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Wikipedia has become the worst place on the internet for me, it's so addictive that I've been on it for decades despite being banned from editing because I vand
by xacky 3y ago
Wikipedia has become the worst place on the internet for me, it's so addictive that I've been on it for decades despite being banned from editing because I vandalized it years ago. If you look at the list of "long term abuse" on Wikipedia you see a lot of addicted people taking out their frustration on Wikipedia. There is not much true difference between an admin and a vandal, in fact a lot of admins became vandals themselves, including one this month. The deletionists are the worst of all, the digital version of book burners.
- robjan 3y agoWhat part do you find addictive? Is it the endless depth of links or the ability to search for anything you think of or something else?
- xacky 3y agoIt's basically like a endless library but with big gaps missing on the shelves, and you know that the books that are missing there were destroyed intentionally, and attempts to bring new books to the library are sabotaged. I hate parts of Wikipedia like articles for deletion, where endless debates around notability are held. The fact other sites monetize Wikipedia's rejected content infuriates me too.
- 101011 3y agoIf I may ask, how did you 'vandalize' it? It sounds like the definition of this word has some additional connotation within Wikipedia.
- arrowsmith 3y ago"Vandalizing" in the Wikipedia context means editing pages to add stupid, offensive, trollish, or deliberately incorrect content. It happens all the time, which is why some pages (mainly those about controversial topics) have additional protections to make it harder for untrusted people to edit them.
- PopePompus 3y agoIt is amazing how frequently Wikipedia is vandalized. It happens several times per second. Much of it is removed automatically by bots that will roll back edits which contain strings like "qeqeqeqewqeerrttt". On weekends, you can expect something like "List of Sluts" to appear on the articles for many highschools - they will disappear within a minute or so. You can configure Wikipedia to send you an email whenever a certain article is edited. I monitor several thousand articles that way, and remove malicious edits. Lots of editors do that, and vandalism is usually cleaned up very quickly.
- xacky 3y agoIt's a long story, I was a legitimate editor for a about a year and just built up a grudge which turned into making more unhelpful edits until I got banned. Wikipedia is not a good environment for when things go wrong.
- drawkward 3y ago>Wikipedia is not a good environment for when things go wrong. I want that, when it is being said by someone who >built up a grudge which turned into making more unhelpful edits
- simbolit 3y agoI don't want to judge prematurely, but have you ever thought about the possibility that perhaps you are the problem?
- droopyEyelids 3y agoSomehow, vandalism is associated with my account, even though it's only attributed to an IP address, not my logged-in user. They still let me edit though!
- chris_wot 3y agoI got banned for life from Wikipedia, because I commented on a request for adminship from a user the literally banned forever 9 weeks ago. I wrote countless articles for them, but they didn’t give a crap. I now contribute photos to commons. Don’t bother contributing to Wikipedia. Only people who fiddle around with changing URLs, categories and templates are appreciated. It’s not worthwhile putting in the effort.
- simbolit 3y agoDepends what your goal is. If you want to feel appreciated, I agree, wikipedia is a horrible place. If you want to contribute to making human knowledge available to everyone, it's the best place we have. My personal rule: don't interact with the community, unless absolutely necessary. has served me well in the last 18 years.
- terminous 3y agoIt sounds like you're not addicted to Wikipedia, you're addicted to imposing your particular point of view on everyone else, and all the messy Internet drama that results from that. Things don't go your way in a collaboration and so you "vandalize" other people's contributions, and then blame the platform that "addicted" you? It sounds like if you joined any open source, open collaboration project, or volunteer organization, you'd be a huge pain to work with unless everyone agreed with you all the time.
- dang 3y agoPlease don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html