Hacker News Reader

Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

As a victim of such things, it is mostly true, not false.

I've mostly given up on editing wikipedia because it's just too annoying to deal with.

Your numbers area meaningless because most articles are ignored, tiny, and full of spam, it's the higher profile articles that are patrolled.

The problem in a nutshell is this:

The less qualified someone is to edit wikipedia the more time they tend to have to edit on it.

The people who actually know the subject, have little time on their hands to edit things, and no desire to waste it.

To fix it:

They should make a rule: It's forbidden to simply remove things, instead if you want something removed or changed you have to actively research the subject first, and attempt to help make the edit good. Or show that it's incorrect.

Right now all the timewasters simply remove edits, instead they should fix them.

View on HN

Then you have the opposite problem: anyone can add spam and hoaxes with impunity because it takes more effort to remove than add. Then in response you add the same rule for adding information. Voila, you just recreated Wikipedia except you now made citations mandatory and now everyone has to do tons of research to ever fix or modify anything. So much for a wiki. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wikiwiki#Hawaiian

I tried to counter that years ago with [citation needed], but eventually I expected unreferenced material would be removed.

As it turns out, you can remove material: just claim it is a BLP violation. Give the most spurious reasoning you can find, but it will be enforced no matter how absurd.

Yes, the burden to provide citations to add it back rests on the person who wants to reinstate challenged information. This helps to tend towards an article that has more cited content over time as anything questionable only gets reinserted with sourcing. I think this is the best balance between allowing anyone to add information and to have verifiable articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Burden

Except that's not what is happening. If you state that the source is not verifiable or reliable (even if it is) then it will likely get removed. Often the admin will block the editor who readds the material without even checking the source. If that doesn't work then the next tactic is to accuse the editor of violating [[WP:UNDUE]] and create an unbalanced article. An admin will then come along and see that because the editor used a citation template via a named <ref> tag that the number of characters rapidly increases, and just assume that the material added is causing the article to become unbalanced.

Alternatively, another tactic is to remove the entire section, not just the bit that is disputed. After the editor reverts 3 times, no matter if they object in the talk page they will be blocked.

The ultimate way to keep material removed, however, is to claim that it violates BLP. Due to the paranoia around this area (which is admittedly somewhat justified) no admin will look into it further and the default position is that the material is forbidden no matter how absurd or invalid the claim.

After you've been reverted, incidentally, it appears that the end run around discussion and consensus is to switch the archival boy tag to about 7 days and add a collapse template on the discussion thread, which prevents it from being seen by default and effectively silences the one who was blocked - which means appeals and review of the discussion become largely meaningless.

I don't know if you know this, but every article has a history of changes. Admins look at the diffs of these changes and can see exactly what was added or removed. And about edit-warring and BLP violations, again, the best way to resolve those are using the talk page. For the former the alternative is a game of attritions, and for the latter the possible harm is too great to not arrive at a consensus for the change first. You sure do seem to have something personal against Wikipedia admins, but they don't even get involved unless you've been vandalizing or editing very disruptively. Even then, they are not arbitrators of content, but behavior.

I not only know it, but it's what I used to do on a regular basis. But please, have a look at the [[Salim Mehajer]] article's talk page, and tell me if it's reasonable that extensive discussions have been collapsed. Or perhaps maybe the edit comment that the character limit increased from about 15,000 to 30,000 characters, but that 8,500 or so characters were references to verifiable or reliable sources. Or that an entire section was constantly removed, even though I asked what the specific issue was repeatedly.

It's funny how many journalists have contacted me about this and commented that the situation is ridiculous. They can see it, but it appears admins cannot.

> They should make a rule: It's forbidden to simply remove things, instead if you want something removed or changed you have to actively research the subject first, and attempt to help make the edit good. Or show that it's incorrect.

[citation needed] was a terrible creation. It made it much easier for people to just tag the bits of articles that they disagree with. Instead they should spend some time trying to find citations.

That was never the point of [citation needed]. I created that because it was impossible to remove info without a massive revert war. It was meant to encourage sourcing reliable material that backs up the text, it was certainly never intended to allow text to remain without a citation forever.

I'd encourage those who add the tag and who find that even after discussion (or if discussion is totally ignored!) none is provided that they remove the material. They just need to use commonsense to work out a reasonable timeframes.

You still end up in a revert war. Usually with a 14 year old using automated tools who makes thousands of stupid pointless edits per week, without adding anything (such as citations) of value.

Yeah, but that's not the fault of the [citation needed] tag.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com