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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> It enforces ego-less-ness by not showing you names; it doesn't want your contributions, especially not on general topics that people enjoy "debating".

Every time I have tried to edit anything in Wikipedia I have run into a very ego-driven community of long-term editors who don't much care for outsiders playing in their sandbox. The levels of "proof" and "citation" demanded to make even the smallest correction, often far beyond anything backing the preexisting copy, means only those with ego-driven determination are likely to have their edits stick. I do care a little that a wikipedia article is incorrect about a topic related to my profession. But I don't care enough to engage some armchair lawyer/soldier in an epic back-and-forth debate over a period of days/weeks. So I back off and just let the errors sit.

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I love Wikipedia. I agree all the good things people are saying about it here and all the people supporting Wikipedia.

That being said.

Wikipedia isn't the truth. I know this for a fact, because there are historical articles that I was there to witness that are not even close to being documented correctly by Wikipedia.

Wikipedia simply collates narratives that can be drawn from citable evidence. Still, their definition of citable evidence is about as workable as I can imagine.

If one doesn't like it, one is invited to get your side of the story published in a reputable source, and then cited. It outsources the process of fact-checking to the free press, such as it exists on the internet.

There is a clip from Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom that humorously illustrates[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/3wla-vK4Buw

I still think Wikipedia is better than we probably deserve and I'm glad we are training training AI on it. I also hope that they are trained on the edit discussions, because that is the AI that's going to really understand humanity.

> Every time I have tried to edit anything in Wikipedia I have run into a very ego-driven community of long-term editors who don't much care for outsiders playing in their sandbox.

This is likely similar to the force that keeps StackOverflow from growing and staying useful. StackOverflow is basically "Answers to programming questions as if it were still 2009" because any new content gets quickly removed as "duplicate" of content that existed a decade ago.

I've seen the same thing happen on OpenStreetMap. You make an edit, and some old-timer comes in and just reverts it. I even once got an angry message there where someone "claimed" an area in a city for himself.

I'm not a Redditor, but I understand Reddit has similar problems with mods.

Not sure the solution. It's hard to develop a community of passionate volunteers, but every time a platform does build this community up, the content calcifies under an inflexible cabal of power-mad volunteers.

> I've seen the same thing happen on OpenStreetMap. You make an edit, and some old-timer comes in and just reverts it. I even once got an angry message there where someone "claimed" an area in a city for himself.

I'm sorry this happened to you. Usually, edits are only reverted if the are 'bad', e.g. the one edit I reverted this morning, where a user added some buildings in India and some buildings in the ocean close to Greenland; https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/136040657

If you've copied data from another map into OpenStreetMap this might also be a cause for a revert, otherwise `some old-timer` should absolutely not revert your edit. Do you care to link us to the edit that was reverted and to the user that sent you an angry message, because such things should not happen in our community! (If desired, you can also message me thought the internal OSM messaging system, same username).

OSM was probably not a great example on second thought. This all happened over a decade ago and sounds like it’s uncharacteristic of the community. Edits I’ve done recently are fine. I’m probably projecting an ancient anecdote onto an entire community which is not fair.

Thank you for being fair and self reflective enough to admit fault

There are people in the OSM community that are difficult to interact with. It's good to hear there are no recent issues you've encountered, so it seems that at least there is a good development.

I believe the solution will lie with AI mods at some point.

I've been an casual editor for over a decade, and I've never run into this issue.

I've made substantive changes to either little known but contentious or moderately well known pages - and my changes largely persisted.

Sometimes edits are easier on the contentious pages. There are more people looking at those pages and so democracy can prevail over time. But edit an almost unknown page and someone may jump out of the woodwork. There are editors of small pages, especially original page creators, who jealously guard their tiny mountains.

Some communities have a latest substantial author owns the page policy, along with a major edits only policy, which tends to work better for math and CS where there’s a lot of people who want to make micro corrections.

Technical communities also value professional credentials and prestige as a blockbuster, so it may be helpful to reveal your professional achievements.

> Technical communities also value professional credentials and prestige as a blockbuster, so it may be helpful to reveal your professional achievements.

Wikipedia generally does not (if anything it would probably count against you as most people who bring that sort of thing up are lying about them anyways).

Sometimes people are unfairly reverted, but often people are reverted for good reason and have problems accepting that their edit simply was not a positive change to the page.

I'll second this (over a decade of low to moderate activity). I've seen contention of course, discussions do occasionally get heated, but territorialism doesn't appear anywhere near as frequently as I've seen in similar projects, like OSM.

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