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Comment by oxfordmale | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that PR companies can push out whatever they want, where as an ordinary individual with personal knowledge of a topic, can't. It means many Wiki articles on person or companies, are often glorified advertisements, rather than encyclopedic entries.

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A blog post can be sufficient reference.

The point is that Wikipedia isn't original research. You updating the page on the basis of personal knowledge isn't the way it is supposed to work.

I added Dimon as short name for Dmitry in RU, referenced YT video with 40M views were Dimon was short name for Dmitry, video was named "He is not Dimon" for person with official name Dmitry, who was prime minister of Russia. I am Dmitry too btw, I know Dimon is also in Belarus.

Was reverted as that was not reference to some book or sciene article.

Never contributed after that. May be one or 2 graph theory improvements.

Wiki denies realitity.

And for math i use only 10% of my math requests.

That seems to usually root cause to asshole editors.

   - Thing done
   - Editor makes a judgement call
   - Turns out to be a bad call
   - Editor refuses to admit mistake
   - Things escalate

Yes, I am not necessarily disagreeing with this approach. The problem is the imbalance. A PR company can buy a news article, link it and update a Wikipedia page. It means the balance is in favour of big corporations and wealthy individuals.

Elsewhere in this thread people complain that the balance is all left wing.

corporations are bipartisan pretending to be partisan. I'm liberal and don't doubt liberal-facing companies can and do do this.

Nobody writes blogs anymore, so that doesn't seem like it'd help.

I've thought a two/three-lens Wikipedia split was needed to handle this, because each brings its benefits.

I remember when nascent Wikipedia had user-contributed content, and the niche articles were way more interesting and detailed. Though at the cost of inaccuracy.

Now, the submarine PR being backfed into it makes cited content pretty beige.

Something like (1) a non-reader-visible, upstream Wikifacts + (2) a community-driven, laxer Wikiprototype + (3) an authoritative, cited Wikipedia.

Actually it is really hard if you work for a company and you need some amends on Wikipedia.

Imagine your quite large company has a small guitar shop on the other side of the globe that has the same name.

You just want a disambiguation so nobody thinks your company is this little guitar shop. You can't just edit it yourself, you need to find a Wikipedia expert and bribe them to somehow help with your plight. It is easy to imagine that a vast PR company will wave a magic wand, but it is not always like that.

Just a few links to companies that advertise to clean up your company profile on Wikipedia.

https://www.wikiexpertsinc.com/get-free-wikipedia-consultanc...

https://www.legalmorning.com/cleaning-up-a-company-wikipedia...

And a writeup on how those companies are usually scams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

That is all far too American for me!

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