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Wikipedia is a toxic mess. If you try to contribute anything even slightly controversial and one of the page patrollers decide you are obnoxious, or wrong, then

Wikipedia is a toxic mess. If you try to contribute anything even slightly controversial and one of the page patrollers decide you are obnoxious, or wrong, then your work will be eviscerated. The funny thing is, even when you know the policies and follow them, it's irrelevant. For example, I was told by several people that primary sources are entirely verboten. I did a search to verify the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) company ownership of a number of companies, which is entirely non-controversial, I was told this was violating WP:OR, or more specifically [[WP:PRIMARY]] as this disallows primary sources. This, however, is a shortcut to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary.2C_secondary_and_tertiary_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research... This reads: Policy: Unless restricted by another policy, primary sources that have been reputably published may be used in Wikipedia; but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge. When I pointed this out, there was silence and my work was removed. The project is now completely impossible to contribute to in any meaningful way. There are literally users who do nothing but watch the incoming edit stream and revert or tweak edits as soon as they get made. Often they make mistakes or make it impossible for an editor to do any sort of extensive contributions. One editor I interacted with did this to me, and when I reviewed what happened after I found I couldn't go on further I realised they have made over 98,000 edits since 2009, yet there is literally no article they contributed to in any significant way whatsoever! It's all reverts, page moves, typo fixes, wiki link changed or the creation of small article stubs (they claimed to have created 500 articles, but when I checked they created over 500 pages, but about 450 are redirects or pages moves, and nothing else. Of the rest, about 25 article are 1 sentence stubs, albeit with a reference, and the rest are still very basic and not deeply researched articles - not really much better than stubs. It's really a lost cause now. I certainly know the quality is degrading very rapidly. Unless practices are drastically changed, it will degrade to the point where traditional sources will come back into fashion. Jimmy Wales once stated the grand vision of Wikipedia was summed up by asking people to "imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." [1] That was the goal, and for years that was what I and many others worked towards. For whatever reason, the project has now stagnated and that is no longer occurring consistently. This grand vision has been lost, and I don't see that there are any moves to bring it back. 1. http://m.slashdot.org/story/48267 http://m.slashdot.org/story/48267

iamgopal 10y ago
If agreeing what ever being said, is there an alternative way things can be improved ?
- chris_wot 10y ago
  Sure, I think firstly editors can treat each other with much more kindness and respect. Secondly, administrators should be refreshing their understanding of policy. Any editor who tries to be a wikilawyer and force their viewpoint even when it is contrary to the very policy they say another editor is violating should be warned and told to carefully read the policy. Editors who deliberately hide discussions via tricks like adding collapse tags should be warned then sanctioned. That's deliberately being disruptive and preventing consensus based contributions. BLP accusations should be more carefully analysed - a lot of what I was being accused off had nothing to do with a violation of BLP and huge swathes of non-controversial material was removed under the BLP policy, even though Much of it was no a violation at all. Admins should not accuse editors of not discussing things on talk pages when in fact that's what they have done. And lastly, editors who are page patrollers only should not be given more weight than new editors who make substantial contributions to Wikipedia. Those new editors should be encouraged and a polite message should be given detailing what the issues are when material is contributed. If they ask questions in the talk page and the page patroller refuses to discuss things further, then the page patroller should entirely disengage from the article - especially those who have not shown any skills in research or even the slightest attempt at getting any article to good article start us, let alone an attempt at making the article a featured article!
- dingaling 10y ago
  One could establish a system-enforced rule that users could only delete as many bytes as they had contributed.

iamgopal 10y ago

If agreeing what ever being said, is there an alternative way things can be improved ?

chris_wot 10y ago
Sure, I think firstly editors can treat each other with much more kindness and respect. Secondly, administrators should be refreshing their understanding of policy. Any editor who tries to be a wikilawyer and force their viewpoint even when it is contrary to the very policy they say another editor is violating should be warned and told to carefully read the policy. Editors who deliberately hide discussions via tricks like adding collapse tags should be warned then sanctioned. That's deliberately being disruptive and preventing consensus based contributions. BLP accusations should be more carefully analysed - a lot of what I was being accused off had nothing to do with a violation of BLP and huge swathes of non-controversial material was removed under the BLP policy, even though Much of it was no a violation at all. Admins should not accuse editors of not discussing things on talk pages when in fact that's what they have done. And lastly, editors who are page patrollers only should not be given more weight than new editors who make substantial contributions to Wikipedia. Those new editors should be encouraged and a polite message should be given detailing what the issues are when material is contributed. If they ask questions in the talk page and the page patroller refuses to discuss things further, then the page patroller should entirely disengage from the article - especially those who have not shown any skills in research or even the slightest attempt at getting any article to good article start us, let alone an attempt at making the article a featured article!
dingaling 10y ago
One could establish a system-enforced rule that users could only delete as many bytes as they had contributed.