The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

There are simply way to many forms and inputs we have to deal with on Wikipedia to make it a one off for every case. We eat our dog food all over wikipedia for that reason.

Personal user styles and javascripts are even stored as wiki-pages. We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere. User's get used to it and can figure out wikisyntax through the site and it's easy.

For it to get added as a special page, it has rise to a general enough thing to be needed by everyone using Mediawiki or something so pressing that could never or should never be on a Wikipage. Meta concepts usually only fit that (like permissions and stats and new page reviewing).

Don't get me started about the time I engaged in a revision war with the crazies over the Serial (Oxford) Comma. The Wikipedia page still has an "example" of where the Serial Comma "leads to ambiguity", but which is grammatically incorrect. All I was asking for was a single grammatically proper example to back up the extraordinary claim that the anti-serial-comma folks were making. They couldn't provide it but why does that matter when the revert button is so easy to press?

A popular band can, if there are good sources for the information. Regardless of what other policy exists, having written a number of band articles, I've found that to be more or less the one de-facto rule: cite thy sources, preferably to sources that seem relatively legit (musicological books or journal articles good; newspapers and magazines ok; the band's own website ok but not as the only source; "personal communication" not so good). Overall I think that makes sense, because it's the only real way of verifying that it's not just fans writing impossible-to-verify opinion or lore. Plus, Wikipedia is supposed to be a tertiary source that compiles secondary sources, which doesn't make any sense if there aren't secondary sources.

Whenever I've written articles about music groups that do have good references, I've never run into problems, even if they're obscure groups. For example, I recently wrote one on a minor 1980s punk band, with citations to the book American Hardcore (a history of 80s hardcore), which I doubt anybody would challenge. I do think there's an awkward gap around subjects that clearly should have secondary sources, but for some reason don't, because music historians and journalists have somehow neglected to write about them, or just haven't done it yet (musicology tends to lag). I can see why people get pissed off in those cases, but I do think it's basically no-win for Wikipedia, because in cases where good sources don't exist, it's not possible to produce an article up to what Wikipedia claims are its standards, a tertiary-literature article solidly referenced to the existing literature; because the problem is with the secondary literature itself being deficient (http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...).

Nowadays I mostly do my Wikipedia-editing source-first: I find a good source or two about something, and then decide, hey, this is a good basis for a Wikipedia article. So for example, I'll pick up a book on the history of hip-hop, and use it to write articles about hip-hop musicians. Doing it that way, I have a remarkably laid-back, trouble-free Wikipedia-editing experience. It's still theoretically possible to read some policy pages in a way that could cause me problems: there might be some minor band that I've written a well-referenced article on, but is somehow still "too minor" to deserve a Wikipedia article under the Notability policies. But in practice, those objections almost never come up in the case of well-referenced articles; I think Verifiability basically trumps Notability these days, and that the deletionists who argued for a more strongly curated encyclopedia have lost that battle.

That's what makes this particular discussion strange. Of all the problems Wikipedia does actually have, this isn't one of them: the system worked ok here, in a pretty straightforward way. It also lacks any evidence that the person in question was even interested in contributing to Wikipedia in the first place, except for the sole purpose of inserting a backlink to herself. Those aren't the kinds of contributions Wikipedia is most direly lacking, so when it comes to improving the community, I'd focus effort on not scaring away the people who are actually attempting to contribute things (other than self-promotion).

I did sort of chuckle when I realized this was about an SEO/SEM person, though, as I've run into this kind of angry reaction outside Wikipedia as well. If you run a private wiki/forum/whatever, it's not uncommon to run into people attempting to "organically" contribute links to themselves, who seem to think they're being very clever and incognito when in fact their contributions look spammy from a mile away, and then get extremely indignant and try to raise an internet-stink when you delete their contributions.

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.