He attracted the ire of some wackjob when he referenced printed materials. Given his somewhat unique position, he had some stuff digitized and posted, and returned to Wikipedia a few months later to find that almost everything he did was reverted.
I'm glad that people put up with the nonsense and contribute to Wikipedia... but what a shit experience.
Were these published documents, which reviewers could independently obtain and verify?
That doesn't stop some of the people at WP from reverting everything. Which means OP's friend is left to either leave it reverted, or trawl through the various arcane dispute resolution / meta pages, arguing their case, building consensus, to eventually get people saying it should be left in. Or saying it should be left out because those meta pages sometime feel as random as tossing a coin.
Unsurprisingly this optimizes for people who tolerate vast amounts of meta bullshit, and not people who know what they're talking about and know what the good sources are.
But facts ("Here's the catalog number in the New York Public Library, and how to request it via interlibrary loan.") shouldn't require consensus.
Especially for cases like that - if someone has more 'sway' on Wikipedia than you, they can (and will often) just say something like "Thanks for the source - I'll verify and if it says what you think it says, I'll add it in to the article." Then do nothing, ever again. In fact, unreliable citations, or citations that don't actually say what the citer thinks they say, that can be easily checked online are far more acceptable on Wikipedia than citing a book.
Inertia like this leaves useless pages like "Oplomachi" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oplomachi) live way after they should have been merged, as well as leading to the deletion of useful pages/sections/references.
The major articles, which are more likely to get attention, tend to be less dysfunctional than niche interests. That said, there are of course far more articles relating to niche interests than there are major articles.
At that point it was too late... anything he did was on some tickler list and waging wiki-war was not worth the time investment.
Then someone can link form Wikipedia to Wikia.
Wikia isn't just for TV shows and games. For example, the text editor Vim has a Wikia section: vim.wikia.com
There's just no justification for that. Even if a policy required all references to be available via the internet, the author fulfilled that requirement.
If this was allowed, and Donald Trump is putting up his documents on the internet and referencing them on his wikipedia page would you allow it? It can do a lot of damage and people and organizations do this all the time and every day.
This is the kind of behavior the policy exists to prevent. Its well known that it isn't perfect Please read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
Edit: ... their own unpublished stuff.
http://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_Issuer_Identification_Nu... that page seems like a decent example though. That seems like a really useful resource if I were looking for that information. I can't figure out why it would have been deleted.
Somebody somewhere is maintaining the official list. If you start a new bank, you can just make up your own Issuer Identification Number and expect to interoperate with the rest of the financial industry. Since someone somewhere has a official list, Wikipedia should publish or link to that official list.
I suppose if the official list is "secret" or unpublished, then the question is trickier. Even in that case, I think the best option would be for Wikipedia to offer an external link to someone compiling or maintaining such a list.
- Not Comprehensive - Not wholly accurate - Difficult to keep updated - Not all sourced/vergiable or unsourced
Which is totally fair, except that would apply to a lot of articles...
This is the protective wall around the Wikipedia editor's kingdom.
Seems like pretty good reasoning to me. The list is unsourced and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Plus it's not a notable topic, something I'd also agree with.
Perhaps there ought to be a "wiki facts" website where such material could be published and editors could attempt to ascertain its validity and publish any facts that can be confirmed, even if not with typical encyclopedic quality sources.
I just found it annoying because if you look through Wikipedia's [List of Open Source games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game...) is pretty much full of less notable abandonware, and it seems like some people just got a chip on their shoulder for this game's article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_SQL_Ser...
This is in no way encyclopedic and violates several policies and guidelines on lists and external links https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_SQL_Ser...
Seems reasonable but I almost wish their could be a tier 2 Wikipedia where people could share this type of a time investment. Maybe that's what the various undeletion sites will wind up doing!
It's amazing how so many people have the same problems with WP and they are never addressed. Comments here are getting tons of up votes due to frustration.
My questions are:
- Does WP leadership really know the extent to which people have stopped editing due to frustration?
- Do they not fix it because they don't want to change, don't know a solution, or are bullied by their own editors?
- Are they aware that WP tends to attract people with this trait and mitigating these effects would make a massive difference?
I feel like the Wikipedia project is one of the better run communities anywhere on the Internet, and that we don't perceive them that way mostly due to the absolutely spectacular scale that they operate at.
Note that I'm not saying they're the most pleasant community in the world to work with. They aren't! But that's because they're doing so much, working with so many people at so many different levels of engagement. Hacker News is a trifling community by comparison, and look how much work goes in to trying to maintain norms and civility here.
I feel like the Wikipedia community has bent over backwards to understand the concerns that completionist interest groups have about logging every possible startup, every open source developer of any note, every open source project, &c. They spend more time discussing their norms and processes about subject inclusion than any other meta-concern.
I do not feel like the tech community meets Wikipedia halfway. Every argument I see in HN threads about "deletionism" seems rooted in the idea that an Internet encyclopedia need not have strict standards for inclusion because the marginal cost of an additional article is zero. But that's simply a false statement; it's based on the false premise that the only cost for Wikipedia for articles is storage space. You can't read the Wikipedia project charter for 5 minutes without realizing that storage is their least important cost.
I think this mischaracterizes WhitneyLand's fear. The worry is not that the individual edits are crucially important, it's that without a welcoming community Wikipedia will eventually run out of editors willing to do keep the site alive. While the content of Wikipedia won't disappear as a result, one fear is that over time the information will become static and eventually outdated. Perhaps this is acceptable, as older encyclopedias can be a snapshot of their time.
A greater worry that some have is that Wikipedia may change from being a relatively unbiased collection of information to cherry-picking and displaying only one side of the facts. I think it's a legitimate fear that some revisions are being refused because they don't match the desired narrative, and that the "rules" are being (selectively) applied as post-hoc justification. While this may not be an overwhelming problem yet, it's possible that a more inclusive community will prevent it from becoming a greater problem in the future.
tptacek, I appreciate your passion, but actually I don't even feel strongly about the deletiionist/completionist issue. I also don't have any pet subjects that I feel are unjustly excluded.
It is about needlessly driving away good contributions in situations where there is no net benefit.
I don't want to generalize too much, but there are people who care more about the letter of the wikipedia process and debate than they do about the net affect on content quality.
Why not let editors build reputation based on customer service to their peers and to occasional contributors? If such a system was designed and motivated well enough, I believe it could be one way to help the situation. I actually journaled a while writing about ideas to discuss, but lost interest because I didn't know anyone who would care.