I’ve only ever looked back when the English version didn’t have a lot of information on some Germany-specific topic. Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia…
In the first year or so of the english Wikipedia, I was very engaged in adding content but never really tried to engage with the community. I started adding articles about my topic of interest at the time, which was New York 80s punk and hardcore bands. Soon, I had the lot of my articles deleted for "lacking relevance".
I haven't been contributing much since.
> Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia
I once asked on (then) Twitter why they kept that crappy design, and got the most depressing NIMBY answers on even making the new design optional. That really killed any rest of hope I had for the German Wikipedia. Glad to hear that at least that tiny improvement made it.
I probably disagree with your opinions, but the debate would likely be useless.
They listed Greyzone as an unreputable new source because it’s pro-Palestinian. When you Google the usernames of those who voted to ban them pro Israeli think tanks from DC come up. Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics. If you’re lucky you can find the real contours of an issue by seeing who’s been censored and silenced out of the article on the Talk page.
One example of a heavily debated neutrality issue was the opening paragraph of the Zionism article, which ended up like this. Surely noone would call this remotely pro-Israel? "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...
What isn't a joke when it comes to politics? The only way to be informed about politics I have found is to regularly read news from several different media sites paying careful attention when they talk about the same issue. This way you learn their biases and how to interpret their news articles, you get the ability to guess what really happens, not just their takes on it.
For instance, they would not directly edit the target's page, but start working 2 links removed from it, compromise the "friend of a friend of a friend", and then work towards the actual target and finally try to cancel the target through "association with " accusations.
and seeing some of the people she proudly mentions - it seems like she's just switched cults.
But even if I were, you’re not accounting for the cumulative benefit saving others from having to research the same acronym.
You’re making a lot of effort here to claim that people should already know this when the evidence here (of people asking what it means) demonstrates that it’s not universal.
For the record, I don’t actually mind people not spelling it out on first use if the acronym is guessable from the context of the comment (which, ironically, a lot of technical acronyms are). But in the case of the OP, you wouldn’t know what SJW was u less you already knew what a SJW was. So it’s not an unreasonable request from the GP. And frankly, the comments criticising them for asking is really unfair. They have just as much right to ask as you do to say “it’s common” and the OP had to use that acronym in the first place. Let’s all just be nice rather than moaning that someone didn’t memorise some specific piece of tribalism before coming to HN.
I'm sure they did at the time this (SJW) acronym got popular. That was maybe 10-15 years ago.
Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can appraise the situation, Israel sucks and has a somewhat higher incidence of committing war crimes than other western countries, but Palestine would suck even worse if you switched their places around, the only thing holding them back from committing much worse atrocities being lack of resources, going by their human rights record and direct statements from their leadership. Israel isn't executing anyone for being gay for example. But out of many factors, one being some left leaning people taking the mental shortcut that the anti-American option is always more intellectual and "owns the conservatives", we've ended up in this nonsense scenario.
The person he's referencing, specifically, got really pilled by evangelical Christianity and believes that anyone advocating for liberal causes has created a religion out of nebulous cultural values, unmoored from god. She blames the "cult of SJW" for the kind of character assassination she claims to have done, that it was the force of rootless bolshevism that was responsible for her supposedly destroying lives and careers by making up(?) relationships and cultural crimes on whole webs of Wikipedia articles.
There are moderators who take care of cleaning those up, then starting harassment against users who have posted these things.
I've seen one particular page, when a corruption allegation was blown up against a politically connected individual, be set up for permanent deletion (the only way to remove a page so it can't be remade).
They have all the time in the world and its clearly a full time job for them to do this, so its very hard to deal with as an individual editor. Hence the result has been that the Portuguese wikipedia has very little information on the corruption of Portuguese politicians, while the English language is full of it.
In my case I saw that they even invent new rules if needed to remove things. Completely compromised.
But in order to do that you need X amount of edits. You also need strong evidence. There are other complaints for other Wikipedias in other languages that have become biased.
You need to take into account that the Croatian Wikipedia had become a Holocaust denial website. That’s how far things had been allowed to slide.
Just look into the fact that theyre is an article about ‘Super Dragões’ which is an ultra/hooligan mafia that runs the drug trade in Porto, Portugal. They’ve been involved in multiple murders, episodes of violence, and recently their leader was arrested.
For some reason this article kept being altered/censored by two users, over literally months. They’ve successfully removed important details that link the leader of the group to an important murder (I assume they couldn’t do more).
Every single major Portuguese org. Or political figure in Portugal is like this. You add things and then it’s a fight for months to get it to stick, if you’re lucky. Here a moderator clearly acted well, but they still managed to clean some of the detail.
Or look at the article for Valentim Loureiro, where the major crimes are there, but it’s been removed that he was in fact convicted at least once. They clean up what they can.
> ... also known for hoaxing at List of Crayola crayon colors. Obsessed with inflatable, bursting, popping, and bouncing objects
I'm frankly amazed that enough people have the time to track this nonsense and stamp it out that it ends up being self-correcting. It's not just about time, either; chasing bad edits and prosecuting bad users must be a huge chore in terms of the sheer amount of work needed. I always find it amazing how horrible the tools are (like how almost anything, including having discussions, is done by editing pages; how can anyone have a discussion in such a disorganized way?), which surely must be a hindrance to productivity or to the ability to detect and deal with constant abuse. But seemingly it works. Maybe there are better tools that pro-level admins know about?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Anan...
Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Long-term_abuse...?
Therefore, if legal problems arise with these pages, they probably will just delete the legally problematic info and hide every edit done before.
And the times I've brought up the fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable before, I've had numerous editors come in and claim that wasn't true and that people could rely on the claims they find in Wikipedia. This runs counter to the claim that Wikipedia editors know about these influence campaigns and openly fight about them. A lot of the active and vocal editors are openly dismissing such concerns.
(Except the claim as stated isn't always in the source anyway. Best to check.)
> The way we determine reliability is typically based on the reputation for editorial oversight, and for factchecking and corrections. For example, if you have a reference book that is published by a reputable publisher that has an editorial board and that has edited the book for accuracy, if you know of a newspaper that has, again, an editorial team that is reviewing articles and issuing corrections if there are any errors, those are probably reliable sources.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/P...
Those voters (with the exception if bad actors) are working on the basis of "factual circumstances", which they debate extensively before voting.
And most LLMs probably have Wikipedia as a significant part of their training corpus, so there is a big ouroboros issue too.
The non-profit public benefit service they provide is the openly editable encyclopaedia wiki, not its contents or its editors. The same safe harbour provisions as with other content hosters should (and need to) apply as with YouTube hosting questionable videos.
Wait, why? If the edits were so clean and uncontroversial, what was suspicious?
Sorry for asking, the wiki talk-page links very chaotic to read.
Icewhiz is a bad example because a lot of the evidence is non-public now (there's a cabal of CheckUsers approved by the Wikimedia Foundation who deal non-public cases). A simpler one is Lieutenant of Melkor/CaradhrasAiguo. Lieutenant of Melkor was banned in 2014, CaradhrasAiguo was made in 2015, and in 2020 someone linked the two accounts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...
> Editor interaction tool shows 2691 common pages. This is because both have been AWB power users in several same topic areas. However, there are numerous specific commonalities with extreme detail related to American cities, Chinese cities, weather templates and airports.
> Both used navigational popups to revert edits which resulted in a non-standard date format in the edit summary.
> LoM created many US city weatherbox templates. CA has been the only editor to do major updates in many of them.
> Both have done major work with pushpins related to Chinese maps. 'Pushpin' is found in many edit summaries of both editors.
> Both often removed bold text from non-English words. Both used edit-summaries with "debold" which I don't think is a real word.
> Both updated snow days and precipitation days in US city infoboxes with almost identical edit summaries.
> Both have an interest in classical music. CTRL+F for Beethoven, Mozart or Chopin in the editor interaction tool.
They're also both named after Lord of the Rings characters. "Caradhras" is a mountain, "Melkor" was the most powerful Valar and later went by the name "Morgoth". Sauron, the antagonist of LotR, was his lieutenant.
So, is it better than reddit? I agree, probably. That bar doesn't seem very high though.
Part of the issue with gamergate discussion is that there's a lot of vapid perspectives along the lines of "it's just video game journalism who cares" which allows an infinite amount of bad behavior, dishonesty and manipulation in the name of an abstract greater good. I believe it was used as a prototype for future wikipedia manipulation for "more important" topics.
What do you consider a leftist? Why do you think they don't have jobs?
> The pro-gamergate editors were completely shut out of that article eventually and the article doesn't even mention any perspectives from the other side
The "pro-gamergate" perspective is described in the very first sentence under "Purpose and goals":
The most active Gamergate supporters or "Gamergaters" said that Gamergate was a movement for ethics in games journalism, for protecting the "gamer" identity, and for opposing "political correctness" in video games and that any harassment of women was done by others not affiliated with Gamergate.The way the article is written is arguably biased and irrational on it's face, when reading it you should get the feeling of something being amiss and information being excluded. Sometimes you can just tell when writing is biased based on the language, it's a pattern that's good to learn.
There is evidence¹ that the whole gamergate thing was an organized harassment campaign pretty much from the start. Further, the "ethics in game journalism" argument was a calculated and intentional misdirection, used as cover to provide plausible deniability to the harassment campaign.
1. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/09/new-chat-logs-show-ho...
Wikipedias policies to promote neutrality are often counter productive.
Because neutrality is hard to define, what these policies actually do is progressively raise the effort required to keep or remove a particular point of view. Unfortunately, requiring more effort also means substituting the point of view of knowledgeable but time poor and inexperienced contributors, with the point of view of time rich chronic contributors and admins. The result is that instead of neutrality, you actually select for the strongest held points of view of a small ingroup of chronic users. The viewpoint diversity of such users is extremely low, which is why you’ll notice all controversial topics tend to lean a certain way.
Also, your anecdote is specifically about a social media article about an attempt to use social media spaces to harass people.
Seems extra “special case” to me.
Amazing... I can't tell if you are trolling or seriously think this.
Same with all those “free speech wing of the free speech party” folks.
Quite frankly i find people who think there were actually some kind of organized misogyny campaigns in 2014 to be a form of insane, like something breaks inside a person because they need a bogeyman so badly that it becomes a core of their being even though it's incredibly irrational. At the time journalists would just take random twitter people who weren't affiliated with gamergate and hold them up as if they represented the movement. Reminds of me the tactics used against occupy wall street honestly. It's not a rational or reasonable belief.
I recently watched The Silence of the Lambs, an Academy Award winning movie from the early 90s. Afterward, I skimmed the Wikipedia article to see if I missed any plot details.
There is a whole section on how the movie is considered transphobic by some nobodies, how the director defends that it isn't, blah blah blah. Having just watched the film, the thought didn't even enter my mind. I realized that the entire section is irrelevant to someone seeking information about the movie and at its worst, an opinion piece or cleverly disguised political shit-stirring.
Wikipedia is full of stuff like this. As a comparison I checked a 'real' encyclopedia (with editors) and of course not a mention of this, just the facts. Any attempt to delete irrelevant stuff from Wikipedia is closely guarded by self-appointed article gatekeepers because it has 'sources'.
Literally nearly every Wikipedia page for a fictional work or creator will have a section on "controversies" or similar, if there have been any. Regardless of which political direction they go in. If it's been covered in the media or a book or whatever, it tends to be included.
This is a good thing. It helps situate everything in a broader cultural context. When I look something up on Wikipedia, I want to know these things. It's not irrelevant and it's not an opinion piece.
It's not like the articles takes sides. They just objectively describe the controversies which are real objective things which exist.
I find it curious that you seem to want to be shielded from the existence of these controversies. Nobody is forcing you to read them. But many people do genuinely find them useful and informative.
Is there guidance on what makes a controversy 'notable', or can anything be listed there? E.g. "Nobody blogger and her Twitter army were upset about $thing" - does that qualify? Nearly anything can be controversial, or have fabricated controversies. You see this a lot on political articles.
And yes, obviously controversy will focus on the one controversial detail. There are hundreds of other details that are not controversial, so they aren't mentioned.
I don't understand why this bothers you. The world is a controversial place. It's good to document these things.
Hypothetically speaking, let's say you were a famous or notable person. Your Wikipedia article would probably have a controversy section with a vague statement like, "Some people find crazygringo's feet objectionable."
The citation would be a podcast where a guest told the host in an offhand comment, "I went on a date with crazygringo once and thought he had oddly-shaped feet."
Any attempt to delete this statement, even by you with full knowledge of your own feet, would be reverted as 'vandalism'.
This is Wikipedia in a nutshell.
Articles for celebrities and political figures are full of this garbage, which merely 10 years ago we would consider exclusively tabloid fodder.
I've read articles on complete nobody actresses with a controversy section that listed any and every political opinion she's ever said. It's a lame attempt to extrapolate (or reimagine) someone's entire personality from a few offhand statements made once in her life.
It's low quality content like this that undermines Wikipedia. Unfortunately it's all over the site and growing by the day.
I’ve found that the system works pretty well. It’s not perfect, but I can’t think of a better solution.
I agree that Icewhiz is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like figure at this point who's used by pro-Hamas editors/ultranationalists. A bunch of those pro-Palestinian editors that loved to complain about Icewhiz to deflect from their own behaviour were topic-banned from Israel-Palestine area a few months ago in January.[2]
It's challenging to deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict on any website that allows for user contributions. There's astroturfing and nation-state backed influence operations from probably a dozen countries. I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.
It is not survivorship bias to point out that the survivor survived.
> Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years.
Not “faltering after a few years” is part of “succesfully navigating that minefield”. If you fall out of the “race” no matter how good your policies would be otherwise you won’t be a reliable source of information. Because your can’t be if you no longer exists.
This is not a statement about what could have worked, this is a statement about what did work. And there survival is a necessary ingredient of success.
I understand your whole statement perfectly. It is just wrong. My understanding is not the problem here.
We are not comparing them to other samples. We say that out of the currently existing X they are the best.
Imagine a town with 3 bakeries. Lets call them A, B, and C. Bakery A gets shut down by the health deparment and B goes bankrupt. Then we can, rightfully and without survivorship bias, call C the best run bakery of the town. Because if you get shut down by the health department, or you go bankrupt then by definition you are not the best run bakery. (Obviously it is not a high praise with that kind of competitions, but they still are the best run bakery.)
Staying in the business is not some incidental part of “being the best run bakery”. It is a core component of it.
Imagine a marathon with 100 runners. Henry runs the fastest time, and 25 others do not finish. Some got lost, some had medical issues during the race. Is it survivorship bias to call Henry the fastest competitor in that race? Of course not. You need to finish the race to be even considered to be the fastest. Just because there are others who didn’t make it, doesn’t make him somehow not the fastest. Definietly doesn’t make calling him the fastest “survivorship bias”.
Finishing the race is a core component of “being the fastest finisher”.
Similarly in the case of wikipedia. If other similar sites stopped operating then they by definition did not “successfully navigated that minefield”. Their bakery is shut and they did not finish their marathon. That is the very definition of “not succesfully navigating that minefield”.
This is how rationalwiki defines survivorship bias: “Survivorship bias is a cognitive bias that occurs when focusing on entities that made it past a selection process, while overlooking those that didn't.”
We are not overlooking the failed attempts here. We are considering them.
Bakery A and B is worse run than C. And we know that because they got shut down.
The runners who did not finish the marathon are not faster than Henry. And we know that because they haven’t finished the marathon.
The abandoned community edited websites are worse at “successfully navigating that minefield” than the ones which are still operating. We know that because they are no longer operating. They were not overlooked.
What you are missing is that the “selection process” here is not some independent, and unrelated thing. The selection process is, at least in part, is what we are talking about. You cannot be considered the best run bakery unless you are running a bakery. You cannot be considered the fastest racer unless you finished the race. And your community edited website cannot be the one who most succesfully navigates a minefield unless you are navigating the minefield at all.
Please let me know if any of the above is unclear. Happy to go into details.
By comparable, I'm meaning an alternative or competitor that had gained equal prominence as Wikipedia, in terms of Google search results, and the eyes of the whole world, again like what Pepsi is to Coca-Cola and vice versa. We would have something to compare to in terms of the criteria if Google has given their favoritism to one or more other platforms, instead of just Wikipedia.
I believe you are mistaking me with someone else. Please pay attention to the usernames when you are re-reading the thread.
What i’m saying is what you describe as survivorship bias is not survivorship bias.
I don't believe this is the case, the Israeli/Palestine are restricted to long-time contributors, so the articles are either messy and unmaintained due to lack of editors, or worse, edited only by members of influence campaigns who have scared away everyone else
I suspect the real reason is more likely due to Trump not liking pages related to himself, including the page on the Jan 6 attack.
"DEAR AMERICAN FRIENDS IN THE ADMINISTRATION KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THE WIKIPEDIA"
"Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record"
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
The only pages that seem useful are the technical ones.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
Wikipedia is, today, a pale shade of what it once was, a source of information.
Because it is extremely hard to figure out what is going on. Lots of mysterious abbreviations. Unclear timeline.
I still don't really know it, it seems the scandal is, that he had a sockpuppet account? And there is only "private" evidence (meaning not public)?
"The Arbitration Committee has determined through private evidence, including evidence from the checkuser tool, that Eostrix (talk · contribs) (a current RfA candidate) is a sockpuppet of Icewhiz (talk · contribs). Accordingly, the Committee has resolved that Eostrix be indefinitely blocked."
So having a sockpuppet account is the reason for indefinite ban? Or that in combination with edits he made? Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic. And this is what prevented me since the beginning to participate in Wikipedia. I always got this impression. I made some edits here and there, but I think was mostly reverted/deleted/ignored - but no idea, I never felt like making the investment to really dive into it - and that seems required to contribute. Casual contribution seems pointless - and they likely miss out a lot through this.
"But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up."
So it seems good if wikipedia is more open - but from this story I just take "private evidence" with me and lots of questions about the whole process.
Sometimes things are genuinely complicated. If you want to understand the hardest, most elaborate forms of Wikipedia community management you're going to need to work really hard at figuring out what's going on.
Community dynamics at this scale, and with this level of bad actors, are not something that can be explained in a few paragraphs.
More and more, especially in engineering, I am in contact with people who just want everything to be easy to understand in TikTok length video clips or short posts.
Some things are hard to understand, dynamic systems especially, black or white answers do not exist.
(Sorry for the slightly off-topic/meta rant. This hit a nerve by me.)
A good place to start for information about how user blocking is done would be the following links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guideli... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry
In this case I think that a sock puppet account can be trivially blocked without much process as long as it can be proved that it is operated by someone who is already blocked for some violation. The sock puppet is an attempt at evading the block that was placed on that user's other account.
but
> Because it is extremely hard to figure out what is going on. Lots of mysterious abbreviations. Unclear timeline.
> But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english. Which makes it clear (usually). But in wikipedia to understand a indefinite ban, I have to understand global wiki community dynamics first?
your position aligns with someone who desires decision with serious consequences to be easy to understand.
And this is kind of like a court decision.
But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english. Which makes it clear (usually). But in wikipedia to understand a indefinite ban, I have to understand global wiki community dynamics first? I am a bit reminded of Kafka - The Trial.
Thats not really true either. There is a lot to unpack to understand court cases. Just the hearsay rule and its exception would fill a book. Jurisdiction, double jeopardy, means rea, “reasonable man”, Brady disclosure, fruit of poisonous tree, presumption of regularity, habeas corpus, SLAP, reasonable doubt, writ of mandamus, motion to dismiss, motion to supress, motion for change of venue, motion in limine, amicus curiae, consideration. Just to unpack the latin terms makes your head spin, and then you will be caught out by some term with some seamingly easy to understand common meaning used in surprising ways.
One can almost say it is a whole profession to understand what is going on in court. We could call them lawyers or something if we want to be fancy about it. And then turns out even those specialist further specialise in narrower areas.
Almost all of Wikipedia's community administration is done by volunteers working for free!