I’d be grateful if, in this thread, anybody with an anecdote about how their perfectly fine edit was reverted by the evil career Wikipedians, could provide a link so we can judge for ourselves.
Not an edit I made, but the final straw for me was a debate about the article name of the turkey (the animal) on the German wikipedia. The only commonly used name is "Truthahn" which refers to both the female and male animal if you are not being specific. But one especially vocal Wikipedian insists that in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turkeychicken" to the average German. I have never heard this outside of Wikipedia. You might use it to contrast the female from the male animal in a zoological setting, but the thing you eat or the thing that makes "gobbeldigock" is called "Truthahn". So this was a win of technically correct over useful.
I've also had many small edits on technical subjects (particle physics and supersymmetry) reversed by people who were self-professedly not experts, with comments like they could not find it in their beginners' textbook. So I just gave up. (Edit: this was over ten years ago, and I can't find it anymore - not even sure what my username was - but one dispute was about the naming convention of some exotic particles. I was quoting from the famous "review of particle physics" and respectable textbooks, but it kept being reverted to a made-up notation...)
The non-expert with a beginners' textbook having strong opinions about the subject is everything that's wrong with places like wikipedia and reddit. I just hate it.
> places like wikipedia and reddit. I just hate it.
All human products have issues, but are there any superior alternatives at scale?
Wikipedia is one of our civilization’s greatest achievements, isn’t it? It seems like the Library of Alexandria on steroids to me. Especially when combined with an internet archive.
It’s funny to admit it, but Reddit is also quite an achievement due to the scalable human moderation model and very useful hive mind.
No I don't have any superior alternatives at scale. For anything I can get away with, I avoid large scale places completely. Of course it's not always possible. I'm just tired of non-experts giving opinions and having the power to enforce those opinions.
I think wikipedia is as good as it can get given the constrains it has. Some kind of vetting process for experts on specific fields could potentially be useful for specific information though. But the matter of fact is that I have pretty much stopped using wikipedia for anything but the most rudimentary info check. I rarely even check the sources they provide. If I want more than the couple paragraphs wikipedia has on most subjects I go straight to books an sometimes I skip wikipedia altogether when I know that it won't be enough.
Pay tens of thousands of experts to work on the encyclopedia instead. The issue isn't scale, but the cost of the labor (which, in Wikipedia's case, is free - but in many cases you get the quality you paid for).
The problem with wikipedia is that the existing editors tend to drive away experts who are willing to edit things for free though. Like one comment here about the random editor with a beginner's textbook reverting edits with information that was not in their textbook( that were properly cited from well-known books). That's just ridiculous and I'm blown away at the level of hubris that makes you trust your own lack of knowledge more than proper citations.
> Wikipedia is useful for a high-level overview. For more info, you'll be clicking on the references a lot. No reason not to start with the sources.
Ok, you got me there. I knew using "research" with no qualifier was going to get me into trouble. I should have said "general research."
I can't wait for Sci-Hub, or better, to become legal. The fact that is not legal is pretty embarrassing for our civilization.
Regarding the search engine, for a lot of general research adding "... reddit" often improves results in my experience. It's so weird how important that site turned out to be. Now if only it could make money without unneccesary features. I feel like we should buy reddit for the commons while we can :)
> The fact that is not legal is pretty embarrassing for our civilization.
Philosophically speaking sure, but practically it already works fine now.
I don’t think any judge is going to convict a researcher for bypassing these paywalls. if Elsevier and company will decide to prosecute, it will become a PR nightmare for them. Also likely to cause a legislative response which will undermine their ability to collect their profits. I don’t believe these people are stupid, I think they understand these consequences as well.
> adding "... reddit" often improves results in my experience
Interesting, will try next time. I have an account there for a few years, but wasn’t using it much.
This applies to any internet discussion site that doesn’t list your entire background, which is basically every internet site. How many people do you think does the same thing in HN? I’d say it’s most of them.
There is no way to tell whether you are debating a child on the internet.
> I've also had many small edits on technical subjects (particle physics and supersymmetry) reversed by people who were self-professedly not experts,
I'm all for having experts determine the notation to be used in their respective fields...
> in his ornithology book, the generic term is always the female term, so "Truthuhn" (with u). That sounds like "turkeychicken" to the average German.
... but that also means deferring to ornithologists on the question of what birds are called, instead of relying on your lay understanding based on eating turkey meat. If chickens were named after their meat, they might be called "Hähnchen". But of course chickens are mostly kept for their eggs, so we end up with the opposite situation where the average person treats neuter "Huhn" as synonymous with female "Henne".
When I discuss test driver development with a friend we often end up talking about the definition of a unit, what inherently defines a programming type, constraint, system tests, what it mean to allow a test drive the development, a class vs function vs data, exploratory programming, what should be tested vs not tested, if refactoring is likely or unlikely once we have a initial version running in production, what they think when using the word test vs what test might mean for me, and a bunch of side topics maybe related to programming.
Collaboration is hard even when two persons are paid to work for a common goal. An encyclopedia also encourage such debate over word definitions, and its only over the medium of writing, so it can very easy fall into arguments over words rather than productive collaboration that produce a working article. When that happen the easiest way out is to follow two rules: the assumption of good faith and an almost robotic approach to using what the majority of sources is using. It is not without reason why most of the issues in Wikipedia comes down to conflict resolution.
That sounds like the situation with violoncello. No one refers to it with the full name, but it pops up in the occasional music tutorial, probably for the same reason: the author read it in a book that said it was the correct name. It's technically true, but practically weird.
I enjoy that in one paragraph you are upset about somebody using the technical name over the common name, and in the next paragraph you are upset people reverse your technical edits for what might be a more common notion from a beginner's textbook.
This is the Wikipedia article of the high school I attended just a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monta_Vista_High_School. While I was there it had approximately ten times as much content, which I will readily admit was probably not entirely written by a third party but gave a fairly decent amount of information that to my knowledge was accurate. Some time recently it has been stripped entirely by a Wikipedian who seems to have made a policy to trim down articles like this one to essentially nothing and go through the list of notable graduates and decide for himself which ones “deserved” to be on there. Apparently “tons of people die in war” is a reason to remove a Navy SEAL who was awarded some sort of thing for bravery (I can’t judge military decorations very well, but he has a statue in the city park and such so I think it’s at least worth more thought than the edit summary indicates was given.) It’s difficult to feel these edits were done in good faith rather than a way to flex the rules by taking over an article and reducing it to a husk of its original self (rather than working to source the information that was missing citations, for example…)
Wikipedia is supposed to be a reliably sourced and verifiable encyclopedia, not a blog or advertisement, not full of random non-notable or unverifiable information. In other words, it is supposed to be useful.
Wikipedia mentions him in multiple other places. This article features both the information about his involvement and his posthumous awards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Red_Wings. The part about the commemorative statue that I mentioned comes with no fewer than six sources. Considering that it is a centerpiece of the park and any Memorial Day discussion here, any Wikipedia guidelines that are being interpreted as being unable to verify this are broken.
I am well aware of that. Deleting the entire article by removing everything but the introduction makes the article significantly less useful, especially if much of the information was properly sourced but you got rid of it because you didn’t like it, or got into a revert war with authors of the content to show that you controlled the article. The behavior of the Wikipedia involved is not in good faith.
I once came across some Python code on Wikipedia which looked like:
for i in range(n):
a = [f(i) for i in range(q)]
I was reading over it and got temporarily confused by the re-use of the variable "i" in the list comprehension so I edited it to something else in order to help the next person. Reverted without explanation.
Another complaint I have about Wikipedia: There are certain people who are sometimes described in the media as "antisemites", "white nationalists", "white supremacists" etc. If it's a reliable source then Wikipedia will describe the person as a white supremacist or whatever. That doesn't bother me a lot.
However, in some cases the person themselves will say something to clarify their view, and a surprising number of Wikipedia editors think that the subject of the article's own statement of their political view does not merit inclusion in the article.
I believe I remember one particular case where there was a person whose Wikipedia bio referred to him as an antisemite, but if you went to his Twitter profile, he used some of the (very limited) space in his Twitter bio to refer to himself as pro-Israel... and a certain senior editor strongly objected to mentioning this fact in his Wikipedia bio.
At that point I think you're effectively just smearing living people in their Wikipedia bios and that really rubs me the wrong way.
The broader issue here is that Wikipedia, due to its reliable sources policy, can't really be much better than journalists are. And journalism isn't what it once was. Same argument for academia and the replication crisis. We live in a society, basically.
Your example with the python list comprehension could just be an example of a conflict over content because of an inevitable difference of opinion. There is nothing wrong with that, and no way around it: you either invest enough of your time to work it through, or pay someone else to do that (although I don't know how you could find someone both competent enough and willing to do it).
The example with the antisemite is probably more complicated, if you wanted a discussion on it you should have posted a link to the relevant discussion on Wikipedia, but I very much doubt it would be appropriate to take Twitter as source in that case, because Wikipedia is not meant to be (an extension of) social media. Also, it seems like you are not aware that it is very much possible to be a pro-Israel antisemite, e.g., the Nazis at one point supported Jewish Zionist emmigration to Palestine.
BTW, I am not a Wikipedia apologist, see my next comment.
"I very much doubt it would be appropriate to take Twitter as source in that case"
Editors also didn't like it when I added info from his website. Basically, they didn't want anything he said in his own defense to make it to his Wikipedia page.
"Also, it seems like you are not aware that it is very much possible to be a pro-Israel antisemite, e.g., the Nazis at one point supported Jewish Zionist emmigration to Palestine."
I'm aware of that. This person also said he encouraged Jews to join a political organization he ran.
But anyway, I tried to be very clear: I was not saying the citations which claimed this guy was an antisemite should be removed. I'm saying it was worth including this person's own statement of their political views as well.
> I'm saying it was worth including this person's own statement of their political views as well.
It is an interesting situation, because I dislike the idea that my defence of my own position is insubmissible, vs the interpretation of some third party of what they claim I think. Certainly there are positions I have on sensitive topics that could be trivially misrepresented.
On the other hand, just taking my 'PR' response is dangerous as it allows me to potentially Rewrite history / spin truth etc.
I lean towards the right to state: "author claims to be misunderstood and accusations are unfounded". I can see both sides a bit though
I've been able to get some edits through only by making a blog post that had the text of what I needed to edit into the WP article so that I could reference it as a second-hand source -- thus doing the proper kind of rain dance to the WP bureaucrats. It seems most of the time the only way to get things to stick is find the right sort of rain dance the threats the loophole needles that make somebody not revert your changes.
Another ridiculous case I know about was where the leader of the team that factored RSA-230 updated the page with a reference to the announcement. It was reverted by an editor with the note "Wikipedia is not the venue to announce your own results." So WP went from having it listed as "factored" to "not factored so far" by the revert making it incorrect. The editor who reverted the change hadn't even bothered to check the cited source where the announcement was actually made. What even was the point of the revert? Why would somebody take time out of their day to make Wikipedia inaccurate over some perceived and misunderstood ceremony following to guidelines and process?
It's so much trouble to contribute it's just not worth it, I stopped contributing entirely about 6 years ago after a bunch of edits I wrote on a topic were merged with another one even though the two topics are different. After a few weeks of fighting I just gave up. Amazingly it was unmerged and most of my original text was returned, and then usefully updated by other contributors where it still lives.
Without trying to be dismissive (I’m grateful for the examples), it looks like your first example was a simple workaround for the reasonable policy of having citable sources rather than hosting original research; your second example was unreverted within an hour and no lasting harm done; and your third example ended in a useful article with your contribution preserved.
In short it sounds like the process, while frustrating at times, is still somehow generating good outcomes.
I mean I guess that's true. But it's also true that every reversion was entirely unnecessary.
It definitely makes a non-collaborative environment when everything you try to do to help is met with entirely unnecessary hassle.
It's a bit like trying to drive a car with a passenger who doesn't have a license and doesn't know how to drive, but is constantly telling you how to do things and even keeps grabbing the wheel and sometimes tries to reach their leg over to push the pedals. Sure it's possible to drive your car from a-to-b this way. But is it a way that you're likely to repeat? Not really.
Also true of StackOverflow and "Google ignores my keywords" complaints. People almost never provide the examples, despite claiming it is a daily occurrence.
Here’s one from Stack Overflow that annoyed me recently: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16023637/difference-betw.... The question is quite sane (there are these two similar options in GCC, how do they differ?), but it was closed as being “ambiguous”.
It’s because cases are rarely black-and-white and even legitimate grievances usually have at least some element of fault lying with the complainant, which undermines hyperbolic claims that the sky is falling at these websites.
I am more interested in an analysis of the “controversies” section and the initial paragraph of a topic. The kind of information that is included versus the kind of information that is not included. This is likely to be where the most significant bias can be found.
Since Wikipedia is getting a lot of unfounded criticism here, it may be good to raise some real issues: Wikipedia (even just the English Wikipedia) should not be considered as a unit. The fact is, a lot of articles are very good, better than in any other encyclopedia, but that can sadly lull people into dropping their guard/critical thinking when it comes to other articles/topics.
The thing is, Wikipedia is very vulnerable not just to unconscious biases, but also to malicious involvement. Just a single malicious editor with a lot of time on their hands can be unexpectedly harmful, especially if they are targeting a topic where the malice will not be obvious to the majority of editors, or if there are not many editors there to contest the malicious edits for some other reason.
Once that single editor gets support of like minded people, the situation is grim. The other ones don't even have to be naturally competent, a single "puppet master" can coordinate many "meat puppets" (people that follow orders or a common goal) or even plain-old "sock puppets" (abusing alternative accounts). Most good-faithed editors just avoid conflict with the malicious group, because
* it is unpleasant
* it requires much time
* it may require knowledge (even though malice requires less knowledge, especially with off-wiki coordination)
* it (and other conflict) may look bad for them on Wikipedia in the future
* the admins and the arbitration committee tend to punish all sides of a conflict
The "political" topics (including the parts of history that are "relevant" to nationalism) tend to be the worst. I suppose one reason for that is that politics is a viable common goal that can unify some meat puppets and competent malicious actors together. Another is that politics tends to scare a lot of editors that operate in good faith.
Another issue is that the people in power on Wikipedia in case of conflict between other editors, admins and ARBCOM, very rarely (or never) want to invest enough time to really get to the bottom of the issue at hand (which can, admittedly, be very difficult, especially since the people in power often lack the specific knowledge regarding the possibly obscure topics at hand). In the end often both the pro-Wikipedia and the malicious side gets punished, because the admins or ARBCOM just want to "resolve" the conflict or content dispute and get it over and done with.
Yet another issue is that in recent years the Wikimedia Foundation (owner of Wikipedia and other projects) has started to act against the volunteers (the case with Fram[0] is most notorious).
I've also had many small edits on technical subjects (particle physics and supersymmetry) reversed by people who were self-professedly not experts, with comments like they could not find it in their beginners' textbook. So I just gave up. (Edit: this was over ten years ago, and I can't find it anymore - not even sure what my username was - but one dispute was about the naming convention of some exotic particles. I was quoting from the famous "review of particle physics" and respectable textbooks, but it kept being reverted to a made-up notation...)