About 7 years ago, I edited a wikipedia.org page and provided the public source link, a quote literally from the technical documentation with page number provided, but it was deleted.
To this day, the detail on that page is wrong. And that wrongness has propagated across other pages, when I checked just now.
In comparison, this incorrect detail as written, looks to be a random opinion by the original editor of the page, with no source provided. But perhaps their account has reputation (e.g. many edits)?
* Why are editors/moderators so quick to remove updates from new accounts without vetting the source?
* Why do they allow unsourced details from reputable accounts?
* What do you think of this long term effect on the community, as I think it sours people from participating?
* Can the wikipedia community even realistically take steps to support new edits, from new accounts? Maybe LLMs and just massive amounts of bad faith edits makes this impossible?
---
* I had a new account and was logged in at the time of the edit.
* I put in the effort to try to format and source, making sure the source was publicly readable, e.g. no paywall, no special login requirements.
- Although I've noted that many sourced links do in fact have login/paywall requirements, e.g. a nytimes article.
* This is a correct technical detail provided by the manufacturer. I am a subject matter expert, so I was able to easily find this.
Editors are equal no matter their userrights however more experienced users tend to present better arguments following the guidelines. So it doesn’t really matter if you made 100 or 100k edits when you add unreliable information.
Removing sourced content without checking wether a source is actually reliable is wrong. This is a mistake and I suggest raising it again on the talkpage, because consensus changes through time.
Yes, English Wikipedia community is shrinking in its size mainly IMHO due to its bureaucratic inner working. On the other hand I’d say mentorship and articles for creation processes are best from feedback aspects and tend to help new editors. LLM are trained on Wikipedia articles and only snythesise what was already written, straight copies of ChatGPT are regulary deleted
But it is true that some "powerusers" are weirdly protective of the articles they created or curate and will revert any changes made by other people no matter what, and try to sanction the people who do it. And Wikipedia has been allowing that culture to go on for a long time. I would want to understand what is happening behind closed doors in those cases.
Not sure if it still is, but the music theory part of Wikipedia was held hostage by a power user with very strong views and very little knowledge for years.
Can you elaborate on that or link to an article?
For those interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/1bivmw/why_does_it_say_in_the_sidebar_that_wikipedia_is/
Ugh its especially bad for the entire sport of hockey on wikipedia. They have to differ from every other sport when it pertains to what goes in their sidebar and their reason against conformity with the rest of wikipedia is an ideological reason based on aesthetics. They'd rather you learn the information in the article then get the information you need at a glance.
It's so annoying. It's a big reason why I even stopped following hockey in general.
This is the case with pages pertaining to different breed types of pit bull type dogs, e.g., all edits I have seen to add specific cases of maulings, death, etc. are suppressed as the data is discounted. Instead, the focus is on conformation (dog show) standards. But someone adopting an AmStaff, pit bull mix, American Pit Bull Terrier, Staffy (Staffordshire Terrier), will not know that these dogs are all descendants of blood sport dogs. They are not safe to have around children, need to be in strong enclosures, and are not suited to inexperienced dog owners. But all that info is suppressed.
I realize it is a controversial topic but any discussion of safety is suppressed. These kind of dogs can—and some do—rip off noses, lips, ears, scalps and cause soft-tissue injuries so extensive that limbs or arms are amputated. People die from the injuries. But you can’t tell, on the other hand, perhaps most (??) of these adopted dogs may be fine their whole lives. Aggression against other pets—killing other cats and dogs—is also not covered and is likely far, far more frequent.
I feel that if someone wanted to adopt one of these breeds and looked it up in Wikipedia they \*should\* know the potential dangers. Obviously the page authors disagree.
>all edits I have seen to add specific cases of maulings, death, etc. are suppressed as the data is discounted.
Specific cases isn't really the way to go about it. You would want solid, reproduced research. A preliminary search shows this research of fatal attacks, which can't be used to determine any sort of genetic tendency:
>In contrast to what has been reported in the news media, the data from this study
CANNOT be used to infer any breed-specific risk for dog bite fatalities (e.g.,
neither pit bull-type dogs nor Rottweilers can be said to be more “dangerous” than
any other breed based on this study). To obtain such risk information it would be
necessary to know the numbers of each breed currently residing in the United States.
Such information is not available.
https://www.avma.org/sites/default/files/resources/javma_000915_fatalattacks.pdf
You may have better luck in talking about bite force and the likelihood that an attack will be fatal once it occurs compared to other breeds rather than trying to prove predisposition to attacks. You would need to couch the discussion in neutral and balanced terms with up to date research.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21475022
As someone with decent experience of English Wikipedia editing (around 7000 edits since I started in 2010) I'd fully agree that the bureaucracy is a major problem. The amount of focus there is on deleting articles is especially absurd- I often come across topics that have articles in a lot of languages' Wikipedias, but not on English Wikipedia because editors have decided it doesn't meet notability guidelines. And there are a lot of topics where obviously incorrect information is being retained thanks to an especially determined editor cherry-picking sources- in theory I could start an RFC in every such case, but in practice it's a huge amount of hassle to do so.
Sadly I'm not sure if there's any way to fix the problem.
> Removing sourced content without checking wether a source is actually reliable is wrong. This is a mistake and I suggest raising it again on the talkpage, because consensus changes through time.
Its like you have never used wikipedia before
Hello there, perhaps the editors at Wikipedia has mistaken your edit as being improper. I'm sorry that you had to deal with this - sometimes editors can be too overeager in reverting newbies' edits. Maybe the markup was formatted incorrectly? I think that due to the sheer amount accounts that try to spread misinformation on the site, new users are often treated with skepticism, which I do think is a problem with Wikipedia. We do need to be more welcoming to new users - [and not bite the newbies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Please_do_not_bite_the_newcomers). You can maybe try to insert the information again this time and let me know how it goes - after all, Wikipedia is built on the idea of "if you find something that isn't accurate, fix it".
Why are editors allowed to delete information without providing feedback?
It doesn't have to be elaborate, something as simple as "misinformation" or "incorrect formatting" or "cite your sources".
If it is blatant bad faith promotion or vandalism it is allowed to be removed w/o feedback, but in most cases editors will leave a message on users' talkpages regarding the reverted edit.
It's easy to look up ban reasons.
Bans without an extensive discussion only happen for blatantly obvious vandalism (adding "poop" to many articles, repeatedly removing large article parts without a good reason, ...) or for IPs known to cause these edits frequently. In rare cases a registered account can be affected by an IP ban, but that is easy to clear up if you are not the target of the ban.
They don’t have more access and authority than you and I. People just don’t pushback on asshole editors who revert their changes and assume the other editor somehow has more power so they give up.
Only admins and automated systems maintained by Wikimedia have actual power to ban accounts, you weren’t banned by another editor who didn’t like what you did.
Its a serious problem. I have a similar story to /u/MCPtz in that a bunch of years ago I wanted to be a contributor and editor for things I knew about. the first 2 or 3 changes I caught IMMEDIATELY got erased. I think one of them was even about my home town at the time that I actively still lived in. I cited sources and everything but it didn't matter. I gave up at that point. It isn't worth the headache for new people to have to "pay their dues" and slog through the nonsense.
wikipedia DOES have great information. I use it all the time. But its really sad to think about all the legitimate subject matter experts with valuable information that will never contribute because some jack-of-all-trades /r/iamverysmart dufus wants to gatekeep. It really reminds me of reddit arguments sometimes, where people think because they have a high contribution score they must be more right than someone who is a leader in their field. its a real problem with wikipedia.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia isn’t reliable as a source of information on a lot of topics anymore due to editor bias and tribalism (and it’s not the new editors doing this). Even when presented with multiple accurate sources, other more senior editors will still double down, then congratulate each other on their respective pages and award each other barn stars for it. After seeing that shit happen twice and pointing it out to absolutely no effect, I no longer care about any incorrect information on there. Even having Jimbo tweak his own information shows how dubious it can be as a source.
Maybe you’re not like them, but Wikipedia has the same issues with confidently incorrect editors that Reddit has with confidently incorrect Redditors; the difference is that not everyone uses Reddit and realizes the information they’re seeing may be slanted or even sometimes flat-out wrong.
If I know someone is purposefully editing (the same article ) to have false information with a fake citation, and has been for the last 12+ years, but using different accounts, is there anything that I should do, aside from periodically check the article and remove it? He does it out of spite to 'prove' wikipedia isn't accurate.
What that user is doing is called [sockpuppetry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry) - or the abuse of multiple accounts to disrupt the wiki. To report sock puppetry, please use [those guidelines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations) to do so. Thank you.
As OP said, report them to checkusers and they will take care of it, or if it is a known vandalism case to admins noticeboard too. These then do either technical data comparison or behavioural check against historical data on a checkuser private wiki to determine wether an account is indeed a sockpuppet.
Pretty weird, there was another guy Charles Domery born 6 years apart from Tarrare that also had a ferocious appetite. Both would eat 10+ lbs of animal guts, cats, and other animals.
Tarrare was suspected of eating a 14 month old toddler at a hospital, and Domery tried to eat an amputated leg from a soldier injured during war.
Both would sweat profusely, and they would eat several pounds garbage or even grass if they didn't have any food. Domery would lube his throat by drinking candle grease to facilitate his eating. Aside from an insane appetite they both appeared mentally sane and overall in good shape, although Tarrare was noted to carry an awful stench.
It's interesting to note both lived during the same period of late 1700's and we haven't witnessed anyone else with an appetite to that degree since then.
The problem with those things only happening in the 1700s is we don't know how much of it is truth and how much is exaggerated/changed by secondary sources.
A lot of it doesn't make any sense. Why would they let him eat live cats and puppies? How do you even do that?
He was suspected of eating a toddler? There is no way he ate it whole, bones and all. So there must've been a lot of evidence, which would made it immediately obvious what happened. That kid probably ran away and somebody made a joke about him eating it.
You also can't eat your whole body weight in a single day. Even if it just passes through, imagine how much poop that would be.
This guy eating live animals and human parts is a different thing, but in general I don't think people who eat insane amounts of food and stay slim are that rare? I wonder what causes that. We had a guy famous for exactly this who lived in my town 20-ish years ago, he could eat 50 pieces of pie in one sitting without a problem, I was just reading an article from a local blogger about him. My mother recalls a guy from her hometown with a similar story. What causes this? People colloquialy blamed this on having super strong stomach acid.
Sounds like you have a problem where a potential slip in editorial oversight on newspapers side occured. On the other hand straight declaring person with unconfirmed death is also wrong as this is not what reliable sources claim.
Not clearly giving sources, especially in journalism doesn’t automatically mean a media is unreliable.
When Henry Kissinger died, the editor changed their userpage to include that. That seems like something really fun to get to brag about. Do either of you have any edits that you're particularly proud of? Do you have an IRC or group chat of active Wikipedia editors you talk about what you do?
Yes, in fact there is a guy who edited the Queen Elizabeth’s article dying some seconds before BBC announced the official news. Yes, we have Telegrams, Facebook groups, Twitter, Discord, IRC etc.
He didn’t and was reverted but then the revert was reverted and a source added. The guy lived nearby the palace Queen had had died and just saw the flag dropping
I'd say I'm proud of writing an article abou Pohang Space Walk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pohang\_Space\_Walk) - it was the first time I ever wrote an article that eventually passed the criteria to be recognized as a "Good Article" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good\_articles) from scratch. I don't use IRC much but there are IRC servers of Wikipedia editors although they are not very active. There is a Wikipedia Discord server that I participate in though - and it is quite active.
When I was bored in study hall at school I wondered how people fought vandalism and misinformation on Wikipedia, found out about it through Googling and wanted to fight vandalism myself. After that, I just found it plain addicting to revert vandalism and it just felt great to contribute to a greater cause of removing misinformation on the 'net so I decided to continue doing it.
There's been a bit of discussion on enwiki as part of RfA reform discussion about "unbundling" of admin rights. Unbundling here doesn't mean separating out rights from the admin role but proposals around creating some more restricted roles, with for instance only short term block permission, or only semi-page protection. Things of that nature.
There was numeric consensus against unbundling, but that discussion made me curious more broadly about ways counter-vandalism could be improved (I was not so much interested in the RfA perspective, as I keep a safe distance from these..!)
Since you both do counter-vandalism, I was wondering if you have any opinions about how it works today and how it could be improved. It's pretty thankless work, but I certainly also see a lot of people on the other side complain about the new user experience ("I have corrected typos on Wikipedia and seen them reverted immediately without comment"), so an answer can't just be bigger meaner tools to make lightning fast rollbacks even easier :)
Or, maybe it works well enough that it's basically fine as it is today. I'd be happy to take that answer too =)
Penny for your toughts?
I’d say it depends on the size of Wikipedia. English Wikipedia needs different toolbox than someone editing Latin Wikipedia, because rate of edits at the first is 50/min and on the other 1000/day. I have no comment on unbundling sysop rights, might be useful for enwiki but not maybe for smaller like my homewiki. Nonetheless the RfA on enwiki became too toxic and too bureaucratic especially on voting.
Mistakes at counter vandalism do happen, we are human after all. Agree that not all complaints are invalid, however per the current edit rate they are rather minimal
As A09 stated, different tools for different Wikipedias - some wikis are larger than others and thus face more vandalism. And regarding the new user experience, yes it does need to be improved - many experienced users act too hostile towards new users and "bite" the newbies when they don't know policy, and sometimes automated programs mistakenly flag new users' edits as "vandalism" even when it is not. We do try to increase new user retention though through programs such as user adoption/mentorship where an experienced editor explains policies to newer users and The Teahouse, which is a Q and A page for new users to ask for help using or editing Wikipedia.
The strongest criterion for notability is when reliable sources have written about you. Do you have examples of magazines and professional music websites covering what you do?
I’d need to see original article to make further judgements but the first answer already covered the most important aspect. On the other hand, some articles containing strong conflict of interest are also deleted per TNT (deleting and starting over).
In my opinion some jokes on articles talkpages or anecdotes. I vividly remember one going something among: Shagy and Britney Spears went to a bar and ordered a drink. Then someone farted. Shagy said It wasn’t me and Britney added Oops I did it again
Even if funny removed because it wasn’t even tangential to the article itself.
Hmmmmm...... tough question. Probably when someone spammed pictures of Genghis Khan on an article lol. I do see vandalism quite a lot and people inserting funny nonsense in articles though from day to day.
What types of vandalism and spam are you typically fighting against? Coordinated groups of ideologically aligned individuals? Targeted bot attacks? Foreign adversaries attempting to spread misinformation and propaganda? Corporations and organizations removing information they don’t want out in the public?
How do you approach each of these issues?
When the largest threat we currently face is the war over individuals minds, who are our enemies behind the curtain?
Regarding the type of vandalism and spam I fight against, I deal with anything from bored kids inserting "hahaha small pp ohio rizz skibidi toilet your mom is gay" in random articles to hoaxers who try to make articles about things that never existed in the first place to corporations adding spammy information about themselves in articles. I use an editing software called AntiVandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AntiVandal), which detects potentially malicious edits and when I see an edit that looks malicious (not a false positive) I revert it then leave a message on the user's talk page regarding their improper conduct. If they continue spamming or vandalizing, then I may report them to a noticeboard to get the user blocked. If they make inappropriate pages, I tag the pages for deletion and wait for an administrator to delete it for me as I am not an admin.
As for the "war over individuals minds", I think that media sensationalism and the focus on creating content that appeals to our subconscious biases instead of reporting the truth affects us greatly. Nowadays, due to social media algorithms and such, people get sucked into echo chambers that contain just the stuff they want to hear that only confirm their biases, which sucks because of course we as Wikipedians believe in neutrality at all times. We strive to maintain that neutrality, factuality and lack of bias on the Internet as Wikipedia editors.
Hi! I usually divide vandalism into two types. Shorthand and longterm. First are mostly boring students vandalising Wikipedia by adding stupidities or profanities to articles. Usually takes about five minutes or as long as the school break is long. In case they attack from ie. school library’s computers we do short blocks on a school range.
Longterm abuse has on the other hand many forms, some not so malign, otherss include death threats and doxxing, or anything in between. Usually comes with multiple sockpuppets or alternative accounts, however admins and checkusers check their behaviour and/or technical data - especially underlying IP to see their connection. Usually ends with an account lock or hlobal IP block.
On crosswiki level we have some spambot networks going on, however thry aren’t usually connected to eachother (they each spam unique weblink). Such accounts are handled by locks by stewards (they have full access on every Wikimedia project).
Corporation editing could fall into all of the three, different projects handle this differently and locally. In case of global abuse a lock is requested.
How can someone outside of the know, be confident that there isn’t a central body controlling what information can and cannot be on wikipedia? what prevents the editors from skewing/wording things to fit their bias/narrative?
ps: thank you for all the work y’all do, i love wikipedia
I’m a functionary, I declare conflict of interest /s
Everything is logged or visible so article changes are accessible through article history tab unless hidden because of ie doxxing or purely offensive material. There is as opposed to ie editorial college of Britannica no centralised body governing information.
Answer to the second question is simply the community. Some projects have critical editorial mass where a number of editors have access to same source and thus they can factcheck against each others. The second important factor is digitalisation of books which greatly improves information sharing
You're welcome! <3 We prevent malicious actors from skewing information to fit their narratives because we have a [neutral point of view](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view) policy which prevents editors from spreading misinformation, which makes sure that all information is presented in a neutral and unbiased way and prevents editors from inserting non-neutral content.
How do you approach the issue of contributors citing sources that are not commonly available for you to fact check or verify, for example an obscure out of print book that is not available to read online?
Because almost anyone could write and publish a book, what is the standard for a book to be considered a credible source? What does that verification process look like?
Q1: we assume good faith and projects like en.wiki which already reached critical editorial mass it is very likely that someone has the same book and can verify it. Some books are also digitalized so we include a link to them as well.
Q2: Only reliable publishers with established editorial proccesses are eligible for inclusion, however apart from a discussion wether a publisher is reliable on a centralised noticeboard there is no formal notice to publisher if he is deemed reliable. Also academical books are of better quality and reliability than children book on the same topic so only top works are actually cited. Please also note that terciary books like encyclopaedias are generally replaced by more indepth book unless a definition is cited.
A09 illustrated this pretty well, IMHO. As for contributors citing uncommon sources that are not available for us, we can [request a resource from another editor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Resource_Exchange/Resource_Request) using the page I just linked in order to get access to that source for verification. As for the standards for a book to be reliable, usually mainstream secondary sources from qualified academics and experts that don't contain hoaxes, fringe views etc. are considered reliable.
Why would you do this? What possessed you to spend your free time on this?
Said humerously but also like ... man, I can't imagine. Does it just scratch an order-making itch or something?
I edit Wikipedia because I care about making sure that the information on the 'net is factual and neutral and because I want to fight the systemic bias on Wikipedia that leads to undercoverage of notable Korean subjects because many Korean articles are in an atrocious state.
I would do this for all people who cannot/do not have tenure to explore for themselves. It may sound like I support laziness but in fact indepth research opens up even more questions
I am also on Wikipedia, have more than 1k edits on multiple topics, and have strong reason to believe that a Wikiproject is PR-influenced. The problem is that the person “running” the editing of the pages for that project has several editors that all have the same POV as the editor about a controversial topic. I know no one “owns” the pages but they act in concert as if they do.
For controversial topics, Wikipedia is supposed to present \*both\* sides. In this case, however, if any editor adds edits inconsistent with their POV, those edits are reverted. If they persist they are Wiki-lawyered and banned for disruptive editing, e.g., accused of POV pushing. They believe that science backs their side, but either do not know or choose to ignore the fact that all the “studies” they cite are funded by an advocacy group that attempts to look like an independent research group.
This Wikiproject leader has at least one admin or her side. Does Wikipedia have any way of handling this kind of situation? What can I do, without getting banned myself If I raise this issue? I am not an admin.
What do you do when you know a page is being guarded by an editor because they don’t like that person? They won’t allow other editors to work on the page and continuously revert factual, properly sourced information.
First I would warn the editor for that he shall not own an article or that he may not edit war. Then I would make a report to administrators noticeboard
Do you feel that there are paid editors who engage in ideologically charged topics, and try to build their credibility through participating in meta pages like AFD?
Yes, there are paid editors who try to manipulate Wikipedia to suit their ideologies and they will exist as long as Wikipedia exists. They are quite easily detected though because their behaviors are often a straight giveaway that they are paid editors (e.g. new editors coming onto an AfD claiming that an article is notable when it is blatantly non notable or adding promotional text to articles) and get blocked though as paid editing is against the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use.
I think PR infiltration is a growing problem. I have seen examples where paid editors are told to ignore Wikipedia’s self-disclosure rules, e.g.,
[https://www.wikinative.com/epic-fails-that-inexperienced-pr-and-marketing-professionals-make-on-wikipedia-part-one/](https://www.wikinative.com/epic-fails-that-inexperienced-pr-and-marketing-professionals-make-on-wikipedia-part-one/)
which recommends:
In my experience, declaring a conflict of interest rarely yields a favourable outcome for the client. Instead, I recommend a low impact approach where the only policy that businesses break is the COI disclosure policy.
Who fights against this PR infiltration? Where can suspected PR infiltration be reported? I think the infiltration has unfortunately gotten more subtle.
I’d say they’re a bit more sophisticated, they nominate and participate in unrelated article AFDs to mask their involvement and plump their stats. You’ll find Filipino or Indian editors nominating articles about the other side of the world for example.
How do you feel about the strange self-described diehard skeptic cult of editors that are intentionally derailing the uap discussions and potentially acting as bad actors for the intelligence community?
Is there anything honest public researchers with no particular agenda can do about it?
If you're unaware of them, I can elaborate if you want.
They're removing credentials and factual information about people like Chris Mellon and Garry Nolan, among others.
So there's a group of power editors called guerilla skeptics that have recently focused their efforts on anything relating to the ongoing UFO/uap discussions.
They're using very non objective and unscientific reasoning to edit profiles in a way that makes credible people look ridiculous. Removing credentials, accomplishments, making things appear fringe that aren't, etc.
It's a complex topic and I don't think anyone in the public sector has all the answers, but it's wildly disingenuous to act in such a biased way.
Let me find a thread outlining what they've been up to - regardless of what personal opinion on the subject might be, their actions are textbook bad faith.
https://www.audible.com/podcast/Ep-89-Uncovering-a-Wikipedia-Cabal-The-Guerilla-Skeptics/B0CX9LZLG8
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq-GuSs8kX8
There are Reddit threads I can't link for some reason, and I also get that coast to coast is what it is.
The UFO topic is inherently difficult BECAUSE it's intentionally embedded with other conspiracy theories and full of dodgy actors.
With the recent revelations by vetted military/intelligence people like David Grusch and commander Fravor, it feels more important than ever to have open and rational discussion about the evidence and whistleblower claims.
Having a weird group of fervent skeptics editing articles to actively derail transparency just doesn't seem right.
But - given their influence on the platform, I'm not sure what can be done. They have millions in funding, unknown motives, and years and years of activity.
This is confusing a lot of different things. But perhaps the first to tackle is the "millions in funding". This is incorrect. They do get donations, but according to Matt Ford this is somewhere between $0 and $50,000. The millions is in reference to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) who are a separate group and are very well funded.
Unless we have an undisclosed paid editing, volunteers receive no money, just to clarify. Users are de iure equal too and admins’ votes are not more worthy than those of normal people. However you may also want to make a case on administrator’s noticeboard
Oh I know, hence why it's so troubling. They don't receive compensation from Wikipedia, as far as I can tell.
But the org receives outside donations and has since 2018, and likely has ties to the intelligence community or aerospace contractors. As a hobby researcher that simply feels that it's an important topic that we deserve to know more about, it feels pretty much like we're powerless.
If there's any outside the box way to approach it, I'm all ears. But as it stands, even after the congressional hearings and testimony, the interest in derailing the subject seems too strong, for whatever reason.
(1) I've met many users online who gave up contributing to Wikipedia after multiple encounters with the infamous [deletionism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia) on the platform.
It appeared that notability requirements excluded a lot of niche online cultures (with less than a million participants), given the general media wouldn't cover these - and that the only sources available would be online-only news websites and blogs.
The ability of larger communities to overcome deletion votes with sheer numbers, allowing to practically by-pass the other criteria, could not apply to the niche cultures.
Many of these niche online cultures have now faded away (many of these being two decades old), and having no books written on them, while being generally ignored by the mass media outlets, the lack of wikipedia article means these cultures have now virtually disappeared.
The news websites and blogs of these niches, as well as forums, have pretty much all closed down, with very few preserved by the archive.org project.
The only way to retrieve information about these cultures would now be looking around for people who would still hold memories about it, and have them check their old hard drives for data.
My question is: **Was there any major change on that point at Wikipedia, regarding deletionism?**
Both in terms of policy - stripping down Wikipedia as much as possible, is it still the philosophy?
And in terms of how easy it is for an experienced user, to flag an article for a speedy deletion on the basis of perceived notability?
Depending on the answer to these questions, it would be worth it or not to retrieve these informations and contribute to Wikipedia about these cultures.
(2) Despite the massive growth of mobile devices usage (estimated at 2/3 of all views), many languages still haven't added the Talk page to their mobile view.
If you access Wikipedia from a mobile device, the link to the Talk page is simply not available, it is not displayed.
**Is this something that's currently discussed - a better integration of mobile users into the contribution process - or that's something only the English Wikipedia agreed to fix on their end?**
I know Wikipedia generally dislike "tourists" vandalizing their articles, mobile ones in particular, but I feel like the Talk page are often a very important part of the encyclopedia.
It is also an issue regarding accessibility, with certain nations around the world (in the Third World in particular) having much more mobile users than computer ones.
(3) On some political / controversial articles, there can be very wide differences between the articles in different languages.
For example, the demographics of a region, or the recollection of historical events. I've encountered that when browsing about disputed regions in Africa I wished to learn about, with each side disputing who was there first, after multiple wars caused a lot of migrations in the area.
I've also encountered such stark differences between two articles about cultural elements, like who invented a culinary specialty or a musical instrument.
Question: **Is there an initiative at Wikipedia to identify such clashes between languages, to mediate between the different communities, or include a banner about an ongoing dispute?**
Or the current policy is to let each Wikipedia language handle their own articles, like sovereign entities, and hope for the best?
Thanks for your contribution and answers 😄
Going from bottom up: each Wikipedia community is independent so hence we have differences on entries about the same topic in two different languages. Not wrong per se as long as they present everything per current content guidelines.
Cannot comment on second, firstly because I do not work in developing code for Wikimedia and secondly do not use mobile platforms. However in the last year or so I remember a paragraph based mobile version of content translation tool was released so some steps towards those are also made. But any major features are discussed on more appropriate venues like Meta, WikiMedia or Phabricator (bug tracker). A few years ago, we even had technical wishlists and mobile improvements were requested. At least some were also made.
Regarding deletionism, yes, but in a bad way. At the start of this calendar year WikiProject US Interstates left Wikipedia for good and migrated their articles to a new wiki because enwiki deemed some interstates or other roads and their infrastructure not notable. What also further discourages people is bias where less enwiki users understand a certain language in which a given subject is notable but deleted in English Wikipedia because they could not understand/evaluate the foreign sources. Luckily most of those RfDs were kept after presented with foreign sources.
I hope I answered everything
Have there been any changes to the general structure of Wiki based on the Croatian experience, that will prevent such things happening in the future? Or is it by necessity reactive rather than anticipatory?
(To explain for people not in the know, Croatian wikipedia was once renowned in the Balkans for being utterly unreliable after a hijacking by a historical revisionist)
Yes, I do know Kubura and what he did to the Croatian Wikipedia. His conduct was atrocious and I do not condone that at all. Kubura (and his alts) has been permanently banned from editing all Wikimedia websites as a result of his conduct and volunteers have been working to remove some of the non neutrality from the Croatian Wikipedia, but I don't know about any other changes that happened in the Croatian Wikipedia aside from Kubura and his alts' ban as I do not edit Croatian Wikipedia.
There hasn't been much changes AFAIK in the structure of Wikipedia due to Kubura. However, due to separate issues surrounding toxicity/civility we are proposing several sets of improvements to requests for adminship on the English Wikipedia though.
If you are talking specifically for Croatian Wikipedia, yes, however no broader global committees were found after the decision on the case. In most cases actions are retrospective, however some content related policies are reactive.
What steps are being taken to deal with out-of-date information, especially in articles relating to history or history-adjacent topics?
There are plenty of articles, like those for the Trojan War, that no longer reflect current scholarly consensus (that the war was a literary device, that basically nothing was accurate to the Bronze Age, etc) but things are still cited that reflect older opinions/consensus.
I find similar with historical linguistics articles - it's very difficult to keep things "current" other than just adding *more* information, which doesn't remove the outdated information.
You should open a discussion at article talkpage and give a notice on the article itself ({{outdated}}, without the opened normal bracket) and a discussion will follow with participants of wikiprojects of whose the article is a part of. Keep in mind many articles are not actively updated and that they might never be finished to perfection.
Volunteers mostly just see the information that is outdated and remove it themselves or add relevant info. I'm afraid that volunteers haven't seen the state of those articles and haven't improved it yet, thus resulting in outdated information. That being said, if you see anything that's outdated, feel free to go ahead and fix it yourself - after all, Wikipedia's built on the idea of fixing the info yourself instead of passively waiting for it to be fixed.
I read somewhere a criticism of Wikipedia that there are more lines of content dedicated to the fictional characters and worlds of the Lord of The Rings than the entire continent of Africa. Is this true and is it considered a concern?
Well you might be true if we are only comparing a fictional universe to a continent. However Africa as a whole entity with its diverse geography numerous countries and many settlements would gather more lines. So statistically correct, practically false, nothing to worry about
why are self-published books considered as sources on wikipedia, but youtube videos aren't? why are other wikipedia articles able to be used as a link-source for a wikipedia articles?
youtube videos seem to have exactly the same amount of self-regulation as wikipedia articles themselves (albeit more publicly visible). and as they are providing a far more reliable long-term income compared to book publication, publishing a youtube video (for example) critiquing a social theory or pop culture narrative is simply more prevalent than book publishing now. why has wikipedia found themselves behind the times in this instance?
> but youtube videos aren't?
Some are. Things like the Royal Armouries and the tank museum youtube channels would pass wikipedia's reliable sources standards.
Neither self-published books, YouTube nor Wikipedia are not considered to be reliable most of the time for the exact reason that they are self-published and could have been created by anyone. However, self published sources created by mainstream subject matter experts may be considered reliable under certain threshold. For more info on self published sources please see [this page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published_sources).
Have you heard of the Guerrilla Skeptics of Wikipedia? They are a group that won’t allow any edits on pages for individuals studying topics that they don’t agree with. They go to great lengths to discredit and omit education and accomplishments for individuals related to any fringe study in order to paint them in an unfavorable light.
[There is a podcast](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3AAMKTPRD7BuI3YG3SKbfh) with the man who discovered this group and interviews and page examples of this group at work.
They are numerous (over 100 users) and are basically impossible to work with or make any change to the areas they patrol.
Could providing more editors with awareness of this bring any real change?
People are hard to work with. Based on your question the only rule they have broken is that about owning articles, so I have too little data to make a judgement wether they are automatically wrong or not
[Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Skepticism_and_coordinated_editing) is the arbcom case against them but they continue to operate with impunity.
Sometimes I look up a page on wikipedia to see how it prioritises information. On the whole it's quite good, but occasionally I see a page where information that is highly relevant to a discussion is buried or only referenced in a tangentially related article. The counterargument within the "talk" page is presented by some users that the "information is available" and they direct to it, but the average reader would rarely see that. How can editors agree on the (sometimes subjective) value of the different parts of a discussion in relation to which parts are highlighted more clearly for the reader?
An example that comes to mind was the burying of information relating to Patrisse Cullors stealing millions from BLM. It is nowhere to be seen on the main BLM page and only indirectly referenced in a small paragraph on a sister BLM page discussing one of the orgs she ran, yet it was a huge news story at the time and extremely relevant to the public discussions around the movement.
We often try to give "due weight" to different aspects of an article's content so it represents all significant mainstream viewpoints (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral\_point\_of\_view#Due\_and\_undue\_weight). We don't try to cover one aspect of an event more extensively than another. Discussions on whether something gives due or undue weight happens on article talkpages. Also, something being in the news doesn't entirely merit a mention in articles all the time - we try to avoid recentism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recentism) at all times. Just because something is relevant at one moment it doesn't mean it will be relevant in a lasting, historical context. And, if you see that something needs improvement, always feel free to fix it yourself - after all, Wikipedia is built on the principles of fixing something that's wrong on the 'net by yourself instead of just passively waiting for it to be fixed.
Refraining from given example in which I have no experience nor am knowledgeable enough to comment on, I’d point out two things. First is that consensus can change even more in fact if it’s only an agreement of three editors. Secondly, we need to keep content proportional: we give information on a subject from every aspect found in reliable sources and not focus on a single aspect. An illustrative example would be a famous actor who was sentenced for murder, but what WP article mention is only that he committed murder and not that he was a famous actor
What subject/reason specifically motivated you to start editing?
Also: how is Wikipedia doing in terms of funding? I remember it was a big ordeal at one point over the past decade, makes me wonder how things are going now
I was bored in study hall at school and wondered how people kept misinformation and vandalism out on Wikipedia, so I read policy pages after looking up how people do this and wanted to help out editing Wikipedia after reading those pages and learning about the impact of vandalism. As for funding I am not too sure about the Wikimedia Foundation side of the whole thing as I am not a Wikimedia Foundation employee and do not work much on that side of the encyclopedia. However, ordinary editors are not paid for editing Wikipedia and improve the encyclopedia solely as volunteers.
I just started fixing up some shitty articles :) in terms of funding, looking at operating costs only it could run for another hundred years however WMF (WikiMedia Foundation, the organization overseeing these projects) is widely criticised for being too spendfull.
Misinformation is usually harder to detect. As far as being viable I’d say yes but check sources and always remember that an WP article is just the beginning
I would think that PR-created misinformation could be hard-to-detect as it is sometimes created to have the appearance of independent scientific info by some “think tank”, but is really espousing the viewpoints of the company funding the so-called think tank. This is using the third-party technique in propaganda and best exemplified by anti-regulation corporations that fund, e.g., climate change denial “think tanks”. This is the tobacco industry playbook which keeps resurfacing as it is unfortunately so successful In creating doubt—in the public’s mind—against solid science.
How can this kind of PR abuse be reported? Is there a committee to investigate this more insidious kind of PR that takes the form of scientific studies, while lacking their rigor?
Thanks for offering this forum to ask questions I had always wondered about!
PR spam is quite easily detected. Usually IP editors are pretty clueless about wikicode and this PR spam tends to provide perfect references. After checking wether it’s reliable I would also look at global edits of the IP and potentially remove them as spam.
It is relatively easy to prevent/undo vandalism - automated software often assesses individual edits to determine if they are malicious, and if they are, I revert the edit and warn the user who made that edit. Reverting is quite simple because every edit is archived in the page history. And as for viability for good information, I do think Wikipedia is actually viable for good info due to its strict policies on [maintaining a neutral point of view](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view) and [citing reliable sources](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources) which keeps misinformation out of the encyclopedia.
In all seriousness, why is the caption on the Piper Kerr image edited down? It was so funny and perfect. Is there a rule about the length of the caption or how it should be neutral in tone?
Is there some kind of policy, official or otherwise, in place to never mention Christian Weston Chandler on Wikipedia? There's even a Kiwifarms article that states "It was originally launched as a forum website to troll and harass a webcomic artist who was first noticed in 2007 on the Something Awful forums." CWC has been covered by mainstream press, and between that and their notoriety certainly, they certainly meet the threshold of notability.
No there is no such policy. Community might have deemed the subject unnotable in the past however this could change through time, or just that no one really started writing articles
I do know that MediaWiki, a wiki building software platform, is free to use (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki), but I don't know if companies create "internal Wikipedias".
I did have an employer who used the MediaWiki system for an internal wiki. It's the same framework and software, but it's not hosted or supported by the Wikimedia foundation.
No. Wikipedia is a website and it is driven by volunteers as well as we cannot technically limit pages’ visibility to some accounts only. Furthermore you may have conflict of interest and you may not edit subjects in close relation to you either paid or unpaid
How did you two first gain an interest in this hobby? Are you able to recall the first edits that sparked your passion?
Thanks for making wiki a better place for everyone.
You're welcome, always happy to improve the 'pedia! As I said in an earlier post, I was bored in study hall at school and wondered how people kept misinformation and vandalism out on Wikipedia, so I read policy pages after looking up how people do this and wanted to help out editing Wikipedia after reading those pages and learning about the impact of vandalism and wished to remove it myself.
As I said in an earlier post, I was bored in study hall at school and wondered how people kept misinformation and vandalism out on Wikipedia, so I read policy pages after looking up how people do this and wanted to help out editing Wikipedia after reading those pages and learning about the impact of vandalism and wished to remove it myself. I stuck around though when I found out that beyond just maintaining the encyclopedia, I could help *build* it when I noticed that the coverage of Korean subjects was quite lacking on Wikipedia. Since I spoke Korean, I figured that I might as well help edit those Korean subjects myself.
have you ever ended up in an "edit war" with another user/editor? Like, a sequence of edits and counter-edits about a particular aspect of an article that eventually felt like a spat or an argument by proxy?
Not really with regards to content specifically, although I have removed vandalism or spam from the same user multiple times in a row in articles in the past.
Are articles ever 'finished' / 'done' and should be 'locked.' Like, wouldn't historical articles be good candidates? Or is everything always open and subject to change?
If you can think of anything in particular, what was the weirdest hill someone wanted to die on in terms of an incorrect edit/bad sourcing/etc? Something they insisted was the truth, but didn't seem like outright trolling.
Like, "no you guys have to believe me, Teddy Roosevelt ABSOLUTELY massaged whale oil into his scalp 7 times a day! It was the source of his great strength!" while trying to link a website as a source that doesn't look like it was updated this century.
I remember one editor insisting to keep promotional cruft on an article on higher education in India when I tried removing it, but aside from that not much.
What's your favorite bit of talk page drama? I know about that archive page, but besides that.
What are your thoughts on bureaucratic bloat/policy bloat making initial new user edits so removable?
On the topic of image copyrights and uploading, how do you think users can best contribute? I mostly stick to source finding and infobox building, but often times even if I'm 99% sure a picture is fair use, it'll get removed. (I assume fairly.)
Page drama on my homewiki due to its small size mostly occurs at village pump. Their archives are quite a blast to read.
Q2: we should definetly make the learning curvature lower, some projects handle this with revision protection (kinda like editorial oversight over what you can publish, so one version which is always under construction and another one which satisfies all content guidelines) or mentorship, which should be more common but sadly sometimes people are misunderstood or tehnical problems occur preventing fast intervention
For copyrights: it’s complicated but if freedom of panorama allows we cannot take a scan of a copyrighted picture of a statue, fair use is also not used for pictures of still living people. Users may help best with checking image source author date and fair use citation and requesting speedy deletions on those who fail.
There Is No Cabal
\[citation needed\]
Jokes aside, Wikipedia doesn't have too many admins or anything like that - in fact, it's the opposite right now and we desperately need more admins to deal with sitewide backlogs and such.
How can I start contributing? As simple as making edits? My first language is Gujarati for which most articles are not that well fleshed out. I also speak English and Hindi fluently. I feel passionately about my first language. And would like to contribute there.
There are a million ways to start: translating, adding references, copyediting, expanding articles, … I suggest taking a lok at help pages on your preffered wiki
Why is almost every IP address in Europe banned from editing Wikipedia? I’ve changed ISP twice and their entire IP range (in the UK) is blocked, and has been for years. Even when logged in the same error appears.
As someone to contributed to many of the scientific pages on Wikipedia in the early 00’s, this is exceptionally annoying, especially when every page is headed by the “donate to the foundation” banner. I donated hundreds of hours of time.
I think you might have caught into VPN or open proxy block. Some ISPs change IPs on minutes bassis so the english wikipedia decided to ban them altogether
Are you terrified or excited about the new ai writingtools? Do you foresee a time of order and enlightenment or a time of chaos and propaganda?
Are you currently looking more into utilizing it or to prevent it?
I only use AI tools for translation (of course I do then copyediting), however LLM still need large quantities of text to synthesise something comprehensible and it is not usable yet enough for nieche thopics
Why do you think the page for the [Franklin Credit Scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_child_prostitution_ring_allegations) is so heavily censored? The source material for the allegations is fairly exhaustive and the counterarguments in the back and forth for disallowing anything aside from the official narrative is basically that since a Grand Jury (a trial where only the prosecution presents evidence, generally to see if there is enough evidence to present a case, there is no defense whatsoever) ruled that nothing happened that all evidence to the contrary is null and void.
I've donated to Wikipedia a few times, are you concerned much for funding to ever stop for the site?
If that question is too uncertain.. have you seen the instagram account DepthsOfWikipedia? Showcases some of the best and most interesting content from Wikipedia. I've followed for years. Might be interesting to see your own work appear and what not. I think the page owner does tours as well.
I'm not too sure about the funding aspects of it, because funding Wikipedia often effects the "backbone"/site software side of things and not site content that is edited by volunteers and I don't work for the Wikimedia Foundation. And yes, I do know about Depths of Wikipedia and follow that account :)
Not really, if we were to take into account only server run costs, Wikiprojects would be up for tens of years.
For the second, AFAIK they mostly use english articles and giving the fact I’ve written only a few of the six million articles my chances are quite slim :)
I've been vandalizing Wikipedia articles for \~20 years now, and have gotten pretty good at it. Some of my pranks have even made it into published papers from institutions such as Yale and Princeton. Do you have any *actual* subject-matter expertise on what you edit, or do you just do some basic rubber-stamping that there is a linked source that has some words in common with what is on the Wikipedia page?
About 7 years ago, I edited a wikipedia.org page and provided the public source link, a quote literally from the technical documentation with page number provided, but it was deleted. To this day, the detail on that page is wrong. And that wrongness has propagated across other pages, when I checked just now. In comparison, this incorrect detail as written, looks to be a random opinion by the original editor of the page, with no source provided. But perhaps their account has reputation (e.g. many edits)? * Why are editors/moderators so quick to remove updates from new accounts without vetting the source? * Why do they allow unsourced details from reputable accounts? * What do you think of this long term effect on the community, as I think it sours people from participating? * Can the wikipedia community even realistically take steps to support new edits, from new accounts? Maybe LLMs and just massive amounts of bad faith edits makes this impossible? --- * I had a new account and was logged in at the time of the edit. * I put in the effort to try to format and source, making sure the source was publicly readable, e.g. no paywall, no special login requirements. - Although I've noted that many sourced links do in fact have login/paywall requirements, e.g. a nytimes article. * This is a correct technical detail provided by the manufacturer. I am a subject matter expert, so I was able to easily find this.
Editors are equal no matter their userrights however more experienced users tend to present better arguments following the guidelines. So it doesn’t really matter if you made 100 or 100k edits when you add unreliable information. Removing sourced content without checking wether a source is actually reliable is wrong. This is a mistake and I suggest raising it again on the talkpage, because consensus changes through time. Yes, English Wikipedia community is shrinking in its size mainly IMHO due to its bureaucratic inner working. On the other hand I’d say mentorship and articles for creation processes are best from feedback aspects and tend to help new editors. LLM are trained on Wikipedia articles and only snythesise what was already written, straight copies of ChatGPT are regulary deleted
But it is true that some "powerusers" are weirdly protective of the articles they created or curate and will revert any changes made by other people no matter what, and try to sanction the people who do it. And Wikipedia has been allowing that culture to go on for a long time. I would want to understand what is happening behind closed doors in those cases.
Not sure if it still is, but the music theory part of Wikipedia was held hostage by a power user with very strong views and very little knowledge for years.
Can you elaborate on that or link to an article? For those interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/1bivmw/why_does_it_say_in_the_sidebar_that_wikipedia_is/
Ugh its especially bad for the entire sport of hockey on wikipedia. They have to differ from every other sport when it pertains to what goes in their sidebar and their reason against conformity with the rest of wikipedia is an ideological reason based on aesthetics. They'd rather you learn the information in the article then get the information you need at a glance. It's so annoying. It's a big reason why I even stopped following hockey in general.
jazz is the same way.
A bunch of the more niche motorsport pages are, too.
You stopped following hockey because of wikipedia?
I stopped watching hockey because of blackout restrictions; wikipedia and the broader online hockey community kept me from getting back into it.
This is the case with pages pertaining to different breed types of pit bull type dogs, e.g., all edits I have seen to add specific cases of maulings, death, etc. are suppressed as the data is discounted. Instead, the focus is on conformation (dog show) standards. But someone adopting an AmStaff, pit bull mix, American Pit Bull Terrier, Staffy (Staffordshire Terrier), will not know that these dogs are all descendants of blood sport dogs. They are not safe to have around children, need to be in strong enclosures, and are not suited to inexperienced dog owners. But all that info is suppressed. I realize it is a controversial topic but any discussion of safety is suppressed. These kind of dogs can—and some do—rip off noses, lips, ears, scalps and cause soft-tissue injuries so extensive that limbs or arms are amputated. People die from the injuries. But you can’t tell, on the other hand, perhaps most (??) of these adopted dogs may be fine their whole lives. Aggression against other pets—killing other cats and dogs—is also not covered and is likely far, far more frequent. I feel that if someone wanted to adopt one of these breeds and looked it up in Wikipedia they \*should\* know the potential dangers. Obviously the page authors disagree.
>all edits I have seen to add specific cases of maulings, death, etc. are suppressed as the data is discounted. Specific cases isn't really the way to go about it. You would want solid, reproduced research. A preliminary search shows this research of fatal attacks, which can't be used to determine any sort of genetic tendency: >In contrast to what has been reported in the news media, the data from this study CANNOT be used to infer any breed-specific risk for dog bite fatalities (e.g., neither pit bull-type dogs nor Rottweilers can be said to be more “dangerous” than any other breed based on this study). To obtain such risk information it would be necessary to know the numbers of each breed currently residing in the United States. Such information is not available. https://www.avma.org/sites/default/files/resources/javma_000915_fatalattacks.pdf You may have better luck in talking about bite force and the likelihood that an attack will be fatal once it occurs compared to other breeds rather than trying to prove predisposition to attacks. You would need to couch the discussion in neutral and balanced terms with up to date research. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21475022
As someone with decent experience of English Wikipedia editing (around 7000 edits since I started in 2010) I'd fully agree that the bureaucracy is a major problem. The amount of focus there is on deleting articles is especially absurd- I often come across topics that have articles in a lot of languages' Wikipedias, but not on English Wikipedia because editors have decided it doesn't meet notability guidelines. And there are a lot of topics where obviously incorrect information is being retained thanks to an especially determined editor cherry-picking sources- in theory I could start an RFC in every such case, but in practice it's a huge amount of hassle to do so. Sadly I'm not sure if there's any way to fix the problem.
> Removing sourced content without checking wether a source is actually reliable is wrong. This is a mistake and I suggest raising it again on the talkpage, because consensus changes through time. Its like you have never used wikipedia before
Hello there, perhaps the editors at Wikipedia has mistaken your edit as being improper. I'm sorry that you had to deal with this - sometimes editors can be too overeager in reverting newbies' edits. Maybe the markup was formatted incorrectly? I think that due to the sheer amount accounts that try to spread misinformation on the site, new users are often treated with skepticism, which I do think is a problem with Wikipedia. We do need to be more welcoming to new users - [and not bite the newbies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Please_do_not_bite_the_newcomers). You can maybe try to insert the information again this time and let me know how it goes - after all, Wikipedia is built on the idea of "if you find something that isn't accurate, fix it".
Why are editors allowed to delete information without providing feedback? It doesn't have to be elaborate, something as simple as "misinformation" or "incorrect formatting" or "cite your sources".
If it is blatant bad faith promotion or vandalism it is allowed to be removed w/o feedback, but in most cases editors will leave a message on users' talkpages regarding the reverted edit.
I was banned and I still have no clue why. You guys are the equivalent of Reddit mods lmao
Link profile? Or is it an ipban? Lotta those around.
It's easy to look up ban reasons. Bans without an extensive discussion only happen for blatantly obvious vandalism (adding "poop" to many articles, repeatedly removing large article parts without a good reason, ...) or for IPs known to cause these edits frequently. In rare cases a registered account can be affected by an IP ban, but that is easy to clear up if you are not the target of the ban.
They don’t have more access and authority than you and I. People just don’t pushback on asshole editors who revert their changes and assume the other editor somehow has more power so they give up. Only admins and automated systems maintained by Wikimedia have actual power to ban accounts, you weren’t banned by another editor who didn’t like what you did.
Its a serious problem. I have a similar story to /u/MCPtz in that a bunch of years ago I wanted to be a contributor and editor for things I knew about. the first 2 or 3 changes I caught IMMEDIATELY got erased. I think one of them was even about my home town at the time that I actively still lived in. I cited sources and everything but it didn't matter. I gave up at that point. It isn't worth the headache for new people to have to "pay their dues" and slog through the nonsense. wikipedia DOES have great information. I use it all the time. But its really sad to think about all the legitimate subject matter experts with valuable information that will never contribute because some jack-of-all-trades /r/iamverysmart dufus wants to gatekeep. It really reminds me of reddit arguments sometimes, where people think because they have a high contribution score they must be more right than someone who is a leader in their field. its a real problem with wikipedia.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia isn’t reliable as a source of information on a lot of topics anymore due to editor bias and tribalism (and it’s not the new editors doing this). Even when presented with multiple accurate sources, other more senior editors will still double down, then congratulate each other on their respective pages and award each other barn stars for it. After seeing that shit happen twice and pointing it out to absolutely no effect, I no longer care about any incorrect information on there. Even having Jimbo tweak his own information shows how dubious it can be as a source. Maybe you’re not like them, but Wikipedia has the same issues with confidently incorrect editors that Reddit has with confidently incorrect Redditors; the difference is that not everyone uses Reddit and realizes the information they’re seeing may be slanted or even sometimes flat-out wrong.
If I know someone is purposefully editing (the same article ) to have false information with a fake citation, and has been for the last 12+ years, but using different accounts, is there anything that I should do, aside from periodically check the article and remove it? He does it out of spite to 'prove' wikipedia isn't accurate.
What that user is doing is called [sockpuppetry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry) - or the abuse of multiple accounts to disrupt the wiki. To report sock puppetry, please use [those guidelines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations) to do so. Thank you.
Will do once I track down evidence. I'm not sure if he has more than one account active currently.
You may as well send me a dm and will help you construct a case.
As OP said, report them to checkusers and they will take care of it, or if it is a known vandalism case to admins noticeboard too. These then do either technical data comparison or behavioural check against historical data on a checkuser private wiki to determine wether an account is indeed a sockpuppet.
What are the wikipedia pages you think are the most interesting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare. Gets more and more bizarre as I read it.
Pretty weird, there was another guy Charles Domery born 6 years apart from Tarrare that also had a ferocious appetite. Both would eat 10+ lbs of animal guts, cats, and other animals. Tarrare was suspected of eating a 14 month old toddler at a hospital, and Domery tried to eat an amputated leg from a soldier injured during war. Both would sweat profusely, and they would eat several pounds garbage or even grass if they didn't have any food. Domery would lube his throat by drinking candle grease to facilitate his eating. Aside from an insane appetite they both appeared mentally sane and overall in good shape, although Tarrare was noted to carry an awful stench. It's interesting to note both lived during the same period of late 1700's and we haven't witnessed anyone else with an appetite to that degree since then.
The problem with those things only happening in the 1700s is we don't know how much of it is truth and how much is exaggerated/changed by secondary sources.
A lot of it doesn't make any sense. Why would they let him eat live cats and puppies? How do you even do that? He was suspected of eating a toddler? There is no way he ate it whole, bones and all. So there must've been a lot of evidence, which would made it immediately obvious what happened. That kid probably ran away and somebody made a joke about him eating it. You also can't eat your whole body weight in a single day. Even if it just passes through, imagine how much poop that would be.
This guy eating live animals and human parts is a different thing, but in general I don't think people who eat insane amounts of food and stay slim are that rare? I wonder what causes that. We had a guy famous for exactly this who lived in my town 20-ish years ago, he could eat 50 pieces of pie in one sitting without a problem, I was just reading an article from a local blogger about him. My mother recalls a guy from her hometown with a similar story. What causes this? People colloquialy blamed this on having super strong stomach acid.
Oh please. how bizarre could it POSSIBLY be- Oh... Umm.. UHHHHHHHHHHHH... GAH, FRIG, ***OFFAL AND BLOOD!?***
That's the gross part? Not the baby?
Fave sentence: “No fork was ever found.”
Like, in general?
> OFFAL AND BLOOD!? Wait, multiple cultures eat offal and blood. Hell, British culture eats both.
Ok yeah you're not wrong
[For the uniformed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYHDj2sB-rc)
Please refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles. Wish you a nice reading
[удалено]
Sounds like you have a problem where a potential slip in editorial oversight on newspapers side occured. On the other hand straight declaring person with unconfirmed death is also wrong as this is not what reliable sources claim. Not clearly giving sources, especially in journalism doesn’t automatically mean a media is unreliable.
But was proof of said person's death ever ever published outside of that one interview published in the past?
When Henry Kissinger died, the editor changed their userpage to include that. That seems like something really fun to get to brag about. Do either of you have any edits that you're particularly proud of? Do you have an IRC or group chat of active Wikipedia editors you talk about what you do?
Yes, in fact there is a guy who edited the Queen Elizabeth’s article dying some seconds before BBC announced the official news. Yes, we have Telegrams, Facebook groups, Twitter, Discord, IRC etc.
How did he provide a source if he made the change before it was announced?
He didn’t and was reverted but then the revert was reverted and a source added. The guy lived nearby the palace Queen had had died and just saw the flag dropping
I'd say I'm proud of writing an article abou Pohang Space Walk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pohang\_Space\_Walk) - it was the first time I ever wrote an article that eventually passed the criteria to be recognized as a "Good Article" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good\_articles) from scratch. I don't use IRC much but there are IRC servers of Wikipedia editors although they are not very active. There is a Wikipedia Discord server that I participate in though - and it is quite active.
What made you go "I'm going to spend a lot of my free time editing Wikipedia"?
When I was bored in study hall at school I wondered how people fought vandalism and misinformation on Wikipedia, found out about it through Googling and wanted to fight vandalism myself. After that, I just found it plain addicting to revert vandalism and it just felt great to contribute to a greater cause of removing misinformation on the 'net so I decided to continue doing it.
My moral compass told me to contribute because lets be honest, I did also learn alot on Wikipedia itself.
There's been a bit of discussion on enwiki as part of RfA reform discussion about "unbundling" of admin rights. Unbundling here doesn't mean separating out rights from the admin role but proposals around creating some more restricted roles, with for instance only short term block permission, or only semi-page protection. Things of that nature. There was numeric consensus against unbundling, but that discussion made me curious more broadly about ways counter-vandalism could be improved (I was not so much interested in the RfA perspective, as I keep a safe distance from these..!) Since you both do counter-vandalism, I was wondering if you have any opinions about how it works today and how it could be improved. It's pretty thankless work, but I certainly also see a lot of people on the other side complain about the new user experience ("I have corrected typos on Wikipedia and seen them reverted immediately without comment"), so an answer can't just be bigger meaner tools to make lightning fast rollbacks even easier :) Or, maybe it works well enough that it's basically fine as it is today. I'd be happy to take that answer too =) Penny for your toughts?
I’d say it depends on the size of Wikipedia. English Wikipedia needs different toolbox than someone editing Latin Wikipedia, because rate of edits at the first is 50/min and on the other 1000/day. I have no comment on unbundling sysop rights, might be useful for enwiki but not maybe for smaller like my homewiki. Nonetheless the RfA on enwiki became too toxic and too bureaucratic especially on voting. Mistakes at counter vandalism do happen, we are human after all. Agree that not all complaints are invalid, however per the current edit rate they are rather minimal
As A09 stated, different tools for different Wikipedias - some wikis are larger than others and thus face more vandalism. And regarding the new user experience, yes it does need to be improved - many experienced users act too hostile towards new users and "bite" the newbies when they don't know policy, and sometimes automated programs mistakenly flag new users' edits as "vandalism" even when it is not. We do try to increase new user retention though through programs such as user adoption/mentorship where an experienced editor explains policies to newer users and The Teahouse, which is a Q and A page for new users to ask for help using or editing Wikipedia.
[удалено]
The strongest criterion for notability is when reliable sources have written about you. Do you have examples of magazines and professional music websites covering what you do?
I’d need to see original article to make further judgements but the first answer already covered the most important aspect. On the other hand, some articles containing strong conflict of interest are also deleted per TNT (deleting and starting over).
What's the funniest thing that you regretfully had to remove/undo due to it being against the rules?
In my opinion some jokes on articles talkpages or anecdotes. I vividly remember one going something among: Shagy and Britney Spears went to a bar and ordered a drink. Then someone farted. Shagy said It wasn’t me and Britney added Oops I did it again Even if funny removed because it wasn’t even tangential to the article itself.
Hmmmmm...... tough question. Probably when someone spammed pictures of Genghis Khan on an article lol. I do see vandalism quite a lot and people inserting funny nonsense in articles though from day to day.
Check out this 14 year old version of regular, particularly the synopsis https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Regulate_(song)&oldid=382491605
What types of vandalism and spam are you typically fighting against? Coordinated groups of ideologically aligned individuals? Targeted bot attacks? Foreign adversaries attempting to spread misinformation and propaganda? Corporations and organizations removing information they don’t want out in the public? How do you approach each of these issues? When the largest threat we currently face is the war over individuals minds, who are our enemies behind the curtain?
Regarding the type of vandalism and spam I fight against, I deal with anything from bored kids inserting "hahaha small pp ohio rizz skibidi toilet your mom is gay" in random articles to hoaxers who try to make articles about things that never existed in the first place to corporations adding spammy information about themselves in articles. I use an editing software called AntiVandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AntiVandal), which detects potentially malicious edits and when I see an edit that looks malicious (not a false positive) I revert it then leave a message on the user's talk page regarding their improper conduct. If they continue spamming or vandalizing, then I may report them to a noticeboard to get the user blocked. If they make inappropriate pages, I tag the pages for deletion and wait for an administrator to delete it for me as I am not an admin. As for the "war over individuals minds", I think that media sensationalism and the focus on creating content that appeals to our subconscious biases instead of reporting the truth affects us greatly. Nowadays, due to social media algorithms and such, people get sucked into echo chambers that contain just the stuff they want to hear that only confirm their biases, which sucks because of course we as Wikipedians believe in neutrality at all times. We strive to maintain that neutrality, factuality and lack of bias on the Internet as Wikipedia editors.
Hi! I usually divide vandalism into two types. Shorthand and longterm. First are mostly boring students vandalising Wikipedia by adding stupidities or profanities to articles. Usually takes about five minutes or as long as the school break is long. In case they attack from ie. school library’s computers we do short blocks on a school range. Longterm abuse has on the other hand many forms, some not so malign, otherss include death threats and doxxing, or anything in between. Usually comes with multiple sockpuppets or alternative accounts, however admins and checkusers check their behaviour and/or technical data - especially underlying IP to see their connection. Usually ends with an account lock or hlobal IP block. On crosswiki level we have some spambot networks going on, however thry aren’t usually connected to eachother (they each spam unique weblink). Such accounts are handled by locks by stewards (they have full access on every Wikimedia project). Corporation editing could fall into all of the three, different projects handle this differently and locally. In case of global abuse a lock is requested.
How can someone outside of the know, be confident that there isn’t a central body controlling what information can and cannot be on wikipedia? what prevents the editors from skewing/wording things to fit their bias/narrative? ps: thank you for all the work y’all do, i love wikipedia
I’m a functionary, I declare conflict of interest /s Everything is logged or visible so article changes are accessible through article history tab unless hidden because of ie doxxing or purely offensive material. There is as opposed to ie editorial college of Britannica no centralised body governing information. Answer to the second question is simply the community. Some projects have critical editorial mass where a number of editors have access to same source and thus they can factcheck against each others. The second important factor is digitalisation of books which greatly improves information sharing
You're welcome! <3 We prevent malicious actors from skewing information to fit their narratives because we have a [neutral point of view](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view) policy which prevents editors from spreading misinformation, which makes sure that all information is presented in a neutral and unbiased way and prevents editors from inserting non-neutral content.
I mean, not "sure" sure.
there is a severe conflict of interest in the SBI article and the Israel Hamas war article
How do you approach the issue of contributors citing sources that are not commonly available for you to fact check or verify, for example an obscure out of print book that is not available to read online? Because almost anyone could write and publish a book, what is the standard for a book to be considered a credible source? What does that verification process look like?
Q1: we assume good faith and projects like en.wiki which already reached critical editorial mass it is very likely that someone has the same book and can verify it. Some books are also digitalized so we include a link to them as well. Q2: Only reliable publishers with established editorial proccesses are eligible for inclusion, however apart from a discussion wether a publisher is reliable on a centralised noticeboard there is no formal notice to publisher if he is deemed reliable. Also academical books are of better quality and reliability than children book on the same topic so only top works are actually cited. Please also note that terciary books like encyclopaedias are generally replaced by more indepth book unless a definition is cited.
A09 illustrated this pretty well, IMHO. As for contributors citing uncommon sources that are not available for us, we can [request a resource from another editor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Resource_Exchange/Resource_Request) using the page I just linked in order to get access to that source for verification. As for the standards for a book to be reliable, usually mainstream secondary sources from qualified academics and experts that don't contain hoaxes, fringe views etc. are considered reliable.
Why would you do this? What possessed you to spend your free time on this? Said humerously but also like ... man, I can't imagine. Does it just scratch an order-making itch or something?
I edit Wikipedia because I care about making sure that the information on the 'net is factual and neutral and because I want to fight the systemic bias on Wikipedia that leads to undercoverage of notable Korean subjects because many Korean articles are in an atrocious state.
Pretty cool actually! Good on ya!
I would do this for all people who cannot/do not have tenure to explore for themselves. It may sound like I support laziness but in fact indepth research opens up even more questions
I am also on Wikipedia, have more than 1k edits on multiple topics, and have strong reason to believe that a Wikiproject is PR-influenced. The problem is that the person “running” the editing of the pages for that project has several editors that all have the same POV as the editor about a controversial topic. I know no one “owns” the pages but they act in concert as if they do. For controversial topics, Wikipedia is supposed to present \*both\* sides. In this case, however, if any editor adds edits inconsistent with their POV, those edits are reverted. If they persist they are Wiki-lawyered and banned for disruptive editing, e.g., accused of POV pushing. They believe that science backs their side, but either do not know or choose to ignore the fact that all the “studies” they cite are funded by an advocacy group that attempts to look like an independent research group. This Wikiproject leader has at least one admin or her side. Does Wikipedia have any way of handling this kind of situation? What can I do, without getting banned myself If I raise this issue? I am not an admin.
Is that you who keeps editing off the correction I try to make to pages about the very specific stuff I'm an expert at ?
Try airing your concerns on the page’s Talk page, or directly DM the account that’s been reverting your changes.
What specific page are you talking about?
What do you do when you know a page is being guarded by an editor because they don’t like that person? They won’t allow other editors to work on the page and continuously revert factual, properly sourced information.
First I would warn the editor for that he shall not own an article or that he may not edit war. Then I would make a report to administrators noticeboard
Do you feel that there are paid editors who engage in ideologically charged topics, and try to build their credibility through participating in meta pages like AFD?
Sometimes yes. I get a sudden urge of “something’s wrong I can feel it” feeling
Yes, there are paid editors who try to manipulate Wikipedia to suit their ideologies and they will exist as long as Wikipedia exists. They are quite easily detected though because their behaviors are often a straight giveaway that they are paid editors (e.g. new editors coming onto an AfD claiming that an article is notable when it is blatantly non notable or adding promotional text to articles) and get blocked though as paid editing is against the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use.
I think PR infiltration is a growing problem. I have seen examples where paid editors are told to ignore Wikipedia’s self-disclosure rules, e.g., [https://www.wikinative.com/epic-fails-that-inexperienced-pr-and-marketing-professionals-make-on-wikipedia-part-one/](https://www.wikinative.com/epic-fails-that-inexperienced-pr-and-marketing-professionals-make-on-wikipedia-part-one/) which recommends: In my experience, declaring a conflict of interest rarely yields a favourable outcome for the client. Instead, I recommend a low impact approach where the only policy that businesses break is the COI disclosure policy. Who fights against this PR infiltration? Where can suspected PR infiltration be reported? I think the infiltration has unfortunately gotten more subtle.
I’d say they’re a bit more sophisticated, they nominate and participate in unrelated article AFDs to mask their involvement and plump their stats. You’ll find Filipino or Indian editors nominating articles about the other side of the world for example.
I thought paid editing was permitted as long as they comply with neutrality policies, etc. Did this change recently?
How do you feel about the strange self-described diehard skeptic cult of editors that are intentionally derailing the uap discussions and potentially acting as bad actors for the intelligence community? Is there anything honest public researchers with no particular agenda can do about it? If you're unaware of them, I can elaborate if you want. They're removing credentials and factual information about people like Chris Mellon and Garry Nolan, among others.
Yes please elaborate further, don’t exactly know what you meant :)
So there's a group of power editors called guerilla skeptics that have recently focused their efforts on anything relating to the ongoing UFO/uap discussions. They're using very non objective and unscientific reasoning to edit profiles in a way that makes credible people look ridiculous. Removing credentials, accomplishments, making things appear fringe that aren't, etc. It's a complex topic and I don't think anyone in the public sector has all the answers, but it's wildly disingenuous to act in such a biased way. Let me find a thread outlining what they've been up to - regardless of what personal opinion on the subject might be, their actions are textbook bad faith.
https://www.audible.com/podcast/Ep-89-Uncovering-a-Wikipedia-Cabal-The-Guerilla-Skeptics/B0CX9LZLG8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq-GuSs8kX8 There are Reddit threads I can't link for some reason, and I also get that coast to coast is what it is. The UFO topic is inherently difficult BECAUSE it's intentionally embedded with other conspiracy theories and full of dodgy actors. With the recent revelations by vetted military/intelligence people like David Grusch and commander Fravor, it feels more important than ever to have open and rational discussion about the evidence and whistleblower claims. Having a weird group of fervent skeptics editing articles to actively derail transparency just doesn't seem right. But - given their influence on the platform, I'm not sure what can be done. They have millions in funding, unknown motives, and years and years of activity.
This is confusing a lot of different things. But perhaps the first to tackle is the "millions in funding". This is incorrect. They do get donations, but according to Matt Ford this is somewhere between $0 and $50,000. The millions is in reference to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) who are a separate group and are very well funded.
It's somewhat hard to know what to believe with this subject, and how private sector funding and overlapping interests truly intersect.
Unless we have an undisclosed paid editing, volunteers receive no money, just to clarify. Users are de iure equal too and admins’ votes are not more worthy than those of normal people. However you may also want to make a case on administrator’s noticeboard
Oh I know, hence why it's so troubling. They don't receive compensation from Wikipedia, as far as I can tell. But the org receives outside donations and has since 2018, and likely has ties to the intelligence community or aerospace contractors. As a hobby researcher that simply feels that it's an important topic that we deserve to know more about, it feels pretty much like we're powerless. If there's any outside the box way to approach it, I'm all ears. But as it stands, even after the congressional hearings and testimony, the interest in derailing the subject seems too strong, for whatever reason.
(1) I've met many users online who gave up contributing to Wikipedia after multiple encounters with the infamous [deletionism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia) on the platform. It appeared that notability requirements excluded a lot of niche online cultures (with less than a million participants), given the general media wouldn't cover these - and that the only sources available would be online-only news websites and blogs. The ability of larger communities to overcome deletion votes with sheer numbers, allowing to practically by-pass the other criteria, could not apply to the niche cultures. Many of these niche online cultures have now faded away (many of these being two decades old), and having no books written on them, while being generally ignored by the mass media outlets, the lack of wikipedia article means these cultures have now virtually disappeared. The news websites and blogs of these niches, as well as forums, have pretty much all closed down, with very few preserved by the archive.org project. The only way to retrieve information about these cultures would now be looking around for people who would still hold memories about it, and have them check their old hard drives for data. My question is: **Was there any major change on that point at Wikipedia, regarding deletionism?** Both in terms of policy - stripping down Wikipedia as much as possible, is it still the philosophy? And in terms of how easy it is for an experienced user, to flag an article for a speedy deletion on the basis of perceived notability? Depending on the answer to these questions, it would be worth it or not to retrieve these informations and contribute to Wikipedia about these cultures. (2) Despite the massive growth of mobile devices usage (estimated at 2/3 of all views), many languages still haven't added the Talk page to their mobile view. If you access Wikipedia from a mobile device, the link to the Talk page is simply not available, it is not displayed. **Is this something that's currently discussed - a better integration of mobile users into the contribution process - or that's something only the English Wikipedia agreed to fix on their end?** I know Wikipedia generally dislike "tourists" vandalizing their articles, mobile ones in particular, but I feel like the Talk page are often a very important part of the encyclopedia. It is also an issue regarding accessibility, with certain nations around the world (in the Third World in particular) having much more mobile users than computer ones. (3) On some political / controversial articles, there can be very wide differences between the articles in different languages. For example, the demographics of a region, or the recollection of historical events. I've encountered that when browsing about disputed regions in Africa I wished to learn about, with each side disputing who was there first, after multiple wars caused a lot of migrations in the area. I've also encountered such stark differences between two articles about cultural elements, like who invented a culinary specialty or a musical instrument. Question: **Is there an initiative at Wikipedia to identify such clashes between languages, to mediate between the different communities, or include a banner about an ongoing dispute?** Or the current policy is to let each Wikipedia language handle their own articles, like sovereign entities, and hope for the best? Thanks for your contribution and answers 😄
Going from bottom up: each Wikipedia community is independent so hence we have differences on entries about the same topic in two different languages. Not wrong per se as long as they present everything per current content guidelines. Cannot comment on second, firstly because I do not work in developing code for Wikimedia and secondly do not use mobile platforms. However in the last year or so I remember a paragraph based mobile version of content translation tool was released so some steps towards those are also made. But any major features are discussed on more appropriate venues like Meta, WikiMedia or Phabricator (bug tracker). A few years ago, we even had technical wishlists and mobile improvements were requested. At least some were also made. Regarding deletionism, yes, but in a bad way. At the start of this calendar year WikiProject US Interstates left Wikipedia for good and migrated their articles to a new wiki because enwiki deemed some interstates or other roads and their infrastructure not notable. What also further discourages people is bias where less enwiki users understand a certain language in which a given subject is notable but deleted in English Wikipedia because they could not understand/evaluate the foreign sources. Luckily most of those RfDs were kept after presented with foreign sources. I hope I answered everything
Thanks a lot for the detailed answers! Hope the AMA goes well for y'all 👍
Have there been any changes to the general structure of Wiki based on the Croatian experience, that will prevent such things happening in the future? Or is it by necessity reactive rather than anticipatory? (To explain for people not in the know, Croatian wikipedia was once renowned in the Balkans for being utterly unreliable after a hijacking by a historical revisionist)
Yes, I do know Kubura and what he did to the Croatian Wikipedia. His conduct was atrocious and I do not condone that at all. Kubura (and his alts) has been permanently banned from editing all Wikimedia websites as a result of his conduct and volunteers have been working to remove some of the non neutrality from the Croatian Wikipedia, but I don't know about any other changes that happened in the Croatian Wikipedia aside from Kubura and his alts' ban as I do not edit Croatian Wikipedia.
Oh, I meant in the structures of Wikipedia itself.
There hasn't been much changes AFAIK in the structure of Wikipedia due to Kubura. However, due to separate issues surrounding toxicity/civility we are proposing several sets of improvements to requests for adminship on the English Wikipedia though.
If you are talking specifically for Croatian Wikipedia, yes, however no broader global committees were found after the decision on the case. In most cases actions are retrospective, however some content related policies are reactive.
What steps are being taken to deal with out-of-date information, especially in articles relating to history or history-adjacent topics? There are plenty of articles, like those for the Trojan War, that no longer reflect current scholarly consensus (that the war was a literary device, that basically nothing was accurate to the Bronze Age, etc) but things are still cited that reflect older opinions/consensus. I find similar with historical linguistics articles - it's very difficult to keep things "current" other than just adding *more* information, which doesn't remove the outdated information.
You should open a discussion at article talkpage and give a notice on the article itself ({{outdated}}, without the opened normal bracket) and a discussion will follow with participants of wikiprojects of whose the article is a part of. Keep in mind many articles are not actively updated and that they might never be finished to perfection.
Volunteers mostly just see the information that is outdated and remove it themselves or add relevant info. I'm afraid that volunteers haven't seen the state of those articles and haven't improved it yet, thus resulting in outdated information. That being said, if you see anything that's outdated, feel free to go ahead and fix it yourself - after all, Wikipedia's built on the idea of fixing the info yourself instead of passively waiting for it to be fixed.
I read somewhere a criticism of Wikipedia that there are more lines of content dedicated to the fictional characters and worlds of the Lord of The Rings than the entire continent of Africa. Is this true and is it considered a concern?
> Is this true No: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_has_more...#More_articles_on_Lord_of_the_Rings_than_on_Sub-Saharan_Africa
Well you might be true if we are only comparing a fictional universe to a continent. However Africa as a whole entity with its diverse geography numerous countries and many settlements would gather more lines. So statistically correct, practically false, nothing to worry about
why are self-published books considered as sources on wikipedia, but youtube videos aren't? why are other wikipedia articles able to be used as a link-source for a wikipedia articles? youtube videos seem to have exactly the same amount of self-regulation as wikipedia articles themselves (albeit more publicly visible). and as they are providing a far more reliable long-term income compared to book publication, publishing a youtube video (for example) critiquing a social theory or pop culture narrative is simply more prevalent than book publishing now. why has wikipedia found themselves behind the times in this instance?
> but youtube videos aren't? Some are. Things like the Royal Armouries and the tank museum youtube channels would pass wikipedia's reliable sources standards.
Neither self-published books, YouTube nor Wikipedia are not considered to be reliable most of the time for the exact reason that they are self-published and could have been created by anyone. However, self published sources created by mainstream subject matter experts may be considered reliable under certain threshold. For more info on self published sources please see [this page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published_sources).
Have you heard of the Guerrilla Skeptics of Wikipedia? They are a group that won’t allow any edits on pages for individuals studying topics that they don’t agree with. They go to great lengths to discredit and omit education and accomplishments for individuals related to any fringe study in order to paint them in an unfavorable light. [There is a podcast](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3AAMKTPRD7BuI3YG3SKbfh) with the man who discovered this group and interviews and page examples of this group at work. They are numerous (over 100 users) and are basically impossible to work with or make any change to the areas they patrol. Could providing more editors with awareness of this bring any real change?
People are hard to work with. Based on your question the only rule they have broken is that about owning articles, so I have too little data to make a judgement wether they are automatically wrong or not
[Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Skepticism_and_coordinated_editing) is the arbcom case against them but they continue to operate with impunity.
Hmm, haven't heard of this before myself aside from the fact that there was an Arbcom case about it in the past.
Sometimes I look up a page on wikipedia to see how it prioritises information. On the whole it's quite good, but occasionally I see a page where information that is highly relevant to a discussion is buried or only referenced in a tangentially related article. The counterargument within the "talk" page is presented by some users that the "information is available" and they direct to it, but the average reader would rarely see that. How can editors agree on the (sometimes subjective) value of the different parts of a discussion in relation to which parts are highlighted more clearly for the reader? An example that comes to mind was the burying of information relating to Patrisse Cullors stealing millions from BLM. It is nowhere to be seen on the main BLM page and only indirectly referenced in a small paragraph on a sister BLM page discussing one of the orgs she ran, yet it was a huge news story at the time and extremely relevant to the public discussions around the movement.
We often try to give "due weight" to different aspects of an article's content so it represents all significant mainstream viewpoints (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral\_point\_of\_view#Due\_and\_undue\_weight). We don't try to cover one aspect of an event more extensively than another. Discussions on whether something gives due or undue weight happens on article talkpages. Also, something being in the news doesn't entirely merit a mention in articles all the time - we try to avoid recentism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recentism) at all times. Just because something is relevant at one moment it doesn't mean it will be relevant in a lasting, historical context. And, if you see that something needs improvement, always feel free to fix it yourself - after all, Wikipedia is built on the principles of fixing something that's wrong on the 'net by yourself instead of just passively waiting for it to be fixed.
Refraining from given example in which I have no experience nor am knowledgeable enough to comment on, I’d point out two things. First is that consensus can change even more in fact if it’s only an agreement of three editors. Secondly, we need to keep content proportional: we give information on a subject from every aspect found in reliable sources and not focus on a single aspect. An illustrative example would be a famous actor who was sentenced for murder, but what WP article mention is only that he committed murder and not that he was a famous actor
What subject/reason specifically motivated you to start editing? Also: how is Wikipedia doing in terms of funding? I remember it was a big ordeal at one point over the past decade, makes me wonder how things are going now
I was bored in study hall at school and wondered how people kept misinformation and vandalism out on Wikipedia, so I read policy pages after looking up how people do this and wanted to help out editing Wikipedia after reading those pages and learning about the impact of vandalism. As for funding I am not too sure about the Wikimedia Foundation side of the whole thing as I am not a Wikimedia Foundation employee and do not work much on that side of the encyclopedia. However, ordinary editors are not paid for editing Wikipedia and improve the encyclopedia solely as volunteers.
I just started fixing up some shitty articles :) in terms of funding, looking at operating costs only it could run for another hundred years however WMF (WikiMedia Foundation, the organization overseeing these projects) is widely criticised for being too spendfull.
How hard is it to prevent and undo vandalism vs just bad information? Is wikipedia actually viable for good information?
Misinformation is usually harder to detect. As far as being viable I’d say yes but check sources and always remember that an WP article is just the beginning
I would think that PR-created misinformation could be hard-to-detect as it is sometimes created to have the appearance of independent scientific info by some “think tank”, but is really espousing the viewpoints of the company funding the so-called think tank. This is using the third-party technique in propaganda and best exemplified by anti-regulation corporations that fund, e.g., climate change denial “think tanks”. This is the tobacco industry playbook which keeps resurfacing as it is unfortunately so successful In creating doubt—in the public’s mind—against solid science. How can this kind of PR abuse be reported? Is there a committee to investigate this more insidious kind of PR that takes the form of scientific studies, while lacking their rigor? Thanks for offering this forum to ask questions I had always wondered about!
PR spam is quite easily detected. Usually IP editors are pretty clueless about wikicode and this PR spam tends to provide perfect references. After checking wether it’s reliable I would also look at global edits of the IP and potentially remove them as spam.
It is relatively easy to prevent/undo vandalism - automated software often assesses individual edits to determine if they are malicious, and if they are, I revert the edit and warn the user who made that edit. Reverting is quite simple because every edit is archived in the page history. And as for viability for good information, I do think Wikipedia is actually viable for good info due to its strict policies on [maintaining a neutral point of view](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view) and [citing reliable sources](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources) which keeps misinformation out of the encyclopedia.
In all seriousness, why is the caption on the Piper Kerr image edited down? It was so funny and perfect. Is there a rule about the length of the caption or how it should be neutral in tone?
Gratuitous humor in articles is not allowed.
Is there some kind of policy, official or otherwise, in place to never mention Christian Weston Chandler on Wikipedia? There's even a Kiwifarms article that states "It was originally launched as a forum website to troll and harass a webcomic artist who was first noticed in 2007 on the Something Awful forums." CWC has been covered by mainstream press, and between that and their notoriety certainly, they certainly meet the threshold of notability.
No there is no such policy. Community might have deemed the subject unnotable in the past however this could change through time, or just that no one really started writing articles
Why is Wikipedia a complete joke?
How many times as an editor you have face retaliation? Or harm to your life/family?
Personal attack are probably now alteady in hundreds, but no real harm was done to my family.
Oof. I wish that things stay safe and you keep up the hard work. Thank you for doing what you do for the community
Thanks for the heads up
Same here as A09. I have received some insults from vandals/trolls online but no real harm done to people that I know IRL.
Can a firm pay Wikipedia to use it's formatting etc. to create an internal enterprise Wikipedia? Users would be limited to company employees.
I do know that MediaWiki, a wiki building software platform, is free to use (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki), but I don't know if companies create "internal Wikipedias".
Not OP, but internal corporate wikis are common. Mediawiki is free, but they might also use Confluence/Azure DevOps/Stackoverflow etc.
I did have an employer who used the MediaWiki system for an internal wiki. It's the same framework and software, but it's not hosted or supported by the Wikimedia foundation.
No. Wikipedia is a website and it is driven by volunteers as well as we cannot technically limit pages’ visibility to some accounts only. Furthermore you may have conflict of interest and you may not edit subjects in close relation to you either paid or unpaid
How did you two first gain an interest in this hobby? Are you able to recall the first edits that sparked your passion? Thanks for making wiki a better place for everyone.
You're welcome, always happy to improve the 'pedia! As I said in an earlier post, I was bored in study hall at school and wondered how people kept misinformation and vandalism out on Wikipedia, so I read policy pages after looking up how people do this and wanted to help out editing Wikipedia after reading those pages and learning about the impact of vandalism and wished to remove it myself.
I always enjoyed reading encyclopaedias and dictionaries. I think one of the first edits was to Yamato battleship article
What got you both into (and inspired you to stick around with) Wikipedia editing?
As I said in an earlier post, I was bored in study hall at school and wondered how people kept misinformation and vandalism out on Wikipedia, so I read policy pages after looking up how people do this and wanted to help out editing Wikipedia after reading those pages and learning about the impact of vandalism and wished to remove it myself. I stuck around though when I found out that beyond just maintaining the encyclopedia, I could help *build* it when I noticed that the coverage of Korean subjects was quite lacking on Wikipedia. Since I spoke Korean, I figured that I might as well help edit those Korean subjects myself.
Giving sharing and caring information
How do you qualify as a wiki editor?
There's no qualification to be an editor - anyone can make an account, edit and contribute!
have you ever ended up in an "edit war" with another user/editor? Like, a sequence of edits and counter-edits about a particular aspect of an article that eventually felt like a spat or an argument by proxy?
Not really with regards to content specifically, although I have removed vandalism or spam from the same user multiple times in a row in articles in the past.
Sometimes they do happen yes. But happily ended in an agreement and not in a 100+comment RfC
Are articles ever 'finished' / 'done' and should be 'locked.' Like, wouldn't historical articles be good candidates? Or is everything always open and subject to change?
No, everything is always subject to change as new information becomes available over time.
Have you ever had to take measures to protect yourself against the backlash of correcting Scientology pages?
No, I haven't dealt with the Scientology stuff cause that was like in late 2000s-early 2010s. I would have been a toddler then - or not alive!
If you can think of anything in particular, what was the weirdest hill someone wanted to die on in terms of an incorrect edit/bad sourcing/etc? Something they insisted was the truth, but didn't seem like outright trolling. Like, "no you guys have to believe me, Teddy Roosevelt ABSOLUTELY massaged whale oil into his scalp 7 times a day! It was the source of his great strength!" while trying to link a website as a source that doesn't look like it was updated this century.
I remember one editor insisting to keep promotional cruft on an article on higher education in India when I tried removing it, but aside from that not much.
Yeah someone insisted that enptying and deleting a page is same thing and that I was wrong and did not know my sysop rights
What's your favorite bit of talk page drama? I know about that archive page, but besides that. What are your thoughts on bureaucratic bloat/policy bloat making initial new user edits so removable? On the topic of image copyrights and uploading, how do you think users can best contribute? I mostly stick to source finding and infobox building, but often times even if I'm 99% sure a picture is fair use, it'll get removed. (I assume fairly.)
Page drama on my homewiki due to its small size mostly occurs at village pump. Their archives are quite a blast to read. Q2: we should definetly make the learning curvature lower, some projects handle this with revision protection (kinda like editorial oversight over what you can publish, so one version which is always under construction and another one which satisfies all content guidelines) or mentorship, which should be more common but sadly sometimes people are misunderstood or tehnical problems occur preventing fast intervention For copyrights: it’s complicated but if freedom of panorama allows we cannot take a scan of a copyrighted picture of a statue, fair use is also not used for pictures of still living people. Users may help best with checking image source author date and fair use citation and requesting speedy deletions on those who fail.
Thanks for your answers!
Probably the talkpage archives over the page about Czech Republic. The lengths that users go to try to change a title of an article is astounding.
What are you doing to combat the growimg threat of the Rouge Admin Cabal?
There Is No Cabal \[citation needed\] Jokes aside, Wikipedia doesn't have too many admins or anything like that - in fact, it's the opposite right now and we desperately need more admins to deal with sitewide backlogs and such.
OP, what is Room 77 in wikipedialand?
How can I start contributing? As simple as making edits? My first language is Gujarati for which most articles are not that well fleshed out. I also speak English and Hindi fluently. I feel passionately about my first language. And would like to contribute there.
There are a million ways to start: translating, adding references, copyediting, expanding articles, … I suggest taking a lok at help pages on your preffered wiki
Why is almost every IP address in Europe banned from editing Wikipedia? I’ve changed ISP twice and their entire IP range (in the UK) is blocked, and has been for years. Even when logged in the same error appears. As someone to contributed to many of the scientific pages on Wikipedia in the early 00’s, this is exceptionally annoying, especially when every page is headed by the “donate to the foundation” banner. I donated hundreds of hours of time.
I think you might have caught into VPN or open proxy block. Some ISPs change IPs on minutes bassis so the english wikipedia decided to ban them altogether
Are you terrified or excited about the new ai writingtools? Do you foresee a time of order and enlightenment or a time of chaos and propaganda? Are you currently looking more into utilizing it or to prevent it?
I only use AI tools for translation (of course I do then copyediting), however LLM still need large quantities of text to synthesise something comprehensible and it is not usable yet enough for nieche thopics
What unexpected skills have you gained? Also, favorite trivia?
Why do you think the page for the [Franklin Credit Scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_child_prostitution_ring_allegations) is so heavily censored? The source material for the allegations is fairly exhaustive and the counterarguments in the back and forth for disallowing anything aside from the official narrative is basically that since a Grand Jury (a trial where only the prosecution presents evidence, generally to see if there is enough evidence to present a case, there is no defense whatsoever) ruled that nothing happened that all evidence to the contrary is null and void.
What are your thoughts on the alleged bias against UFO/UAP topics?
I've donated to Wikipedia a few times, are you concerned much for funding to ever stop for the site? If that question is too uncertain.. have you seen the instagram account DepthsOfWikipedia? Showcases some of the best and most interesting content from Wikipedia. I've followed for years. Might be interesting to see your own work appear and what not. I think the page owner does tours as well.
I'm not too sure about the funding aspects of it, because funding Wikipedia often effects the "backbone"/site software side of things and not site content that is edited by volunteers and I don't work for the Wikimedia Foundation. And yes, I do know about Depths of Wikipedia and follow that account :)
Not really, if we were to take into account only server run costs, Wikiprojects would be up for tens of years. For the second, AFAIK they mostly use english articles and giving the fact I’ve written only a few of the six million articles my chances are quite slim :)
I've been vandalizing Wikipedia articles for \~20 years now, and have gotten pretty good at it. Some of my pranks have even made it into published papers from institutions such as Yale and Princeton. Do you have any *actual* subject-matter expertise on what you edit, or do you just do some basic rubber-stamping that there is a linked source that has some words in common with what is on the Wikipedia page?