Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
he resuggested "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity", a group with the goal to make "Wikipedia more intellectually diverse" and "ensure fair and open decision-making and governance, broaden the range of permissible sources, reinforce genuine neutrality, rein in over-aggressive blocking while holding the powerful to higher standards of accountability", etc, with the implied undertone of preventing Wikipedia from drifting too far to the political left.
This is unpopular because people oppose this on various grounds (mostly that it might be vote brigading and tiling decisions in their favor just by showing up in an organised way around wikipedia). Also the same project was apparently suggested before and rejected in early stages
But then he made a tweet that basically just says "I suggested this, some people like it, some hate it". That's super against the rules, because it attracts people to the proposal who otherwise wouldn't have seen it. Probably in an attempt to sway discussion, because his tweets are obviously seen primarily by people who like his ideas
Which then lead to the vote to ban him from editing Wikipedia. With a total ban getting more votes than a more limited ban, like banning him from participating in articles namespaced for internal matters
Is that about right?
After that, Larry Sanger remarked: "What people don't realize, actually, is the number of people who are actually at work on Wikipedia on any given day is not really that enormous. It's more in the hundreds or low thousands, not in the millions. Well, there's a lot of people in India. There's a lot of educated people in India, right? There's a lot more educated people in India than there are in, say, England. Just due to sheer numbers, you can field a lot of good writers on Wikipedia, and if you quite simply learn how to play the game..." (33:54).
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
To be clear: it would be equally bad if you swapped left and right in that sentence. I don't know if his assessment of the issues with Wikipedia is correct, but his solutions aren't what you propose if you want to make Wikipedia more neutral
He’s not saying they need to “march through this institution”. He’s saying they need to learn how to navigate the increasingly Byzantine rules set up by the small number of editors so they can contribute to the site.
Why would it be bad to counter bias by bringing in people from the under-represented group? What would be permissible to you, if not bringing in people from that group to participate?
The part you left out was that he was asked by the interviewer how Indians who felt the site was biased against them could fight the bias:
> When asked about how "Indians and Hindus who feel there is this bias" could "fight it actively", Larry Sanger responded:
So he’s saying that a group can combat bias on the site by participating in the site. India has a lot of educated people and therefore it wouldn’t be hard to find people to contribute. Why is this so controversial?
How would this in any way be against the rules? Wouldn'tan open and democratic process like wikipedia want as many eyes as possible on a vote or rule change?
That sounds completely backwards from the open and free spirit of wikipedia. If even wikipedia has gone full mob rule then hwo do any projects stay open and free to everyone?
I stopped engaging with Wikipedia because my experience of their administration is that it's deeply toxic. This specific instance doesn't seem too out-of-hand to me, since the rules are clear in this instance. It's where there are grey areas that their behavior starts to get unhinged.
if you bring in a bunch of non-wikipedia people (i.e. people who haven't previously cared about or participated in wikipedia discussions at all), all from 1 person's twitter following, you aren't getting "open and free spirit"-ed discussion. you are getting a bunch of larry followers who want larry to "win"
The core idea is, Wikipedia has internal mechanisms to make these kinds of notifications, and making these decisions needs some knowledge and experience about how Wikipedia works.
Recruiting inexperienced people to bias decisions which requires knowledge is effectively converting that proposal to a blunt instrument and trying to force your way in (aka bludgeon).
When the mechanisms in place and requirement of experience (i.e. competence), whistling the town square and calling people to force a gate is textbook brigading, and brigading is forbidden everywhere (maybe except 4chan/8chan).
I agree with your premise and with your conclusion. That said, campaigning in a democracy is exactly recruiting inexperienced people to bias decisions which requires knowledge. Any support of that viewpoint would effectively ban political campaigning.
Moreover, Wikipedia is not a democracy [0]. It's a consensus based system. So, as they say, votes coming from outside doesn't count, and that's fine by me.
Last but not the least, this is a kind of decision on the level of law-making for the Wikipedia. People elect politicians, but don't write the laws themselves. Criticizing Wikipedia for not allowing "ordinary citizens" to write the laws is a bit stretch while giving democracy as an example to aspire to doesn't make sense, because even a democracy doesn't work the way you want to portray here.
Anyway, Wikipedia is not a democracy to begin with, so that's moot in a sense.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
As several users mentioned, “The Unblockables” are notorious, as only one admin willing to unblock them is sufficienf. Even against the wishes of another admin and many users.
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:IS_NOT_A_DEMOCRACY...
Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy or any other political system. Its primary (though not exclusive) means of decision making and conflict resolution is editing and discussion leading to consensus—not voting. (Voting is used for certain matters such as electing the Arbitration Committee.) Straw polls are sometimes used to test for consensus, but polls or surveys can impede, rather than foster, discussion and should be used with caution.
Off-site petitions and votes have no weight in the formation of consensus on Wikipedia.
Sanger wrote the original version of that rule, and its change over the years has reflected a shift from people coming to Wikipedia in the very early years thinking that they could just do whatever the Hell they wanted, to in later years people coming to Wikipedia thinking that it is run like a legislature.
A democracy can vote that pi=4.
This is not a very useful property for an encyclopedia, so you're going to need a different system for determining outcomes.
Preferably you need a method that is somehow still somewhat fair. And that's how we get to the concept of rough consensus. It's absolutely not perfect, and it's not meant to be, because nothing is. Improvements welcome.
It's perfectly acceptable for them to charter their own rules and keep these kinds of matters internal until they agree it's best, for their goals, to involve the public.
Frankly, they strive to be some of the greatest practitioners on neutrality. This is not the kind of organization that needs the kind of public correction you are wondering about.
And if it was, I think we can all understand why modern day Twitter is the wrong place to exclusively inspire that discussion.
Of course, some editor decided it was 'marketing' for starlink so it got deleted despite loads of people protesting. It was the only source I could find easily for showing which country got starlink when.
A huge list of prose is still on the page (not marketing?) showing the updates in a very hard to read and not comprehensive way. Something is really quite wrong over there.
1. There is incorrect information on wikipedia.
2. Legacy news publishes an article, using wikipedia as source (of course).
3. Now the incorrect information is essentially canonized
* https://youtube.com/v/mLdB5s7-h0w
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Off the top of my head: https://citationintegrity.org/
Wikipedia features prominently as a defaulter.
1: the media has a vested interest in only reporting a certain slant, because it involves criticizing the media
2: because the media is the only source deemed reliable, that slant becomes the truth
Wikipedia has an article titled “Yahweh.” Now, as I am a Christian,[8] "Yahweh" is the name of my God.[0]
This is one of Sanger's proposed changes and this is not an undisputed fact, more like a dispute among theologicans [1] and with the confidence he wants this change implemented, I am highly sceptical, that misinformation will decrease.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses#....
[1] https://christianeducatorsacademy.com/is-yahweh-the-christia...
...I mean, yeah, that doesn't sound particularly encyclopedic. "Marketing" might be a bit strong but that doesn't mean it belongs in a general encyclopedia.
It got to the point where there was a column for "verified" numbers, others, and then "Manufacturer projected" numbers.
> "But you haven't made any comments on the Talk page about that."
Well then, make that comment yourself and you can go ahead and revert it later if the other person does not respond.
Go use conservapedia or grokpedia if you want the lies, no one is forcing you to use Wikipedia, and no one is asking for it to be turned into shit like everything the alt right touches
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
The ingroup knows the rules well enough that they can wait until an enemy crosses one of the rules, then they have an excuse to punish them. The more rules on the books, the more opportunities to use them against your enemies.
When someone inside breaks the rules, it’s treated as a misstep, handled internally, and then forgiven after a short ceremony to make it look like order and procedure are still being maintained.
At clubs. At school. At work.
This is one of the first things I taught my kids to recognize and yet I see plenty of people in their 40s or more that still haven't figured it out. Some of them even become "useful fools" and make matters worse.
This is why Codes of Conducts became so popular.
It's gone now, but this is hilariously on-brand - Wikipedia Review had its own axes to grind but did hugely in-depth work exposing Wikipedia Admins for "caballing", having secret mailing lists that Wikipedia denied the existence of, private IRC channels where admins had their pet topics that they owned and would "get suppressing fire" from other admins when they were going to make edits that reflected their POV (i.e. "watch while I edit and block/ban people who try to revert or interfere"). They'd do the same for admin elections etc.
I took a quick look at what the "Wikiproject intellectual diversity" was actually monitoring. Specific articles or categories about things Mr Sanger finds interesting,right? Well, indeed: specifically it's all arbcom, admin elections, policy pages. You can check it out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/WikiProject_...
Then he canvassed people from outside wikipedia to help with that project.
So he claimed to be doing one thing, but in reality it was more of a thinly disguised power play by the look of it.
Clearly all significant names involved with Wikipedia, including admins, have some kind of ulterior motives, to some degree above literally zero.
Unless you believe in literally perfect altruism 100% of the time.
The degree can vary from one to another, but that seems like a much higher bar to confidently pin down.
This doesnt seem to address my comment?
Yours was a bit non-sequitur, so perhaps I misinterpreted the implication.
It’s literally directly addressing the last sentence of the parent:
“So he claimed to be doing one thing, but in reality it was more of a thinly disguised power play by the look of it.”
The bad ulterior motives may help explain the bad behavior, but the behavior is bad in and of itself. That's why I thought there was a misunderstanding when your post totally ignored the behavior.
How can you know that is not part of the “whole point”?
Presumably the sentence was included for some reason, not just pure random keyboard bashing.
Unless you are the GP?
You replied to me initially, I didn’t seek out one of your comments to reply to.
And you still haven’t explained why you answered a comment believed to be a non-sequitor… with your own non-sequitor. Which still makes no sense.
If you don’t want to answer any of the questions so far, you are free to leave.
consider that the reason you think my post was a non-sequitur to yours, may be because mine was discussing the topic of the thread you sought out and responded to with a non-sequitur
thus, you are confused by both my post and GP ("This doesnt make sense… ?"), because you're ignoring the substance of their comment and the allegations
You’ve written multiple nonsensical replies in a row, so I’m not going to bother puzzling it out anymore.
> This doesnt seem to address...
> This makes no sense.
> you still haven’t explained...
> still makes no sense.
> This just reads like gibberish
> multiple nonsensical replies
It is unfortunate that you're so confused by what everybody else in this thread is saying. It is totally normal, however, that so many things don't make sense to a confused person.
On the plus side, nobody else seems to be confused by any of the other comments in this thread.
Until I see a situation where this is used to add leftists or far left to a right wing organization, I will just assume it means quota for minimal number of underqualified right wing hacks.
Very short background:
Larry Sanger left Wikipedia in 2003.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/707321
Sanger went on to set up Citizendium, a wiki encyclopaedia project organized the way that xe thought one should be organized, with an extensive rulebase and 'constables'. Sanger's edits on Wikipedia were sporadic from 2004 to 2023, and were almost exclusively focussed on Jimmy Wales's account talk page, the articles on Sanger and Wales, the article on Citizendium, and the articles on the history and criticism of Wikipedia. There was also a whole debate on whether Sanger was a co-founder or an employee.
Citizendium died 15 years ago. (Yes, you can see it now. It was resurrected in 2022, everyone having to start from scratch with new accounts.) I actually thought of getting an account there in its early years, but for several years prior to its effective death it sported an announcement that the new accounts process was temporarily not in service, come back later. The writing was on the wall for a long time.
Sanger re-gained interest in Wikipedia in 2025, but still far more interested in how an encyclopaedia should be governed, which motivated the creation of Citizendium in the first place, than in actually writing one. In the intervening years, xe had done a lot of punditry from the sidelines, concentrating everything through a lens of U.S.A. politics.
JdeBP is misgendering him on purpose, which is a very serious offense and even illegal in many parts of the world.
We'll see if this is allowed to stay here.
I don’t think he’s ever explained his intentions with "Xe" on HN. My guess is that forcing “Xe” somehow gives him pleasure, neverminding the misunderstanding it incurs.
(I'm not necessarily endorsing his screed here... but it is one of my "favorite" bits of Stallmanism. His first entry in the "subsequent notes" section makes me laugh every time.)
edit: oh, this user actually has a similar piece on xe/xem pronouns on his website! excellent. this pleases me greatly (no sarcasm).
Oh no. It's not like a fairly large swathe of admins (and their clingers on) haven't been credibly accused of speed running their contributions just to try to get admin/bureaucrat status. My own Wikipedia history has dozens and dozens of "No" votes on people who either had a serious chance of, or were, elected, who had a contribution history of 80%+ in the WP: namespace, rather than, as you say "than writing an encyclopedia".
Thanks!
They've created their own lexicon and priesthood to run it. No wonder it's so badly compromised. Larry is right.
This is usually not a problem, but given how aggressively vague the WikiProject's goals are (eg. "We hope to open Wikipedia up to using more sources" - which?) and Larry Sanger's prior conduct (eg. advocating for whitelisting of sources like Fox News[2]), it seems the real goal was organizing conservative editors. I'm not sure whether the fact that this is not clearly written is deception or trolling, but it's not a good look for Sanger either way.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/WikiProject_...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Cou...
[2]: https://san.com/cc/wikipedia-co-founder-says-site-has-libera...
> advocating for whitelisting of sources like Fox News
> it's not a good look for Sanger either way.
Wikipedia editors are a bunch of diverse, geeky kooks.
Yeah, citation needed on that one.
Seems like a distinction without a difference to me. If he got his way the website would quickly be overrun with right wing misinformation campaigns. I hope he stays banned.
I'd rather see neither side successfully oust the other. But it seems that the left got there first and is entrenched.
Furthermore, I'm not in the US, but "US politics" doesn't seem to have much left wing about it either.
I learned about wikipedia rules before learning about actual law, it's interesting to see exactly how the mechanisms of modern democracy protect against the specific ways in which Wikipedia fails:
1- Separation of powers between rulemakers and judges. In practice many Administrators who have the power to enforce rules and bans are actually editing articles themselves!
2- Ignore all rules, certainly crazy, it makes the rules an afterthought, it reminds me a bit of the Common Law focus on Case Law as opposed to Napoleonic Civil Law's focus on codified laws, but way stronger.
3- No or weak procedure. Imagine you are in a legal fight with another editor, and you say a bad word, woops, turns out that's a 2 day ban. Maybe there's a parallel with contempt of court? But what happens in wikipedia is that the whole edit war is lost on that technicality, Administrators don't rule in favour of one edit or the other, they distribute penalties to one part or the other and if one party is temp banned, they can't edit the article anymore and the article state the other party desires has a stability and consensus advantage. The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be.
Merely inactive admins are automatically deadminned, because if you don't need it, you don't get it.
There is also something analogous to the political world: users can petition for an administrator recall, if the issue is a rogue admin abusing their privileges, or even just the admin is trying to hold onto their privileges when it's clear to others that they don't actually need them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RECALL
So while I don't think Wikipedia is perfect, it does better than your summary implies.
Separation of judge and party is enforced pretty consistently, it is official policy that people shouldn't participate in a decision if they were involved in the kerfuffle in any way. You can edit articles and enforce rules, as long as these are separate. And then, rules can be proposed by anyone, but they're not just created on the fly because it's convenient. That would obviously be objectionable.
In fact this isn't limited to admins, regular users have the power to decide on a ban. An administrator is only needed to close and enact the decision, and this is what happened to Larry Sanger here.
>The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be.
Admins don't have a special power to decide what should be in important protected articles. It is not like a government where people are elected, and then citizens don't have any say until the next election.
The community tries to reach a consensus, and admins are part of the community. They get an input like everyone else plus special powers to enact decisions. But any "ruling" better reflect consensus, or you better bet you will wake up to the Noticeboards on fire with about 50,000 words of heated complaints and discussion.
There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators#Invol...
While admins do have the rights to block users or protect pages, many a times, they leave it to other admins to carry out the administrative actions on the users or pages they are involved with. The editors have recalled or reported admins who had overstepped such boundaries one too many times as well.
It doesn't. Wikipedia rules are often abused and selectively enforced.
A quote, from his own talk page, written by himself:
> But as of fall 2025, I have returned, with the aim of helping Wikipedia in various ways to reform.
This is somebody who (re)started their wikipedia editor career with one goal in mind, and set up a project to reach this goal, and then canvassed for that project.
There is no doubt about any of those 3 things. Specifically, he wants this project to get accepted, he is not all that interested in anything else, and it was him, himself, canvassing for this project in ways that wikipedia policy clearly delineate are not allowed.
This is specifically what the 'no canvassing' rule was written for. One can make quite a few remarks about how the 'no canvassing' rule can be abused, but this isn't an example case, at all. Quote the contrary: This is a textbook case for why the rule exists, and serves as a trivial slamdunk case as to when it should be applied.
Your point stands as an interesting debate, but it has no meaningful effect on Larry Sanger's banned status. It would have been interesting if, for example, somebody else started this project, and Larry Sanger started canvassing for the project. Banning Larry Sanger as an editor would then be an obvious community decision (banned for canvassing), but do you ban the project at that point? The cat's out of the bag, and, indeed, if you adopt the policy of: "If anybody on any social media anywhere canvasses for project X, then that automatically means project X gets canned without any further vote", then one can trivially can any project by canvassing for it.
But none of that is relevant here.
Wikipedia is the wrong place for opinions
* https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Why_I_am_n...
Still there after 23 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Ordinary_Leg...
And this one is now pending deletion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Editorial_pa...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/1359185792
And the second is being discussed, with at minimum 3 more days of discussion to go. It isn't pending anything yet. It only becomes pending deletion when the outcome of the discussion is a consensus to delete. Indeed, the discussion so far has a fair number of people arguing that it should not be deleted.
So still nope.
In practice, just read TFA and this whole thread of comments about it.
The meta-pages where people discuss the pages and the sites are full of opinions and debate.
Wikipedia is literally all about opinions. A huge amount of its activity is different ideological camps battling to control the narrative presented in the reference work millions use by default and treat as authoritative.
And it's not an even close to an even playing field for every camp. Some camps get to push their opinions as authoritative and squash dissenters, others have to fight for the barest representation.
The key is selective enforcement: depending on your camp, you either have to walk on eggshells (and probably will get banned anyway) or can behave atrociously towards others and be given a pass every time time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noti...
This is the list of articles Sanger contributed to in 2026: [1]
Compare that too all his contributions: [2]
Does it seem like this person is participating in Wikipedia in a genuine way? Or is he there to start political arguments on various internal pages?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContrib...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContrib...
Can someone here please help me understand what the issue is?
(I keep seeing stuff in that linked article about canvassing and "the left marching through institutions" but again I'm not following the overall argument / issue. Please forgive my ignorance if I'm missing something obvious.)
Changing the whole institutional culture at Wikipedia is more of a social challenge than a technical one, and I am not well-versed in that area. So, I would rather fork some wiki software, write code, and write articles for myself.
Will my wiki be able to compete with a giant like Wikipedia on the internet? I don't know. I don't even know whether mine is indexed by search engines yet. But I love writing articles, so I'll keep doing it as long as I can.
At worst it can be a hive mind echo chamber where certain views are banished to the Abyss.
Certain topics attract the latter rather than the former…
Like arguing with cranks at a town hall meeting, ignorant high school group project classmates, and bureaucracy-obsessed nonprofit initiative zealots all wrapped into one.
in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't have an intimate knowledge of all the details of the editing bylaws, and seemingly infinite time to be able to litigate your case, it's almost impossible to get any of these edits through when the original page author is sufficiently motivated to prevent them.
Take this.
Not to say Wikipedia isn't great + useful! But realize that it is owned by a distributed network of feudal nerd-lords that will defend to their death the contents of Wikipedia articles because they get off on being the dictators of what's true.
Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.
> Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.
Any insight into how these people all manage to dodge the policies against such behavior? Is it just too much effort to complain + favoritism towards frequent editors?
I still love Wikipedia, but mostly as a starting point to find deeper references. (Which, to be fair, is primarily how you should use an encyclopedia.) The degree to which you should trust it as your sole starting point for research in an unfamiliar area is anti-correlated with the length of the article's Talk page.
They know how to play the game 100x better than you do, and you don't want to waste your time learning to play the game at their level.
There is a Wikipedia rule for everything, and for the opposite of that, if you know the right buzzwords. If a "good guy" writes on a topic he is involved in, that's great, because he is a subject-matter expert; we need more heroes like him. If a "bad guy" writes on a topic he is involved in, that's a conflict of interest, instant revert and ban. You can accuse people of all kinds of bad behaviors, but if anyone does the same to you, you accuse them of not assuming good faith. You need to be very very patient and diplomatic, because if you lose temper even for a moment, you get banned. Shameless lying is perfectly okay if you stay polite and pretend to be too dumb to understand.
They would make for effective politicians if they could translate what they do beyond wikitext.
As I discovered later, I was just lucky to hit pages that weren’t possessively controlled by one person or a small group who want to control the page with a tight grip. That’s often true for pages for obscure topics that don’t have much text.
Get into a more mainstream topic or anywhere near a contentious topic and your edits will be reverted, rewritten, or debated by someone with more free time than you until the text goes back to what they wanted to control. It doesn’t matter how much you follow the rules, you’re at the mercy of what that person or group wants the page to say.
unfortunately I was editing under my real name and I'd rather not dox myself so I can't link to the reverts. but the general area was in social choice / computational democracy. so if you scroll around the edit history of some of those pages maybe you'll get the picture?
This could be true. But I saw it in histories of not controversial pages also. Some people feel they own articles they contributed to. Wikipedia made a policy against this because it was a problem.[1]
> You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.
I noticed they said it was years before nearly always if they said when. And to find revisions of forgotten date in Wikipedia required more time than most people would spend for a comment. And anecdotal evidence changed beliefs rarely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content
It's absolutely fair that people aren't going to dig up old edits. At the same time, I'm not sure how relevant years-old anecdotal evidence is. It would be interesting to see some actual statistics on this; I guess the data is public, so it would be possible to do research on how often helpful edits are rejected.
As someone that has battled with this, I agree, but in my experience more often than not, the people that complain are complaining about basic rules like "stuff should have external citations". So I can't really pick either side.
The problem was, if you actually go read the content being cited, it did not at all conclude what the page author was asserting it did. In fact, it concluded the opposite. So the citation was "real" but the way it was being used with the implication that it supported the author's position was pure misinformation.
I tried to point this out and petitioned to unlock the page, but I was told that "consensus has been reached, and edit warring will not be tolerated" ...
It's not easy to make a contended edit, especially against a more experienced editor.
Here's a few tips:
1- Don't focus so much on the edit, but focus on the discussion page. As mentioned, edit warring is a no-no.
The core of edit warring is the 3RV rule, so if you must discuss through edits, space them out over time to avoid 3RV over 24 hours. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring#The_thr...)
The rule is biased towards change, so whoever makes the first edit, will hold the advantage in terms of punitive action. However, you may invoke a request for someone else to revert to the last stable version.
2- In general there is a lot of policy to read, but that goes for any tool worth using no? And it's what provides some sort of stability to the whole project.
Wikipedia is a computer system like any other, but some code may be enforced by humans (bureocrats). You just have to learn the code if you want to edit, the expectation that it would be easy to edit wikipedia was actually true in the begginning, but as it grows larger, it will prioritize stability over growth and make editing harder.
Also, you can see my unpublished essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TZubiri/sandbox#Wikipedia...
It's outdated, I'd have to clarify on the punitive offensive bias and the modern content defensive bias. At the time I didn't have a clear understanding of the RVV (or it may have been different).
But the idea of a slower, edit based discussion is there.
3- Tags are a powerful tool, as powerful as policies and guidelines. They are much more succint, and do not require so much effort on your part. Consider the WP:FV tag
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Taggin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Failed_verification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_articles_with_fai...
If you just apply the tag (or ask someone else to apply the tag), you expend almost 0 effort, but are backed by a custom so big and common that it merited the creation of a tag. No need to link to policy, its presence is self evident and self explanatory.
It also doesn't delete the content, and doesn't count as a reversal, it progresses the state of the article, if it goes uncontested for a couple of days, you can then proceed with removal much more safely. Even if it doesn't, it's not a bad result if someone makes a claim and it has a {{failed verification}} tag, the existence of their position is clarified, but it is weakened, which is in line with the WP policy of Documenting the controversy and letting the facts speak for themselves:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Let_the_facts_speak_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_%22teach_the...
Feel free to ask for help in my talk page when editing a page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:TZubiri
Or better yet, publish an edit request, and tag me or notify me in my talk page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_Request_Wizard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_requests 4 Finally, policy wise, it's common for sources to be used to advanced views not explicit in them, this constitutes original research, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
so much effort all to fix what should be a clear and objective inaccuracy
Especially for math, were I feel like people generally agree on what is true and what is not, this seems unusual. Can you point to an instance of misinformation?
these contributors tend to have some kind of unrelated engineering / technical background, though never in econ or social choice itself, are often retired with lots of free time, and _always_ have incredibly stubborn and strong opinions. the demographic matches the [trisector](https://www.ufv.ca/media/faculty/gregschlitt/information/Wha...) very closely
if you look around on these pages in social choice and voting algorithms you will find plenty of inaccuracies, vague assertions about strategic manipulability, misunderstanding of the formalization of certain electoral axioms, and other misinformation.
Today, we already have free blogging platforms, newsletters, photo sharing, and microblogging, but we are in dire need of a free wiki platform (and maybe a knowledge base tool too).
I'm currently experimenting with building exactly that. So far, so good, but the setup is still too difficult for non-technical people, even though it is already free to register.
Ironically they might have amplified the reach of their articles to laymen and editors and made him a martyr in the process.
I quite like what he's going for with these 9 theses - the ideas of the public rating articles or enabling competition between articles seems like a clever compromise position - but frankly I don't see how the Wikipedia community could treat this as anything other than an attack whether or not the ideas are improvements. The parallel with Martin Luther and the Catholic Church was appropriately foreshadowed by Sanger.
Organisations eventually become corrupt. Wikipedia might already be there or it might have a ways to go, who knows. But this sort of change might require a new project or some sort of schism among the Wikipedia editors, it sounds pretty radical. Especially in the post-Trump era; I expect his presidency has been a traumatic era for the English Wikipedia project.
The problem with the "competing articles" is that the end game is quite obvious - the far-right wants to get crap like Musk's "Grokipedia" or "Conservapedia" out of the gutters where it belongs and into the brand protection of Wikipedia.
And that, frankly, is an existential threat.
Paid by evil billionaires? Or just a continuing descent into MAGA-tinged madness?
Can you explain the reason? from a brief skim he is promoting some project he wants to start in wikipedia from outside wikipedia, is that it or did I misunderstand?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noti...
He broke this rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
This is fairly straightforward, with the result (blocked from editing) mentioned clearly. It doesn't matter the topic.
Being a cofounder is immaterial.
Consider updating your comment to make more sense wrt. that.
If there is a decision to be made on Wikipedia, the decision is made by reaching a consensus among Wikipedia users using discussions. You’re not allowed to bring in other people that might share your view but that might not even be Wikipedia users and have them argue your position for you. You’re not even allowed to selectively advertise the discussion among Wikipedia users to bias the discussion.
What is this supposed to mean?
That summary you are replying to is not a verbatim text of the guidelines (since there is none), but an interpretation of the page "Canvassing" itself.
Yes, it does.
> Consider updating your comment to make more sense wrt. that.
It makes perfect sense to reasonable people.
Larry was essentially inactive* on Wikipedia from 2002 until he started stirring things up last year. Nobody "wanted him gone" - he simply wasn't relevant to the project.
*: Aside from updating his user profile and commenting on talk pages about himself and his projects.
Half the references are dead or paywalled, so it's impossible to actually read more about anything. I'm sure AI would effectively be able to recreate webs of knowledge.
Indexing services which compare different forks and communities providing different 'lenses' on topics would be incredibly interesting.
Would give various institutions around the world something to do, aswell; curating their space and giving a badge of approval to provide a slight anti-slop defence.
Database dumps and software for the entire enyclopedia are avaible for free, and multiple forks already exist, including two which are run on behalf of the Russian and Chinese governments. You are, and have always been, more than welcome to create your own.