6 ms·
Apart from the usual wikilawyers warring and reverting everything, I've also recently found lots of bots come by just to tag edits, which were correct, as possi
by jerrya 15y ago
Apart from the usual wikilawyers warring and reverting everything, I've also recently found lots of bots come by just to tag edits, which were correct, as possible vandalism, etc.
Plus the problem mentioned in the article that it's no longer "okay" just to drop a url into an article, everything has to match some bizarro world template that no one would ever want to fill out given their lousy pay rates.
And for all that, the wiki staff is too stupid/poor/unimaginative to automatically download and archive what the urls in the articles point to, meaning that the whole thing suffers from increasing amounts of link rot.
It's also fun to contribute a new article and then see it nominated for swift deletion because it rubs someone the wrong way and has violated one of a trillion different little wiki policies all put up to justify reverting/deleting otherwise fine content.
- _delirium 15y agoThe template isn't as important as the source; if you drop an IEEE/ACM/jstor/Citeseer URL in lieu of a formatted citation, that's fine, and someone should fix it up later into the full journal citation. If it's a URL to a DailyKos diary or something, though, that's less useful.
- jerrya 15y agoI would claim you've got it skewed, especially for someone posting from Hacker News. Let me try and reformulate it: If you drop a URL in that's fine, one of our bots will come by, not to chastise your edit as possible vandalism, but to fill out the journal entry for you and download the url and archive it.
- Enlightenment 15y agoThe biggest problem with wikipedia edits are people NOT following the rules. People act like they can make CRAPPY edits in any way THEY like and then EXPECT those CRAPPY edits to stick. If you add a bunch of text WITHOUT a reference citation, then whine because someone deletes your text, then it is YOUR own fault for NOT adding a reference. Most people need to quit whining like a bunch of little girls and edit articles the correct way.
- _delirium 15y agoThat is basically what happens, at least some of the time. The bots are mostly volunteer-run rather than something official or consistent (framework code and an API are open), but I've definitely had bots come by and improve my citations, usually doing things like converting a bare nytimes.com or jstor.com URL into a proper citation. An interesting project for HN folks might be to write bots to take care of stuff that isn't currently being automated. Of course, perhaps instead we want the Wikimedia Foundation doing more of this. They're moving in that direction to some extent, though I don't much like that. In the past I've argued against that direction, because I think one of Wikipedia's strengths is its open, volunteer-run nature, rather than being a professionalized/bureaucratized NGO type organization with paid staff and centralized organization--- I'd rather WMF just ran the servers.
- gamble 15y ago> the whole thing suffers from increasing amounts of link rot. Citations on Wikipedia are a joke. At least a quarter of the citations I check are broken links or go to a wildly inappropriate or biased source.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- blackboxxx 15y agoAnd these wildly inappropriate links, you remove them, correct?