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Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Who says Wikipedians don't have a sense of humor? While perusing Wikipedia I recently came across an article documenting the lamest examples of wikipedia edit wars over the most trivial things. As one wikipedian says: 'Some discussions are born lame; some achieve lameness; some have lameness thrust upon them.' A few of the most amusing examples include: Was Chopin Polish, French, Polish–French, or French–Polish? Can you emigrate from a country of which you are not a citizen? Can you receive citizenship if you already have it? The possibilities for intensive study are endless. Next up, Are U2 an 'Irish band' or simply a band that happen to be from Ireland, since two of their members were born in the UK? A heated discussion took place for over two-and-a-half weeks that resulted in at least one editor getting blocked and many more getting warnings. Next, should members of the Beatles be listed in the 'traditional' order or in alphabetical order? Another edit war which flares up continuously in The Beatles involves whether to identify the band as 'The Beatles' with a capital T or 'the Beatles' with a lower case t. The issue became so contentious it merited an article in the Wall Street Journal. One such installment of this saga was brought before the arbitration committee (by an administrator, no less) where it was quickly declared 'silly.' Next, Is J. K. Rowling's name pronounced like 'rolling' or to rhyme with 'howling'? Rowling is on record claiming she pronounces her name like 'rolling'. An irate editor argues that this is a 'British' pronunciation and the 'American" pronunciation of her name should also be noted. 'This is slightly ridiculous as she is English, and therefore of course will pronounce it in an English manner. Perhaps it rhymes with "Trolling"?' Finally did Jimmy Wales found Wikipedia or co-found it? 'Not surprisingly, those who actually were around at the time and know the answer stayed far away from this one. The casualty list has yet to be compiled, but no doubt editor egos will be among the worst hit.'"
Or do we really not have that kind of time?
Slow news day?
Sometimes people don't think too far past the end of their noses. I mean they don't pronounce bowling like howling in the U.S. so it shouldn't be much of a stretch to pronounce Rowling like bowling instead of howling. sheesh.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
People get territorial about Wikipedia articles and don't like to be told they are wrong. Just try editing a Wikipedia article introduce a deliberate mistake and see what happens :)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
...is the reason I don't donate money to WF.
Slow news day.
Rowling is on record claiming she pronounces her name like 'rolling'. An irate editor argues that this is a 'British' pronunciation and the 'American" pronunciation of her name should also be noted.
What would the purpose be to telling Americans how to pronounce her name the "American way"? They should already be incorrectly pronouncing her name that way already. You pronounce someone's name how they want it pronounced, assuming they don't have some strange sound that you can't reproduce, then you just try your best.
I regularly replace misspelled "aluminum" with the correct "aluminium" whenever I see it in an article, but backwards people just revert my changes.
Signature intentionally left blank.
I gave up on being a Wikipedia editor a long time ago, what a waste of time trying to be helpful and make the articles better. Even doing a simple edit like "its" for an incorrect "it's" got nasty emails sent to be almost immediately about it, and the edits reverted in no time. All I ever wanted to do was correct minor grammatical and typographical errors, which never would have gotten past an editor in a "real" encyclopedia, and make for better looking articles. The grief I got for it..., well, it wasn't much fun. They want editors, they get them, the editors give up in disgust. It's also why I haven't given them a dime.
Everything2 was what Wikipedia should have been. Much better class of people there.
-> I dislike sigs...
Namely, this was in the page for Desiree Washington, the woman that Mike Tyson was convicted of raping.
In the section about the rape accusation, trial and conviction of Mike Tyson, I added information about a previous false allegation made by Ms. Washington against a high school friend.
Someone reverted my change with a cryptic comment about "BLP". I saw it a few days later and re-created my change. Again, my change was reverted with more comments about "BLP".
This was several years ago so I don't remember exactly what was said back and forth but the gist of it is that the other party thought that there was something in the wikipedia rules about the "Biographies of Living Persons" that prevented me from including the information about the false rape allegations Desiree Washington made in the past. I challenged the person to show specifically where BLP precluded me from including this information, they could not so I restored my change.
Apparently this other editor had wikipedia political connections because I received a "Warning" for making my edits. I was willing to be banned over this because for me it's about the principle of the thing. If wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, I was going to make sure that this factual information was included. Hell, I can generate throw-away email addresses and wikipedia accounts. I'm not sure who resolved this but what happened in the end was that Desiree Washington's page went away and the information about the false rape allegations in her past were included on Mike Tyson's page.
After this, I stopped editing articles. I realized that situations like this are precisely why wikipedia isn't considered an authoritative source in the academic sense. People with more knowledge about a subject and with the supporting documentation can lose edit wars if the ignoramus on the other side has the political clout to have them blocked.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Wikipedia has become staffed with a sizeable number of edit trolls, who know a lot about a tiny slice of something, and think that gives them great and wise moral authority over the entire domain...somewhat like real academia. I found this out the hard way when I made an edit to an article, which was modest, relevant, and neutral in tone. Immediately, it got removed by someone who left a mini-screed about it. I checked the person's history and found that they had numerous arguments with other users, but apparently still retained their account because they managed to effectively play rules lawyer with Wikipedia's policies. Again, like real academia. That said, articles like this make me cringe, because it a) turns people off of what is really an excellent resource, and b) makes Wikipedia sound like it is somehow less worthy than traditional reference sources (where no one sees the bile and acrimony that goes into the production of some of those works). It's like anything, some people are bound and determined to play the chemically imbalanced turd in the punchbowl.
One of the big underlying problems seems to be that when someone is a big contributor of some article, he ends up guarding it and the article just "feels wrong" to him when someone else modifies it, even if the contributions would objectively make sense. Let the information evolve and the words be shuffled around, it's not your precious snowflake thesis...
I'm sure all these editorial discussions will be promptly settled once and for all now that they have been slashdotted.
People are not wearing enough hats.
I'd been contributing to an article on a film. We'd sourced plenty of material and it was a really in-depth affair.
Then some ding-dong undergraduate deleted it and substituted his own 35,000 word essay. This boring shot-by-shot description written in stiff prose and sprinkled with gems from the thesaurus undid a year of work and good luck trying to get it repealed because his school buddies have plenty of time to wage an edit war when the rest of us are at work.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
It's got nothing to do with Wikipedia and everything to do with
1. How people how argue and more specifically
2. What pedants argue about.
You want to argue about who's going to win the Super Bowl or be purged next in North Korea? Lots of good arguments and at the end, there is an actual measurable outcome.
Want to argue about which is the best operating system? Lots of arguing there but no measurable outcome. You can measure which is the most popular but that's like saying the most popular music is the best music. We argue about music and art.
But the arguments over word use and definitions of fact are the most vociferous because they are the most picky. And only picky, anal retentive types will argue so the arguments get more and more precise each time. When done well, we call it science.
But it's hard to use words and syntax well when arguing about word definitions and syntax. If you see no difference between French-Polish and Polish-French, well then there's no difference between African-American and American-African. It actually is debatable. Uninteresting to most but debatable to many.
This is the real question being grappled with, the important issue.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Your right about that. I always corrected minor errors and its really annoying when people keep on changing them back irregardless of weather their correct or knot.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I can't decide if I should be thrilled that we have achieved some kind of intellectual enlightened society evidenced by our capacity to be pedantic in a globally connected ecosystem of information, or appalled that people don't have better things to do with their time.
Perhaps we should have a discussion about this. On-line.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
It's almost like it's a really bad information management model or something.
Well played, friend, well played! :)
-> I dislike sigs...
1. Chopin was Prussian.
2. You can only emigrate from a countrybefore receiving citizenship while already being a citizen.
3. U2 are a UK band with Irish members.
4. It should be capitalized with a capital T as such: "the BeaTles".
5. J.K. Rowling's last name is pronounced "roo-ling".
6. Jimmy Wales co-opted Wikipedia.
Now can we finally stop the edit-wars?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
They evade their taxes in the Netherlands, so it's a Dutch band.
Privacy is terrorism.
One thing I've always hated is Wikipedia's use of kilometre, instead of kilometer, etc. I nearly flipped when my search for Jewelry ended up at Jewelery. Really? If they just implemeted a hits counter for searches, they would see that the British usage is not preferred.
I lost it after an article I'd written, putting a fair bit of work into, was stolen and placed on another website. An editor found this site and accused me of copyvio and then refused to simply compare timestamps. No-one has ever apologised, despite ample opportunity, and until they do, I refuse to waste my time on it.
[FUCK BETA]
Yes, many Wikipedia editors seem more obsessed with destruction of content rather than creation. I added something once that I didn't realise someone would be so absurdly anal as to suggest requiring a citation and they just removed the whole block of information, rather than spend literally 10 seconds searching Google to merely add the citation they so desperately wanted. I did one of those dispute deletion things and the tit who deleted it was overturned but it still put me off ever wasting my time there again.
Wikipedia is going to reach a fundamental limit of knowledge if these people equal or outweigh the helpful editors because their whole existence will be spent removing as much content as positive contributors add and worse, it's far easier to remove content than spend time researching, citing, and correctly formatting it so destroyers of content will always have the upper hand.
So it's basically a list of ideas on how to troll wikipedia?
They really do try to cover every topic you'd want to know about on there!
Fact is that articles about American subjects are supposed to use American spelling, and articles about Commonwealth subjects are supposed to use Commonwealth spelling. Otherwise, match the spelling already in the article.
weather their correct or knot
...must resist urge to make pun about wind speed...
Chopin was Prussian.
Does that mean in Psoviet Prussia, the Chopin article edits YOU?
Patrolling and trying the bestselling author ridin' dirty...
One thing I've always hated is Wikipedia's use of kilometre
Please see my other comment.
The other one the American bulldog it's an English Bulldog and the U.S. have no native breeds of dogs. They simply cross a Bull mastiff, which is half Bulldog with a English Bulldog.
So when an American Bulldog leaves a mess on your lawn, is it three-quarters bullshit?
For example the U.S. has no official language
True, the United States has no de jure official language. But because the Constitution, U.S. Code, Code of Federal Regulations, and all U.S. patents are in English, as are all state constitutions, it has a de facto official language. If you're claiming that the UK has a better claim to English than the USA because England is a country in the UK, then you also have to put down Austria, which speaks a language not named after itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_fictional_ducks
May not be as protracted and vitriolic as some of the others but the disagreement over the notoriety of Jemima Puddleduck was hauntingly stupid.
Flame and edit wars, not to mention disappearing edits, make editing Wikipedia an waste of time.
"Who says Wikipedians don't have a sense of humor? "
No one, except some lame submitter trying to make a hook for an article by linking to some wikipedia page that's been around forever.
My favorite is not actually an edit war, but a close/reopen war. The article about The Game has seriously been closed and then unclosed about a dozen times, it was hilarious watching it. (Also I just lost the game.)
Star Trek Into Darkness.
http://xkcd.com/1167/
True story, bros.
American and Commonwealth are mutually intelligible languages, no matter how much pedants pretend they aren't. Wikimedia Foundation lacks the funds to run separate American and Commonwealth Wikipedias.
I added something once that I didn't realise someone would be so absurdly anal as to suggest requiring a citation and they just removed the whole block of information, rather than spend literally 10 seconds searching Google to merely add the citation they so desperately wanted
Meh, wikipedia editors gets what they ask for. If you need a citation, just refer to a non-existent paper-book. Wikipedia editors seldom take the time to check that the sources actually says what is claimed and never if it can't be looked up online.
This either a sign of The Apocalypse, or simply a bunch of people with way too much free time on their hands!
Another good question - shouldn't it say "IS U2 an Irish band?" While U2 is a group of people, it's also a thing.
Wikipedia reminds me of the book Animal Farm, which was originally written as a critique on Communism. Yet it appears we reached the exact same conclusions that we got nearly 70 years ago - everyone who edits is equal, but some are more equal than others.
to be honest, it's really a wonderful experiment to see how even though we're all supposedly well educated in the matter, humans STILL end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
And stupid and pathetic war on his sexuality and weather to refer to him as 'he' or 'she'.
You britbongs and your silly words.
My favorite argument on that list was over the issue of whether the article Exploding Whale should contain the phrase "the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds."
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
People who can't get basic grammar correct shouldn't be able to post articles.
You got nasty emails for just correcting grammatical errors? Why would anyone bother? Why would anyone revert to the wrong version?
Definitely "citation needed".
"The article Hummus, along with other articles relating to the Arab–Israeli conflict, is currently subject to active arbitration remedies"
My gravest concern is that the energy of contributors is finite, and that history will eventually be written by the rich. People will pay people to rewrite wikipedia to their liking. History books are written by the winners.
Gently reply
I got into a debate about super cars vs sports cars (I admit, it's a bit of an empty debate) but it seems there's no such thing as a supercar, only sportscars. So I can confirm some pretty dumb shit is debated.
What's significantly more frustrating, is I made a comedy edit to a womans profile who basically belittiles men who play games, quite harshly. (I admit, a comedy edit isn't cool) The edit was rightly removed, a moderator responded to me and said don't do it again. I said fine, I'd already posted the link on a gaming discussion board, someone else makes a similar edit, moderator bans me for editing the page. No idea what an IP address is or username but someones US cable IP does not match my Australian ADSL IP in the slightest.
After that ban, I vowed never to donate to the site again, I've heard many reports about the moderation there, some real power mongering going on and king of the internet syndrome. Fuck em.
I made up my mind about Desiree Washington when I heard her 911 call. If memory serves it went something like "Heh, yeah, I kinda think I've been raped." I'd search for the tube if I thought anyone cared at this point. Still burns me though, having heard it myself.
You're part of the problem and not the solution. I've got yer citation right here: 8===========D
Thanks for reminding me why I will NEVER donate to Wikipedia. Just when I was starting to get soft and let their ads get to me, I remember why I stopped editing articles, never to return. Obsessive persistence is rewarded above accuracy.
I made several additions to the "Zooming User Interfaces" section of Wikipedia which were quickly removed thanks to the losers destroying the Wikipedia system.
Is there anyway to search the deleted posts on any given subject? Seems a tool like this might negate the ego contest of maintaining front page control.
And it ain't just at wikipedia, is it?
Techies are people who skipped out on learning anything about social organization, and yet always think they're qualified to re-invent it all from scratch...
A New Yorker once told me, a country boy, that I was not pronouncing my name properly. I told him I could spell it "Smith" and pronounce it "Brown" if I wanted to, since it is my name. So an editor telling Rowling how to pronounce her name would appear to be an overbearing idiot.
A friend of mine is one-quarter Irish, one-quarter Black, one-quarter American Indian, and one-quarter spanish. What does he call himself? An American. Enough said.
This is possibly the only correct usage of "irregardless" known to exist....made me LOL