These days even much higher quality content will be deleted. For something to be accepted now it needs to be like something written by a professional writer and follow all kinds of guidelines for style, citations and much more immediately. Nobody fixes issues anymore, if there's any issues or something is not very well written it will be deleted immediately.
The time is ripe for something like Knol to be re-introduced.
Even before Knol, we had something like this, and they were called personal websites. People would use them to document their passions (or anything, really) and you could find them on Google. People are probably so addicted to centralization and services, though, and Google's approach to ranking so overwhelmingly works against that style now, that it's probably unworkable to argue for relying on that again.
Actually it is mostly selected by person rather than content or style. Mostly evidenced by the fact that accepted edits are mostly done by the same people. This is at least true for the German Wikipedia, but I have no doubt that the English one isn't any different.
In short, Wikipedia tries to discourage writing about yourself, which also applies to doing so through a representative.
1: Intent matters and advocacy is not permitted on Wikipedia. A lot of people don't like this rule or think it can be ignored if they don't demand payment for it.
2: You can't editing Wikipedia to bring awareness of something while at the same time fulfill the notability requirements. The top 50 academics are important for their fields, and can also be completely unknown for the rest of the world. As an example, people in sport, music and cinema are much more common to have an Wikipedia article about them then academics. This does not mean academics are less important to society, but it does reflect notability.
3: As others has marked, writing a article about yourself or by a representative is heavily discouraged. This runs in the same vein as advocacy.
In this specific case I tried to search for the article/event, but neither of the search engine gave me any results, to the point where I now would like a source from gscott about that story.
I can update pages about some topics (e.g. backup, tape drives, backup products) and nothing gets deleted or changed. But there are others where everything I update gets reverted with a comment like "reverted good faith edit from ____"
I'm not a scientist, however, this sounds like it could be a legitimate study. If it is, what is the control group? 50 men doing the same?
The actually data, as given in the study, is that the first 1 edit has a 2% higher rate of reverting than males, with each further edit a decreased revert rate to the point where female users are less likely to be reverted than male users once they hit their 16th edit.
The statement that "Apparently editors identifying as a woman get rolled back far more often then men" and the actually research result is quite far from each other.
It is often used in non-english Wikipedias as default for all articles, on enwiki however only a very limited number of articles are protected in this way.
However review guidelines usually don't ask for a check of correctness, but against spam and other obviously inappropriate content.
E.g.
[Christopher Columbus]
is a person
is italian
is an explorer, navigator
birth 1451/08/25 - 1451/10/31
death 1506/05/20
is known for the exploration of the AmericasI ran into the bugs in the default web-based client available from the graph.global homepage, though, and I'm not especially fond of the opinionated choices it makes about overriding browser-native behavior for dealing with navigation.
I made an attempt back in November at beginning to implement an alternative frontend for it. I have an "instance" (if you can call it that) running at <https://graph.5apps.com/LP/streamline/>, but right now you can only use it for read-only access to w2g. I will eventually fix this to allow graph changes, too, because my original motivation also included how cumbersome I noticed it was when entering new triples and linking together existing entities. I haven't worked out the right interaction for that yet. See this recent note <https://hypothes.is/a/RdwnFLRlEeu1mD-tdfIKCQ> about adding a command-line interface to w2g.
Granted, it has similar whitespace problems as your criticism of Wikidata. An even more streamlined version that is tailored to be accessed from the terminal is, I think, more in line with what you'd probably like to see.
Which database of statements is this?
More, it might be easy to generate readable text, but accurate, correct text is a wholly different matter.
This sounds strange. Few years ago, when I was still in academia, I used to make small contributions to Wikipedia articles in my field (theoretical physics) and even smaller contributions to all sorts or articles (like fixing grammatical errors or adding "source needed" -tags). I checked my Wikipedia history now and none of my edits were ever reverted.
What I sometimes see on Wikipedia is details of some new and obscure, sometimes even controversial research in a general overview article. It's probably the researchers themselves advertising their own research and trying to make it look more important. Sometimes this is probably even done in good faith. I wonder if this is what happened to the women in your story
[citation needed]
Can't find the NPR article based on your description.
This is how some language versions of Wikipedia work, for example the German Wikipedia. Edits by new editors or IP-addresses are not live immediately but are put into a special review state for a more experienced editor to confirm the change. The English language version only uses this for a subset of pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium
However, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Fact: Earth is flat.
Pros: Earth is flat, it's obvious. [direct evidence]
Cons: Fact: [Picture of the Earth from the space] shows that Earth is round.
Fact: Picture of the Earth from the space
Personally I prefer if Wikipedia just says “earth is a sphere” and links citations, than makes me wade through a bunch of bullshit and evaluate it all for myself.
A Wikipedia 2.0 is needed... one where edits are put into a queue rather then having someone come in ten minutes later and delete your edit simply because it is live immediately.
Some years ago there was an NPR story on women in academia and how one decided to get together 50 top female academics in their fields and update Wikipedia in their subject matter that they hold PHD's in and work at Universities teaching about. Waste of time, all deleted.
Wikipedia is great but its emphasis is on deletion. A new Wikipedia needs to be made with an emphasis on addition and depth.