must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation
Hehehe… yeah.
If a place is generally unfriendly to new people then what is the motivation to find those areas that might be nicer?
It matters if half the active editors are spending an hour or more each day contributing to Wikipedia. It also matters if the remaining editors are fairly limited in what they focus on.
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It’s the endless arguing about rules, and the hovering editors ready to pounce on anyone that changes their Precious.
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I have three wikipedia stories.
One time I was curious to learn who first discovered silicon (possible I’ve forgotten the element but if it wasn’t silicon, it was related). So, I looked it up and found whoever Wikipedia said at the time. Huh. Never heard of that guy. I go over to his page and do some quick math. He apparently discovered it when he was 12. Not impossible but certainly noteworthy if true. And not noted. I hop into the talk page and find out that someone else noted the same oddity and asked about it. The other observant smartass alluded to the problem but didn’t state it outright if I recall correctly. The heavy hitter on the page at the time basically said “What’s your point?”
Second story. I stumble upon a really stubbish page on the page of a John Updike book. I was pretty surprised that the article was a stub because seriously. Anyway, aside from its stubbishness, it was pretty horrible grammar-wise to the point where I had to fuss at it for a few minutes to figure out what it meant. Jumped into talk and suggested some edits. Someone eventually started caring about the page and took it over I guess.
Third story. I ran into the biographical page of a Lumbee hero (might have been Henry Berry Lowrie but I can’t find my notes in the Talk page so perhaps not?) which was at the time about 50% stub and about 50% made by some folks trying to establish themselves as said hero’s descendants.
I put a note in Talk about the problem and probably added a Cite Source tag. Checked up on it a few months later and the page had been fixed. Checked up on it a bit after that and it had been mangled by the descendants again. This time they cited a source!
Which was a video they recorded of themselves saying they were descendants of the hero. Well, that was just brilliant but I was done at that point. If Henry Berry Lowrie isn’t the guy, some supposed descendants of his are up to similar shit on his page now. I should go put a bunch of Cites in there.
Out of three, we’ve got one example of obtuse culture making for shitty Wikipedia. And two examples of the amateurishness WP Rules Lawyers use as an argument in favor of the obtuse culture. And that’s not counting the one example (me) of someone who would love to contribute but never did because WP Rules Lawyers are terrifying and love to delete things you love and were reading.
I don’t know why the editor count has gone down. I’d like to think it’s because the WP Rules Lawyers have found something I don’t care about to be pedantic over. I suspect it’s more burnout.
Bonus: After more than a year of not using my WP account for anything, I got a “welcome to WP” note on my talk page. 
ETA: Haha. It was Henry Berry Lowrie. XD
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I sometimes edit history articles, including history stubs. Unfortunately, it can take a lot more than half an hour to track down current scholarly interpretations; it takes a lot less time for someone to track down and post older discredited theories, fringe theories, or their interpretations of these.
P.S. Can’t you find more informative labels than F0/E5 for the buttons here?
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P.S. Can’t you find more informative labels than F0/E5 for the buttons here?
Um… your computer’s chosen font is missing the glyphs for the buttons or webkit (which is what I believe BB uses) is not rendering stuff correctly in your browser. What I presume is showing up is the unicode fallback font for debugging.
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=UnicodeBMPFallbackFont
This is what it’s supposed to look like:
So, basically, when nobody cared about Wikipedia, there were lots of contributors. Now there are many people being paid to subvert Wikipedia in oder to further the goals of their corporate sponsors. These are people whose job it is to make Wikipedia worse. Now somehow people are surprised that Wikipedia is less welcoming to new editors?
Honestly, I’m having a hard time not calling BS on the whole article.
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Wikipedia is coming up plenty these days - and the issue is very serious, more serious than I was aware. I discovered how serious it was the past two months, when I decided to dedicate to fixing one page that was so far outside of a neutral POV that I was offended by just reading it. So I decided to do some research and join the discussion and create a ‘reasoned’ argument for changes to the page using proper wiki etiquette and WP guidelines. What happened? Within days there was a movement to get me banned, 5 attempts in all for any infraction that could be thrown my way. The 5th attempt worked and I have been banned from Wikipedia for life. I faced public outing of my identity, harassing statements, defamatory and derogatory public bullying. The issue facing Wikipedia is truly shilling, but not the paid shilling that recent news regarding the PR issue with Wikipedia, but any agenda based editor group can completely game the system and control a page. I thought my case was unique at first, but it’s happening far to frequently. This issue needs attention. It’s wrong what’s happening on Wikipedia.
The issue of ‘paid’ shills is a red herring and strawman of the actual problem. The real problem is that most agenda based editors are NOT paid shills, they are volunteers. Paying someone to shill is irrelevant. Actually Wikipedia is creating an environment that will increase paid shills because agenda based editors can game the system and any Biography of a Living Person or company will need to pay editors just to maintain neutrality in many cases.
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a small group of any agenda based editors can game and control any page on Wikipedia.
I gave up on adding to Wikipedia at least a decade ago, because of the same problems everyone’s so exercised about now. But recently as a favor to some fine people who’d done me a favor, I added an entire new article.
The guy I had to convince that the information was “worthy of wikipedia” was a New York theater critic by trade.
It was an article about a piece of antique agricultural machinery.
1 Goto the edit page, copy the raw text
2 edit in notepad or something
3 upload raw txt files to dropbox or something
4 update page at home
Yeah, I was thinking about this article and the responses when I was looking up whaleships, and went down a rabbit hole about different tall ship riggings. I had some serious baby and bathwater thoughts. Used for what it’s good for, it’s irreplaceable, regardless of the controversial parts.
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