Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?

news.ycombinator.com

51–52 of 52 posts

Re: Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?

#51
post #49
post #47

Edited frequently about 2002-2004. About Israel. At that time, Wikipedia was so young and sparsely populated that it was still possible to make great advances on such a contentious topic despite hugely different point of views. Then the trolls came, pov pushers and various ideologues who thought that the best way to push their view on wikipedia was to make "the other sides" editors be as miserable as possible. People…

Not that you're wrong, but it should be no suprise when you engaged in edit wars on one of the most touchy subjects on earth.

That's generally been my experience, that editing contentious topics on Wikipedia is roughly average for the topic, rather than having any strongly Wikipedia-specific characteristics. Sometimes better than elsewhere, sometimes worse.

I've been on committees in academia to co-write overviews of subjects in which there is some contentious debate, even in the computer-science sense of political rather than real-world politics, and they have not all been straightforward or enjoyable experiences. If 10 people have very different views of a subject, where several of them hold the views strongly, and we are collaboratively supposed to write a neutral overview of a topic, it takes a lot of work and negotiation to reach any kind of agreement.

I suspect if you were to select 10 experts in the I/P conflict from across the ideological spectrum, and put them in a room for a week, asking them to replace a few of these Wikipedia articles with better ones, you would not get anything better, if anything at all. You might get some fistfights!

Re: Ask HN: How many of you contribute to Wikipedia?

#52
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to see the change you made, since I've done the same thing hundreds of times (adding or changing an article and giving a reference) and I haven't noticed random reversion.

I considered including that in this post, but it would have the net effect of tying several of my online accounts to my real name, and I'd like to avoid that. Sorry!

I understand, I don't even like linking my pseudo-anonymous accounts across different sites. Eventually you'd give away enough information that you could be easily identified anyway.
Post reply on HN