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.
Interesting. Do you have an example? I'll go look!
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
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)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...>
> 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.
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.
Example:
Most of the important articles were in the first 100,000.
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.
In fairness, this does mean the system is working.
Not sure.
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.
It may also hearten you to know, that small, consistent actions like yours, make these collective systems run.
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.
This has nothing to do with the information itself, it has to do with human emotions and resistance to change.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm still going to ask though! We might get lucky. Want to help out?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Basically, it's become "perfect is the enemy of good."
"If your solution consists of 'everyone should just X', you don't have a solution"
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.
/s
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.