[postflopclarity]

trying to contribute to wikipedia was the most miserable experience in a "collaborative" process I've ever had in my life.

Like arguing with cranks at a town hall meeting, ignorant high school group project classmates, and bureaucracy-obsessed nonprofit initiative zealots all wrapped into one.

in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't have an intimate knowledge of all the details of the editing bylaws, and seemingly infinite time to be able to litigate your case, it's almost impossible to get any of these edits through when the original page author is sufficiently motivated to prevent them.

[avaer]

Most people don't realize that essentially all parts of Wikipedia are owned by random nerds versed in the beaurocracy who will revert all outsider edits. Unless you have hours per day dedicated to arguing with them (which they do!), the sign says you're welcome but the people say you're not.

Not to say Wikipedia isn't great + useful! But realize that it is owned by a distributed network of feudal nerd-lords that will defend to their death the contents of Wikipedia articles because they get off on being the dictators of what's true.

Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.

[handoflixue]

It's amazing how much this behavior is tolerated, despite very clear policies against a single person "owning" a page.

> Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.

Any insight into how these people all manage to dodge the policies against such behavior? Is it just too much effort to complain + favoritism towards frequent editors?

[altilunium]

I hope anyone can start their own private wiki in peace and for free.

Today, we already have free blogging platforms, newsletters, photo sharing, and microblogging, but we are in dire need of a free wiki platform (and maybe a knowledge base tool too).

I'm currently experimenting with building exactly that. So far, so good, but the setup is still too difficult for non-technical people, even though it is already free to register.

[InsideOutSanta]

People often mention anecdotes like that when Wikipedia is discussed, but I made a few changes to pages over the years and never had any issues. I took care to follow the rules, and the changes were usually accepted; when they weren't, it was always for reasonable reasons, even if I didn't always agree with them.

[Aurornis]

That was my initial experience, too.

As I discovered later, I was just lucky to hit pages that weren’t possessively controlled by one person or a small group who want to control the page with a tight grip. That’s often true for pages for obscure topics that don’t have much text.

Get into a more mainstream topic or anywhere near a contentious topic and your edits will be reverted, rewritten, or debated by someone with more free time than you until the text goes back to what they wanted to control. It doesn’t matter how much you follow the rules, you’re at the mercy of what that person or group wants the page to say.

[postflopclarity]

indeed. the field I was trying to improve tend to attract a lot of cranks and trisectors. the topics are not "contentious" in the typical political sense but the pages are closely guarded by very stubborn and uninformed retiree flatearther types.

[coldpie]

I haven't done a whole lot, but I've also never had a bad experience editing on Wikipedia. I suspect most people who complain about getting stuff reverted on Wikipedia are mostly editing controversial pages. Which, yeah, discussing controversial stuff on the Internet is a recipe for having a bad time. The other strong possibility is they are lower quality editors than they think they are. You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.

[postflopclarity]

I am confident that my edits were high quality and improved the mathematical accuracy and clarity of the page.

unfortunately I was editing under my real name and I'd rather not dox myself so I can't link to the reverts. but the general area was in social choice / computational democracy. so if you scroll around the edit history of some of those pages maybe you'll get the picture?

[Mountain_Skies]

Same thing for me when I used to contribute to our local transit system's page. Things were fine for years but one day an editor for some reason took an interest in me and started going after my contributions for all manner of petty legalistic policies that were usually "best practices" rather than rules. He even moved on to my edits on other pages, which mostly were where I'd corrected a spelling or formatting error. Never understood why that happened because I wasn't involved in any edit wars or even contributions on anything that could be considered political or ideological. I just moved on to other things and left Wikipedia behind. So he "won" something, but no idea what that was.

[altilunium]

In the worst-case scenario, they will keep harassing you off-wiki, hunting for your digital footprint across other social media platforms. I actually had to retire several of my internet handles because of this wiki drama.

[TZubiri]

It's a dangerous to go alone out there!

Take this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hounding

[zaik]

> sooooo much technical misinformation

Especially for math, were I feel like people generally agree on what is true and what is not, this seems unusual. Can you point to an instance of misinformation?

[postflopclarity]

it was in the computational social choice sphere which attracts a lot of amateurs interested in electoral reform and "voting theory" (which of course is not the typical term used for the field but is popular among these amateurs).

these contributors tend to have some kind of unrelated engineering / technical background, though never in econ or social choice itself, are often retired with lots of free time, and _always_ have incredibly stubborn and strong opinions. the demographic matches the [trisector](https://www.ufv.ca/media/faculty/gregschlitt/information/Wha...) very closely

if you look around on these pages in social choice and voting algorithms you will find plenty of inaccuracies, vague assertions about strategic manipulability, misunderstanding of the formalization of certain electoral axioms, and other misinformation.

[TZubiri]

>in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't have an intimate knowledge of all the details of the editing bylaws, and seemingly infinite time to be able to litigate your case, it's almost impossible to get any of these edits through when the original page author is sufficiently motivated to prevent them.

As someone that has battled with this, I agree, but in my experience more often than not, the people that complain are complaining about basic rules like "stuff should have external citations". So I can't really pick either side.

[postflopclarity]

I think one of the last straws for me before I quit trying to help is when I "lost" some disputed edit (and the page was subsequently locked) because the original author provided an external citation for their claim.

The problem was, if you actually go read the content being cited, it did not at all conclude what the page author was asserting it did. In fact, it concluded the opposite. So the citation was "real" but the way it was being used with the implication that it supported the author's position was pure misinformation.

I tried to point this out and petitioned to unlock the page, but I was told that "consensus has been reached, and edit warring will not be tolerated" ...