bitter blogger is bitter.
Getting stuff rejected hurts a lot. I also skipped 1-2 donation rounds after that happened to me in the past. But then again I continued using Wikipedia so in the end I got over it ;-)
The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
261–270 of 353 posts
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's extremely difficult to participate, I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? > and I don't want to need to spend a bunch at Wikipedia reading countless rules trying to figure that out You don't want to spend time contributing, you just want readers to accept your contribution? I hope I'm misreading your intent, as it sounds like you feel you're above the vetting process? I've made some modest cont…
> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? I agree with you, though I've also experienced the encouragement to participate as nowarninglabel has: >> When I meet wikipedia people here in SF, they say, "Get involved!" Then, when I have tried to get involved, I get endless bureaucracy and everything eventually deleted. I think this is where the frustration stems. Wikipedia, understandably, wants participati…
Article quality and bureaucracy are two completely orthogonal concepts.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#263First they came for "the woman who was the pioneer in fighting click fraud"
Then they came for me
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#264The reason why Wikipedia has these pages is because people push fringe science theories, jingoist distortions of history, and inflated product claims if you do not.
Even so, Wikipedia is effectively used to promote just these things. For example, the editor FT2 got promoted to ArbCom while underming efforts to eliminate pseudoscience. His philsophy he summed up "Writing for an encyclopedia is not the same as writing for an academic paper. It's more like writing the bibliography for an academic paper. We aren't trying to decide what is "true" and what isn't. To be honest, we don't care what "the truth" is, in that sense, because it's not what an encyclopedia is. An encyclopedia is a collation of multiple perspectives and views. It's more like the bibliography of a paper (listing all kinds of sources so long as they bear on the topic) than the paper and its conclusion itself. Every view of note is in there, represented neutrally. Theres no decision to make, few opinions to form, other than to observe which views seem to be more or less common views of note, and to understand each (and its sources) well enough to document. We care that we document each view fully and with understanding. That is the "truth" we work to here. "
http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_Vi...
If making WP more unfriendly would combat this kind of anti-scientific bullshit, I would be in favour of it. I don't, though. A decent external infrastructure for criticising Wikiedpia articles and groups of articles might be more effective, which is why I have hopes for http://hypothes.is/index.html
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the crazy part! I completely agree with you--it's a massively gamified process and ideally, I'd like to believe that just letting people get to work without too much crap in their way would produce good results just as well as the status quo does, but maybe that's too idealistic and this is just how you make the sausage. Still, there are some useful usability critiques to be made. Even an ugly sausage-making p…
sigh It doesn't work like that.
I spent years in that particular sausage factory. They even let me work some of the levers not everyone gets to work. My time there didn't work out well in the long run. Sorry, but it's pretty ugly and political in there.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
The OP's complaint is 20% that they deleted an article they shouldn't have and 80% that the software and culture of Wikipedia is completely opaque and unusable to everyone except the most dedicated contributors. It's absolutely retarded that discussion pages are just wikipages where you have to handle comment threading and nesting yourself with indentation syntax. It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons…
While I agree that it's clunky, there's something to be said for using the same functionality for articles and discussion pages. Adding a messaging system, a forum and an editable user profile would suddenly add three more interfaces for a potential contributor to learn.
Except those would be interfaces suited for the task and easy to learn, instead of a single interface being abused for tasks it is completely unfit to do.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your attitude speaks to exactly what is wrong with Wikipedia. You seem to think it should be difficult to participate, such that only the elite who have busted their chops should be able to do so. If you wish to end up with a dead community (which is exactly what is happening, the number contributors is stabilizing not growing), then fine, but if you wish to actually expand the wealth of human knowledge available the…
The difference with Drupal is that there are very clearly defined rules for how to participate, clear instructions for how to do so, and new contributors are helped along in the process to get their code right, rather than being told their contribution is worthless, which is the attitude I get anytime I try to contribute something on Wikipedia. But there are also clearly defined rules for how to participate in Wikipe…
Interesting use of the words ‘us’ / ‘we’ here: ‘We can create crappy articles about not notable subjects ourselves, thank you.’ Who are the ‘we’ you speak of? It seems you speak of the group of people that is already used to writing wikipedia articles, and you are in this way enforcing a divide between them and potential contributors. Shouldn’t the ‘we’ who wrote Wikipedia be all of us? Should that not be the starting point?
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
The OP's complaint is 20% that they deleted an article they shouldn't have and 80% that the software and culture of Wikipedia is completely opaque and unusable to everyone except the most dedicated contributors. It's absolutely retarded that discussion pages are just wikipages where you have to handle comment threading and nesting yourself with indentation syntax. It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons…
While I agree that it's clunky, there's something to be said for using the same functionality for articles and discussion pages. Adding a messaging system, a forum and an editable user profile would suddenly add three more interfaces for a potential contributor to learn.
wikiHow adopted the solution of templating message posts; but their implementation lacks any sort of threading: http://www.wikihow.com/Discussion:Main-Page
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Perhaps because the tagline of Wikipedia is "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit", not "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit after conducting 20 hours of intense self-study into the arbitrary bureaucracy and 'standards' that let us have a page for every Pokemon and Justine Ezarik's 300-page iPhone bill but not a page for a band that's won 15 local music festi…
Your first example is a little dated; Wikipedia hasn't had one article per Pokemon since around 2007, at the latest, when they were all merged into a handful of lists. Since then, a small number have been spun back out into articles on individual species or evolutionary lines, but only after careful consideration and considerable effort put into finding sources and establishing notability.
Am I the only person who find this comment (perhaps inadvertantly) amusing? "A small number have been spun back out... but only after careful consideration and considerable effort put into finding sources and establishing notability."
"Establishing notability"?
These are Pokemon we're talking about right?
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#270You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_d…
Here is a question for you, then - why delete at all? Why not mark as not notable and just leave it be?