Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.
Have you actually tried editing wikipedia? It's extremely difficult to get anything approved. You have to provide multiple credible sources for things or else the mods just revert/delete your page.
Isn't is good that there are some forcing factors to help ensure the quality of the content? I get that there's plenty of drama and difficulties in building and moderating the content of Wikipedia, but it certainly does not appear to stagnate in terms of content if you are looking at e.g. the number of articles on English Wikipedia. The overall process appears to produce great outcomes and it is the greatest collection of knowledge created.
I took it as a statement that it is prohibitively difficult to contribute to Wikipedia, and wanted to point out that a large number of contributions are being made and the resulting quality being high, in part due to the difficulty of making contributions.
My comment was disputing the statement above that anyone can just stick junk in Wikipedia. While yes anyone can submit edits, it's pretty hard to get them accepted so the content on Wikipedia is more reliable than just a public notepad.
My statement was that the quality of Wikipedia overall is high, and that one of the reasons for that is because they set and enforce standards for contributions.
Certainly many people are put off by the process and will not have time to deal with it, but my belief would be that such cases are more likely on more controversial topics, and less likely for less controversial topics. Inherently, collaborating on difficult topics will be a difficult process, which also means that there are likely no easy answers for how to make this process not discourage anyone.
The forcing factors aren't what they are supposed to be though. "Credible" sources and citations are exclusively up to the article moderators personal tastes which are very rarely objective.
> The forcing factors aren't what they are supposed to be though.
Is it clear what they should rather be - and are there any examples of mechanisms that have worked better at a scale like this? How are you judging that they are not what they are supposed to be?
If the resulting body of work, which is the totality of Wikipedia, is able to be a curated and high signal collection of knowledge as a result of these mechanisms, how can it be said that they are not working? Having forcing factors, even if they are not ideally aligned or executed, which pushes contributors to increase the quality of their edits to pass, seems overall like a good thing. I'm not saying that its processes and mechanisms cannot be improved, I'm saying I believe it is incorrect to say that they are not working as a whole.
> "Credible" sources and citations are exclusively up to the article moderators personal tastes which are very rarely objective.
Overall I believe Wikipedia to be curated by a large group of people which coordinate through various rules and consensus mechanisms, where I don't believe it is correct to state that sources and citations are exclusively up to any specific article moderators, as they need to be able to build consensus and co-exist with other moderation.
Exactly because Wikipedia is such a large body of work it seems more resistant to corruption to have a large number of curators with different tastes and motivations. How would you determine that their selection of sources and citations is very rarely objective - especially when objectiveness itself seems quite hard to agree upon for many of the topics covered?
From my perspective it seems far more important to consider the quality and value of the totality of Wikipedia, which is massive and signs that many things are working, rather than insisting that it is not working, especially in times where knowledge is being broadly attacked, and where Wikipedia is one of the targets.
In countless ways, there's endless wars among admins.
An example though is that several historically relevant facts are edited out to favor some narrative.
E.g. Crimea, the Ukrainian autonomous republic that seceded/was annexed by Russia, tried to split 3 times from Ukraine, once even during the Soviet Union, but those events have been edited out on multiple pages to favor some western-centric narratives.
I've seen people cite an english book on a German topic and intentionally mistranslate words to construct a connection that doesn't exist and was never intended by the authors of the english book.
And editing with an account can be very dangerous if you manage to upset somebody with clout.
They can turn content disputes into conduct disputes and conduct disputes into social contests which are either shown on ANI or quietly adjudicated with an administrator block.
The content of Wikipedia is great. Its culture, not so much.
And the real reason that editing Wikipedia is difficult, is because of the ideological bias of the moderators so they support only the editors to conform to their ideology and reject any edits that go against their ideology even if those edit are literal proven truths.
Source: I am an editor on Wikipedia and my own informative useful edits to some important topics on my country have been rejected, while the misinformative and even malicious edits by agents of the enemy nation on those same topics were allowed and continue to persist and mislead whoever reads those articles.
Wikipedia has become a weapon of misinformative propaganda, and it's not a tool or repository of useful accurate information. This is why Wikipedia is banned in schools and universities, because its information may not be credible and Wikipedia has long ago lost the integrity that any worldwide free information repository should have had.
Larry Sanger is famously mad at Wikipedia for a very long time now because they wouldn't allow his pseudoscience on it. Later on that also extended to his (increasingly far right) politics.
Some of the garbage I've been involved with that I either had to avoid or bail out of an edit or revert war:
* A claim on "Fisting" that "seasoned fisters can insert their arm up to the shoulder into the anus", "supported" by a deleted PornHub video.
* Fighting on a Production Car top ten list when Tesla announced that Ludicrous Mode was coming the next year and "expected" to have certain performance stats, where multiple editors fell over each other to make sure it stayed at the top of the list, even when they eventually had to add a column just for Tesla where every other result had "Actual Results" and the Tesla had "Projected/Expected Results".
* A collation of John Deere tractors that described multiple models as "light years ahead of the competition".
* An article on an Australian drug smuggler where exhibits from court case were being removed as "biased".
* He's a quite interesting historical character popularized by the video game Assassin's Creed Shadows. However, this insertion has also been controversial. East Asian male protagonists are underrepresented in Western media already, and with Assassin's Creed there's the perception that now they snubbed East Asians again, following a long trend of forcefully inserting foreign perspectives in Asian settings, like The Last Samurai, Shōgun, etc.
* There aren't that many real historical accounts about him so people can argue all day about stuff like "Was Yasuke a real samurai?" without clear evidence about who's right.
Since the first games, many fans have clamoured for "Assassin's Creed in Japan"... I suspect they fantasised about being a male Japanese ninja running across rooftops in the moonlight, sneaking over nightinggale floors, and silently assassinating people in their beds, combining what they saw in Altaïr and Ezio, with every Japanese media trope they knew of.
But in the intervening years, Ubisoft and/or the entire AAA games industry is now seemingly driven by a need to conspicuously showcase diversity and inclusion (from some gamers' viewpoints). You could also view it as the gaming industry trying to broaden its audience and get out of the pigeonhole of catering to the base desires of sweaty manchildren, but either way, it's upsetting a certain type of game consumer.
So, when Ubisoft finally got around to setting Assassin's Creed in Japan, and they picked pretty much the only person around that time period who wasn't Japanese as the main protagonist, seemingly to meet diversity goals, capital-G Gamers went bananas over it, like it was a personal affront to them.
"In May 2024, it was announced that Yasuke would be a major character in an upcoming video game (Assassin's Creed Shadows). While onwiki disagreement about Yasuke's status as a samurai predates this announcement, the historical figure's Samurai status became part of a culture war around video games (J2UDY7r00CRjH evidence) that media sources have described as a continuation of or successor to Gamergate, leading to an increase in attention to the article. (Symphony Regalia evidence)"
I don't get your point. You are allowed to edit articles on contentious topics. Its just more likely to be reverted. Because the topic is... contentious.
My attempt at a point is that the controversial topics are a tiny percentage of the human knowledge stored on Wikipedia. If there were no controversies, then I would actually start to get worried. That would indicate that there was pure control of information on Wikipedia, like a theoretical CCPedia. [0]
Wikipedia is so open, that they even have their own "controversial" section! Is that not the coolest thing ever?
The chip on my shoulder is that there is a concerted effort to destroy and discredit Wikipedia.
The accomplishment of Wikipedia is not just beating the Library of Alexandria by many orders of magnitude, but doing so while keeping moderation logs in the open as well.
Ask @dang, or anyone that has ever had anything to do with forum moderation, if they would be cool with their moderation logs being completely open. Almost everyone with experience would say 100% no. They likely tried that and saw how much nutso drama it creates. Wikipedia actually does that, at the largest possible scale!
[0] Of course that exists, apparently it's called Baidu Baike
> if they would be cool with their moderation logs being completely open
It takes a certain mentality. That's rare but I think it makes for much better communities on the whole.
However I think most participants, not just moderators, don't like the environment that sort of mentality results in. When anything and everything, including the moderation itself, is up for civilized debate that tends to foster an environment in which it's acceptable to question core parts of people's worldviews. There's little shared doctrine beyond "argue any position you'd like" which most people seem to find intensely uncomfortable.
> The accomplishment of Wikipedia is not just beating the Library of Alexandria by many orders of magnitude, but doing so while keeping moderation logs in the open as well.
There is at least one exception to that rule. Users who attract the ArbCom's attention may get a general block. If they ask what they're blocked for, the ArbCom rep will tell them to read their email. These moderation decisions are not public, not even in a form with PII redacted.
There is also what's called "Oversight", which performs actions that are invisible to the public and administrators alike (though not invisible to some very privileged people)
There are also "office actions", where essentially the Wikimedia Foundation and/or its legal counsel have been required to do something. In most cases, the office actions are visible and logged, unless they've been required to use Oversight as well. But the main thing is that the office actions will generally not be explained to anyone, as it usually stems from some legal threat to Wikipedia.
I can't edit now, but when I wrote "CCPedia" I was first thinking about "muskpedia," but I didn't want to get political in a way that might offend other readers.
Currently ROFL, given grokpedia or whatever objectively dumb shit to which we are now exposed. I should not have bitten my tongue. Self-censorship is the worst kind.
I also have problems with Wikipedia's favoritism of insiders who have learned how to navigate its bureaucracy, but the fact that most edits of political and/or controversial topics are immediately reverted is not in itself evidence of a problem. A priori, I would expect that the majority of edits to political and controversial topics are bad and should be reverted.
I guess you picked “tax stuff” because the tax related thing you edited was a sort of dry tax related topic, but I’m sure we could find lots of controversial topics under the “tax stuff” umbrella.
I don't have an extensive wikipedia career, but I've found that even my few edits to political topics have been accepted.
What did get reverted was a trivial [citation needed] fix, for a musician's page, for a sentence stating they were involved in scoring a film. I found a relevant citation and this was promptly reverted, for reasons that were explained but, at least for me, utterly incomprehensible
You're not really considered a veteran editor until you've won at least 10 Request for Comments outquoting your detractors with at least 100 obscure Wikipedia guidelines and policies.
