Then I stopped editing anything there, and I stopped treating wikipedia as a source of any reliable information.
These are people with whom you simply can't reason. Any argument you provide will be shot down with the absurdest of reasons.
Personally, I'm glad this happened to me. Like you, that experience cemented the unreliability of wikipedia in my mind.
I apologize, but I’m a little unclear on what you’re asking for. Let me know and I’m happy to provide.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be the case, specifically with talk pages where the history of the discussion with the editor who deemed it a “hoax” was, but you can see some remnants of it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Random_Hacks_of_K...
I wasn’t the one who made the edits to the page itself, but I was involved in collecting the links to prove it wasn’t a “hoax” and helping make the case to the editor who refused to believe it was true.
You know the saying: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.".
There's excesses and errors on Wikipedia but overall I think it is ok. Just use a skeptic mindset when reading things, just like for any other source.
If you are a professional then, it takes a single day to find that Wikipedia is ruled by brats and its not your place.
It sounds like that professional tried to use Wikipedia as his free PR soapbox and found it hard to post propaganda when his submissions are under scrutiny.
I've seen that before, with a PR guy trying to create a wikipedia article to sell the event he was organizing and link to it from other sources. Oddly enough, he also criticized wikipedia's editors for being childish and irrational. Meanwhile, he failed to notice the irony or even the fact that he was directly going against wikipedia's spam rules.
So what?
It's your job to present proof that the collaboration existed, and it's your job to convince others that the information you're providing is accurate.
And more, submitting a dubious article for deletion is actually just a request for other users to evaluate the merits of the article on their own, and they vote based on the information you provide and the case you make to support your position.
But for some pages it's a competition on who has the most free time and the most willingness to navigate the bureaucracy (and none of those items implies greater knowledge of the subject, quite the opposite)
That was a page about a database. I've added an info, that this database has a feature. Someone removed that. I have added links to documentation stating that yes, there is this feature.
And I'm not going to argue with them. Let me write it so you will understand it: I JUST DON'T CARE.
Let them argue in their own kindergarten. I have more interesting things to work on. I can always make another training where I teach people that this database has this feature.
I don't have links now, but there are quite known cases where a professor, who spent 20 years on a topic, writes something about this topic, and gets over voted by the bunch of kids, who have no idea about the whole thing.
It is not fair. The default is a negative, and its up to the author to convince everyone to add specific information to the global collective. It is also susceptible to attacks from popular opinion, which is a common theme for practically all major breakthroughs. Being "right" has a long history of not being enough at the short time, while social cliques has a long history of allowing the "wrong" facts.
The question however remains: what is a better process? If they had the HN models, your edit could just as easily be downvoted by that "guy" and his support. They could abandon the deletionism model but then limit google/wikipedia search to only show articles that has been approved by the "featured article" process, but which would result in zero traffic for most articles and effort spent on Wikipedia.
As it should be.
That's how false positives get filtered out, even at the risk of losing some minor true positives in the process.
If your contributions are solid then they are kept in. If they are not then keep it in your blog.
To put this into context it would be like a non American saying the next biggest festival to Mardi Gras isn't noteworthy.
> This maneuvering and filibustering is soon likely to exhaust the patience of any reasonable person who naturally prefers not to reason with the unreasonable, and who, unlike the advocate, has no special interest or passion other than striving to maintain neutrality. Additionally, by continually engaging fringe advocates in endless argument, you run the risk of turning Wikipedia into a battleground or a debating society. At the present time, Wikipedia does not have an effective means to address superficially polite but tendentious, long-term, fringe advocacy.
This is definitely a very, very hard problem.
And there's the rub. On Wikipedia, 'truth' is determined by the most powerful players on the page.