It's also nonsense expecting articles to be personally written by doctors and scientists who are also not political in any way is just basically not understanding Wikipedia it's not a primary source.
I remember as a child, reading an article about a man who got up every day and logged into Wikipedia and wrote articles about Native American artists. This was in the 90s, and I thought the whole thing sounded wonderful. So I signed up for an account and became an editor. I've maybe contributed 20 or 30 edits over the past 20+ years. That initial influx of people I think has given the impression, or, perhaps the media, that there is a huge army of people maintaining the site.
I wonder if, as the culture has ossified, fewer and fewer people stuck around as editors long enough.
Either driven away by other editors/admins, not finding it fulfilling enough as so many topics are already “taken”, or simply didn’t think they did enough to be eligible during their time (correctly or not).
Or, I suppose, they don’t WANT to move from editor to admin for some reason.
Is admin really the natural progression after editor, as you seem to be assuming? IMHO, the interest in the "project" part of Wikipedia that is required to be an admin isn't intrinsically linked to being a prolific and dedicated editor.
Although having a decent number of edits is a de facto requirement for adminship.
It seems like the natural progression if someone is interested. You can delete or lock people from editing articles with it, which seems useful if you like editing Wikipedia.
Eh, you're not allowed to use the extra tools without consensus from the rest of the community, so end of day you don't really gain much, and you can do pretty much everything without them.
(By way of experiment: one particular admin had their admin bit disabled and it took people a over a year to notice that they'd done so.)
Personally I still think 90% of the regular editors should have the tools anyway, but people kept inflating the requirements, or actually rejecting admins on the basis of "we have too many already"
As tomodachi94 points out, being a wiki admin ideally should not be a big deal. It just sort of became that way on English Wikipedia, unfortunately.
Wikidata editor here. On some of the older Wikimedia projects (and English Wikipedia/enwiki especially), adminship comes with a large amount of extra baggage and is viewed as a somewhat prestigious position (but I have only seen this on enwiki, not Wikidata or other projects. On Wikidata, adminship is mostly a formality for established editors.)
Keep in mind that enwiki has the largest amount of history and bureaucracy out of all of the Wikimedia projects, due to being the first in a long line.
> The problem 10 years ago was that the electorate was far too picky and rejected candidates who should have been promoted. Today, every potential candidate knows this and self-selects themselves out of standing. There aren't enough outliers who do stand to make much statistical conclusion from there.
Yeah. Everybody got wise to the cliques and power struggles of WP and are put off trying to contribute to it as either an editor (changes instantly reverted) and therefore stops them in their tracks in eventually growing to be an admin.
Same deal as StackOverflow. Petty tiny power users wield that power like a maniac because that's the way they get their jollies, make the experience a chore for the normies, so no newcomers join, and on the site goes, in a wierd reversal of the eternal september effect.
In other cases in real life before the web, i might argue that motorcycles and buicks and HAM radio dealt with this, they got locked into a local culture maxima and have been trapped there ever since, growing stale / ever less appealing to newcomers.
Sorry. Just the generation gap that for my generational cohort, Buicks were reputed to be 'rich old people cars' and therefore not even considered when we would go out shopping for cars.
Whereas in their heyday of 19x0's American car culture, Buicks were right there in the race with Ford Mustangs and Chevrolet Corvettes and such.
I used to run a torrent site with a very significant user population. I would promote great users to mod positions. On average they would last 6 months before they became Hitlerstalins and I would be forced to fire them.
I wouldn't go as far as to say they are 'corrupted', just that they are extracting their payment in a non-monetary form.
i.e. There are no 'unpaid mods', at least for any significant period of time.
It's just that typically in real life we try to avoid setting up relationships were the only compensation is payment in social status, petty office maneuvers, etc..., since it's very visibly obvious in person. So we don't think about the different dynamics online.
But this is the compensation model for a huge fraction of online communities.
That's an interesting theory, actually. Maybe part of the reason that our current economic system has been so successful is that it manages, mostly by chance, to avoid this kind of compensation. People are largely compensated in money.
Of course, "toxic" office politics does exist. But it tends (at least where I'm from) to be something people associate with working for the public service, rather than in the commercial world.
That's interesting. How about if I changed the model and paid the mods? I would seemingly be able to increase my control over them, insomuch as I could more easily tell them to "lighten up," but would that work? Paying them definitely balances out the power dynamic a bit, but I still feel that most people are inclined towards dictatorship when given power that is largely unchecked.
The conception of power is what corrupts. They feel like they have become protectors of thing they moderate and that's what leads to the downfall. I must protect/pet this thing that I love and I inadvertently kill it, see Lenny from Of Mice and Men.
That's a great question. I can't remember any exceptions, which is alarming. Except myself, and I was just an absent mod, never mean. And my lackadaisical attention to the forums was what lead to me hiring all these unpaid mods.
I'm endlessly fascinated by this subject as I'm about to go down the rabbit hole of opening another series of forums and I have no idea how to protect against this.
It's not a "set it and forget it problem". In engineering terms, you've got a steam engine, not a bridge. A bridge you spend a lot of designing and engineering before a single brick is laid. There's upkeep and maintenance required, but it largely just sits there. A steam engine on the other hand, only just sits there if you don't want it to do what it was designed to do - be an engine. It needs a team of people working tirelessly round the clock babysitting it to cajole it into performing.
What does that have to do with moderating a forum? It needs to be actively managed. Don't expect to put up a set of rules and then you'll be done. Solved the problem like it was a math problem. No, it's like the dishes, or doing laundry, it's ongoing work.
New would be to use an LLM to automate moderation. Give it the code of conduct, and then score the comment on how well it follows those guidelines. Set a bar above which requires manual review.
If 6 months was the average limit, just set that as the term limit then. People might choose to go mad with power more quickly, but you could always depose them before that term limit was up.
Did you ever implement a decision transparency system, or require moderators get reelected or a vote of confidence every N months?
These days, I'd go the automation route and use an LLM to mechanize most of the work.
Motorcycling is probably the most diverse and welcoming the hobby has ever been, with women now the fastest growing demographic. Unless you specifically mean the Harley Bro subculture?
yeah I more meant my vague intuition of Harley Bro stuff, I have lots more confidence talking about something online than I do have IRL experience to back it up.
One implication of this is that some time in the future (tough to say when exactly) Wikipedia will have a big attrition problem. I could imagine a scenario in which all the current editors retire or pass away and simply are never replaced and Wikipedia dies.
While a shortage of admins/editors w/could cause the death of rather niche entries, Wikipedia would still have a huge propaganda outlet potential. Whether you believe its being actively used or not, wiki entries that might have political influence (history) will stay active, thus keeping Wikipedia (barely, that is) alive.
Perhaps I should have made it clearer in the article, but the English Wikipedia is not really short of editors. There was an era of decline from 2007 to 2014, though much of that was a side effect of edit filters that rejected certain edits that were highly likely to be vandalism. But the 2015 rally in editing numbers has turned into a sort of plateau - editing from 2015 to 2023 has consistently been above the 2014 minima. This is looking at "time between edits" How long it takes for each ten million edits.
The numbers in the OP indicated that few new editors are being added, so even if it’s not short of editors now, it will be eventually, unless new editors are added or there’s some breakthrough in longevity research.
No. The article is about admins. Very few new editors are becoming admins, and my fear is that a Wikigeneration gap is emerging between the admins and the active editors. New editors are starting, old ones leaving or dying, total volume of editing is higher now than it was in the 2014 minima. But the number of admins is falling. Another way to look at the numbers is that if new admins continue to be promoted at the same rate as the last ten years, they would on average, need to be active as admins for fifty years each if you wanted to maintain current admin numbers.
I have found that wikipedia articles have gotten more biased over time. Early on in my usage of wikipedia, it was clear there were substantial issues in article about things like Israel-Palestine (substantial pro-Israeli bias then), but most articles were still pretty balanced.
Now, it seems that on many actively contested political issues (ie. not something about climate change), there is a clear editorial stance. I say that as someone who has only voted D their entire life and likely will continue to do so absent some realignment. Efforts to change articles like these are reverted by high-status wikipedeans who have made articles like these their pet projects and build up a community of defenders.
A couple years ago, I tried to edit a page about the economist Deidre McCloskey to add some information about a campaign McCloskey had helped organize in the early aughts to attack & discredit the sex researcher Michael Bailey. McCloskey has tried to cultivate a pro-free speech libertarian image, so I was particularly alarmed when I read a thorough accounting of the Bailey affair in a journal article by Alice Dreger.[0] In fact, I had met McCloskey after the Bailey incident, and knew nothing about it based on the excessively mild portrayal in the Wikipedia article.
I tried to edit the page with a more accurate description: namely, that McCloskey attempted to have Bailey fired from Northwestern for violating "research ethics" and tried to have his license to practice psychology revoked in Illinois. Those facts seemed relevant to me, especially about someone who claims to be libertarian or "Classical Liberal." Wikipedia editors did not think so. The change was reverted almost immediately, even despite my citation of a high-quality source - much higher quality than the journalism garbage backing up many of the claims made on Wikipedia, yada yada. I eventually gave up after realizing one of the editors was on a moral crusade to suppress this piece of information, and none of the other editors were going to question her bias.
I imagine the same thing happens on thousands of other politically sensitive pages.
This example probably goes against the hypothesis that there is an increasingly illiberal turn, however, as I can find discussions/arguments about this issue in the talk page dating from 2007.
Looking at your edit, I can see why your initial edit was removed (did not really seem npov) but your corrected edit seems fine to me and I do not understand why it was reverted. The current page is net worse in that none of this controversy is even discussed.
You gave up pretty quickly! The last response you got was basically:
"I agree that the Bailey incident can be expanded and her signature on the Harper letter is worth mentioning, but this has to be written in a neutral way.[...]"
Which is as close to "just tidy it up and you're good" as you're going to get, to be frank. Especially seeing earlier contention on the same topic.
I wonder which editor you thought was on a moral crusade. The last times the topic was touched were in 2007 and 2017, and your edit was in 2020. It's somewhat unlikely that you'd encounter the same editors as back then to begin with, and as far as I can tell the only interaction you had on-wiki was one response to you, which you didn't reply to.
If I'm seeing correctly, they did tidy it up and resubmit it - where it was then removed (I don't quite understand why - perhaps because they didn't reply to the talk saying so?).
The talk page was later. The text still needed a bunch of tidying. Could have asked the other editor to help out!
That said, that looks like quite the controversy. Adding that kind of thing to wikipedia is tricky because it can be hard to represent in a neutral way. Same sequence of events could have happened to me, or anyone else. Fortunately other editors are there to help, but you do need to talk with them.
(edit) Basically Baryphonic started out fine. Discussing on the talk page was the next logical step, after which you can edit the text to fix the issues. Often this kind of change takes several iterations to iron out the problems.
Ah good catch, I missed that. I agree that they probably could have gone through WP:BRD and gotten this into the article.
The article I linked in my original comment is different though and the user Valjean maintains a number of pages that they revert edits from and don't really engage in BRD in good faith.
Without knowing which 'particular situation' you're talking about, I can just save your confusion.
There are articles in Wikipedia which will _always_ convey a certain perspective. Edits to them will always be reverted. The reverters will not engage with the audit process. The senior staff will not challenge those reverters. The procedure to handle this situation will not work. Arguments will be made that make literally no sense and will yet be accepted. If you persist in trying to make those changes your account will be banned on spurious grounds.
The user whimsicalism is probably more interested in discussing this, I'd take it up with them.
I sense that this conversation will lead to a great deal of wordy justifications for the unjustifiable. I've already said that's part of the dissuasion process, I'm not interested in participating in it.
These discussions were already had at great length on reddit r/wikiinaction and resulted only in the subreddit being castrated.
This happens on every article related to these type of people. There is a clique of editors and administrators who go out of their way to keep any such uncomfortable information off Wikipedia, and maintain bias towards their cause on various pages, particularly on those of people critical of their activist movement.
You can see similar on HN, with comments and stories most often being flagged to oblivion if they say anything against this activism and the people involved. I'm even being oblique with my words now because they search for comments that don't toe the line. This comment will probably get flagged too.
This is because Larry Sanger is crazy. There are legitimate criticisms of Wikipedia to be made, but citing them to Sanger makes them weaker not stronger.
Important to note the co-founder has been desperately trying to usurp Wikipedia essentially since it became popular, his opinions on the site should be taken with a heavy pinch of salt.
A symptom of the web's own growth in the mainstream and Wikipedia become much more serious as a resource than its early days, that it requires serious attention and effort, not casual hobby moderation. The generation that was really into it in those early days is/was most likely representative of the early Internet generation who believed strongly in the open information movement, and had years of experience in moderated/moderating communities. Now? multiple generations of people who came up more 'digitally native' but only really consume, consume, consume, and take for granted the effort that many services require unseen to appear 'free'. Who's gonna join the small dedicated but exceedingly fussy team of editors with the amount of process and tape involved with keeping up wikipedia pages?
> people who [...] take for granted the effort that many services require unseen to appear 'free'.
100%, and I'd argue this also applies to services that are for-profit but don't directly charge end users. The shit social media companies constantly pull isn't surprising when you recognize that these companies exist to make money, but I'm surprised by how many people take this into account (and are therefore perpetually shocked/outraged by the latest stunt).
High status admins who bite newcomers with impunity, don't give a damn about systemic bias, ignore their own rules (invoking "Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy"...except when it suits them) - I find the site increasingly infuriating.
On the other hand newly minted accounts (a few months old) seem to be getting involved in arcane things by nominating articles for deletion, despite having flimsy edit histories and limited experience on Wikipedia, possibly to build credibility for adminship in future. A worst case scenario is that the long-in-the-tooth admins finally let go, and these dodgy noobs gain adminship.
I've kept a clean sheet over a multi-decade editing career, so I can't be dismissed as a crank who doesn't understand the project, but there needs to be some sort of reform.
How much are we willing to bet that you'd be (even more) cynical within 12 months though?
This time not at the admins, but at the kinds of weird editors you'd have to deal with. %-)
That said, I haven't kept an eye on wikipedia (let alone admins, let alone high status ones) for a while know. I know that sometimes they don't get enough pushback and start making mistakes that way.
This was what I ran in to. Very aggressive editors and trolls who demanded things be written in a certain way. Edits to "their" articles trigged them and they would then edit your edit. It got ridiculous
This seems to be the case for many long-term websites I was once part of. A site formed in 2002 is heavily moderated by people who were on it prior to 2010; a site formed in 2007 is heavily moderated by people who were on it prior to 2012.
Fact is, experience is king. Someone who's been on a site for a year or two is typically knowledgable about it; but when you compare them to someone with a _decade_ or two of knowledge, it's far harder.
Not to mention the actual politics of picking someone who signed up only a few years ago. Obviously in some scenarios there is just an obvious pick, but, other times, if there is a candidate who joined in 2010 and a candidate who joined in 2020, and both are otherwise mostly equal, you look like a jerk for picking the 2020 user over the 2010.
This, unfortunately, tends to lead to stale ideas; nobody who's been part of a site for over a decade is going to push for things to be better, since they've probably been quite a bit happy with the status quo.
Reading through the responses on that page, many of the editors leaving a comment started editing before 2010. I'm curious how many people considered part of the editor community started in the last few years.
My experience with Wikipedia is that toxic, power-hungry trolls like "CityOfSilver" [0] get into positions of power (though luckily only as a reviewer and not an admin). Funnily enough, for the issue I had, it was an admin who agreed with me and simply made the edit that CoS contested and insulted me over (removing unsourced Russian propaganda).
I thought it would be fun to contribute to Wikipedia about topics I’m knowledgeable about. Every single attempt was rejected and reverted almost instantly. The rejections were happening so quickly that I have to assume admins had created bots to auto revert any change that did not come from them. There is no way there was time for a human to be involved. After about 10 attempts on 10 different articles I gave up and haven’t tried again since. There doesn’t seem to be any point.
Out of interest which topics were these? I've noticed that for some topics, editors treat these pages as their own personal fiefdom and are very quick to revert.
My biggest issue with WP is that it relies largely on corporate news media for many subject areas and you’re only allowed to include the narrative of established corporate news. There is so much bias that is introduced this way and I don’t see any great solution to counter it.
I'd encourage people to keep editing. From HN and Reddit I thought that my changes would be thrown out, but nothing happened except bots cleaning up my references.
An issue that I noticed is that scientific articles accumulate newsworthy theories. The prion article has a section on weaponization, and prion diseases often have sections on alternate theories, or say that the causes remain unknown. Years later these articles need to be updated or trimmed down.
I honestly don't remember the last time I used wikipedia. As a member of a minority community. It doesn't have anything that I care about. My information resources are elsewhere.
I wouldn't be surprised if the number of admins was cut in half again in the next 10 years.
I was an active Wikipedian back in the early days (2002-2006), and I ran for adminship twice, each time I was rejected for petty reasons. If you don't have a "perfect" account, they will pile on opposes. The only reason why so many people became admins at that time was that Wikipedia was still pretty much a "greenfield" site at the time (It had only around 700,000 articles back then, which is ~10% of what it is now), and there were plenty of volunteers signing up. Now it has become more established, and more rules have kept new generations out, similar to how boomers keep younger generations out of housing and high paying careers, despite having more education than them.
Everything that people say about StackOverflow and its "deletion culture" is doubly true of Wikipedia. Wikipedia today is rigidly controlled by a relatively small group of power users. It's completely unusable for any "culture way" topics and politics in general, including geopolitics, economics, etc. They make the site actively worse on purpose on a regular basis. If you try to make any kind of good faith edit it will be pretty much immediately deleted by someone, and then you go to the history of the page and see that guy has been editing that article (and 1000 others) for a decade.
Of course this goes totally against everything Wikipedia originally stood for: neutrality, reliance on reliable sources, "be bold", "anyone can edit", "nobody owns an article", etc. But it doesn't matter, because for every Wikipedia policy there is another policy saying exactly the opposite thing. It's a "rule lawyer"'s paradise: if you know all the policies back-to-front, you can argue your way around any drive-by contributor's attempt to justify their changes.
For me, Wikipedia has gone through a bit of a cycle. For a long time, it was unreliable, but the contents were at least largely contributed in good faith. Then it seemed to get better. But these days I try to get information from any other source first, and check the citations pretty carefully. A lot of "information" is sourced from very political media outlets in the US which wear their biases on their sleeves. That's okay, those outlets should exist. But they're not reliable sources for an encyclopedia.
Given others are giving their Wikipedia edit stories I'll do mine. I am not usually a Wiki editor for context, so I was editing from an IP without an account.
I was reading the page for a weaponry used by civilians when I noticed someone had linked to a protest page but had labelled the link "x riots" instead of "x protests" -- this seemed a little odd to me.
I edited the page to correct the link's text to match the page it pointed to. Within a day it was reverted, I re-reverted and asked the other editor for their rationale. They stated it was important to note that weapons are used by rioters and not protestors and reverted the change once again.
I made one last revert to keep my change, cited npov plus some other wiki customs the offending editor had been ignoring and asked them to just edit the wording if they felt so strongly about the nuances.
And they did. The other person, a power editor, conceded that this unrelated page was not the appropriate place to argue the semantics of a protest vs a riot and they reworded that section while keeping my edit.
Just thought I'd chime in, since positive reviews are naturally rarer than negative ones.
78 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadEither driven away by other editors/admins, not finding it fulfilling enough as so many topics are already “taken”, or simply didn’t think they did enough to be eligible during their time (correctly or not).
Or, I suppose, they don’t WANT to move from editor to admin for some reason.
Although having a decent number of edits is a de facto requirement for adminship.
(By way of experiment: one particular admin had their admin bit disabled and it took people a over a year to notice that they'd done so.)
Personally I still think 90% of the regular editors should have the tools anyway, but people kept inflating the requirements, or actually rejecting admins on the basis of "we have too many already"
As tomodachi94 points out, being a wiki admin ideally should not be a big deal. It just sort of became that way on English Wikipedia, unfortunately.
Keep in mind that enwiki has the largest amount of history and bureaucracy out of all of the Wikimedia projects, due to being the first in a long line.
> The problem 10 years ago was that the electorate was far too picky and rejected candidates who should have been promoted. Today, every potential candidate knows this and self-selects themselves out of standing. There aren't enough outliers who do stand to make much statistical conclusion from there.
Yeah. Everybody got wise to the cliques and power struggles of WP and are put off trying to contribute to it as either an editor (changes instantly reverted) and therefore stops them in their tracks in eventually growing to be an admin.
Same deal as StackOverflow. Petty tiny power users wield that power like a maniac because that's the way they get their jollies, make the experience a chore for the normies, so no newcomers join, and on the site goes, in a wierd reversal of the eternal september effect.
In other cases in real life before the web, i might argue that motorcycles and buicks and HAM radio dealt with this, they got locked into a local culture maxima and have been trapped there ever since, growing stale / ever less appealing to newcomers.
Whereas in their heyday of 19x0's American car culture, Buicks were right there in the race with Ford Mustangs and Chevrolet Corvettes and such.
Power corrupts :(
i.e. There are no 'unpaid mods', at least for any significant period of time.
It's just that typically in real life we try to avoid setting up relationships were the only compensation is payment in social status, petty office maneuvers, etc..., since it's very visibly obvious in person. So we don't think about the different dynamics online.
But this is the compensation model for a huge fraction of online communities.
Of course, "toxic" office politics does exist. But it tends (at least where I'm from) to be something people associate with working for the public service, rather than in the commercial world.
Thank your local admins.
I'm endlessly fascinated by this subject as I'm about to go down the rabbit hole of opening another series of forums and I have no idea how to protect against this.
What does that have to do with moderating a forum? It needs to be actively managed. Don't expect to put up a set of rules and then you'll be done. Solved the problem like it was a math problem. No, it's like the dishes, or doing laundry, it's ongoing work.
New would be to use an LLM to automate moderation. Give it the code of conduct, and then score the comment on how well it follows those guidelines. Set a bar above which requires manual review.
Did you ever implement a decision transparency system, or require moderators get reelected or a vote of confidence every N months?
These days, I'd go the automation route and use an LLM to mechanize most of the work.
I do like your idea of term limits, though.
Now, it seems that on many actively contested political issues (ie. not something about climate change), there is a clear editorial stance. I say that as someone who has only voted D their entire life and likely will continue to do so absent some realignment. Efforts to change articles like these are reverted by high-status wikipedeans who have made articles like these their pet projects and build up a community of defenders.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_investigation_origins_c...
I tried to edit the page with a more accurate description: namely, that McCloskey attempted to have Bailey fired from Northwestern for violating "research ethics" and tried to have his license to practice psychology revoked in Illinois. Those facts seemed relevant to me, especially about someone who claims to be libertarian or "Classical Liberal." Wikipedia editors did not think so. The change was reverted almost immediately, even despite my citation of a high-quality source - much higher quality than the journalism garbage backing up many of the claims made on Wikipedia, yada yada. I eventually gave up after realizing one of the editors was on a moral crusade to suppress this piece of information, and none of the other editors were going to question her bias.
I imagine the same thing happens on thousands of other politically sensitive pages.
[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170124/
Looking at your edit, I can see why your initial edit was removed (did not really seem npov) but your corrected edit seems fine to me and I do not understand why it was reverted. The current page is net worse in that none of this controversy is even discussed.
You gave up pretty quickly! The last response you got was basically: "I agree that the Bailey incident can be expanded and her signature on the Harper letter is worth mentioning, but this has to be written in a neutral way.[...]"
Which is as close to "just tidy it up and you're good" as you're going to get, to be frank. Especially seeing earlier contention on the same topic.
I wonder which editor you thought was on a moral crusade. The last times the topic was touched were in 2007 and 2017, and your edit was in 2020. It's somewhat unlikely that you'd encounter the same editors as back then to begin with, and as far as I can tell the only interaction you had on-wiki was one response to you, which you didn't reply to.
Am I missing something?
That said, that looks like quite the controversy. Adding that kind of thing to wikipedia is tricky because it can be hard to represent in a neutral way. Same sequence of events could have happened to me, or anyone else. Fortunately other editors are there to help, but you do need to talk with them.
(edit) Basically Baryphonic started out fine. Discussing on the talk page was the next logical step, after which you can edit the text to fix the issues. Often this kind of change takes several iterations to iron out the problems.
The article I linked in my original comment is different though and the user Valjean maintains a number of pages that they revert edits from and don't really engage in BRD in good faith.
There are articles in Wikipedia which will _always_ convey a certain perspective. Edits to them will always be reverted. The reverters will not engage with the audit process. The senior staff will not challenge those reverters. The procedure to handle this situation will not work. Arguments will be made that make literally no sense and will yet be accepted. If you persist in trying to make those changes your account will be banned on spurious grounds.
But definitely give me an article/situation on Wikipedia where you feel that this is the case, and I'll take a look with you. Diffs appreciated!
I sense that this conversation will lead to a great deal of wordy justifications for the unjustifiable. I've already said that's part of the dissuasion process, I'm not interested in participating in it.
These discussions were already had at great length on reddit r/wikiinaction and resulted only in the subreddit being castrated.
You can see similar on HN, with comments and stories most often being flagged to oblivion if they say anything against this activism and the people involved. I'm even being oblique with my words now because they search for comments that don't toe the line. This comment will probably get flagged too.
The cofounder of WP himself says the site is compromised.
https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_/status/1686396348159987712
The last time I commented on WP, the same thing happened. Interesting.
The same tag could be applied to almost anyone creative from Tesla to Picasso to Musk.
100%, and I'd argue this also applies to services that are for-profit but don't directly charge end users. The shit social media companies constantly pull isn't surprising when you recognize that these companies exist to make money, but I'm surprised by how many people take this into account (and are therefore perpetually shocked/outraged by the latest stunt).
On the other hand newly minted accounts (a few months old) seem to be getting involved in arcane things by nominating articles for deletion, despite having flimsy edit histories and limited experience on Wikipedia, possibly to build credibility for adminship in future. A worst case scenario is that the long-in-the-tooth admins finally let go, and these dodgy noobs gain adminship.
I've kept a clean sheet over a multi-decade editing career, so I can't be dismissed as a crank who doesn't understand the project, but there needs to be some sort of reform.
How much are we willing to bet that you'd be (even more) cynical within 12 months though?
This time not at the admins, but at the kinds of weird editors you'd have to deal with. %-)
That said, I haven't kept an eye on wikipedia (let alone admins, let alone high status ones) for a while know. I know that sometimes they don't get enough pushback and start making mistakes that way.
Fact is, experience is king. Someone who's been on a site for a year or two is typically knowledgable about it; but when you compare them to someone with a _decade_ or two of knowledge, it's far harder.
Not to mention the actual politics of picking someone who signed up only a few years ago. Obviously in some scenarios there is just an obvious pick, but, other times, if there is a candidate who joined in 2010 and a candidate who joined in 2020, and both are otherwise mostly equal, you look like a jerk for picking the 2020 user over the 2010.
This, unfortunately, tends to lead to stale ideas; nobody who's been part of a site for over a decade is going to push for things to be better, since they've probably been quite a bit happy with the status quo.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CityOfSilver
An issue that I noticed is that scientific articles accumulate newsworthy theories. The prion article has a section on weaponization, and prion diseases often have sections on alternate theories, or say that the causes remain unknown. Years later these articles need to be updated or trimmed down.
I wouldn't be surprised if the number of admins was cut in half again in the next 10 years.
Of course this goes totally against everything Wikipedia originally stood for: neutrality, reliance on reliable sources, "be bold", "anyone can edit", "nobody owns an article", etc. But it doesn't matter, because for every Wikipedia policy there is another policy saying exactly the opposite thing. It's a "rule lawyer"'s paradise: if you know all the policies back-to-front, you can argue your way around any drive-by contributor's attempt to justify their changes.
For me, Wikipedia has gone through a bit of a cycle. For a long time, it was unreliable, but the contents were at least largely contributed in good faith. Then it seemed to get better. But these days I try to get information from any other source first, and check the citations pretty carefully. A lot of "information" is sourced from very political media outlets in the US which wear their biases on their sleeves. That's okay, those outlets should exist. But they're not reliable sources for an encyclopedia.
I was reading the page for a weaponry used by civilians when I noticed someone had linked to a protest page but had labelled the link "x riots" instead of "x protests" -- this seemed a little odd to me.
I edited the page to correct the link's text to match the page it pointed to. Within a day it was reverted, I re-reverted and asked the other editor for their rationale. They stated it was important to note that weapons are used by rioters and not protestors and reverted the change once again.
I made one last revert to keep my change, cited npov plus some other wiki customs the offending editor had been ignoring and asked them to just edit the wording if they felt so strongly about the nuances.
And they did. The other person, a power editor, conceded that this unrelated page was not the appropriate place to argue the semantics of a protest vs a riot and they reworded that section while keeping my edit.
Just thought I'd chime in, since positive reviews are naturally rarer than negative ones.