wikipedia

  On 12/22/2009 at 10:35 PM, chimera slot mom said:

 

Wikipedia isn't perfect but using these types of reasons to claim it's pointless appears to me as slightly narrowminded.

i don't think it's pointless at all, i just think there are a lot of problems. and people with enough motivation and free time can basically rewrite history, at least for a brief period of time. Now unfortunately mainstream news employees will use Wikipedia as a source for information. False reports of celebrity deaths have emanated from wikipedia. And while i personally love culture hackers to fuck with the information in our zietgiest for purely fun and subversive reasons i can't feel comfortable with the idea that corporations, famous people, politicians probably have employees going through IP spoofers to constantly brush up their own image or squash differing opinions on various wikipedia pages

  On 12/22/2009 at 10:21 PM, ezkerraldean said:

 

do they actually, though?

yeah, a lot of articles i've added or contributed to have been removed or massacred for seemingly political or personal reasons.

they will use official wikipedia rules as false reasons for their actions like 'lack of notability' etc and once one person marks an article for deletion and cites one of these official rules, the members who usually vote it down for deletion just assume the article is breaking the rule without actually checking. So even if no rule ever was broken, if one sole person who has any influence on wikipedia as an editor suggest it should be deleted, the rest of his fellow editors will usually oblige him and vote the article for deletion.

There seems to be a lazy undercurrent among wikipedia editors who are eager to mark something for deletion because of it's 'notability' i mean all you have to do is go on google and search for the subject to see that it indeed does fall under the notability guidelines.

edit: fuck i was just writing a really long rant (but it got deleted by accident )on how the article about my friend who did the beheading hoax with me was removed by a hoard of republican wikipedia censor artists and i didn't have the willpower to fight them so now the article is gone. but if someone wants to censor you for any reason and they have enough active wikipedia editors on their side to do it, they will probably do it and do it successfully.

  On 12/22/2009 at 10:45 PM, Awepittance said:

yeah, a lot of articles i've added or contributed to have been removed or massacred for seemingly political or personal reasons.

 

they will use official wikipedia rules as false reasons for their actions like 'lack of notability' etc and once one person marks an article for deletion and cites one of these official rules, the members who usually vote it down for deletion just assume the article is breaking the rule without actually checking. So even if no rule ever was broken, if one sole person who has any influence on wikipedia as an editor suggest it should be deleted, the rest of his fellow editors will usually oblige him and vote the article for deletion.

There seems to be a lazy undercurrent among wikipedia editors who are eager to mark something for deletion because of it's 'notability' i mean all you have to do is go on google and search for the subject to see that it indeed does fall under the notability guidelines

that could suck a bit. what kind of articles though?

it's true that some articles seem outrageously PC (the one about nativism i remember being bad for it) where the article stinks of pussy-leftism. shame that it gets politicised.

however i've seen several articles get hacked by creationists (the radiometric dating one in particular) and then, obviously, people pounce in to fix the article again, and you always see the creationists moaning afterward on the discussion page, making the same claims as you have here. so i guess you do have to be careful you actually know about what you're trying to write an article about.

that idea for a qualified-editors-only encyclopedia would be good, but how would you check people are qualified?

well it's a different then if i was trying to go into other people's articles and things like that, but i am purely talking about an article for Benjamin Vanderford which was deleted for 'lack of notability' even though his name and story appeared in the UK guardian, the BBC, CNN, Foxnews, CSPAN, La Figaro, Harratz, Al Jazeera. The article and himself fell under every appropriate rule for notability but because a bunch of republican wikipedia editors were offended by what the beheading hoax was all about they made it a crusade to go in and delete him.

a creationist VS darwinist debate on an already exsisting article of wikipedia is imo a healthy back and forth. What would be a better comparison to what im talking about is if the darwin people just tried to completely remove even mere mentions of the existence of a christian creationist theory from wikipedia for 'not being a notable theory' lol

according to wikipedia, this man - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5629119/ and the hoax that tricked the entire global media is 'not notable'

wiki is just like any other internets

you have to know how to play the game

i shudder to think the type of damage a team of 20+ high school kids with zero hacking or programming skills can do with a coordinated editing campaign on wikipedia or yelp.com

  On 12/22/2009 at 11:44 PM, Awepittance said:

i shudder to think the type of damage a team of 20+ high school kids with zero hacking or programming skills can do with a coordinated editing campaign on wikipedia or yelp.com

a single person has wreaked havoc more than once, using sleeper accounts

or by encouraging 4chan, somethingawful, etc to fuck with wiki.

grawp was pretty damn funny.

see that's awesome