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Wikipedia Announces the Most Edited Articles of 2016 (npr.org)
Wikipedia has revealed its most edited articles of 2016. Believe it or not, the two most edited articles of the year were for Deaths in 2016, which was edited 18,230 times, and Donald Trump, with 8,933 edits as of December 21. NPR reports: Some are completely unsurprising -- like the articles about Brexit, the Panama Papers, the Orlando nightclub shooting, and other recent and controversial news topics. The popularity of editing others is somewhat more mysterious: like the article for RuPaul's Drag Race, and one for a fictional character named Beverley Gray -- the subject of a series of 26 mystery stories written between 1934 and 1955. The article on Vincent Van Gogh was also edited thousands of times in 2016, as editors reportedly sought to clarify misunderstandings about the artist in hopes of achieving "featured" status for the page. The most edited article by far was for Deaths in 2016, which was edited 18,230 times. David Bowie, Janet Reno, Gwen Ifill, Leonard Cohen, Fidel Castro, Muhammad Ali, John Glenn and Prince are among the notable people who died this year. Donald Trump's entry was second, with 8,933 edits as of Dec. 21. If history is any indication, there's a good chance the president-elect's Wikipedia page will come under even more scrutiny: The Wikimedia Foundation revealed earlier this year that George W Bush's article has the most edits of any article in English in the history of the site, with 45,862 revisions at last count.
It's worse than that.
I am not a big Wikipedia contributor. But an avid reader. It's fun to spend a few hours reading and eventually wondering "now how the fuck did I end up here?". Same happened recently when I ended up on the page about a certain style of the top ornament of certain Greek pillars. Probably not the page too many people will go to, and certainly the pet project of someone since, let's be honest here, who the fuck gives a shit about the style of Greek column top ornamentation in a certain period in a certain area of the classic Greek times?
Now, this page had been vandalized and, being as popular as it is with probably 2 hits per decade, had not been spotted yet. Somewhere inside the 3-4 screens worth of wall of text, it informed in no uncertain terms about the sexual preferences of some gentleman that I never heard about but now know a lot about his favorite bedtime pastimes. Considering this at least slightly off topic for Greek columns (ok, not completely, to be honest, but still... probably not too appropriate at least) I dared to do the unspeakable: Revert a vandalism attempt. Marked it as such and went on, merrily thinking I finally gave something back to the community that provided me with many hours, if not months, of enjoyment, entertainment and information.
I returned there a day later, mostly for egosurfing to be honest, and to pat myself on the shoulder, only to find it vandalized again. Actually, my revert had been reverted. To make a long story short, after another revert of mine, and the ensuing revert of my revert, I was informed that I should please refrain from "edit warring" and that I better leave the article alone now if I value my account.
So I have concluded that it is highly relevant for the understanding of Greek column design that a certain person in Maine is really into buttsex.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I suppose my disappointment is not so much that I spent five minutes trying to help and my help was then rejected, it's that if that happened to me on something where I know WP was wrong before and my change was right, then clearly I can't trust other articles on subjects where I'm not an expert in case the same thing happened. I imagine those operating WP would be the first to say you shouldn't trust WP as a primary source anyway, as I think they always have, but still, rejecting objectively correct changes damages the credibility of WP as a whole.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Slashdot is a site not totally owned by leftists. That makes it a conservative site to those with closed minds who only ever even brush up against different ideas here on Slashdot.
I suppose my disappointment is not so much that I spent five minutes trying to help and my help was then rejected, it's that if that happened to me on something where I know WP was wrong before and my change was right, then clearly I can't trust other articles on subjects where I'm not an expert in case the same thing happened.
Yeah, spend a few years editing on and off (as I did, several years back), and you'll realize how common this problem actually is.
I imagine those operating WP would be the first to say you shouldn't trust WP as a primary source anyway, as I think they always have, but still, rejecting objectively correct changes damages the credibility of WP as a whole.
The problem isn't just the rejection -- since you CAN usually fight enough and escalate the situation enough to get the correct information into the article. Depending on who you're fighting, this might be rather simple or could take a detailed knowledge of Wikipedia procedure and many hours of time investment.
That's all problematic in and of itself... but the larger issue is that even if you fight to get something corrected, there is absolutely NO guarantee it will stay that way. This is a particular issue with stuff where there's a popular "consensus" on an issue, but the subject experts realized that was wrong decades ago. (This is particularly true in many humanities disciplines, like history, where stuff "everybody knows" is frequently wrong. And there are often plenty of non-specialist sources written by otherwise reasonably reputable people where you can still find the old "myths" propagated.)
So, you spend a few days and a lot of effort to get the "right stuff" in, but then a year from now some idiot comes along with some popular citations, rewrites the article, and throws out that stuff you fought so hard to get in. It's not just wasting your effort to get stuff in -- it's then committing to perpetual policing of the content. (And thus it's no wonder why many editors start getting attached to pages -- they themselves probably made some improvements over whatever idiots they kicked off years ago, so they get overprotective.)
Say what you will about the reliability of old paper encyclopedias or their bias or errors too. Sure, that stuff existed. But they didn't spontaneously generate new errors on your shelf so that you never knew whether a given article got better or worse since the last time you opened the book.