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Wikipedia Editor Says Site's Toxic Community Has Him Contemplating Suicide (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A longtime Wikipedia editor wrote an email to a large public mailing list Tuesday, saying he was contemplating suicide due to online abuse by his fellow Wikipedians. "Nobody on Wikipedia seems to be kind," he wrote. "You are all so busy power tripping that you forget there is a real, live person on the other side." He lamented that obstructionism by other editors stopped him from contributing to the site's "great mission -- one I feel so keenly." The email was sent to the Wikimedia-L mailing list, which is one of the largest community-run Wikimedia mailing lists and has hundreds of subscribers. The editor was upset after an ongoing disagreement with other editors on the "talk" pages of an article about a local politician. The debate devolved into name-calling, the editor wrote, and eventually he was completely banned from editing the site he had devoted so much time to.
... It's entire model can literally be summed-up as, "King of the Hill." Whoever camps at their computer to edit pages is the editor,...
In my experience, that is a valid statement.
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I had the few hours to research and edit an article, complete with citations. I did not have the time to sit around, hovering over the article to argue with an "editor" who reverted my change because he had verb-tense disagreements with my edit.
If the only problem he had was the tense of the verb (and he said that was the only issue he had with the changes I made), then why didn't he just fix the tense of the verb?
The Wikipedia model has deep systemic problems that are largely ignored by the powers that be at the top of Wikipedia.
The actual message is here. The politician mentioned in the story is this guy.
The politician, Salim Mehajer, is really something. Sort of an Australian Donald Trump. He runs people over with his super car, threatens people, violates election laws and then gets himself acquitted or wrist-slapped for all of it in court. The editor wanted to elaborate on details of this stuff in Salim Mehajer's Wikipedia page and the powers-that-be blocked him. Seems like the editor was trying to do the equivalent of investigative reporting, to the degree that it amounted to original research and detail excessive for a Wikipedia page.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I've tried to make edits. There was a page where I had cited evidence from multiple sources that my change should be accepted, and no reason was given just a "nope". So why bother?
I'll try.
Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or gods. That's it. That's all of it. It's not "rejection of belief", and it's not the "position there are no deities."
Theism: belief in a god or gods. That's it. That's all of it. It's not just YWHA, it's not just Quetzalcoatl, it's not just Odin. A god or gods. Any one, or any combination. There you go.
The root 'a' means "without."
So atheism means "without belief in a god or gods."
There is no book, no canon, no mantra. Nothing about it speaks to rejection or assertion or anything at all, in fact. It's the state of lacking these specific beliefs. It's what a baby has, or a dog has. No belief. It's like having no money. Either you have it, or you don't. And when you don't, talking about what kind of money you have... that's intellectually bewildered. Likewise, when you don't hold a belief, to say it's this or it's that... it's nothing. Either you have it, which makes you a theist, because that's what a theist is, or you don't, which makes you an atheist, because that's what an atheist is.
Anything else - is something else and doesn't even address the issue.
Rejection of someone's belief? That's all you, or whomever. Assertion of some state or lack thereof? That's all you, or whomever. It's not atheism.
Can you be atheist - without belief in a god or gods - and hold such views? Of course - because atheism doesn't say yea or nae about that, or anything else. You can be atheist and like peanut butter sandwiches; you can be atheist and send people to gulags; you can be atheist and with, or without knowledge.
And while knowledge and meaning are both, however cursorily, on the table, you're either atheist, or you're not. Agnostic is not a third position - it doesn't even deal with the same question, which is belief. It deals with knowledge. It's not a modifier, either, it's about what you (think you) know, which does not speak to belief at all; "atheist agnostic" is just like "atheist peanut butter assembler" and "theist agnostic" is just like "theist peanut butter assembler."
Historically speaking, theists, being both in the majority and in control of most media and definition sources, have usually characterized atheism in a way most convenient, or perhaps familiar, to them. You'll find it called out as "disbelief" in many places, and you'll find people claiming "it's a religion" and "it's a belief" just as often. All are incorrect, and serve, if anything, as a wall between actual understanding of the issue at hand, and the fog of name-calling that stands in for idea exchange in most conversations about this. And that's not to say that there aren't atheists out there who have bought into the idea that lack of belief is somehow belief, or disbelief. There are. Maximum clarity requires isolating every idea in this space and understanding it at a fundamental level. What you do not want to do is start tacking modifiers like "hard" or "soft" or "agnostic" or "peanut butter assembler" onto a basic position as if it were actually a fundamental position in itself. Because it isn't. Any more than "peanut butter liking lego builder" is a basic position.
By all means, hold whatever ideas you want to. What I'm saying here, basically, is that if you can identify which ideas actually accrue to what fundamental facets of your mental state, your education, your social outlook and so on, you'll be much clearer headed overall, and you're likely to be able to understand others much better as well.
That, and Wikipedia's atheism article is a mess. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.