That list is fascinating. Like the obscure Canadian illustrator [1] who for a decade has been repeatedly trying to put herself into Wikipedia despite being told she's a "non-notable" artist.

I'm frankly amazed that enough people have the time to track this nonsense and stamp it out that it ends up being self-correcting. It's not just about time, either; chasing bad edits and prosecuting bad users must be a huge chore in terms of the sheer amount of work needed. I always find it amazing how horrible the tools are (like how almost anything, including having discussions, is done by editing pages; how can anyone have a discussion in such a disorganized way?), which surely must be a hindrance to productivity or to the ability to detect and deal with constant abuse. But seemingly it works. Maybe there are better tools that pro-level admins know about?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Anan...

There are a whole bunch of little utilities like browser extensions and bookmarklets and even an entire in-house cloud infrastructure that is used for hosting various kinds of bots and web-based tools for automating workflows. It's all very ad-hoc, crude and not very well organized or publicized. There have been a few efforts over the years to create a repository for all of the little tools to help with exposure and some level of vetting for security risks. I'm not sure any of those projects were ever successful (or even made it past the planning stage) but there has been some appetite for improving that ecosystem.

They have excess money as an org, why don’t they hire SWEs to improve it?

My impression has been that the project has never been fully scoped and kind of bounced around between teams with nobody ever fully dedicated to seeing it through to completion. Scope creep and a whole lot of competing ideas, on top of a genuinely hard to solve set of problems has caused it to get put on the back burner more than once.

Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough.

I should disclose that I am a former employee of Wikimedia, however, my impression is based solely on reading about the projects on publicly available project planning pages. That is, on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org

They're constantly hiring engineers.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/jobs/#section-8

She tried to add herself to a list called “professional Canadian painter”, and from what I see, she is a professional Canadian painter for 10+ years.

But not notable. Unless notable for long-term Wikipedia abuse. Maybe eventually she gets mentioned on a news site for that, and then she can finally have an article.

This is my favorite:

> ... also known for hoaxing at List of Crayola crayon colors. Obsessed with inflatable, bursting, popping, and bouncing objects

It's going to be a Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, mark my words. Those LTA pages often contains a lot of personal information which would violate GDPR in Europe, at least based on what I've heard from NOYB so far. Some editors have expressed their concerns about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Long-term_abuse...?

On Wikipedia, every edit can be hidden so that even admins can't access it.[1]

Therefore, if legal problems arise with these pages, they probably will just delete the legally problematic info and hide every edit done before.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight

There are actually some proposals to mass-delete the LTA pages but they all came to a naught.