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I had a similar experience a few years ago. I started a new topic and immediately I had some guy marking it for deletion. In the talk page he made various claims, almost all of them nonsensical, apparently with goal of getting me to go away. Eventually, after some fairly harsh replies, he went away, and the pages stand to this day.

But it worked, I gave up soon after and haven't contributed since.

It's like the existing editors want to keep WP all to themselves and don't appreciate "outsiders" interfering. The irony is I'd been contributing since 2002 off an on, but that made no difference.

> Eventually, after some fairly harsh replies, he went away, and the pages stand to this day.

Which brings up the point I was going to make about TFA. If 'toxic' comments are an effective way to reduce the impact of bad editors, then it's not clear that 'toxic' comments have a negative effect on the quality of Wikipedia. They might be improving it.

Just to be clear, I wasn't toxic (although unclear what the definition exactly is), I just vigorously called him out on his bullshit.

I hate to dogpile and I almost never do, but the parent's and GP's experiences are almost the same as mine.

It doesn't take too much blatantly dishonest interaction before I decide "life is too short", regardless of whether it is on Wikipedia or elsewhere.

Reminds me of my experience with Stackoverflow. I tried to solve a very specific problem with Windows installers. I only got some responses from oldtimers that basically said “why would you do such a thing?”and similar. It felt extremely unwelcoming. It’s ok to not answer but why be so dismissive? I guess the only questions they like are things like “how do I calculate 2+2 in python?”. Anything more complicated is not acceptable.

I think StackOverflow is a good example of a site where cultural norms have become a life-threatening issue. The site has experienced a sharp drop in search traffic and yet people still say it's unfriendly all the time. Fixing that perception should be a top priority.

Fixing the unfriendly perception is why stack overflow is dead. Signal to noise for professionals is now close to zero. Maybe it's friendlier, but it's also no longer worth visiting other than the historical record.

From my last 5 stack overflow questions, 3 were some mod closing the question with a rationale that’s ridiculous.

Most questions are now answered in the comments instead of being written as an answer below the question and I assume this is because people have had bad experiences with gate keeper mods when writing answers.

I have reasonably high karma.

I don’t think quality deteriorated due to some attempts to make the site more friendly. It’s the spirit of a county rabbit breeders association that drives people away

I (used to) answer questions in comments. It became too discouraging to post an answer that took 20 minutes to write and get immediately downvoted because someone disagrees with any single part of it (or they're trying to promote their own answer by suppressing everyone else's).

Comments can't be downvoted. MetaFilter had the right of it.

Saying "mod on stack overflow" is much like saying "editor on Wikipedia".

Where these other community members who had the close vote privilege? Or an elected moderator that had a diamond in their name to designate that?

In the rare occasion I'm desperate enough to ask a question, I dread seeing the red inbox notification. I think I've abandoned the last three questions I asked because I couldn't stomach facing the drama I expected.

The cultural norms of internet forums should never have been allowed to take root on a Q&A site. There is nothing "professional" (or even helpful) about answering questions with out-of-scope proscriptions.

Your plumber doesn't show up asking why you want your toilet fixed, nor does he tell you your house is messy, give you dietary advice and passive-aggressively insinuate you need to fix your roof. SO responders are mini-spouse syndrome incarnate.

Yeah, whenever I ask a question on SO, I literally have to write paragraphs of text exhorting people to answer my question instead of a different question they find easier, or why my question is not the same as some vaguely similar one.

Then I have to constantly remind people about the same stuff in the comments.

That culture problem has been getting worse and worse at SO over time. I only go there as a last resort.

Sources?

(Edit: Let’s add /s just in case)

StackOverflow is a great resource if you want to know how you would have done some programming task in 2009. Their cultural aversion to new/updated content has frozen them in time.

Agreed. Certain categories should probably be purged every 5 years or so. In many areas there is no value in learning how things got done years ago. Obviously, there are other areas where the fundamentals haven't changed since the last decades.

I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you). They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help everyone else.

In that light all the weirdness made sense. Of course, I am very interested in getting my problems solved, so I simply stopped asking on SO to avoid the frustration.

> I found SO very frustrating until one of the moderators explained it rather clearly: SO isn't about me (or you). They don't want to help me (or you). They want to help everyone else.

I know that's what they say. The thing they have trouble understanding is that "helping everyone else" does not mean bending every question into some 101 level software design advice thing.

"Helping everyone else" very much can mean being a repository of answers to hard questions or solutions when non-typical constraints are at play. Every software engineer worth his salt must have had an experience where the answer he was looking for was in some old, weird forum post that was the single hit to his search query, but a lot of SO doesn't seem to get that.

Generally I've had pretty good luck with Stack Overflow. Recently however I had a ten year old popular question about how to read terminal responses in a shell script removed b/c some mod decided questions about shell scripts belonged on "another Stack Exchange site".

I had a similar experience in SO, I used the term "the most bulletproof-y way I can think of" or something like that in my answer, definitely used "bulletproof-y." Someone responded with something like "You shouldn't say that. Nothing's really bulletproof, you know."

I expect Wikipedia to collapse under its own weight and hard fork within the next 10 years. I think it would be a shattering like Twitter if the content wasn't under a permissive license. Instead I think it's going to be like WoWWiki being acquired and forking to Wowpedia, and then Wowpedia being acquired and forking to Warcraft Wiki.

The community around it is extremely unwelcoming and has calcified - only the most cynical and bitter editors remain. I know of a couple of the principles of the site, "be bold" and "assume good faith", I don't think those are followed or respected anymore.

And the finances of the foundation, good lord.

> And the finances of the foundation, good lord.

Please expound? Or a link is fine, too.

Maybe start here: https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_c...

While 10 years old, things haven't gotten better but worse. Seems like lots of projects besides the "core product" Wikipedia are being founded. Obviously people don't like that because they want the money to be used for preserving/building/extending Wikipedia.

Any cursory googling of their finances would show you that they balooned and instead of using said finances to run the website they ask for more millions of dollars to sponsor a bunch of unrelated charities and hire a bunch of executives to manage such use of the funds.

I wish someone would hard-fork it already and stick to a promise of strictly sticking to the core job of operating wikipedia the website, with a small dedicated team.

Plus they don't need any more money, they have enough money to run it for a long long time already and if they keep doing a good job people will keep donating. I don't understand this model of "we need to ensure we survive forever as fast as possible by accumulating a billion dollar endowment". Nonprofits should have ~5-10 years runway max and keep getting donations if they keep doing a good job. I don't trust any organization forever. What incentive do they have to be useful and welcoming if they have a forever endowment?

You could make a fantastic fork if you simply stop pretending that credentials can not be validated. It then follows that 5 angry narcissist anons do not equal in value a professor.

Then you can further simplify if you employ expert moderators who have the final say in everything. The infinite size discussions back stage serve no purpose.

I bet people had tons of ideas for other improvements. (think: A distributed system with fancy api's for the robot overlords.)

Volumes have been written on the ballooning budgets of Wikimedia foundation, of which only a trivially small amount goes towards hosting costs. In mobile rn, but Google should get you plenty of results.

I've read stuff from insiders that the foundation spending grows exponentially year-after-year and they use those scare banners that "wikipedia is under threat" to collect more money and grow even more, the money is completely unrelated to hosting the site. This is a recent article from a year ago:

https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...

I've observed this phenomenon for a while. The people deleting these pretty much do nothing else. They are some how considered valuable contributors. Something I've mocked loudly. The effect is that some topics/categories have wild outgrowth of articles even the best of us would doubt necessary but certainly wouldn't care enough to attempt to delete it. Every popstar, every album, every song on the album, covers of it, each their own article. It would be wild if STEM editors got the memo.

Who the hell would not want an article about a tractor company? Tractor are more important than discography. It gets even more stupid if we assume your articles really needed work. Who is to do the work if it is not allowed?

They should just ban the deletionists starting with the ones who didn't contribute a single sentence for years. Filling talk pages with nothing that creates articles.

The worse case I've seen was a guy creating articles about (mostly old) books for many years followed by this giant caravan of deletionists who sometimes deleted the article immediately, sometimes after a week, sometimes a month, sometimes they exchanged troll messages among their own for a whole year. Eventually they deleted the articles faster than he created them with ever cheaper excuses until eventually the person creating them was the excuse for deletion. Thousands of articles gone, all good articles. I know all of the guidelines, I know when it should be good enough.

Same thing happened to me but in my case, I added a simple "citation needed" on a statement that was objectively false (can be proven by simply going to the vendor's landing page). The citation needed tag got reverted almost instantly and I was told that adding this tag was inappropriate and constituted sabotage. I never clicked that edit tab again.

The thing is, I don't blame the editor. He's high on the smell of his own farts. I blame wikipedia for enabling him. At least with stack overflow, they try to make fighting against this kind of corruption easier by making it's voting-based moderation system visible. Not wikipedia. It's opaque. It reminds me a lot of governments.

Anyway, I still notice false statements on wikipedia from time to time, but I always smirk to myself and carry on :)

Wikipedia has an ongoing project on improving articles on the subject of western esotericism (quite interesting one even for "scientifially-minded" if you look at the origins of the Royal Society and the surrounding protosciences). I've been using Wikipedia since its early beginnings, on my primary account loosely contributing for well over a decade and many of my edits from years ago were left unchanged.

A few months ago I've tried creating a small page about a modern-day occultist who seems to have near Indiana Jones status in that community for digging out one well-known magical ritual from medieval archives all over Europe with academic scrutiny (the Abramelin ritual, A Dark Song is a recent interesting movie about it). His name already was mentioned on some related pages.

Went through some lengths searching for more secondary material after they asked for it. Had hours of conversations via Wikipedia IRC to make sure I deliver exactly what is needed (and they claimed my sources are sufficient there). But even several academic papers discussing his work were not enough for the admin in charge, apparently his whole bio needs to be in a secondary source for him to be considered "noteworthy" - which seems to be an impossible demand in this small community.

I get the danger of self-promotion, Wikipedia has a few obvious pages of company CEOs self-promoting, who probably asked some poor employee bloke to write it. But meanwhile Wikipedia is scattered with obvious industry propaganda / damage control (see the suspiciously detailed Monsanto damage-controlling articles on glyphosate or the Séralini affair; and some more recent pharma-related topics) and literal advertisements from several industries. Just check out that page about Justin Bieber portraying that kid as some modern-day musical genius. Industry marketing departments – of course – do have the resources to literally fight for their articles full-time. On top of it this all severely and widely influences public opinion - these articles are much more widely read than one about a well-known author in a hidden subculture -, and nobody seems to be interested in doing something about it.

I'm sure your already aware of it, but if anyone is interested in digging into western esotericism now, the podcast is great:

https://shwep.net/

But it should really be accompanied by the History of Philosophy without any gaps podcast for more historical context. It's very interesting to hear the contrast between the "mainstream" and the "underground" takes on the exact same philosophers throughout history.

Thank you, this looks great (and quite academic, which seems difficult to come by). You likely know about him, but Wouter Hanegraaff, who holds an academic chair about western esotericism could be interesting to you.

> and some more recent pharma-related topics

I'm kind of curious now, what are the topics?

Another victim of deletionism. You might like https://gwern.net/inclusionism#no-club-that-would-have-me

> He had his own TV show, has multiple published books and a popular podcast.

That alone doesn't meet Wikipedia's requirements for noteworthiness. Some of the sources you used have to be independent. Eg. published biographies written by someone else, an independent TV show about him (not starring him), etc. Otherwise any random social media influencer could be included if they publish their content in various formats.

> Otherwise any random social media influencer could be included if they publish their content in various formats.

Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but... Why not?

I know that's an age old question in Wikipedia, but if people are happy to write and edit articles about their niche of interest... Let them do it, maybe they'll contribute even more to other topics.

I tend to be an advocate for including more rather than less, but one argument for requiring a baseline level of notability is that sufficiently obscure topics are difficult to verify information about as well as making it unlikely that people will notice, and Wikipedia gives additional credibility to whatever's currently written there (whether it should or not, it does).

Less obscure topics are both easier to verify and more likely to have someone looking at them and going "wait, what, that's not right...".

I think there is a certain danger associated. I was a watcher of a few Wikipedia lemmas on esoteric topics and it was quite hard to keep these articles grounded in reality, I believe some actors on there were Astro turfing to sell more scams energy devices, and part of their strategy was to have a fitting, non-critical Wikipedia article to the esoterica they sell.

I don’t contribute to Wikipedia anymore for the obvious reasons. Now there is one person less making sure that the article on Orgon Energy something states that it’s not a concept accepted by science.

My point is the more articles the less likely is it that a community can maintain the information and reach a certain consensus on what would be a neutral view when phrasing the article.

And what’s wrong with that? Are you worried that you’ll run out of bits?

Not personally, but it's Wikipedia's rules.

>Otherwise any random social media influencer could be included if they publish their content in various formats.

I have yet to hear a compelling reason why this would be a bad thing. Are you able to expand on why?

I'm guessing because of self-promotion as well as the fact that if nobody's written about them, they probably aren't that significant. Wikipedia says it's not meant to be a collection of all human knowledge.

> Spent literal hours on it collecting citations and what have you. Within a couple hours the page was deleted

> No chance to explain. No chance to reword. Just gone completely

I've had the same experience. It requires too little effort to dump other people's contributions. I don't understand the super users' motivations in cases like this.

I don't understand the lack of respect towards other people's obvious efforts. Probably has a psychological side to it.

Only slightly tangential to parents post but I hate that Wikipedia moderators need articles to be import enough. A lot of deep dive articles into niche shows are all relegated to fandom wikis. Those sites provide no way to get a dump or even has any sort of knowledge graph

I had been working with the zeshel dataset and wanted to build a knowledge graph on top of the dataset for the model that I was planning to build. If those articles were a part of Wikipedia, there would have atleast been some effort integrate them to the larger Wikipedia knowledge graph

Well duh, that's just what you get for trying to contribute without at least a Bachelors in Wikipedia Law with a minor in Editor Politicking

I recently read a page on a 19th century clock maker and found it poorly sourced and very factually incorrect in many places. I thought briefly about putting in the work to correct the page and provide good sources and such, but I read posts like yours and any energy I might have for it just evaporated.

> About a year ago I created a Wikipedia page for a TV personality and author I enjoy. Spent literal hours on it collecting citations and what have you. Within a couple hours the page was deleted for not being noteworthy. He had his own TV show, has multiple published books and a popular podcast. Seems noteworthy enough to me, but what do I know.

Would this be Andrew Heaton? Here is the discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... it doesn't look particularly contested.

Like there is always going to be disagreements about what should or shouldn't be an article, but this case seems pretty reasonable and hardly a close call.

The wikipedians claimed there was no independent coverage of this person, and nobody disagreed. Seems reasonable to delete in such circumstances.

----

> Within 5 minutes of posting the page, someone else did read my citations word for word, and it was marked for “rapid deletion for copyright infringement”. No chance to explain. No chance to reword. Just gone completely and I didn’t have a local copy of the article.

Well yes, copyvios put wikipedia in disrepute so they are handled quickly. That doesn't mean it is the end of everything - you can still discuss after it was deleted. Even if it remains deleted an admin would likely be willing to give you the non copyvio part if you asked.