Hacker News Reader

Comment by Workaphobia | Hacker News Reader

Article makes it sound like the student was being shut out unfairly and that the entrenched editor was hostile or even sexist. This isn't borne out at all by the talk page. It looks like there was just an edit war and a call for citation, with further discussion pending.

View on HN

If you check the history yourself, you'll see that everything the student contributed was deleted twice by the wikipedian. The contributions were not modified, simply everything completely removed.

I don't agree with it, but I could see how the author would justify those edits. The author rolled back edits that he/she felt were unfounded (whether or not they are is a topic for another debate). The student then reverted all those rollbacks without any discussion on the Talk page or edifying comments in their changes. The attempted discussion appears to have happened after this. The only difference between good- and bad-faith edits here is that the student does not understand Wikipedia policy.

Now, the way the original author responded is completely inappropriate given WP:DNB (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BITE). A couple people have already tried having that conversation with the author, and he/she still incorrectly feels the onus is on the (naive) editor.

Please do show how deleting everything that was contributed by the student can be justified (you say that you "could see how" the wikipedian "would justify" the reverts to the pre-student's-contribution-state of the article). I can't see, please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Super-spreader&di...

Obviously the deleted material, that is, everything that the student previously contributed, contained the citations (on the left). Still everything was deleted by the strange behaving wikipedian.

The difference I link to shows the effects of the second deletion of the student's newly contributed material by the wikipedian. How can that be justified? I understand that the wikipedian didn't want the original research. But was it all really just the original research?

Article interprets wikipedian behavior as hostile, but where did you seen sexism? There is brief part where it discuss typical male vs female style of argumentation, but I found no sexism accusation there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com