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Comment by superdisk | Hacker News Reader

> full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.

So absolutely true. These people are insufferable. Any time I've made a non-trivial edit to Wikipedia I usually end up clashing with these people. It really sucks because a lot of the time, they don't argue in good faith, and throw every rule in the book at you to get their way, while hiding behind a facade of impartial rule-abiding.

So frustrating, and has drastically lowered my confidence in Wikipedia.

Also, it's fun to note the "lords" of various general topics. Find an article about a person in the right-wing political sphere and you're very likely to find the same small set of "Wikipedian" toadies ruling over it with an iron fist. I'm sure the same goes for many other topics that aren't about politics.

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It’s not even just controversial topics or politics: people try to control the pettiest things. I used to be active there, and it was a struggle to add “timelines” of band members to some old rock acts even though it was already in place in most of the site, because a classic-rock fan disliked them. There is also one specific user who gets to pick who is metal and who isn’t, and reverts addition to lists for bands who aren’t “metal enough” for him like Rammstein or Nu-Metal.

Even with sources and pushback from other moderators, it’s hard to compete with people with an agenda and a lot of time.

> Even with sources and pushback from other moderators, it’s hard to compete with people with an agenda and a lot of time.

Exactly! This, writ large, is why a small disciplined group can take over a bureaucracy that allows open participation in decision making processes.

You see this, for example, in everything from city council meetings to the state department.

Which explains why bureaucracies always end up with some ideological litmus test of us vs them applied to screen out who is allowed to participate, whether because the bureaucracy doesn't want to be taken over by an ideological group, or whether it has already been taken over by an ideological group, the ends result is the same -- every bureaucracy develops an ideology that it defends.

Taking this back to wikipedia, we see why no project like wikipedia can actually be "neutral". At best you can have a variety of ideological biases for different topics, with the most fanatical group's ideology dominating any given topic.

/rant

The article certainly betrays an ideological alignment that is routinely denied by those who moderate Wikipedia, but nonetheless is often fairly obvious.

But my general attitude toward Wikipedia is not to take it too seriously. These moderators are also generally randos with no credibility anyway, and they know it, hence their style of moderation.

Also, I would much rather have an encyclopedia with individual or a limited number of authors per article (like SEP does). If there is significant divergence on a subject, those divergences can be represented as alternate articles. What you don't want to do is pretend to have a "neutral" body of knowledge just because you have some article edited by an anonymous, unbounded committee and moderated by an asshole.

Even for things you'd think were uncontroversial, they are insufferable. A number of years ago I tried to fix some really obvious errors in the article that described the small(ish) company I worked for. I sourced my changes, generally with links to the authoritative source, and still most of them got reverted. By someone who had no actual connection to the company, even.

I still browse wikipedia on occasion, due to ease of finding things, but I read everything with a very critical eye and keep in mind that I'm only getting one carefully curated version of reality. And it may be false even so.

Wikipedia has a moderately frustrating anti-elite / anti-self-promotion bias that will result in the site maintaining erroneous information added by natural third parties over true information added by those directly involved.

Doesn't matter how true it is... If you're an employee of the company and get found out, your edits get reverted.

Good point. I believe primary sources are flat-out banned, which could explain why those links didn't cut the mustard.

No, primary sources are not banned on Wikipedia.

The kinds of things I offered corrections on were simple and sourced off public filings. Like the relationship of the company with another -- our company bought another, but wikipedia claimed the other company bought ours. Another obvious mistake was the picture of our building. They put a picture of the building next door. There were a number of really egregious mistakes that I tried to correct, but I got a no-comment reversion of almost all of them.

And in case you were wondering, at no time did I identify myself as an employee (and I was just a software guy anyway, not part of the marketing group), nor did they suggest that they knew I was.

Some of those reversions are automatic or semi-automatic. If you did the edits from a corporate IP address, for example, people will run that stuff down, conclude the edits are conflict-of-interest (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Organizations), and revert them regardless of content. It appears that what Wikipedia considers the correct course of action in that circumstance is to highlight the error on the talk page and let someone else fix it.

Wikipedia is useful for the lists of references at the end of articles and for finding public domain or CC licensed images. But there’s never a good reason to look at the text of a Wikipedia article.

And, as you’ve found out, trying to improve the cesspool is a waste of time.

It's particularly bad in the German Wikipedia. Compared to the situation there the English language version is downright welcoming.

Yes, our “Blockwärter” do this for a decade now. If they don’t know something, it doesn’t exist and also isn’t “relevant” enough for Wikipedia. It’s a shame.

This has been my experience also. These people get a mediocum of power and let it go to their heads.

>Also, it's fun to note the "lords" of various general topics. Find an article about a person in the right-wing political sphere and you're very likely to find the same small set of "Wikipedian" toadies ruling over it with an iron fist. I'm sure the same goes for many other topics that aren't about politics.

These people are effectively activists who use wikipedia's reputation for objectivity to disguise what amounts to propaganda. The network of bullies lean almost exclusively in one political direction and any remotely political article will be immediately swarmed if edited with wrongthink - regardless of how well it is sourced. It's not just dishonest, it's dangerous that people are coming to wikipedia, reading articles with subtle but overwhelming bias, and leaving with the impression that they read something objective. Just check the talk page for anything adjacent to politics - you will inevitably see rabidly left leaning full time editors piling onto any remotely right of center edits.

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