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A Third of Wikipedia Discussions Are Stuck in Forever Beefs (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Wikipedia, the internet's encyclopedia, is run entirely by volunteers -- people who spend large swaths of their personal time making sure the information that hundreds of millions of people access every day stays accurate and up-to-date. Of those volunteers, 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by just one percent of Wikipedia editors. As such, tensions tend to get a little high, because these editors are often highly invested. They've been arguing about corn for nearly a decade, for example, and there's a long-running edit war about the meaning of neuroticism.
When editors disagree about an edit to be made on a Wikipedia article, they start by discussing it on the article's Talk page. When that doesn't result in a decision, they can open a Request for Comment (RfC). From there, any editor can choose a side or discuss the merits of whatever edit is up for discussion, and -- in theory -- come to an agreement. Or at least, some kind of decision about how to make the edit. But a new study by MIT researchers found that as many as one-third of RfC disputes go unresolved, often abandoned out of frustration or exhaustion. The most common sticking points were chalked up to inexperience, inattention from experience editors, and just plain petty bickering.
When editors disagree about an edit to be made on a Wikipedia article, they start by discussing it on the article's Talk page. When that doesn't result in a decision, they can open a Request for Comment (RfC). From there, any editor can choose a side or discuss the merits of whatever edit is up for discussion, and -- in theory -- come to an agreement. Or at least, some kind of decision about how to make the edit. But a new study by MIT researchers found that as many as one-third of RfC disputes go unresolved, often abandoned out of frustration or exhaustion. The most common sticking points were chalked up to inexperience, inattention from experience editors, and just plain petty bickering.
... as someone who has been around a long time, i also see many editors are just more interested in pushing their agenda than in writing the truth. In any area where opinions vary, so like 99.9% of things, editors seem stuck in ONE opinion and push that as absolute truth without even acknowledging that other opinions exist. It seems that even if the concensus of the leaders in a field is one thing, the editors will only present their own opinion ad nauseum and delete discussions of anything else.
"Governments have been dominated by the corporate entities and citizens have ceased to matter in public policy" true in
A person who normally is very cool-headed and objective will still have some topic to which they are emotionally attached.
That emotional attachment warps their cognitive processes to the point where they think they are being totally cool and objective, but they aren't. They will start dropping logical fallacies and engaging in defensive tactics left and right, and have no idea they are doing this. They will even deny it when it is pointed out to them.
Rising above this is very hard. For most people, impossible. That includes 99% of the people reading this and thinking that they are in the 1% who rises above. You don't.
Wikipedia was where the culture war started.
Fully half of Slashdot article comment sections are stuck in Forever Beefs! Step up your game, Wikipedia!
Where's the beef?
I'm aware I do the logical fallacy stuff, because it works to manipulate people.
I expect Wikipedia; none of the other nations gave the world Wikipedia.
Are you implying that nation is the only one smart enough to contribute to wikipedia? Thanks!
>> Of those volunteers, 77 percent of Wikipedia articles are written by just one percent of Wikipedia editors.
Great summary, Brownie.
People are very different, our knowledge if often extremely contentious (aside from hard science) - it's amazing Wikipedia exists in the first place.
Also, I bet neuroticism is not even at the top of contentious articles: politics/history/countries/events and famous people must attract even more opposing opinions. As if it wasn't enough we have conspiracy theories, "alien" sightings and abductions, "divine" interventions and all sorts of BS which people are keen to add to Wikipedia.
It's been that way for a decade. I gave up trying to contribute long ago.
It's now a battleground, and the winners are the ones who are most persistent.
It's like a home owners association - the place is run by people with not enough to do, and a desire to control others.
I put out an article about a known area where I live. The area is mentioned in the city Wikipedia. After spending about 3 days creating the explanation and data, I put the article out. Some jerk Wikipedia editor rejected it saying that there wasn't any evidence that the article was true. The article mentioned that the area was referenced in the city Wikipedia.
I have also edited a couple of articles with true additional data, but both were always taken out later.
Don't waste your time trying to help this outfit. They are just going to remove it.
Did I do it right?
"As such, tensions tend to get a little high, because these editors are often highly invested. They've been arguing about corn for nearly a decade, for example, and there's a long-running edit war about the meaning of neuroticism"
there's a long-running edit war about the meaning of neuroticism.
Sometimes you don't even have to go out of your way to make the joke, it just falls right in your lap.
The story basically confirms my experiences with Wikipedia. Nice idea, great intentions, and I even use it pretty often, but not worth trying to improve. Let me clarify that I'm an extremely infrequent contributor, mostly just asking questions and offering suggestion in Talk pages and most of my actual public contributions were just minor editorial corrections. Years ago I cared quite a bit more and fixed lots of grammar problems, but these days I just don't care and don't bother. (However I also think there are fewer low-level grammar problems these years.)
I'm trying to figure out the quickest explanation of how my attitude towards Wikipedia was flipped from mostly positive to mostly negative. Various minor things, but I think the recurring one might have been the spam. Not from Wikipedia, but from spammers using Wikipedia to boost the credibility of their scams, usually 419s.
In my twisted way of thinking this is a relatively minor problem (but with potential to become a more serious problem) with an obvious fix. Flag the targeted articles to defeat the spammers' intentions. I think that Wikipedia should notice spammer-related traffic or at least accept reports that an article is being used to support spam, and add a temporary alert to that article. Something like "Scam alert: If you came to this article because you are looking for evidence that Claude left you a million dollars, then you should know that it is just a 419 scam. Follow this link for more information on 419 scams and how to avoid them."
Maybe the suggestion is stupid, but I would say that "internal" consideration of the suggestion never rose to that level of incomprehension within Wikipedia. And I still think there is a significant risk of active vandalism if the spammers interpret Wikipedia's collective indifference in the wrong way.
Oh well. Too much time again. I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Duty calls
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I wonder if an "ignore" feature would work for Wikipedia. Like on forums where if you put someone on ignore, it auto-hides all their posts. If you have a contributor on ignore, any edits they've made could be undone in the version of Wikipedia you see. Non-editors could then trade blacklists of known stupid/ignorant/troublesome editors they could auto-apply to the version of Wikipedia they see. Wikipedia could make public a ranked list of most-ignored editors.
This would basically give Wikipedia users a vote on who they think are (not) making valuable contributions, shifting the incentive for editors from the current "he who edits last wins" to "he who satisfies the most readers wins."
Knowledge belongs to the Internet Archive (archive.org). For Wikipedians our lives and knowledge are "Not Notable".
There has been a long running argument on that page forever.
Someone keeps spouting off about how ethanol fuel is superior to methanol.
Maybe it is true, however who cares? I just want to know about methanol fuel. If I want to know about ethanol I'll go to that page.
You're saying here that the NSA runs and controls Wikipedia because some people make edits that you find statist.
If you weren't a trolling coward, there would be many easy ways to show you are incorrect, but no anonymous commentator deserves such a courtesy.
Humans with no life get obsessed with control over the one thing that gives them purpose and self-fulfillment.
It's their policy not to publish anything that doesn't have outside sources. They do this to avoid any serious legal issues. Such outside sources can be of any variety from USENET postings (perhaps even facebook, twitter, etc..) to mainstream media articles.
What is most important is the fact that wikipedia is not any more reliable than their published sources. Today with so much fake news and in the bottomless pit published claims, Wikipedia should never be used for the primary or final source for anything, especially AI/Robotic projects such as Sophia.
I know of at least a couple cases where wikipedia articles are in fact, wrong, but they persist and insist with the errors.
If you look at Wikipedia’s admin history, most admins were elected over 10 years ago. This provides a substanial old guard that locks out newer viewpoints. What we need is a new generaton of edtiors who arent revert happy and allows more articles about Women in science. I notice that Wikipedia is very deletionist now days especially after they restricted article creation to autoconfirmed accounts. Remember to repay the favor and be deletionist with your donation money.
So ... you are saying there is really no hope for science as an objective study of truth?
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
maybe some kind of equal time doctrine would be useful, with each article have a common controversies section, so that alternative views are at least documented even if it is on another tab.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
The First Doctor does not run any country.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Wikipedia, the internet's encyclopedia, is run entirely by volunteers
When the first sentence is wrong, the rest of the article isn't even worth reading.
I gave up editing Wikipedia articles. The self-appointed experts always said my additions were not stylish, just plain wrong or not relevant to their vision. They will change that attitude if they want more input
Then here are some things you should never pay for: Cars, clothes, the Internet, chocolate, breakfast cereal, nuclear energy, solar energy, education, health, books, comics, aircraft/flights, computers, food containing grains, beer/wine/mead.
In fact, there's virtually nothing you can pay for. Those you object to invented it all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I tried to participate. It inevitably turned into a MMORPG, where primary attack/left click was bound to "You are not here to write an encyclopedia".
Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic writing or research. Wikipedia is increasingly used by people in the academic community, from freshman students to professors, as an easily accessible tertiary source for information about anything and everything, and as a quick "ready reference", to get a sense of a concept or idea.
However, citation of Wikipedia in research papers may be considered unacceptable, because Wikipedia is not a reliable source.
Most colleges and universities (Especially in some high schools and private schools) have a policy that prohibits students from using Wikipedia as their source for doing research papers, essays, or anything equivalent. This is because Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at any moment. Although when an error is recognized, it is usually fixed. However, because Wikipedia cannot monitor thousands of edits made everyday, some of those edits could contain vandalism or could be simply wrong and left unnoticed for days, weeks, months, or even years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_use
From leaks by Snowden, we know that there is an above Top Secret NSA slide that specifically referred to Wikipedia as a target for HTTP surveillance.
A Third of Wikipedia Discussions Are Stuck in Forever Beefs
WTF is a forever beef?
It's almost as if you're completely oblivious to the fact that you've fallen victim to one of the oldest logical fallacies in the book. An appeal to authority, in this case over something as god-damned stupid as having a slashdot account, does not give you any kind of argumentative advantage.
Let's stick with facts and logic here, k?
No, we are talking about Wikipedia.
I've never seen anyone who is a science attacker ever advance even a remotely feasible or effective alternative. No, obviously faith in God isn't an alternative because faith doesn't teach you about the natural world - honest theologians admit that.
Start by giving some proof to your extraordinary claims then.
I don't get many of my /. messages posted. This is the 2nd one to post in this topic. I don't even waste my time trying to post in here.
hi Putin
I'm not the same AC as the OP, and that's a perfectly reasonable demand.
I was primarily interested in seeing to it that the respondent understood that logical fallacies do not form the basis for a valid counterargument. If you believe their claim is invalid, ask for evidence, but dismissing their claims outright on a fallacious basis is every bit as outrageous as making outrageous claims to begin with.
> I'm not the same AC as the OP
Citation needed.
"They" have been arguing about corn for a decade. As in, some agree and some don't that the title should be "maize" since "corn" has other meanings in some countries. TFS seems to think that the ultimate goal is 100% agreement. That's not the point of Wikipedia. It's not perfect, and it cannot be because people have different preferences. Is it a valuable resource available to all? Yes.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Science is saved by the requirement for repeated experimentation by separate groups. That works around the emotional attachment problem by effectively requiring involvement of people who are not emotionally attached.
That should be obvious, though.
So ... you are saying there is really no hope for science as an objective study of truth?
I dunno what that person was saying, but to me it seems obvious that you don't get there by "voting" on disagreements on the talk page!
Just an example, if you look up a page about Foo-ism, instead of an encyclopedic description of the concept, you get Foo-ist statements right in the opening paragraph claiming that Fooism affects certain Foos more than others; whereas that distinction is itself actually the very definition of Fooism!
It seems obvious that you'd have a section on "Fooism in [geographic region] in the [time period]," but that would not be objectively stated in the continuous tense as "Fooism mostly affects [subgroup divided based on Foo]."
If I write that using the word Foo, most of the response is likely to be, "What?" But if I substitute any actual real-world -ism, I'd get shouted at from multiple sides for taking the objective, removed, timeless, encyclopedic perspective on the concept.
People flatly refuse to be encyclopedic on divisive issues. Being anointed as Very Objective Keepers of the Truth doesn't seem to help, nor does voting.
No, we are talking about Wikipedia.
I've never seen anyone who is a science attacker ever advance even a remotely feasible or effective alternative. No, obviously faith in God isn't an alternative because faith doesn't teach you about the natural world - honest theologians admit that.
Your whole premise of needing to defend science against attackers is an unscientific attack on the scientific process!
It replaces actual science with the dogma of whatever is currently believed by people with letters next to their names, but that isn't the scientific process at all.
It precludes science. But luckily, wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a place that should not be trying to do anything scientific at all. Is there a way to get editors to stop trying? Dunno, but if so they haven't found it yet!
If we can't even agree about the facts of genital mutilation, what hope is there for consensus-based "objective" publications?
I thought culture wars have been going on since the first tribe defeated the second tribe.
Carl Sagan is rolling in his grave right now.
I had a disagreement about a page edit. It went back and forth in an edit war for a while and the discussion page ended with a user just obstinately refusing to change his position--and then threatening anybody with bans and deletions if they dared disagree again. He was clearly in a minority but he had moderator/admin access and used it to enforce his own views.
It's *NOT* an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit" it's a webpage that a few elites with admin powers can bully to say what they want and everybody else can do trivial grunt work at best.
Wikipedia's run by the sort of person who enjoys bureaucracy and also enjoys editing Wikipedia all day. They've driven off all the normal people a long time ago.
No, that is really false. People who have scientific training or who have studied rhetoric are far more aware of logical fallacies in their own arguments. Maybe it is somewhat true for the general public, even though 99% still sounds like hyperbole.
My *greatest* fear, one that gives me nightmares if I think about it too much, is that the fundamentalists might be right.
Specifically, in their claim that God is a monster that imprisons people in a pit where they are tortured in fire forever, keeping them alive just so he can keep on torturing them forever. And, just to put icing on the cake, God does this to nearly everybody! The story ends with a universe teeming with souls trapped in unending torture for all eternity, with a teeny tiny group of elites sitting on top of it all, nodding approvingly and singing praises to the monster God that is doing all the torturing.
Most of the ancient religions had evil Gods, but none of them were as evil as this "Jehova." That's probably why he won out over the others.
See: Wikipedia Editors. Perfect Example. No further talk required.
They are trying to fix the RfC problem, but it's been stuck in a RfC thread for a decade now....
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
I posit that if you have been arguing for more than a decade on the internet about the definition of neuroticism, you ARE the definition of neuroticism.
Rest easy, there is no god. Just fiction written to try and control the people. For the most part, it still works pretty well.
Hopefully the Wikipedia fork Infogalactic will get their "tab for every perspective" idea implemented one day. At least then we can agree to disagree.
Couldn't agree more, this is the folly of people being labeled as "biased" - everyone is biased, it's the human condition.
Anyone who claims to be objective merely lacks self awareness.
MPAA ratings don't belong in film articles ameridumb.
This is just your narrow americentrism overestimating your own importance.
Wikipedia serves a global audience, and every country has film ratings. That's 99% irrelevant information for all audiences.
There are good examples of wikipedia sucking, but you picked a bad one.
Wikipedia was taken over by the self-styled elitists 10 years ago. That's when I stopped contributing anything other than correction of blatant errors.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Even if there is a god, that doesn't mean that anything the Bible says about it is true. Humans aren't in a position to make descriptive statements about god or what god might want or do, because there is no way for humans to know that.
Any human can claim to be a prophet. Any liar, lunatic, idiot, or confused lout can claim to be delivering a message from god. And there is no way to verify those claims. Anything you might believe about god is just taking some human's word for it. That means you aren't actually putting your faith in god when you believe those statements, you are just putting your faith in the humans that made the statements.
And all humans are fallible.
Nonsense! It's more like 457% hyperbole!
The worst bit is that it wasn't even an appeal to authority, it was a plain old ad hominem.
there's a long-running edit war about the meaning of neuroticism.
Easy fix, just made the page about neuroticism a link to the discussion, seems like a solid enough definition.
No, he is saying that science takes as dogma that observation and test are the determinants of truth. All views that do not take this view are not science.
I can't seem to find the quote, but I think it was in Feynman's "5 easy pieces," I think it was something like this:
The essence of science, its definition almost, is this, the determiner of truth is experiment.
Or Hawking, again, I can't find the direct quote, but I think it was in "Brief History..." or else, "Universe in a Nutshell":
The worth of a theory is in its ability to make useful predictions
Basically, science is the way we stumble forward into finding true things by subjecting ideas to test, and throwing away those that fail.
Good morning Comrade Wang! How is the weather in Beijing today?
Z^-1
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
When you correct an article which provides a totally wrong pronunciation guide to words from your native language, and some cabal of idiots who don't speak the language reverts it, you just give up.
Oh, did I get my own personal troll? Awesome! lolz welcome to the internet, kiddo. But no, I won't do that for you. Find a cam boy.
Z^-2
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
But there was a wikipedia alternative/fork with 'Galact' or 'Stellar' or something in the name. It had about 3/4 of the wikipedia articles available, some without media, but was otherwise as good or a better reference on many subjects since it allowed editing by anyone with optional locks or moderation only for situations of spamming or revision wars.
Wish I could remember, but the last Tor Browser update destroyed a few years worth of bookmarks when it silently wiped all the user information without prompting :(