[Morromist]

"It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all"

Yeh. This is why I stopped editing wikipedia very often. They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't. I still love wikipedia and think its the best website on the internet, but this is probably its biggest flaw.

[zerobees]

> "It's amazing that anybody creates Wikpedia articles at all"

Very few people do, which actually makes it worse: of course the spammers and the hustlers are still motivated, so the needle moves more firmly into the territory of "most newcomer contributions are made in bad faith". Editors and admins feel increasingly under siege, so they respond more aggressively to everything.

It's basically the same problem as with real-world policing: because the cops overwhelmingly have deal with "problem" cases (you call them about burglars or drug dealers, not to tell them you baked some cookies), they develop a skewed perception of the average citizen and... well.

[twister2920]

Cops actually spend the vast majority of their time policing traffic violations and responding to non-emergency calls. Not in GTA-style shootouts.

[pessimizer]

Traffic violations and non-emergencies that you would call the police over are problems. That's why we involve the police. Video games are irrelevant.

[lambdaone]

"They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't" is exactly the point of the notability policy in the first place.

Otherwise Wikipedia would almost instantly fill up with crap.

[Morromist]

I see what you mean, but I've written a fair number of wikipedia articles at the behest of professors who are experts in their fields and were annoyed that X person wasn't mentioned. The articles were eventually deleted.

The professors should probably be the ones who decide what is notable in my view. That a small group of wikipedia editors did not appreciate the significance of the persons isn't surpising, they can't be experts about everything.

[fragmede]

Because, in 2026, hard drives are really small and can't hold much information, that we need to limit the world's freely and globally available editable encyclopedia, too what a select group of individuals consider noteworthy. No possible editorial bias there!

Hard drives can hold lots of data these days, and text compresses rather well.

[lambdaone]

You can write about whatever you like and put it on the web, just not in Wikipedia for which, as has been said exhaustively above, there are clearly laid out admissions criteria, not just the whims of a "select group". You are entirely free to contribute to articles-for-deletion process yourself.

Wikipedia does not exist to be a soapbox, self-publishing host or advertising medium, and having a Wikipedia article is not a human right.

[ninjascotsman]

It is filled with crap for example London Bus routes

[lambdaone]

Even the bus route articles seem to have drawn sufficient reliable-sources attention to merit them being kept. The policy is clear and definitive.

[NordStreamYacht]

They even roll back corrections to grammar. Power tripping overrides common sense.

[shevy-java]

This could be automatic. I noticed this myself because I corrected both typos in english and german wikipedia; sometimes they are reverted, sometimes not. There seems no logic in it, so I assumed that in some cases this must have been automatic wiki bots reverting something.

[NordStreamYacht]

This was like 10 years ago. Long before the real invasion of the bots. I don't even remember the username or password of my account any more.

[Nnnes]

The main anti-vandalism bot ClueBot was created in 2007, and its successor ClueBot NG in 2010. They certainly have false positives from time to time, but that doesn't mean they aren't the most useful bots on the website.

[Gander5739]

It aims to have a false positive rate of 0.1%

[andrepd]

Anti-vandalism bots have been used for much longer than 10 years lol

[NordStreamYacht]

Don't know, don't care. Wikipedia is not a major source of information for me any more, the summaries from various search engines are enough.

For everything else there's grok.

[NordStreamYacht]

I would expect a bot to be consistent. Wikipedia editors? Not so much.