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Comment by postflopclarity | Hacker News Reader

trying to contribute to wikipedia was the most miserable experience in a "collaborative" process I've ever had in my life.

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.

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Most people don't realize that essentially all parts of Wikipedia are owned by random nerds versed in the beaurocracy who will revert all outsider edits. Unless you have hours per day dedicated to arguing with them (which they do!), the sign says you're welcome but the people say you're not.

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.

It's amazing how much this behavior is tolerated, despite very clear policies against a single person "owning" a page.

> 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?

There's not a big pool of well-adjusted people who are equally willing to learn the intricacies of Wikipedia and manage it better. The people who care a lot, in the wrong ways, outnumber people who are passionately neutral. Most people don't care enough to fight bad edits and reversions. They just stop contributing. I know I did. (I wasn't even editing controversial areas, just adding to data about chemical compounds.)

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.

> Is it just too much effort to complain + favoritism towards frequent editors?

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.

you have described my experience very accurately

Basically this. They literally devote their entire lives to playing this game.

They would make for effective politicians if they could translate what they do beyond wikitext.

People often mention anecdotes like that when Wikipedia is discussed, but I made a few changes to pages over the years and never had any issues. I took care to follow the rules, and the changes were usually accepted; when they weren't, it was always for reasonable reasons, even if I didn't always agree with them.

That was my initial experience, too.

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.

indeed. the field I was trying to improve tend to attract a lot of cranks and trisectors. the topics are not "contentious" in the typical political sense but the pages are closely guarded by very stubborn and uninformed retiree flatearther types.

I haven't done a whole lot, but I've also never had a bad experience editing on Wikipedia. I suspect most people who complain about getting stuff reverted on Wikipedia are mostly editing controversial pages. Which, yeah, discussing controversial stuff on the Internet is a recipe for having a bad time. The other strong possibility is they are lower quality editors than they think they are. You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.

I am confident that my edits were high quality and improved the mathematical accuracy and clarity of the page.

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?

> I suspect most people who complain about getting stuff reverted on Wikipedia are mostly editing controversial pages.

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

> I noticed they said it was years before nearly always if they said when

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.

Same thing for me when I used to contribute to our local transit system's page. Things were fine for years but one day an editor for some reason took an interest in me and started going after my contributions for all manner of petty legalistic policies that were usually "best practices" rather than rules. He even moved on to my edits on other pages, which mostly were where I'd corrected a spelling or formatting error. Never understood why that happened because I wasn't involved in any edit wars or even contributions on anything that could be considered political or ideological. I just moved on to other things and left Wikipedia behind. So he "won" something, but no idea what that was.

It's a dangerous to go alone out there!

Take this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hounding

In the worst-case scenario, they will keep harassing you off-wiki, hunting for your digital footprint across other social media platforms. I actually had to retire several of my internet handles because of this wiki drama.

I hope anyone can start their own private wiki in peace and for free.

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.

>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.

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.

I think one of the last straws for me before I quit trying to help is when I "lost" some disputed edit (and the page was subsequently locked) because the original author provided an external citation for their claim.

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" ...

Oh, it does seem like you got way farther than just editing something without a source.

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...

or I could just do something better with my time :/

so much effort all to fix what should be a clear and objective inaccuracy

> sooooo much technical misinformation

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?

it was in the computational social choice sphere which attracts a lot of amateurs interested in electoral reform and "voting theory" (which of course is not the typical term used for the field but is popular among these amateurs).

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.

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