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As you say, dealing with the UI is fine. Dealing with the bureaucrats isn't. Having your account banned and your new article marked for spam by a very abrasive

As you say, dealing with the UI is fine. Dealing with the bureaucrats isn't. Having your account banned and your new article marked for spam by a very abrasive person, when trying to add legitimate content, rather than being supported through the maze of rules, as happened to a colleague the other day. That is a problem which stops meaningful content being added.

ErrantX 12y ago
Link? I can probably help :)
- bjelkeman-again 12y ago
  Thanks. I am sitting down with Wikimedia Sweden next week to take a serious look at how we can add some of our rather good content without tripping all the wrong triggers. If it doesn't work I'll ping you. No need to agonise over it until this doesn't work, but appreciate the offer.
_delirium 12y ago
I think false positives on spam are a significant problem for Wikipedia, but false negatives are also a significant problem (maybe a bigger one), which is part of what makes it tough. If you hit "random article" a bunch of times, look for biographies on currently living people of relatively low levels of importance. I would estimate about 20% of those are clearly puff pieces, either written by a PR agency, a university/company publicity department, the person themselves, someone they know well, etc. It's not the end of the world since those articles also tend to be not that frequently read (articles on high-profile people are much harder for a PR agency to control the content of), but it does make me take Wikipedia somewhat less seriously when such a large proportion of random pages I land on are obviously written by a PR hack, using the kind of diction you expect to find in a press release or an official university bio, rather than language you would expect to find in a respectable encyclopedia. While bios are the biggest area, there's a bunch of other areas where I've learned not to pay attention to Wikipedia because it's too spammy: anything to do with tourism (full of booster and hotel spam), any company except very high-profile ones, many non-profit organizations, etc. It's good when writing about people/things that no longer exist, though; the articles about 19th-century French companies don't read like they were written by a PR agency.
mxfh 12y ago
Editing is smallest issue with Wikipedia. For anybody who does an occasional 5-10 edits per year. The admins leave no moment unused to point out that you're doing something wrong (most likely based on Guideline CA 13, where CA stands for cryptic abbreviation₁) and in a lot of cases you're left to the god will of a single person. The whole appeal system needs to be streamlined, it can't be that there a multiple entry point's for a deleted article, solely because it was deleted for different reasons. It's the bureaucrats that drive people away, compared to Wikipedia the German tax forms/appeals are outright user friendly by now. ₁ I see no good reasons why abbreviations should not be expanded by default in discussion pages, makes it look way less intimidating to the casual user. [For Wiki-Admin Eyes Only] If there any admins reading here: can someone please undelete GitLab? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_undeletion#GitLab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_undelet...
- tim333 12y ago
  I put up another GitLab article for you - the previous was deleted for lack of links indication notability. I linked a couple of TheNextWeb articles that will hopefully do. It's kind of hard work this stuff finding references and the like. (I'm not an admin, just an occasional contributor). Thinking about those kind of issues I think they could improve the friendliness of the process by sending helpful / apologetic emails along the lines of "Dear Mr X, Sorry we had to take down your article because we need ... blah blah... If you can find the references just click this and do this. Best, Wikipedia team." Rather than the current situation where the article just disappears and there are somewhat cryptic comments under the talk tab. I don't think it would be terribly hard to implement.
  - mxfh 12y ago
    Thanks for your efforts (though you might have violated some policy, don't ask me), I (User:Diskurs), I already added external sources for review here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mark_Arsten#GitLab_.5BRequest_for_Undeletion.5D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mark_Arsten#GitLab_.... feel free to add them. I don't understand were wikipedia's fixation (other than the name and origin) comes from to handle everything as a wiki page, were any kind of ticketing system might be way more transparent.
bigbugbag 12y ago
This is nothing new, something similar happened to me 9 years ago. I had just started contributing to wikipedia, a couple hours daily, then after about one week an admin decided one of my article title was typographically wrong, after a couple silent reverts from him I got to his personal discussion page to ask why and he brandished some arcane internal rules. I checked and he was wrong so I told him so but he refused to acknowledge this and suddenly I was faced with a bunch of people picking on me. I was followed everywhere i contributed and all my edits were reverted by seemingly fans of said admin who also showed up to gang vote against me in all attempt at resolving conflict. So I went to the public wikipedia space to ask for help and discovered said admin had silently modified the internal global wikipedia policy to reflect his view and it's all downhill from there. I started receiving threats and at this point I was spending 4 hours daily on wikipedia but barely contributed a thing to the content anymore. After a bunch of ineffective bans I worked around, all my contribution were deleted on ground that I had no right to add content while banned. Then came the messages from people experiencing the same situation who supported me because I stood up, I got tipped that a bunch of admins were discussing me on a secret page and escalated the issue until it reached jimbo wales himself who dismissed the whole thing as he said he fully trusted his admins. Then I discovered that other people went through the same process before me, I wrote an article on the importance of newcomers for a healthy wikipedia long term and the bias of the power structure and a weakness of wikipedia that would allow a few individuals to ruin the whole project. For this I received a permanent ban from all wikimedia project and a request from the top of the power structure to delete all my contribution to wikipedia side projects, wikitravel just deleted everything no question asked. So i did the same thing others did before me I replaced a key article of wikipedia with this very story that happened to and reverted my change so now this story would live hidden in a page history inside wikipedia and stopped contributing to wikipedia to do something worthy of my time instead. back then wikipedia was already a totally different thing that what it pretended to be and imho the problem wikipedia has cannot be solved with a better editor.

ErrantX 12y ago

Link? I can probably help :)

bjelkeman-again 12y ago
Thanks. I am sitting down with Wikimedia Sweden next week to take a serious look at how we can add some of our rather good content without tripping all the wrong triggers. If it doesn't work I'll ping you. No need to agonise over it until this doesn't work, but appreciate the offer.

_delirium 12y ago

I think false positives on spam are a significant problem for Wikipedia, but false negatives are also a significant problem (maybe a bigger one), which is part of what makes it tough. If you hit "random article" a bunch of times, look for biographies on currently living people of relatively low levels of importance. I would estimate about 20% of those are clearly puff pieces, either written by a PR agency, a university/company publicity department, the person themselves, someone they know well, etc. It's not the end of the world since those articles also tend to be not that frequently read (articles on high-profile people are much harder for a PR agency to control the content of), but it does make me take Wikipedia somewhat less seriously when such a large proportion of random pages I land on are obviously written by a PR hack, using the kind of diction you expect to find in a press release or an official university bio, rather than language you would expect to find in a respectable encyclopedia. While bios are the biggest area, there's a bunch of other areas where I've learned not to pay attention to Wikipedia because it's too spammy: anything to do with tourism (full of booster and hotel spam), any company except very high-profile ones, many non-profit organizations, etc. It's good when writing about people/things that no longer exist, though; the articles about 19th-century French companies don't read like they were written by a PR agency.

mxfh 12y ago

Editing is smallest issue with Wikipedia. For anybody who does an occasional 5-10 edits per year. The admins leave no moment unused to point out that you're doing something wrong (most likely based on Guideline CA 13, where CA stands for cryptic abbreviation₁) and in a lot of cases you're left to the god will of a single person. The whole appeal system needs to be streamlined, it can't be that there a multiple entry point's for a deleted article, solely because it was deleted for different reasons. It's the bureaucrats that drive people away, compared to Wikipedia the German tax forms/appeals are outright user friendly by now. ₁ I see no good reasons why abbreviations should not be expanded by default in discussion pages, makes it look way less intimidating to the casual user. [For Wiki-Admin Eyes Only] If there any admins reading here: can someone please undelete GitLab? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_undeletion#GitLab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_undelet...

tim333 12y ago
I put up another GitLab article for you - the previous was deleted for lack of links indication notability. I linked a couple of TheNextWeb articles that will hopefully do. It's kind of hard work this stuff finding references and the like. (I'm not an admin, just an occasional contributor). Thinking about those kind of issues I think they could improve the friendliness of the process by sending helpful / apologetic emails along the lines of "Dear Mr X, Sorry we had to take down your article because we need ... blah blah... If you can find the references just click this and do this. Best, Wikipedia team." Rather than the current situation where the article just disappears and there are somewhat cryptic comments under the talk tab. I don't think it would be terribly hard to implement.
- mxfh 12y ago
  Thanks for your efforts (though you might have violated some policy, don't ask me), I (User:Diskurs), I already added external sources for review here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mark_Arsten#GitLab_.5BRequest_for_Undeletion.5D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mark_Arsten#GitLab_.... feel free to add them. I don't understand were wikipedia's fixation (other than the name and origin) comes from to handle everything as a wiki page, were any kind of ticketing system might be way more transparent.

bigbugbag 12y ago

This is nothing new, something similar happened to me 9 years ago. I had just started contributing to wikipedia, a couple hours daily, then after about one week an admin decided one of my article title was typographically wrong, after a couple silent reverts from him I got to his personal discussion page to ask why and he brandished some arcane internal rules. I checked and he was wrong so I told him so but he refused to acknowledge this and suddenly I was faced with a bunch of people picking on me. I was followed everywhere i contributed and all my edits were reverted by seemingly fans of said admin who also showed up to gang vote against me in all attempt at resolving conflict. So I went to the public wikipedia space to ask for help and discovered said admin had silently modified the internal global wikipedia policy to reflect his view and it's all downhill from there. I started receiving threats and at this point I was spending 4 hours daily on wikipedia but barely contributed a thing to the content anymore. After a bunch of ineffective bans I worked around, all my contribution were deleted on ground that I had no right to add content while banned. Then came the messages from people experiencing the same situation who supported me because I stood up, I got tipped that a bunch of admins were discussing me on a secret page and escalated the issue until it reached jimbo wales himself who dismissed the whole thing as he said he fully trusted his admins. Then I discovered that other people went through the same process before me, I wrote an article on the importance of newcomers for a healthy wikipedia long term and the bias of the power structure and a weakness of wikipedia that would allow a few individuals to ruin the whole project. For this I received a permanent ban from all wikimedia project and a request from the top of the power structure to delete all my contribution to wikipedia side projects, wikitravel just deleted everything no question asked. So i did the same thing others did before me I replaced a key article of wikipedia with this very story that happened to and reverted my change so now this story would live hidden in a page history inside wikipedia and stopped contributing to wikipedia to do something worthy of my time instead. back then wikipedia was already a totally different thing that what it pretended to be and imho the problem wikipedia has cannot be solved with a better editor.