Dumb Shit on Wikipedia

given my ironic name, I should comment here. Wikipedia is obstructionist, deletionist, bureaucratic, full of pop culture drivel, and at times unreliable, biased, and poorly written. even at its best, it provides shallow-to-intermediate coverage, and does not approximate serious reference works. trying to add quality, well-sourced content on there can be an uphill battle. it's far too easy to use 'consensus' and 'reliable sources' to game the system, especially when there's no vetting or oversight of content. in fact, Wikipedia is less like an encyclopedia, and more like a MMORPG pretending to be one.

with that said, it's still a successful crowd-sourced project, and no one's been able to challenge its dominance. Larry Sanger's Citizendium never took off for a variety of reasons -- it was even more bureaucratic, and the 'expert wiki' model doesn't work (while experts could potentially be useful for settling disputes and vetting content, CZ took it way too far, which led to 'experts' abusing their position). I have hopes for Infogalactic, but it hasn't gained significant momentum yet.
 
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Wikipedia Scholar said:
given my ironic name, I should comment here. Wikipedia is obstructionist, deletionist, bureaucratic, full of pop culture drivel, and at times unreliable, biased, and poorly written. even at its best, it provides shallow-to-intermediate coverage, and does not approximate serious reference works. trying to add quality, well-sourced content on there can be an uphill battle. it's far too easy to use 'consensus' and 'reliable sources' to game the system, especially when there's no vetting or oversight of content. in fact, Wikipedia is less like an encyclopedia, and more like a MMORPG pretending to be one.

with that said, it's still a successful crowd-sourced project, and no one's been able to challenge its dominance. Larry Sanger's Citizendium never took off for a variety of reasons -- it was even more bureaucratic, and the 'expert wiki' model doesn't work (while experts could potentially be useful for settling disputes and vetting content, CZ took it way too far, which led to 'experts' abusing their position). I have hopes for Infogalactic, but it hasn't gained significant momentum yet.
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I can see what you mean by the "MMORPG" part.
 
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Wikipedia Scholar said:
with that said, it's still a successful crowd-sourced project, and no one's been able to challenge its dominance. Larry Sanger's Citizendium never took off for a variety of reasons... I have hopes for Infogalactic, but it hasn't gained significant momentum yet.
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It makes no sense to crowdsource knowledge. Knowledge only emerges after discussion and debates, and the crowdsource model discourage, if not downright prohibits, them.
 
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Positron said:
It makes no sense to crowdsource knowledge. Knowledge only emerges after discussion and debates, and the crowdsource model discourage, if not downright prohibits, them.
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I think it's useful to crowdsource knowledge when you need a bulk of it, like as the root of your encyclopedia, but you also need to REFINE said knowledge. Which means not doing what Wikipedia does and let a bunch of random internet autists chase off actual scholars or pick and choose which sources are "reliable".

The Essjay controversy is like 15 years old but it's still painfully relevant.
 
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You can crowdsource statements, if you don't particular care whether the statements you gather are true or not, or whether they even mean anything at all. But you can't crowdsource knowledge.
 
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Does an Instagram gossip account concerning the fashion industry warrant a Wikipedia page? They're called "Diet Prada" and have since become an "activism platform" to call out "cultural appropriation", the "lack of diversity" and to "hold accountability" in the fashion industry. Yet other useless pages get deleted all the time.

I don't why "activists" always focus on certain "injustices" of the fashion industry but stay silent on the child/slave labor used to make all these fashion brands clothes. You never see them advocating to make sure all clothes are made in high paying, good work environments outside of developing countries. Its always about "culture appropriation", "lack of diversity" and other typical social justice drivel.

Off topic, but I remembered there was this one IP user back when I had an account. What made me remember this one was that when I didn't agree with one of their edits, they searched through my old accounts contribution history, found my latest edit, reverted it and left a comment stating that I was a "banned account who vandalized the page". They always talked about "vandalism" and "disruptive editing" when other users disputed their edits and deleted all their talk page discussion, which they deemed was "useless". But I guess this behavior is expected for Wikipedia users.
 
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Lucille Bluth said:
Off topic, but I remembered there was this one IP user back when I had an account. What made me remember this one was that when I didn't agree with one of their edits, they searched through my old accounts contribution history, found my latest edit, reverted it and left a comment stating that I was a "banned account who vandalized the page". They always talked about "vandalism" and "disruptive editing" when other users disputed their edits and deleted all their talk page discussion, which they deemed was "useless". But I guess this behavior is expected for Wikipedia users.
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Genious, guess it's time I start doing this too.
 
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