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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"I habitually use a VPN, and Wikipedia does not let me contribute ..."

Lucky you.

If you had been allowed to edit, your edits would most likely have been reverted so fast as to be confused with an automatic process. New pages would be up for deletion immediately. A swarm of people with far, far more time on their hands than you could ever have would block you every step of the way.

There is this notion that well meaning, knowledgeable individuals can make small, worthwhile contributions to wikipedia and slowly refine the resource as we all chip in our little bit.

This notion is false.

It's a real shame because I would love to contribute time and effort in the way that people think they can contribute to wikipedia.

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> If you had been allowed to edit, your edits would most likely have been reverted so fast as to be confused with an automatic process.

If you know that your edit is at risk of being reverted, you can argue for it on the talk page beforehand. Then if no one replies, you can just make the edit and mark it as "per talk"/"see talk page". If the other person reverts, you can now argue that they're in the wrong because they didn't provide a constructive objection beforehand.

It's a silly game, but it helps provide clarity when editing contentious topics.

Has it become that bad? Back when my password was short and I didn't use a VPN and made the occasional addition or change on Wikipedia, it was all accepted or otherwise incorporated, as far as I can tell.

Full disclosure: I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has cancer".

See https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21700802 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Re: "Has it become that bad?" No. Not even close. The people who complain about such things are typically newbies who make the mistake of trying to "fix" articles on highly contentious topics with hundreds of edits per day. Just pick a page that hasn't been edited in a while, which is most of them. The history tab tells you how often it gets edited.

Thanks. Yes, I used to fix minor mistakes on esoteric topics that I happen to stumble across. Alas, not since I use a VPN.

(BTW, thanks for disclosing your affiliation always.)

I'm a very occasional contributor over the past decade, and not had these nightmares. Of course, I've had my hand swatted a couple of times over obscure rules, but for the most part my edits have gone through without too much fuss, including companies I've launched and products I've built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Adsah98

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