Hacker News Reader

Comment by thebooktocome | Hacker News Reader

The math sections are okay up to what a typical mechanical engineer would know. My own sub-field is very poorly covered.

View on HN

Ah, yes some areas are lacking. I am more concerned about correctness though. Do you ever find math material that is completely wrong on Wikipedia? Stuff like number theory, abstract algebra, and category theory seem to hold up when I cross reference. I'm in no position to qualify myself as mathematician though, I just enjoy mathematics a lot.

Do you submit corrections?

Do you? Seems like there should be a xkcd covering this. The usual case as near as I can tell is something like: Make a minor correction to an obvious error, including a link to a source and other wikipedia articles. Edit gets immediately reverted by whoever has declared themselves the guardian of that particular page. Talk page lights up with all sorts of tangential discussion of whether or not this particular subtopic should be corrected or deleted or reworded or something else. Someone else tries making a modification, which again is immediately reverted. People who enjoy the drama have a self-interested desire to perpetuate it. If you are lucky you could go back 6 months later and there's maybe a 50% chance that the original has been corrected (that's if the original topic hasn't come into contact with the non-notable deletionists).

Anyone know when C2 became a javascriptified dumpster fire? Seems like that's a "Day the Music Died" event that should have a date associated with it.

(Not OP) I have in the past, and my experience was that the talk page was civil, my changes were discussed and we came to a common agreement as to what the change should be. Nothing like the fiasco you're describing.

You still haven't answered the question though; do you submit corrections?

>You still haven't answered the question though;

I was never asked a question until now (N.B. the original posters).

> do you submit corrections?

I haven't for years (as in over 5+ years). I'm sure someone will point out it is different now.

> The usual case as near as I can tell is something like:

Based on this I'm not sure you have edited yourself, despite retorting the parent. First off articles don't have guardians; [0] just because someone disagreed with you, it doesn't mean they disagree with everyone or on every article, you're making a huge generalization. Second, I'm not sure why you see talk page discussion as a bad thing; when two parties disagree on something, they usually discuss and try to reach a consensus. [1] Do you believe you're above that or something?

> Someone else tries making a modification, which again is immediately reverted.

This is called edit warring [2] and shouldn't be done. You shouldn't just try to force your revision in after it has been disagreed with.

All you're doing in your comment is painting up some illusory image to discourage someone from trying to engage the system themselves. How about you let them edit and see for themselves if what you said is true? Based on my experience Wikipedia isn't anything like that at all, in fact most articles aren't watched enough for anyone to care how you tweak them.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring

Yeah, that's a hopelessly optimistic viewpoint, I fear. I have many hundreds or more contributions, but stopped a few years ago.

Tried coming back and immediately ran into edit wars on a list of fastest production cars, when legions of people were eager to get the Tesla on there on the strength of a press-release of an upcoming release. Rules warring, silent reversion, you name it.

Wikipedia Review (though not without its share of cranks, and now largely dead), shares a pretty good history of the more sordid history of WP.

When complaining about inadequate behavior from other Wikipedia editors, it would be very useful to point out concrete links to edits and reverts. This gives a chance to other interested parties to fix the article and contribute to the discussion.

Used to, circa 2011. Got tired of rules lawyers and deletionists.

Anecdotal, but what here isn't now: I used to edit as well after noticing how incredibly wrong some of the less popular but obviously wrong articles were. Until one day I made some anonymous corrections with proper sources properly cited. I would see my edits immediately undone. I went back and re-did my edit, rewording it to be clearer, and explaining my citations, assuming I was at fault and if I simply corrected MY mistakes the edit would go through. It did not, and this time I was notified I had attempted to vandalize said page and would be banned from making further edits if I persisted. I went on to create an account and try and argue my points civilly in the talk page, to no avail, and being attacked by the article's caretaker (who by the way knew ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the article's underlying facts/science, anything). After this I left the editing of wikipedia to people with far more patience than I, and I really believe after seeing other talk pages with glaring errors on the wiki article, that this is the modus operandi for many of these "caretakers". You step on their territory and they shoo you away as quickly as possible(they get so bad and pedantic with their arguing they call themselves "wikilawyers"). Still upsets me to this day that when I see an obvious mistake such as a bad date, misspelling or other easily identifiable misinformation I can't be bothered to do more than wonder about what the poor soul who tried to correct it went through. /rant

> Until one day I made some anonymous corrections with proper sources properly cited. I would see my edits immediately undone.

I understand where you're coming from. I've edited for items such as the citation having nothing to do with the content, and seen it reversed and gone through the same thing. Sometimes something as simple as "show me where I can find this in your citation" brings more than civil discourse -- it brings obvious animosity and is countered with straw man attacks or other logical fallacies. I think people have psychological and emotional needs, and some have a need to feel important, dutiful and powerful. This is where they satisfy that need.

Another problem is I think people in authority--sometimes very smart people--draw conclusions that they haven't properly thought about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com