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You should check out the gamergate page. Not only have dozens of editors been banned for edit warring, but the entire thing is a complete mess where even factual information is removed because it's contrary to the people who are pushing a narrative.[...] It's pretty sad when "know your meme" and "encyclopedia dramatica" have more factual articles.

Direct links for the lazy:

• Encyclopedia Dramatica (NSFW)
• Infogalactic
• Know Your Meme
• The History of Gamergate

That's the same article where a dozen hardcore feminists were banned for edit warring,

Oops, you believed the Guardian. It's a common mistake. What actually happened was that one feminist editor Ryulong was banned after he was caught begging for money from the activist group GamerGhazi which was formed by Reddit's SRS clique to suppress the spread of information about Gamergate. That's like asking for money from the Trump campaign after changing the name of Hillary Clinton to "Lying Hillary." They were still going to let him off the hook but Ryulong acted like a total ass on the last few days of the arbitration case so one or two of the votes flipped.

Every other hardcore feminist editor got away with it. Then the admins took vengeance for their friend Ryulong by instantly banning anybody who reported the misbehavior of any of the hardcore feminist editors in any other area of the wiki. They also took out a bunch of the Japanese editors who tried to correct Ryulong's misspellings where this white fanboy had made himself Wikipedia's final judge of Japanese spelling and grammar and had previously banned anyone who disagreed with him. When Gamaliel got elected to the Arbitration Committee a year later, ArbCom quickly banned two prominent editors who had presented evidence against Gamaliel during the Gamergate case, Cla68 and The Devil's Advocate, without presenting any justification for either ban. It was straight out of Kafka.

Some people still mistakenly think that the adults will take charge if you stay calm and reasonable and don't break the rules. That has been tried and results in a quick and permanent ban. Explaining your own position is "soapboxing" and "beating a dead horse" and is grounds for a ban. Having strong sources to support your position makes you a "POV-pusher" who is "not here to build the encyclopedia", which justifies a permanent ban. Presenting evidence of rulebreaking by the admins is "trolling" and "sockpuppetry" and merits an instant ban, and they are likely to remove your comments and insult you on the way out. If you try to appeal your ban on the grounds that you never broke any policy, your appeal will be rejected and you are likely to have your talk page access revoked. You are required to confess to sins you have not committed and proclaim that the admins are correct in policy when they are not. The place is run by completely irrational people who belong in an insane asylum.

For further reading:

• GamergateHQ's Wikidrama thread
• Wiki In Action
• Wikipediocracy
• Wikipedia Sucks

This does *not* automatically mean that they are somehow wasting this money, giving its employees lavish salaries, or anything of the sort. It means we do not know. No amount of ridiculous theorising will change that.

I'm curious, would you call this known scandal to be "ridiculous theorising"?

http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...

Even if they are reliable at serving up content, it's still content that is highly suspect in terms of accuracy. One systematic survey of vandalism showed the thoughtfully-formatted vandalism will last at least for weeks, over 60% of the time: http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...

Thanks for citing their marketing material. Every nonprofit-for-profit has "reasons" why they need all the money the solicit. But you need to peek behind the curtain to see if "reasons" are supported by actual data. It isn't hard.

We can look at the exploding spending at Wikimedia.

And there are very serious questions about all that money being rushed out the door, who it is going to and why. There is a high level of self-dealing in passing out grants, and creating and filling the ballooning list of paid positions. It is very lucrative to be a "friend-of-Jimmy".

A glance at the financials shows that "building an endowment" is NOT the reason for the incessant fund-raising. First, the endowment was only launched this year , and their stated plan is to use only 10-20% of their fundraising revenue for that endowment. Currently they seem to be at the low end of that number (or below it) but we will need to see a report on 2016 to see the actual break-out. The goal of the endowment is to reach $100 million, but in their last annual foundation report (a 28 page advertising pamphlet with only one page of actual information) they state having $78 million in net assets as of 18 months ago, which is an increase of $25 million from the previous year report (almost all of it unrestricted).

If we assume that the net assets are only accumulating at the same rate as from June 2014 to June 2015 (by all data it is probably higher, much higher), then right now they have about $115 million in assets, more than enough to fully fund their foundation with soliciting a penny (they received at least $6 million in designated donations to the foundation when they set it up, so they no more than $94 million to make up to reach their stated goal.

So no. The foundation has nothing to do with their aggressive, relentless fund-raising.

People make claims like this all the time around here, but they never include the actual links or article titles.

It happens often enough to sustain environments to discuss these cases.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiI...
http://wikipediocracy.com/foru...
http://wikipediasucks.boards.n...
https://8ch.net/gamergatehq/re...

Wikipedia is a treasure of useful information, a starting point for unknown topics.

Most of the time, sure. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to tell the difference between a well-researched article that agrees with the scholarly consensus vs. an article based on weird sources (but usually popular, not necessarily scholarly) that are 50 years out of date. Now, it's true that paper encyclopedias could suffer from that problem too. On the other hand, good paper encyclopedias often had information on authors of articles or at least the major subject editors, so you could take a guess about whether it was reliable. You don't have that on Wikipedia, where "anyone can edit."

But there are much worse things -- like how you don't know whether an article has been randomly vandalized, or edited recently by some idiot who just inserted false information. Back when I was actually active editing Wikipedia for a while (before I became aware of how insanely screwed up it was), I remember a number of cases of very subtle vandalism that went unnoticed for weeks.

My favorite was some person -- who was a registered user, rather than just an "anonymous IP address," so it didn't send up as many immediate red flags -- who went through and just changed DIGITS in historical dates. So some random historical person suddenly did X in 1742 instead of 1752 or whatever. They did this on perhaps a dozen articles, and the edits stood for at least a week. The main reason I think he was caught is because -- like most vandals -- eventually he couldn't contain himself and altered some historical article on a woman to say she was "a dirty whore" or something. If he hadn't done that, it might have been months or years before anyone noticed that this one guy had been randomly switching digits across a bunch of Wikipedia articles.

The "vandalism" problem is definitely something that is much WORSE than traditional paper encyclopedias... and if you don't think you've viewed articles that contain various subtle forms of it, you have no idea of how much vandalism is attempted on Wikipedia all the time. (And that doesn't even get into deliberate hoaxes or persistent misinformation that doesn't look like obvious vandalism.)

In such an endeavor striving too much for perfection is the enemy of the good. People always have to understand the perspectives and biases of their sources. That isn't a flaw, that is just reality.

"Perspectives and biases of their sources" is important. But the problem with Wikipedia is that we don't know the perspectives and biases, because it's written mostly by anonymous people and pseudonyms (who have sometimes been known to lie about their identities, even when they claim to provide real-world info about themselves).

And leaving almost all articles open to random editing ensures a continuous war against the kind of vandalism I've already mentioned. That's not a "perspective or bias" -- that IS a serious FLAW. Say what you will about Encyclopedia Britannica, but when I open the paper copy two days later, there won't be random NEW misprints appearing or the word "PENUS!!" suddenly appearing in the middle of an article.

Sure it still sucks, but show me something better and that will suck too.

I have a real problem with this attitude -- "Oh, well it's still better than other stuff!" That's a lame excuse, frankly. We could still improve the concept significantly.

I've been saying this for years, but if Wikipedia really wants to be successful in the long term, it needs major changes. The idea that "anyone can edit!" any article was great in the early days to build a foundation of information -- and it's still good for new articles

Calling this issue "WikiGate" reflects a rather single-minded focus.

A few days ago, we learned that there was an extortion ring operating in Wikipedia – see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... or http://www.independent.co.uk/n... and many others.

A few months ago, we learned that a hoax article had survived for ten years on Wikipedia, and that its content had come to be cited in numerous places, among many other hoaxes: https://www.washingtonpost.com... see also http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...

A few weeks prior to that, we learned that an administrator had managed to manipulate Wikipedia's articles on a bogus Indian business school over a period of years, with an Indian journalist estimating that Wikipedia had messed up thousands of students' lives by lending its brand's supposed credibility to the school's misleading propaganda: http://www.newsweek.com/2015/0... and http://scroll.in/article/71429...

Each of those would have deserved the title WikiGate more than this non-issue, which if anything actually helps improve Wikipedia's reliability.

Before you keep throwing money at the Wikimedia Foundation, educate yourself on whether they actually NEED any more money: http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...

Couldn't be more wrong about the "dollars counting", I'm afraid. See this: http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...

Wikipedia is very strong on a very narrow set of articles: non-controversial scientific...

Really? Is that like how Wikipedia's article on inflammation said that pain in the inflamed tissue is caused by volcanic rock that is produced by the body? (And it said that for weeks on end, viewed about 100,000 times.) Please, stop the mythology that Wikipedia is "very strong" on any set of articles. http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...

However, when you look at the presence of WikiPedia on the internet, it's basically first hit on google in every search on every possible subject. It's probably the number one source for people to find information about a subject. They have a HUGE presence.

Yes -- all the more reason to NOT keep encouraging them. I know most people use Wikipedia on a frequent basis, but if you start poking around the Wikipediocracy posts (not just the one listed in TFS), you start to see a LOT of serious issues there.

Wikipedia is NOT a reliable source of information. Let me repeat that: Wikipedia is NOT a reliable source of information.

(Or, if you prefer a more mainstream media discussion, look here for something recent.)

We should be lamenting your fact that such a screwed up resource has become so dominant as a source of information for so many.

I love the idea of Wikipedia. I was an active contributor back in the early years. But it's never "grown up." It's like a piece of open-source software stuck forever in alpha because active contributors are dwindling, new contributors get mired in a bureaucratic nightmare of argumentation over meaningless "policies" rather than content, and the actual source has remained so open to "Wild-West-style" editing that past hard work is continuously degraded by people deliberately introducing "new bugs into the code."

Meanwhile, they're asking people to donate money -- not to the actual contributors or authors, or even to the admins who police the content to keep the vandalism at bay. But instead to some weird set of people who are only tangentially related to all the supposed "high-value" content that isn't produced or directly managed by them.

Really? If this were a software project, you'd want to contribute to a software project like that? (Well, in all honesty, it IS a software project, not an information source that you're contributing to... but that's another whole discussion....)

And what about honesty in their fundraising? Wikipedia doesn't want people talking about the bureaucratic crap going on behind the scenes or about the rampant vandalism that threatens the apparent value that you point out people place on the site... and they also can't be honest to readers and potential donors that they have plenty of money to keep the servers running ad-free -- they're just choosing to spend it on other things??

Anyone who actually reformed this mess into something even moderately more stable and reliable would definitely make it worth billions, as in your estimation. But it's not there, and until it is reformed significantly, it has a high probability of getting worse and more problematic over time.

This is a rather important distinction since non-profits often depend heavily on interest from investments as their primary stable source of income. So if this is the later case, it sounds like responsible stewardship

While it's possible that this is the case, I believe the objection here may be to the way that Wikipedia is advertising its fundraising drives.

It's one thing to say "Please donate to us so we can have a suitable sustainable endowment to keep this website running forever" and it's a different thing to say "Please donate now, or this site might go down imminently because we can't pay our bills."

According to an older story at Wikipediocracy, the objections seem to be partly that fundraising campaigns are expressed in a dire "We need money now or the lights go off!" kind of tone, when that really isn't the situation.

The first goal of raising an endowment is certainly a laudable one for any sustainable non-profit. The question is whether they're being honest with their donors about what their situation is and what they are going to do with the money.

>Wales dictated that "interwiki transclusion" links that included thousands of links to his for-profit enterprise Wikia site, should be "do follow",

I am interested in this. Do you have a citation?

Of course! I don't like to spout off accusatory claims, without having ample documentation.

http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/...

http://wikipediocracy.com/foru...

And guess who created the first interwiki linking configuration on Wikipedia, for the Wikia domain? None other than Angela Beesley, co-founder of Wikia (with Jimmy Wales).

And, by the way, guess how much of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees was populated by key players from Wikia, Inc. or Bomis -- the for-profit corporations of Jimbo Wales?

2003: 100%

2004 - early 2006: 80%

late 2006: 60%

2007: 28%

For background on the Brazilian aardvark and the citogenesis phenomenon see the original New Yorker story and How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia

Well said. Here is another example of Wikipedia re-writing history with the new, Wikipedia-based version, being regurgitated by Associated Press, among many others. Never mind that an innocent basketball player was defamed.

The Bhutanese Passport hoaxer, by the way, also worked on other "projects" that promptly infected Google's "Knowledge Vault", like all these Wikipedia hoaxes do.

Some of these hoaxes have entered academic literature. In such cases, Wikipedia actually destroys knowledge.

Well said. Here is another example of Wikipedia re-writing history with the new, Wikipedia-based version, being regurgitated by Associated Press, among many others. Never mind that an innocent basketball player was defamed.

The Bhutanese Passport hoaxer, by the way, also worked on other "projects" that promptly infected Google's "Knowledge Vault", like all these Wikipedia hoaxes do.

Some of these hoaxes have entered academic literature. In such cases, Wikipedia actually destroys knowledge.

Well said. Here is another example of Wikipedia re-writing history with the new, Wikipedia-based version, being regurgitated by Associated Press, among many others. Never mind that an innocent basketball player was defamed.

The Bhutanese Passport hoaxer, by the way, also worked on other "projects" that promptly infected Google's "Knowledge Vault", like all these Wikipedia hoaxes do.

Some of these hoaxes have entered academic literature. In such cases, Wikipedia actually destroys knowledge.

Wikipedians do seem to operate on the assumption that existing content, even if completely made up, is somehow superior to any recent change, as though content gained legitimate merit and factuality simply by being in Wikipedia. There was a concrete example of this in the edit history of the Thoreau case mentioned in the Washington Post article. The hoaxer had made up a reference to make their nonsense stick. When the hoaxer later himself tried to delete the hoax again, another Wikipedian REVERTED them, saying, "Rv; the information is referenced; if you say it's wrong, prove it." Just because the content had been on Wikipedia for a few months, it was assumed it must be correct. Discussed in more detail here.

It's a band aid that ultimately benefits Wikimedia more than users, just like the equivalent Facebook Zero programme. A source that is as error-prone and vulnerable to manipulation as Wikipedia shouldn't be the only source people in these countries have access to.

They should at least have access to a broad range of news outlets, Google Scholar and Google Books. Zero-rated programmes diminish rather than increase the chances of that happening, perpetuating rather than ending the digital divide and treating people in the developing world as second-class citizens that are fed crumbs from the first world's table.

There are lots of Wikipedia admins who are social entrepreneurs of one form or another. This should be clear if you think about the fact that they are not getting paid for this. Sure there are idealists; but there are also lots of admins who get their reward out of the fact that they can use Wikipedia to influence public opinion – via the top Google search result – in line with their social, commercial or political agenda, and do so anonymously. No one should be surprised by this. You get what you pay for.

It was only the Wikimedia Foundation's inability to get along with its own user base that saved it from implementing completely failed code and possibly wrecking their own encyclopedia. http://wikipediocracy.com/foru...

The circle goes like this:

Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!

Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!

Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!

Shit, we are paying out 40% more than last year. We need a bigger reserve! Let's up our fundraising!

Hey, we got 40% more money than last year. We can expand our staff by 40%!

Etc.

Or simply look at this graph. The reserve they shoot for is a function of the spending, and the spending is a function of how much money they have.

They still want to "scale up" much more. And they can *always* justify that they need a bigger reserve next year than this year by spending more in this year. So it's always just "prudent and sensible" to ask for more money than last year, whether the money was spent sensibly or not.

I don't think anyone minds if they spend more, if there is a commensurate benefit to the end user, such as enhanced quality and reliability, and readers are told honestly what their donations are supposed to fund. But 1. product quality has been lacking, and 2. none of this is about "keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free" as the banner implies. The more they spend on paid staff, the smaller the proportion of their budget concerned with that actually becomes.

Just for a laugh, listen to Jimmy Wales speaking in 2005 about hosting, server and bandwidth costs. (Yes, articles are longer today, page views are 15 times higher than in 2005, but on the other hand bandwidth has become cheaper and there are economies of scale.)

These already exist. Wikiwand is one, and there are many other less sophisticated mirrors that do not make much of an impact, as they have poor Google rankings. It's partly why the Wikimedia Foundation feels it has to expand and professionalise its software engineering effort: the Wikipedia interface looks very dated today, and as Wikipedia content is free, anyone can host it. And if anyone does it better than the Wikimedia Foundation itself, it's conceivable that readers will flock elsewhere, leaving the Foundation in the lurch. The fact that Google includes data from Wikipedia in its Knowledge Graph (the information panel on the right that appears when you Google a word) is already having an impact on Wikipedia pageviews.

Wikipedia has a significant problem with content related to this part of the world. Read How pro-fascist ideologues are rewriting Croatia's history. There are similar problems in Indonesia – see Don’t Trust Wikipedia on Indonesia – and in South Africa: The political economy of wikiality: a South African inquiry into knowledge.

It's all got to do with why people contribute to Wikipedia.

It also gives anyone the ability to break things. Whatever you fix today, someone else can (and most likely will) break tomorrow.

It also gives anyone the ability to break things. Whatever you fix today, someone else can (and most likely will) break tomorrow.

Have a look How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia. Technical info is certainly not immune when it comes to these problems with reliability. Even worse, an incredible number of people accept stuff in Wikipedia without questioning it, to the extent that it gets repeated by sources deemed authoritative. Here is Wikipedia re-writing history, and here is a journalist who discovered she had accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax when she saw a journalist from The New Yorker quote a joke on Twitter as fact – a joke which she had entered in Wikipedia five years earlier for fun, as a stoned sophomore.

Have a look How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia. Technical info is certainly not immune when it comes to these problems with reliability. Even worse, an incredible number of people accept stuff in Wikipedia without questioning it, to the extent that it gets repeated by sources deemed authoritative. Here is Wikipedia re-writing history, and here is a journalist who discovered she had accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax when she saw a journalist from The New Yorker quote a joke on Twitter as fact – a joke which she had entered in Wikipedia five years earlier for fun, as a stoned sophomore.

Wikiwand is one of those engineering shops they are scared of, because WikiWand have been doing better work than their own programmers, and are presenting Wikipedia content in a prettier format. And if people migrate to Wikiwand, then as you rightly say, people don't see their fundraising banners.

Their new VP of Engineering, Damon Sicore (ex-Mozilla), spelt that fear out. According to Sicore, the WMF will have to “scale to a size that enables us to compete with the engineering shops that are trying to kill us. That means we need to double down on recruiting top talent, and steal the engineers from the sources they use because well they are REALLY GOOD. ... I want everyone to keep this in mind: If we don’t move faster and better than google, apple, and microsoft (and their ilk and kin), they will consume us and we will go away. It’s that simple.”

Note well that what he's talking about going away there is the Wikimedia Foundation, not Wikipedia. The Wikipedia volunteers work for nothing; they are not reliant on donation money. And Wikipedia itself is also free, meaning it can be hosted by WikiWand, Google or anyone else who thinks they can present the content better than WMF. And if they managed to improve the content at the same time ... As I see it, this is what this expansion is about, not about keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free. And that's not what they're telling the public.

Exactly. They could tell people what they actually want the money for, cause it ain't to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free. If they provided that info, then people could make an informed choice whether to support that effort or not. It would introduce some accountability. Two flagship projects that Wikipedia donations paid for over the past couple of years were considered abject failures by the volunteer community. The third, Wikipedia Zero, is controversial because it violates net neutrality.

http://wikipediocracy.com/foru...

Anyone who think Wikipedia is reliable source of information needs to read
this article and similar ones on wikipediocracy.

First of all, the Nature piece itself found Britannica to be superior – just not by as much as expected.

Secondly, it is a matter of record that Nature only examined science articles, many of them quite specialised. It is inexcusable to omit that qualification. There simply is no evidence at all that Wikipedia is superior to Britannica in other topic areas, and copious evidence within Wikipedia itself of how often articles are biased by special interest groups (just look at the history of Wikipedia arbitration cases).

Third, Nature chose to penalise Britannica for information that was omitted, but contained in Wikipedia: that was counted as an "error". As Britannica themselves pointed out, "Nature accused Britannica of 'omissions' on the basis of reviews of article excerpts, not the articles themselves. In a number of cases only parts of the applicable Britannica articles were reviewed." In other words, they butchered Britannica articles and then penalised Britannica for the fact that the remaining stump failed to contain some item of information that the full article would have contained.

Fourth, Nature noted, but chose not to penalise Wikipedia for, confusing presentation and bad style, essentially proposing that a haphazardly compiled jumble of facts should be considered equal to a well-structured, easy-to-understand introduction to a topic written by a world-renowned expert.

Lastly, there is by now a very long list of journalists and writers found to have copied spurious facts from Wikipedia. Where is a similar list of writers embarrassed for having gotten their information from Britannica? If Lord Leveson had looked up the founders of the Independent newspaper in Britannica, he would not have ended up ascribing that achievement to some unknown Californian student.

Beyond simple errors, there is very copious evidence of bias and covert paid editing in Wikipedia. The Croatian Wikipedia was taken over by right-wing extremists, to the point where the country's education minister warned students not to rely on it, as the country's history was thoroughly falsified by fringe groups. Those are all problems Britannica has never had.

I could go on. I have been a Wikipedian for nigh on ten years. I have seen the problems first-hand.

Back in 2005, Wikipedia was studied for accuracy against the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And they were found to be about the same. Since then Wikipedia has improved a lot, and they've stopped printing the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The 2005 "study" comparing Britannica and Wikipedia was not a rigorous peer-reviewed study, and they only looked at articles on relatively obscure science topics – a fact that no one seems to remember these days. The average Wikipedia vandal would not even know how to find an entry on a topic like the “kinetic isotope effect” or “Meliaceae” (two of the articles they looked at).

The assertion that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica is ludicrous. Granted, it's a lot bigger than Britannica, and has articles on breaking news stories, but as reliable? Of the English Wikipedia's nearly 5 million articles, at least 10% are on no Wikipedia editor's watchlist – a result of the continuous increase in the number of articles combined with the continuous decrease in the number of active editors – and those articles are sitting ducks for subtle vandalism.

Britannica may have had errors, but it did not contain false information inserted by anonymous people for fun or for financial gain; it contained no anonymous hatchet jobs written by people's rivals, and was not full of puff-pieces written by the biography subjects themselves.

Repeating this false "Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica" meme only contributes to future cases like this one here, or this one.

That was part of Hill & Shaw's assertion (see endnote in the original article). I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced.

I guess this page wouldn't be complete without a reference to WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance, a 2011 paper which contains a lot of interesting data related to all of this.

But for Wikipedia to actually become a platform fully embraced by women, it would have to change its culture in fundamental ways, reducing its emphasis on anonymity and providing more opportunities for meaningful companionship and satisfying social relationships between its contributors. Failing that, women will simply continue to vote with their feet, and find their enjoyment and altruistic fulfilment elsewhere.

Most of the reasons for the lack of female participation in Wikipedia, including those above, are false. On Newslines, my crowdsourced content site that aims to replace Wikipedia's biographies and news-based events, 80% of our contributors are women and minorities. See our leaderboard

Wikipedia can never work for minorities and women because its software and policies are specifically designed to exclude them. The reason we get more women posting is because Newslines is created specifically to allow users to add content without the conflicts that are inherent in a wiki-based system. Wikis are built through conflict. Wikipedia's conflict-driven software and policies attract ego-driven white males eager to gain power through the display of their knowledge. The intensity of this conflict excludes other groups.

I go further into this in this post, but the gist of it is that 1) we pay our writers to contribute 2) we have system that allows people to add information with no conflict -- so far over 11,000 posts with no trouble 3) posts are assessed on the quality of the post, not on who made them -- no conflicts of interest or harassment possible 4) and we don't allow editors ownership of the page -- denying powerful groups the ability to censor people and text.

The real crime though, is to blame the people who are excluded for the failings of the system. How many times do we have to hear -- by the people who created the system that excludes them -- that women and minorities are not interested, they don't have enough time, they don't know enough, they can't use the interface, they prefer fluffy stuff, and that they are are lazy? It's time to move past these old arguments and see Wikipedia's dysfunction for what it is - a software, policy and leadership failure.

If you take things on people's say-so, you end up with this. Reliability is bad as it is – looking at an article, you can never be sure, without checking the references, whether it is a bunch of nonsense or a well-researched, accurate article. But if you allow everyone – well-intentioned, knowledgeable people like yourself as well as pranksters and hoaxers – to add stuff without citations, the site would quickly be corrupted altogether. No one can tell if you are sincere or making stuff up out of whole cloth.

Kozierok's First Law: "The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."

Incidentally, since you mention it, gays are well represented on Wikipedia, I think. African-Americans on the other hand are poorly represented, and you can tell from some of the content in related topic areas. The hair straightener hoax described here for example probably wouldn't have succeeded if there weren't a dearth of Black editors.

It's partly the fault of people who shout from the rooftops that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica. Some even crow it's more accurate than Britannica. It simply isn't. Certainly the English Wikipedia isn't.

There is no way Britannica would have had the name of some Californian student as the founder of the Independent, or told a million readers for a year that the average winter temperature in Greenland and Antarctica is between –2 and +4 C ... or had a racist slur ("sand monkeys") as the purported name of an Arab football team.

Yes, errors have always existed. Britannica has errors. But Wikipedia has errors (and probably rather more of those than Britannica, given contributors' qualifications) AND hoaxes AND propaganda from fringe groups on top of that. Yet there are millions of people who buy the hype that it's as good as Britannica, a hype that is aided even by journalists of supposedly responsible newspapers.

It's partly the fault of people who shout from the rooftops that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica. Some even crow it's more accurate than Britannica. It simply isn't. Certainly the English Wikipedia isn't.

There is no way Britannica would have had the name of some Californian student as the founder of the Independent, or told a million readers for a year that the average winter temperature in Greenland and Antarctica is between –2 and +4 C ... or had a racist slur ("sand monkeys") as the purported name of an Arab football team.

Yes, errors have always existed. Britannica has errors. But Wikipedia has errors (and probably rather more of those than Britannica, given contributors' qualifications) AND hoaxes AND propaganda from fringe groups on top of that. Yet there are millions of people who buy the hype that it's as good as Britannica, a hype that is aided even by journalists of supposedly responsible newspapers.

For some real-world examples of made-up Wikipedia information entering other sources, sometimes to the major embarrassment of the people who reused it without checking, see two recent articles: How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia and I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax. It happens quite a lot, at least in the English Wikipedia, that hoaxes stay around for years before they are discovered, by which time they have entered all sorts of other sources (remember the Bicholim conflict?). Even people who work for Wikipedia tell you not to trust it, but to check the underlying citations.

It would help if the English Wikipedia had edits by new and unregistered users looked at and approved by more experienced Wikipedians before showing them to the public (that's how it's done in the German and Polish Wikipedias for example), but the English Wikipedia community has steadfastly refused to introduce that system ("Pending Changes", also known as "Flagged Revisions") in all of its articles, saying it would be too much work and be a downer for new contributors who might have to wait a while before they see their changes go live.

For examples of Wikipedia being abused for personal vendettas against people, see Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia and The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose: A false and malicious identity is admitted. Anonymity encourages this sort of thing, of course. Again, Pending Changes would have helped a little ...

The Wikimedia Foundation has so far not really cared very much about content quality. They do not measure it, and don't know how to, by their own admission. Their metrics of success are the number of articles, the number of editors, the number of edits (more is better!), the number of page views (Alexa!), and how many millions in donations they take. Little if any of this money goes towards measuring and improving quality. Most of it is spent on their software engineering and product development department, which represents two-thirds of the 200 or so Wikimedia staff. They are approaching Wikipedia more like Facebook than an educational project. Quality assessment and real-time quality control, the job of sifting through all the millions of contributions, is left to all the volunteers, who are stretched ... and unlike the Wikimedia Foundation staff (many of whom are not really skilled professionals, but simply Wikipedians who have managed to join the gravy train), they are not getting paid. Short version: The Wikimedia Foundation now takes $50 million a year in donations (compared to just $2.5 million six or seven years ago), and they don't really know what to do with it. It's not making Wikipedia a more reliable reference source.

For some real-world examples of made-up Wikipedia information entering other sources, sometimes to the major embarrassment of the people who reused it without checking, see two recent articles: How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia and I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax. It happens quite a lot, at least in the English Wikipedia, that hoaxes stay around for years before they are discovered, by which time they have entered all sorts of other sources (remember the Bicholim conflict?). Even people who work for Wikipedia tell you not to trust it, but to check the underlying citations.

It would help if the English Wikipedia had edits by new and unregistered users looked at and approved by more experienced Wikipedians before showing them to the public (that's how it's done in the German and Polish Wikipedias for example), but the English Wikipedia community has steadfastly refused to introduce that system ("Pending Changes", also known as "Flagged Revisions") in all of its articles, saying it would be too much work and be a downer for new contributors who might have to wait a while before they see their changes go live.

For examples of Wikipedia being abused for personal vendettas against people, see Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia and The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose: A false and malicious identity is admitted. Anonymity encourages this sort of thing, of course. Again, Pending Changes would have helped a little ...

The Wikimedia Foundation has so far not really cared very much about content quality. They do not measure it, and don't know how to, by their own admission. Their metrics of success are the number of articles, the number of editors, the number of edits (more is better!), the number of page views (Alexa!), and how many millions in donations they take. Little if any of this money goes towards measuring and improving quality. Most of it is spent on their software engineering and product development department, which represents two-thirds of the 200 or so Wikimedia staff. They are approaching Wikipedia more like Facebook than an educational project. Quality assessment and real-time quality control, the job of sifting through all the millions of contributions, is left to all the volunteers, who are stretched ... and unlike the Wikimedia Foundation staff (many of whom are not really skilled professionals, but simply Wikipedians who have managed to join the gravy train), they are not getting paid. Short version: The Wikimedia Foundation now takes $50 million a year in donations (compared to just $2.5 million six or seven years ago), and they don't really know what to do with it. It's not making Wikipedia a more reliable reference source.

Well, yes, but it's no longer transparent. You know, if Coca Cola edits the Coca Cola article, isn't it better if people can see in the edit history which edits were made by Coca Cola, what they took out, added, reworded and so on? In practice, you can look at almost any Wikipedia article on a small or midsized company, and with a bit of detective work you can identify one or several accounts that have contributed prominently to that article and are quite clearly operated by principals or employees of that business. There are dozens of examples of that in this thread.

The irony here of course is that Wikipedia's content (at least as long as it's not a hoax) is based on the selfsame news outlets that the public apparently trusts less than Wikipedia. It's a case where the copy is considered more reliable than the original!

Once again......

That's what it looks like today -- after months of editwarring, followed by 2+ weeks of people trying to "fix" it, because of the bad publicity brought by the lawsuit.

Use the "History" tab yourself. It was an ugly war, and no one else noticed it until Barry made legal threats.

And oh, BTW, Wikipediocracy people discovered that a couple of the guys trying to attack Barry had also been doing COI editing of other Wikipedia articles. In addition, UC Berkeley's "official Wikipedian-In-Residence" Kevin Gorman has been taunting Barry on Twitter. All petty, small-minded bullshit. But typical Wikipedia.

According to the latest comments under the piece, it looks like HyperfineCosmologist and the 173 IP can reasonably be assumed to be two of the other creators of the game. http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...

I note the link in the edited version on the front page is just the Wikipedia page about Wikipediocracy. Here's the link to the actual post on the site: http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...

Sirwired, are you saying that a paid employee of a company that writes about that company on Wikipedia is not a "paid advocate"? How about a junior copywriter in the public relations department? How about a senior vice president for marketing? I think you're on a slippery slope when you try to make an exception for "front-line employees". Jimbo has clearly said, "The idea that we should ever accept paid advocates directly editing Wikipedia is not ever going to be ok. Consider this to be policy as of right now." And he said, "No editing of Wikipedia article space by paid advocates. There is absolutely no reason to ever do this - the talk pages, notice boards, wikiprojects, and OTRS provide ample opportunity for ethical engagement of Wikipedia. This is easy. The most common opposition to this comes from corrupt interests." You should take a look at this Wikipediocracy thread, then let us know which of those editors were "front-line" employees (exempt from any bright line rule) and which were PR and communications professionals: http://wikipediocracy.com/foru... I believe you'll soon see that "front-line" employees are just as likely (if not more likely) to cruft up Wikipedia with promotional content as purely "paid advocates" are.

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” - Isaac Asimov

Wikipediocracy:1. Wikipedia disrespects and disregards scholars, experts, scientists, and others with special knowledge. Wikipedia specifically disregards authors with special knowledge, expertise, or credentials. There is no way for a real scholar to distinguish himself or herself from a random anonymous editor merely claiming scholarly credentials, and thus no claim of credentials is typically believed. Even when credentials are accepted, Wikipedia affords no special regard for expert editors contributing in their fields. This has driven most expert editors away from editing Wikipedia in their fields. Similarly, Wikipedia implements no controls that distinguish mature and educated editors from immature and uneducated ones.

Compare to Jimbulb Wales' response regarding expert certification of sections on articles on science and medicine:

"There's a notion that the way to get the very highest quality information is to have an expert certify it. But there's actually little evidence that this is true. There is far more evidence that the best way to get to high quality information is to have a thoughtful, open, public dialog and discussion and debate. To ask anyone with a concern to come forward and voice it reasonably. And to respond quickly and openly to errors."

So what we get with Shittypedia is what we've always gotten with shittypedia: lack of anything more than superficial "well it wer in the new york times durr" level research, people who engage in edit warring to "own" the articles, and the admins playing to push their personal POV or help their personal friends. Articles remain much, much worse because of the threads of anti-intellectualism running through the wikipedia culture. It's the "if it isn't on the internet it isn't worthy as a reference" crowd, and the "TL;DR" crowd.

And of course Jimbulb will never answer the other problem inherent to Wikipedia, which makes the anti-intellectual problem even worse:

3. Wikipedia’s administrators have become an entrenched and over-powerful elite, unresponsive and harmful to authors and contributors. Without meaningful checks and balances on administrators, administrative abuse is the norm, rather than the exception, with blocks and bans being enforced by fiat and whim, rather than in implementation of policy. Many well-meaning editors have been banned simply on suspicion of being previously banned users, without any transgression, while others have been banned for disagreeing with a powerful admin’s editorial point of view. There is no clear-cut code of ethics for administrators, no truly independent process leading to blocks and bans, no process for appeal that is not corrupted by the imbalance of power between admin and blocked editor, and no process by which administrators are reviewed regularly for misbehaviour.

4. Wikipedia’s numerous policies and procedures are not enforced equally on the community — popular or powerful editors are often exempted. Administrators, in particular, and former administrators, are frequently allowed to transgress (or change!) Wikipedia’s numerous “policies”, such as those prohibiting personal attacks, prohibiting the release of personal information about editors, and those prohibiting collusion in editing.

Ask yourself: why did Jimbulb hire "Essjay", KNOWING that the kid had lied and misrepresented himself as a topic area expert (claiming to have a doctorate and b

If anyone wants to see evidence of Wikipedia's many, many (many!) problems, try Wikipediocracy. There is a blog with regular posts full of horror and madness, plus a forum where you can be lectured at length about the failings of Wikipedia, and Jimbo. And all nonprofit too.