Dumb Shit on Wikipedia

[Baraadmirer]

It's already running. I've been getting banners since the start of October. Last one was so big, it took up the entire screen. I thought I was looking at a different website

Ah, it helps to have an account. You can disable the fundraising banners in account preferences, so that's why I haven't noticed it.

 

[alpha889boba]

Wish I had bothered to look for this thread earlier. Started wondering about bullshit on Wikipedia after reading all the trans stuff, finally went into the rabbit hole of talk pages and edit reversions. I'm sure its old news, but the fact they block viewing previous article versions to hide "dead names" of troons goes against everything wikipedia is supposed to be about.

 

[alpha889boba]

The hilarious thing people don't seem to understand is that the money doesn't go to the project specifically; it goes to the WikiMedia Organization that runs multiple projects, like WikiVoyage and WikiSource. There were a lot of angry (and justified) outbursts over last year's fundraising campaign, most of which you can find on this archive page.

Some highlights:

Cookies being placed to track how many times a user has seen the banner
View attachment 3732770

Angry sperging
View attachment 3732775

Guilt-tripping a senior strapped for cash to donate and a table of financial statement summaries
View attachment 3732780

More angry sperging
View attachment 3732789

By the way, the fundraising campaign for this year will start in about a month or so, so keep your eyes peeled for potential drama.

This is how Mozilla operates with Firefox too. You don't actually donate to the site / product. A lot of the money either goes to salary increases or being dumped in DEI shit.

 

[RobertDole]

Leftist's control of language in politics is genius. Terms like "anti-racist" or "anti-fascist" and black lives matter which in reality really just means nothing more then far-left radicals/Marxists sound fantastic to normies who have no fucking clue they are being manipulated. Image is everything and they know how to keep theirs clean. How are you going to attack a self proclaimed "anti-racist"? You can't. They are basically immune to anything you say. During the summer of love in 2020 Antifa was able to help terrorize almost every single city in America just by labelling themselves anti-fascist.

And as soon as the right comes up with their own catchy political phrase, the backlash against it swift and severe. Just look at "groomer" -- went from virtually unknown to hate speech that is banned across all social media platforms within a matter of months. Wikipedia won't even let the word have its own article. Instead it gets the following title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_grooming_conspiracy_theory

 

[AnOminous]

And as soon as the right comes up with their own catchy political phrase, the backlash against it swift and severe. Just look at "groomer" -- went from virtually unknown to hate speech that is banned across all social media platforms within a matter of months. Wikipedia won't even let the word have its own article. Instead it gets the following title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_grooming_conspiracy_theory

Making "Wikipedo" no longer a joke.

 

[WhiteNight]

This Athaenara case (a Wikipedia admin with a 16-year editing history who once contradicted a troon's gender identity, admittedly rudely, may be banned forever) is the gift that keeps giving:

• The ArbCom case page has 85 users commenting on it (not counting the arbitrators), so far.
• There is now a subsidiary arbitration case on the same page over a single accusation of conflict of interest for one admin's involvement, which now has 20 users commenting.
• Admin noticeboard incidents now has three sections devoted to endlessly long discussion of the fine points of what to do about this grievous crime against troondom, with subsections with counter-proposals.

All of this over a single 46-word comment in an RfA which was deleted within minutes.

Highlights:

User Tamzin (discussed earlier in this thread, identifies as a multiplicity) has pored over Athaenara's RfA/RfB vote history to find evidence that she is biased:

Molly White aka GorillaWarfare of course weighed in on the RfAr; I'll quote one paragraph:

And on and on in that vein. Lots of squealing about the "harm" and "hurt" that such comments cause (seeing a contrary opinion on your computer screen, oh my!).

It's instructive to compare to cases such as the Confederate-sympathizing editor from earlier in this thread, who was piled on and called a racist, a fascist, a Nazi. This is not at all uncommon. I have seen several editors get WP:NONAZIS thrown at them. Yet there seems to be no concern that such attacks might be "hurtful" or harmful. Indeed, there is potential for real-world harm if such an account is linked to a real person, and anyone can see Wikipedia admins calling them a racist. There is no equivalent harm to a troon because someone attacked xir on Wikipedia.

As of now, Athaenara has been desysopped and subjected to a series of topic bans appealable after a year, with discussion ongoing as to whether to turn the current indefinite block into a permanent community ban. A few editors have chimed in saying this is all an overreaction, but they appear to be a minority.

 

[Lerias]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway–Pakistan_relations



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stratigraphic_units_with_ornithischian_tracks

Huge list tables with Description boxes that just say "Description" in them, to no surprise it was almost all created by a single autist.

https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools-ar...ornithischian_tracks&project=en.wikipedia.org

Hate to necro-reply this but 6 years later it's still the same. I mean no one with knowledge on geology has attempted to fix this page in more than half a decade. This is the same Wikipedia that reverts your edits in 0.043 picoseconds after you don't cite something in your edit, Kiwi Farmers.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Hate to necro-reply this but 6 years later it's still the same. I mean no one with knowledge on geology has attempted to fix this page in more than half a decade. This is the same Wikipedia that reverts your edits in 0.043 picoseconds after you don't cite something in your edit, Kiwi Farmers.

Christ i almost want to fix this because of dinosaur spergery but fuck wikipedia

 

[Fat Tub of Lard]

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE

 

[JJLiautaud]

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE

Honestly not the worst thing in the world, its just not all things are what they seem.

 

[HodgePodgeRogerDodger]

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE

That’s a lot of words comparing old, mostly settled issues to newer hotly contested issues.

 

[AnOminous]

Christ i almost want to fix this because of dinosaur spergery but fuck wikipedia

I used to do neutral edits like this but now I want the whole thing to burn and die, so the more shitty and incompetent it looks, the better.

 

[RobertDole]

Has anyone looked at the gender breakdown of wikipedia admins? Are there that many actual women, or is it like speedrunning / infosec where almost all of them turn out to be MtF when you look hard enough?

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

Has anyone looked at the gender breakdown of wikipedia admins? Are there that many actual women, or is it like speedrunning / infosec where almost all of them turn out to be MtF when you look hard enough?

There are meta pages that list female amd transgender admins, iirc, but that's self reported.

 

[AnOminous]

There are meta pages that list female amd transgender admins, iirc, but that's self reported.

I like how John Updike wasn't considered a "reliable source" about his own novel but people who lie all day long are.

 

[RobertDole]

https://www.today.com/parents/jessica-wade-wikipedia-women-scientists-rcna51628 [A]

Wade has written more than 1,600 Wikipedia entries for long-ignored women scientists, and she has firm beliefs on ideas on how to support girls interested in the field.

As her Wikipedia entries climbed into the dozens, and then into the hundreds, she spoke and wrote more on gender equality in science. She won awards and medals and was cited by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.

However, not all of Wiki-world was happy with her. Several of her entries were deleted by other Wikimedians, as the most influential contributors and editors are called. She told TODAY.com that they said a handful of the women she wrote up were not all that well-known.

Wade said that’s right, that’s the problem: they should be better known.

Meanwhile, Wade’s own Wikipedia entry — written by others, not her — has grown to 10 printed pages.

From her own entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jess_Wade

Her research investigates polymer-based organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs).[5][9][10][11] Her public engagement work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) advocates for women in physics[12] as well as tackling systemic biases such as gender and racial bias on Wikipedia.[13][14][15]

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

Several of her entries were deleted by other Wikimedians, as the most influential contributors and editors are called.

I like the lack of details, suggesting it's due to sexism.

 

[AnOminous]

I like the lack of details, suggesting it's due to sexism.

As anyone who has dealt with Wikipedia knows, it is probably a few of the surviving deletionists who dare ask, for every retarded article created, "is this really of encyclopedic notability?"

I don't actually think Jess Wade is one of these weirdoes, I think this is probably just a bad news story. It's actually good for underappreciated scientists to get an article.

Actual African history deserves better treatment too so that black people don't have to invent a bunch of kangs bullshit because they actually do have a history.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

One problem with writing good articles about Actual African (and related) history is that sometimes, even recently, they didn't record their own history that well. Much of what is known about early Haiti is what foreign governments wrote about them, rather than what they wrote about themselves - almost none of their early leaders recorded cabinet meetings. In many other cases, what was written down is buried in some poorly kept archive and prone to being ravaged by fire/insects/flooding. There really ought to be alot more digitization of basically every government record, especially from smaller states because there is a much greater likelihood of it vanishing.

This is something I myself ran into since I had ancestors involved in the Caribbean sugar trade, so I have had to poke around archives from Haiti and St. Thomas to see how much of it simply didn't exist.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

One problem with writing good articles about Actual African (and related) history is that sometimes, even recently, they didn't record their own history that well. Much of what is known about early Haiti is what foreign governments wrote about them, rather than what they wrote about themselves - almost none of their early leaders recorded cabinet meetings. In many other cases, what was written down is buried in some poorly kept archive and prone to being ravaged by fire/insects/flooding. There really ought to be alot more digitization of basically every government record, especially from smaller states because there is a much greater likelihood of it vanishing.

This is something I myself ran into since I had ancestors involved in the Caribbean sugar trade, so I have had to poke around archives from Haiti and St. Thomas to see how much of it simply didn't exist.

African history is an absolute clusterfuck because the records which do survive are in poor shape and are archaic versions of African languages written in Arabic or actually are Arabic meaning only a few historians can even study it. A college professor I had from Africa said that if you learned an African language and dug through an archive with an open mind, you'd be able to discover all sorts of shit historians today don't even know. But most of what we do know is locked away in limited print college books or journal articles which you can't access without Libgen (which only has SOME of them) or a college library, which limits the pool of autists willing to actually contribute to the encyclopedia.

At the very least we do have lots of semi-literate Nigerians writing random Engrish on any and all pages related to random places, politicians, and ethnic groups in Nigeria.