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1. This isn't a political example, but big parts of Scottish Wikipedia were basically written by one teenager, who took English texts and wrote them with Scotti

by rvba 5y ago

1. This isn't a political example, but big parts of Scottish Wikipedia were basically written by one teenager, who took English texts and wrote them with Scottish accent. He did not use real Scottish language, but rather some strange version of English. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-... Either nobody reads the relatively small Scottish Wikipedia, or (more likely) everyone who complained about it got banned by said admin. And since nobody really reviews bans (why cant the Wikimedia Foundation have someone for it?), then you are generally out of luck. 2A. There was a Wikipedia administrator who created 80 000 pages and redirects related to breasts. Also seemed to have some obsession over some low key political woman. https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/dk17c9/wikipedia_the_admin_who_created_80000_pages_about/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/dk17c9/wikipedi... What is more sad in this case, is that every other admin knew very well that thousands of such pages were created, but nobody did anything. This is the usual situation when the clique will never go against one of their own. It took them an incredible amount of time to do anything with that rogue admin and at the end I think he wasn't even removed from his role and banned, he simply stepped down on his own. 2B. Compare the rogue admin described in point 2A (who created 80 thousand articles and redirects related to breasts) with the typical experience of a new wikipedia user, whose article will be probably speedy deleted immediately after creation. There is a big group of admins who try to speed delete everything - because by default they treat every new user as human trash and every new article as not encyclopedic. I dont have any statistics,but I assume that after the new article is deleted, most new users will simply give up, because the alternative is to fight versus the admin clique through various "committees" (full of said admins). This time is wasted, because instead of improving the article you go through a trial of tears. 2C. Also very possible is that every edit by a new user is reverted by default. The new user cannot revert it back - since this is an "edit war". I dont feel like searching for examples, but there are admins who have literal counters that show how many things they reverted - and they pride themselves of it. This basically means thousands of users pushed away of trying to improve wikipedia, just because some sad asshole sits and reverts everything to paddle his stats. Other admins dont do anything about it, because it is incredibly hard to remove an admin / if they removed that guy, then someone else could go after them. The Wikimedia foundation simply does not care at all. They just need those millions for various expensive "projects", lunches and so on. A very similar thing happened with Firefox, where the Mozilla foundation is interested in everything, but not their core product. If you are a new Wikipedia user a very typical situation is that if you create a new article, some admin will "improve" it (generally making it worse) and you cannot revert those changes, or you get banned by the said admin. On some smaller Wikipedia the admins knew each other very well, so they ask their friend to ban you. I am aware that I dont provide any examples for those + I sound like a "frustrated person". If you dont believe me, you can make a second account and see how it looks for someone new (using two accounts is against Wikipedia terms of service btw). Perhaps a good way would be to randomize admin names, so those assholes get banned by their own friends, or reverted by own friends, who like to revert everything. 3. Regarding examples of "fresh" political cases having a lot of problems. You can check the page of Aimee Channelor and constant edit wars related to that person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aimee_Challenor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aimee_Challenor That's the person involved in the reddit scandal in 2021. If you feel like a detective, you can also try to figure out who are the people who constantly guard and edit the said article. Btw. I guess I also have to add a disclaimer that I never had anything to do with article from point 3.

leephillips 5y ago
Everyone I know who has tried to contribute to Wikipedia would concur with your comments here. I myself dipped my little toe tentatively into the Wikipedia swamp a couple of times, and can confirm everything you say. It’s a toxic presence on the web, a cesspool of plagiarism and insular politics masquerading as political neutrality. It sucks the energy out of the web of creative, individual voices that should be the ideal, and substitutes crowdsourced mush that reads as exactly what it is: something written by a committee.
visarga 5y ago
> by default they treat every new user as human trash and every new article as not encyclopedic Maybe setting a high bar to new edits is not a bad idea. Wikipedia is old, it should settle at least on some of the topics.
- rvba 5y ago
  Nice that you talk about edits (or new articles?) that you have not seen. Spoken like a true Wikipedist: be hostile to anyone who is outside of the clique and dares to criticize it. The hostile speed deletions and reverts applied to new users are never happen admins, or members of the clique - even if the quality of things they add is very, very low. I even wrote above that there are ways to fight it: for example by randomizing the names of users who made the edits. Although Im quite sure that Wikipedia is full of sad people, who will spend a lot of time and effort to still be able to bypass such a system. What is even more sad, is that in this particular discussions, you have 3 different users who wrote that it happened to them... just look to other replies to the top comment.
  - visarga 5y ago
    Ten years ago I wrote a bunch of articles in a niche of my interest. One in particular was very complex, I spent a whole month doing research for it, posted citations for everything. When I came back a few years later it was unrecognizable. Now it barely has anything of what I wrote in it. So I know how it is to see your work trashed and how difficult the 'pro' editors can be. That's why I don't write there anymore, it's like writing on sand. Even so Wikipedia is still one of my top 3 sites. I'm doing NLP and I see the Wikipedia corpus used in hundreds of papers. It's useful in many ways.

by rvba 5y ago

leephillips 5y ago

Everyone I know who has tried to contribute to Wikipedia would concur with your comments here. I myself dipped my little toe tentatively into the Wikipedia swamp a couple of times, and can confirm everything you say. It’s a toxic presence on the web, a cesspool of plagiarism and insular politics masquerading as political neutrality. It sucks the energy out of the web of creative, individual voices that should be the ideal, and substitutes crowdsourced mush that reads as exactly what it is: something written by a committee.

visarga 5y ago

> by default they treat every new user as human trash and every new article as not encyclopedic Maybe setting a high bar to new edits is not a bad idea. Wikipedia is old, it should settle at least on some of the topics.

rvba 5y ago
Nice that you talk about edits (or new articles?) that you have not seen. Spoken like a true Wikipedist: be hostile to anyone who is outside of the clique and dares to criticize it. The hostile speed deletions and reverts applied to new users are never happen admins, or members of the clique - even if the quality of things they add is very, very low. I even wrote above that there are ways to fight it: for example by randomizing the names of users who made the edits. Although Im quite sure that Wikipedia is full of sad people, who will spend a lot of time and effort to still be able to bypass such a system. What is even more sad, is that in this particular discussions, you have 3 different users who wrote that it happened to them... just look to other replies to the top comment.
- visarga 5y ago
  Ten years ago I wrote a bunch of articles in a niche of my interest. One in particular was very complex, I spent a whole month doing research for it, posted citations for everything. When I came back a few years later it was unrecognizable. Now it barely has anything of what I wrote in it. So I know how it is to see your work trashed and how difficult the 'pro' editors can be. That's why I don't write there anymore, it's like writing on sand. Even so Wikipedia is still one of my top 3 sites. I'm doing NLP and I see the Wikipedia corpus used in hundreds of papers. It's useful in many ways.