1. Wikimedia foundation is doing literally nothing. It is painfully obvious that they should hire people who would sit all day and review actions of admins (their bans, reverts, edit wars.. yes admins participate in them too, but nobody does anything about it). Obviously we end up with a question "who watches the watchmen", but this could be made all public too.

For example Wikipedia has a role called CheckUser - what is a person that has special access rights to check IP addresses of all other users. This is mainly used to see if a person doesn't use multiple sock puppet accounts to make various types of abuse (e.g. vote manipulation).

I know a local Wikipedia, where the CheckUser literally refuses to check if admins don't have sock puppet accounts. This means that the admins can literally make any sock puppet they want and always win any vote, including future votes for a new CheckUser.

What can you do about it? Nothing.

Can you write about this to Wikimedia Foundation? Nope. There even isnt any official way to contact them. They basically let local Wikipedia branches run themselves.

2A. You write a lot of text to defend literal garbage. That admin added 80 THOUSAND incredibly low effort redirects related to woman breasts.

"Titty tumors", "Segmental removal of the titties", "Constructions of the booby", "Hypoplastic tits", "Atrophy of the titties"...

Please explain to me how this is any good?

If a new user made such garbage, it would be speed deleted and the user IP banned immediately.

2B. So basically an experienced Wikipedia user still got their article speed deleted, had to fight to get it back.. and then somehow what I wrote is wrong. So to sum up, if you dont like the facts, you ignore the facts? I realy dont understand what is your point here.

3. Again, you seem to miss the point. Someone asked for an example of a political article that was problematic. So I provided an article. You can look at the edit history to see that there were literal wars about everything there.

Also in case of articles about living people, politicians etc. it is often quite clear that said politicians or their aides are the ones who are tasked with guarding the article, editing it.

> Please let us know how the article is not neutral.

Do you represent Wikipedia or Wikipedia foundation in any way?

You did not provide one link nor citation in your entire 400-word rant.

Hey, please explain to me why "Constructions of the booby", or "Atrophy of the titties" are things that should be on Wikipedia? I guess you cannot defend this, so you just change the subject. Or maybe you are a sexist, who thinks that this is ok.

Why do you demand citations when Wikipedia is discussed? For any other topic, you dont demand them, or dont use them.

I guess you are just some common troll, probably a Wikipedia admin. Joke's on me, since I even bothered to reply.

You crossed badly into flamewar and personal attack in this thread. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing before. We ban accounts that do it repeatedly, so please stop and don't do it again.

You can make your substantive points without any of that, and it's also in your interests to do so!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Those articles aren’t on the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delet... — https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delet... (Edit: The references show that they were on the Wikipedia, but were deleted in 2015, i.e. before #MeToo. Also, the offending admin was topic banned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... )

I am demanding citations because you’re making contentious accusations based on half-truths.

This will be my last reply to you; I do not think a productive conversation is possible at this point.

It is clear from when he originally brought it up that those articles had been, eventually, removed. Indeed, part of his point (and a relevant issue, I believe) was to ask why this took so long. Since this must be clear to you, it seems that your comment is disingenuous.

I agree, the Wikipedia process is very slow, and often times a lot of discussion happens before something is finally done. That’s a natural consequence of a process where consensus, reliable sourcing, and a desire to be neutral and accurate determines what is acceptable and not acceptable.

I much prefer the process to what Reddit does, which is, in many subreddits, to quickly ban anyone who goes against the group think of a given subreddit, even if the subreddit is wrong.

In Wikipedia, as a rule of thumb, is that the truth does win out, even if it takes a while to get there. As one example, while Tara Reade’s now-discredited accusation [1] against Joe Biden was all over numerous subreddits and presented as objective fact, [2] the Wikipedia was taking a slower, more measured approach to reporting the accusations which ultimately ended up being far more accurate than what Reddit was doing at the time. [3]

As another case, a lot of noise was made over how horrible the Wikipedia was because Clarice Phelps didn’t have a Wikipedia article. She has one today. [4]

[1] This probably needs a citation. How about https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-74-former-biden-s... or, yeah, since it’s so heavily sourced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_sexual_assault_alleg...

[2] For example, https://old.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/it5n91/multip...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Joe_Biden/Archive_10#Tara...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarice_Phelps

[5] Wikipedia has a hard time with allowing articles about cool open source projects and languages. I agree this is really annoying, since it means I have to dig through GitHub, forums like this one, or (for fonts) Google Fonts to find high quality open source programs or content.

[6] Adding footnotes without a reference to the footnote is an old alt.sysadmin.recovery tradition

I wonder how many people have been to the scary devil monastery, or still know what it is.

Yeah, I used to love that place. Alas, the last time I was there, I got in a bad flame war which left a sour taste in my mouth. These days, the place is (mostly) dead, although they did have a nice eulogy for Brian Kantor (who actually killfiled me because of said flame war)

[1] It seems to have picked up some during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020

You sidestepped the point about disingenuously pointing out that the articles that the original commenter was very clear had been already taken down, were not there.

Do you think that being better than Reddit is a high bar?

I do not think I side steped the issue. Of the three issues the OP originally brought up, he only stated that one of those issues were resolved by the Wikipedia (and he quoted Reddit instead of a more direct source, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... ).

While the post was quite heated and it’s hard to separate facts from expressions of anger, to me he strongly implied the other two haven’t been dealt with or resolved, while, in fact, all the issues are resolved or are being discussed, in Wikipedia’s typical style of discussing things to death (I remember when discussing whether to host pro-pedophile advocacy was a thing on Wikipedia, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pedophile_movement/Archiv... )

I brought up Reddit because the OP brought up Reddit; I agree they are horribly inaccurate, and if something I read on Reddit makes me angry, I check other sources to make sure I’m not getting worked up over a lie.

I believe you did. In rvba’s item 2A, he is clear that the issue was addressed, after “an incredible amount of time”. Your reply provides the information that the articles no longer exist on the platform, as if it were a refutation of rvba’s point. This is what I am calling disingenuous, and I think my characterization is warranted.

EDIT: But perhaps I am wrong or confused. Wouldn’t be the first time. In that case, please clarify what, exactly, was the purpose of your citations that began “Those articles aren’t on the Wikipedia:”.

Thank you for the discussion. I have edited my parent posts to better clarify my position. For the record, I am no fan of Wikipedia’s “Deletionist” movement, and didn’t edit there for years because I did not approve of their wide spread deletions.

I was, when pointing out the articles are not on the Wikipedia, answering the direct question “please explain to me why "Constructions of the b—by", or "Atrophy of the ti—ies" are things that should be on Wikipedia?” (I have gone to the bother of bowdlerizing the cuss words) where the answer is “they haven’t been on the Wikipedia since 2015”.

That poster was being, to say the least, quite disingenuous asking me that question: They were making a direct personal insult against me, and they were stating that I advocated a position that I do not advocate. In other words, they were asking me a “are you still beating your wife?” type of question, and they worded their question as if those redirects are still on the Wikipedia.

Indeed, a point you missed they never stated the redirects went away.

Let’s look at what they actually said: >>>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.<<<

Did this poster state the pages were removed? No, they did not. The poster only stated they they “[did] anything” with the admin, inaccurately stated he wasn’t banned (he was topic banned, which is a pretty serious punishment on the Wikipedia), and the OP never said what happened with the redirects.

A reasonable person reading what the OP wrote would not be given the impression the redirects were removed.

Now, back to me: I merely stated that the Wikipedia is a little more loose about redirects than about articles (“if you can make a redirect to something, it’s usually good to do so, even if the redirect uses a term which is not politically correct”); I agree that the particular redirects the OP incorrectly accused me of supporting go beyond the pale, and are examples of why I said “usually good” and not always good. The Wikipedia community agrees they went beyond the pale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...

It would be like if someone asked me “Why is it that pro-pedophile advocacy should be on the Wikipedia?”; it is in no way “disingenuous” to answer “that hasn’t been on the Wikipedia since 2007”, even if they previously pointed out that the Wikipedia did “something” about pedophilia a while ago, and even if I previously said that Wikipedia errs on the side of supporting free speech.

Personally, I think it’s pretty disingenuous to defend someone who was flaming me so hard, @dang had to intervene, and to incorrectly imply they OP said something they never actually said when falsely claiming I was being “disingenuous”. But that’s just my opinion.

It seems that we interpret language in radically different ways. This last comment of yours brings that home, as I find your analysis of the poster’s statements wildly off the mark. If you had simply disagreed with my interpretation initially when I said “Since this must be clear to you”, I could have retracted my characterization and we’d have been done. As it is, I must acknowledge that what seemed obvious to me might not be obvious to you, and, therefore, it is possible you were not being intentionally disingenuous. I’m sorry if my inferences wounded you; I should have taken more care in considering alternative possible, even if unlikely, readings.