Good comparison tbh. MMOs are one of the most toxic game genre (only topped by MOBAs) and that perfectly fits to the holier than thou attitude of the majority of editors
And just as some people somehow manage to play MMOs every waking hour of the day even as ordinary people would have e.g. a job and a family, so Wikipedia has editors who somehow manage to edit all day every day. I have been active in Wikipedia since shortly after its founding and I am quite familiar with all processes and standards, but I have had edits reverted simply because my edit history struck the obsessive editors as too casual; if I wasn’t editing constantly around the clock like them, then I was seen as too low-quality an editor for my edits to stand.
My main problem
that a lot of times I want to do a raid and not the game but the players won't let me do it. The game doesn't say you need this class or this item level, actually anyone can and encouraged to do it. But then you are there against the boss and another player turns up and kills it before you. "Sorry you not meant to kill this boss, this _our_ boss, go farm something else". Then you are locked out from the instance and scratch your head what to do. That's especially frustrating when you know the other players use a very wrong or inefficient strategy (my strat would work 10x faster!) and even worse: you know those players don't even need the loot from the boss (they can't even equip it or they already have it). So why don't they let others join the fun?
Yes but interestingly it's also somewhat calming because the "winners" tend to see winning as the goal. Maliciously changing facts is almost never their goal because Wikipedia itself is their main (maybe obsessive) focus. It might not be good for them but it's not that dangerous for us readers.
That just means they are enforcing their biases on the information. Winning doesn't mean they got it correct, just that they achieved control of the narrative.
That's going to push the means of winning to editing towards the collective biases of the majority of wikipedia editors. Just consider the fact that at various times in our history that commonly accepted knowledge was that the Earth was flat, the Sun, Moon and Stars revolved around it and that slaves were property instead of people.
Effectively this is a proof that mob-sourced information tends towards the mob's interpretation of information and is not necessarily the truth.
I think a lot of people reading Wikipedia forget this and makes me disagree with your last statement -- there's a high potential for danger to the reader if the prevailing mob opinion is outwardly destructive or self-destructive.
That's just what encyclopedias are though, the collective mentality of it's editors, their ideology, so to speak. You were never free to just consume encyclopedias, they were always meant to be understood in the context of their creation. What makes Wikipedia different from its competitors is the sheer diversity of editors contributing.
Encyclopedias usually have lots of competition, outside of niche areas.
Wikis sort of have this backwards. There's lots of competition in the niches but there's not much competition with Wikipedia itself. The risk is in it being a singular body of knowledge.
Sure, that's a good point and I absolutely agree that Wikipedia will neither be unbiased nor always very accurate. My idea was simply to refute the statement that somebody actively controls the world's knowledge in intentionally malicious ways, which would imo be worse than unwillingly reproducing your own biases.
Bias is inherent to the Wikipedia model, at least if you view its content as simply facts. It's not so much a collection of facts as it is a collection of statements corroborated by published sources.
That seems like an overly generous interpretation of Wikipedia. A great many well sourced factual corrections get reverted because that’s effectively the default option and much faster than actually editing new content to fit existing guidelines. Trying to do a good job also means slowing down and thus having fewer edits.
yeah cs has always been pretty toxic. I think the culture of the game matters a lot more than the genre. though it is an MMO, I've always found EVE players to be very polite ingame. won't stop them from scamming you out of every last isk in your wallet, of course.
MMORPG today in general is more polite than its heyday too, since the players are older and more relaxed (younger generations don't play MMORPG as much anymore).