Not antagonistic, just opinionated. :)

I refer you to WP:NOT: “Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy or any other political system. Its primary but not exclusive method of determining consensus is through editing and discussion, not voting.”

That policy has been in place from the start. Perhaps you’re misunderstanding the meaning of “democracy”?

And I refer you to
section 3.4 of “WP:NOT:

“Wikipedia is not an anarchy.
Wikipedia is free and open, but restricts both freedom and openness where they interfere with creating an encyclopedia. Accordingly, Wikipedia is not a forum for unregulated free speech. The fact that Wikipedia is an open, self-governing project does not mean that any part of its purpose is to explore the viability of anarchistic communities. Our purpose is to build an encyclopedia, not to test the limits of anarchism. See also meta:Power structure.”

That’s also been in place right from the beginning.

If people actually bothered to read Wikipedia policy documents, they would run afoul of the policies (and complain) less.

Previously, protected pages were “only the cognoscenti can write in this article”. This was bad, and not very WPish.

In this new system, it’s just “unverified revisions, while visible to the public if they choose, are not the default view shown”. Yes, even anon IP users can edit these pages!

That’s a REDUCTION in the restrictions, even compared to the old “semi-protection” (only registered, confirmed users could post), and yet people are whining like someone took away their favourite toy. Why? Did you like the old “lock the page and prevent edits” system? Are you scared that some anon might edit your favourite protected page now? Did they tell you on CNN that it was bad, and you believed it without checking?

Really. Why is this change a bad thing?

A response-to-problems page like that can’t possibly have been in “from the beginning”, by its nature.

I can’t speak for the others, but my experiences do not match that categorization. Since there seem to be doubts about our experiences, I’d like to elaborate on mine…

I was a moderately active WP editor (~500 edits). Some of my contributions were deleted by another editor that had not previously made edits on that page, or discussed it before hand. I asked why the content was deleted, got a response, and replaced the content with the offending portions removed.

The material was removed again, without further discussion. This time when I asked for a reason, They said the material was disparaging towards living persons. However, it had been taken out of their own autobiographies and public speeches (and cited properly). When pressed further, all they could say was that it was unnecessary.

The other editor then rewrote the rest of the article to make my contribution seem irrelevant, and requested a third opinion. The third opinion sided firmly with them. Upon further investigation, I discovered ongoing talk page discussions between the editor and the “neutral” third party going back far before my original edits. They were old pals.

I brought this issue up on an admin board, trying to explain what had happened as concisely as possible. The only admin that replied turned out to have their own talk page history with the other editor, and threatened to ban me if I didn’t stop posting on the discussion page. So I dropped the issue, and WP editing altogether.

So, Kieran, I cited everything properly, I discussed before making edits, I referenced applicable polices (and was accused of being a wiki-lawyer for doing it). Yet, this other editor was able to get me threatened with a ban for simply discussing re-posting verifiable information, because they thought it was unnecessary.

I think WP should be able to do better than that.

deliberately antagonistic? no. He does tend to be very blunt and has strong feelings about particular subjects, which he has no problem expressing.)

I didn’t say “deliberately,” but I am suggesting that his “strong feelings” cause him to over-simplify.

In this post, he says “It’s a lie,” which itself is not true. He basically saying he disagrees with that assessment, therefore anyone who has a different opinion is lying. It’s the difference between OBjective (truth vs lie) and SUBjective (opinion and interpretation). Confusing the two is (in my opinion) polarizing and antagonistic.

Take for example this post. The sign is “crazy,” and the customers are “crazy,” despite the fact that an astute reader points out why the sign is legally required. Cory’s MO is to jump to a conclusion, write attention-getting headline, make snarky comment, then go on to the next thing without waiting to see if he got it right.

@#21

Since this article is arguing that there’s nuance in Wikipedia’s new rules, I’d say that you have poor reading comprehension.

No, this article is saying differing opinions are “a lie” and that the people who have those opinions are “convinced the Wikipedia must fail.” That’s an extreme and polarizing interpretation.

Wikipedia’s still a wonderful resource for some things. The example of using the GNU “find” command’s -prune switch, for one. I do a lot of research, so I often visit Wikipedia despite my disappointment over how it has evolved over time.

And I agree with Cory and Dewi Morgan that the recent changes are an improvement, though I don’t believe they will cure all of Wikipedia’s problems.

I’m seeing purists turn their back in disgust because their system isn’t the perfection they’d envisioned. Do you see an alternative? Reminds me of an oath i had to take once. Reconciling that makes this seem cut and dry.

It is too soon to quit. wkpdia will be the light of the world when the libraries have fallen away. Only a major social shift can prevent that.

For my part, I would prefer rules if they promote both detail and truth. I accept that wikipedia is a sort of authority, and as such is subject to politics. The idea of using pure democracy for those rules appears not well founded to me.

I stings to hear you old guys with personal knowledge of science/space have had a bad time. Yours are the stories I search out. But would academia have vetted you easier? Truth is a lot of work.

Important work.

Hell, if I didn’t appreciate snark, I’d be over on Bruce Perens’ blog instead of here.

Original research AND non-neutral point of view!

I move that all opinions stated by commenter #14 be immediately deleted, and his IP watched for further vandalism or sockpuppetry.

#27: Can someone explain to me why lowering the restrictions on editing protected pages is a bad thing, or in any way not in the spirit of WP?

For the same reason tasers as non-lethal substitutes for guns turned out to be a bad thing. We won’t see an improvement in edits to protected articles, but we will see a new category of semi-protected articles covering entirely different swathes of admin hubris.

Well, many of these articles have been deleted.
Obscure articles that could only be written by someone who truly loves the subject that they’re writing about, deleted by power-hungry jerks for no good reason.

What harm are these articles doing by existing?
Taking up disk space?
They’re what made wikipedia special.
Frankly, for the more highly trafficked subjects, I would trust a more authoritative source like Encyclipedia Britanica than wikipedia.

It used to be that each fan podcast about the American TV show LOST had it’s own wikipedia entry.
Some of these podcasts were quite notable by wikipedia’s own standards, having been featured in newspapers and the like.
They were updated by fans and kept accurate, and it was nice to have one place on the Internet where all of this stuff was kept up to date.

Of course, editors who didn’t know a damn thing excised all of that and it’s gone now.

I read on Wired blogs (?) that there was going to be (October?) a new system where new text was going to be highlighted in Orange and slowly over time, as the entry remained, or if the person who put it there in the first place was trusted based on a large number of edits that had staying power, the highlighting would fade away. I hope it isn’t annoying to look at, but this seems like a good idea.

The best thing about Wikipedia is the MediaWiki software.

Yeah, I’m not trying to be humorless, but most people just read the headline and a few comments. Even when corrected in a comment, the headline stays up forever and is much more prominent than the correction. It’s like the late local news (not in a good way). Now, if he issued corrections or updated the original post, like a responsible journalist, that would be a start.

I still think he needlessly over-simplifies and polarizes issues (even when I mostly agree with him), but there you go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley

Xenotransplantation pioneer! Spiritual godfather to Viagra…probably himself robbed of the rightful Governorship of Kansas…cross-border radio propagandist…would-be Hollywood doctor to the stars…if he had won, would Kansas be today as “anti-science” as it is reputed to be?

But as with all sources of info, it’s best to corroborate , and to listen for the ring of truth (so to speak), before betting the farm on the accuracy of the info.

Kieran O’Neill, I never had a page or edit removed due to “style” (and that seems ridiculous on the face of it anyway; no volunteer can fix the style if something’s been deleted) and I’ve never encountered an editor that actually looked up references (though I’m sure they exist). I agree with your initial characterization of the complaints, though, with the caveat that “armchair expert” seems unnecessarily dismissive – my chair had no arms on it when I was testing nuclear weapon delivery systems and designing test regimens for apogee boost motor exit nozzles. You don’t have to believe that if you don’t want to, obviously, and it’s clear that Wikipedia has no tools to distinguish between expertise and mental illness.

Maybe I’ll be one myself someday. For now, I’m too busy/lazy. But I do donate money from time to time. I figure it’s the least I can do.

I can’t speak to individual cases, but there are many legitimate reasons that wikipedia articles get deleted. For example, a great many are indeed “written by someone who truly loves the subject that they’re writing about,” because they’re self-promotion. Editors have to be very vigilant about this, because it’s an arms race with those seeking to sneak in some free advertising. What is at issue is the integrity of the project, not just disk space.

This change to policy promotes “trusted editors” from unofficial arbiters to sanctioned gatekeepers. We’re told that the new system will be used instead of protection, with the almost certainly false implication that the protection standards will remain unchanged.

No, what I think we’ll see is every two-bit edit war between a newcomer and an established user immediately flagged semi-protected, to keep the newcomer from competing. Meanwhile protected status continues to exist on nearly the exact subset of pages it would have been on anyway.

The argument WP is putting forth has the same flavor and carefully implied-but-never-stated loopholes that taser introduction contained. You may not like the analogy but well, neither do I. Don’t semi-protect me, bro.

“I’m an armchair expert in XYZ, and when I contributed anonymously to the XYZ article, all my edits kept getting reverted by a regular user too full of himself to know that I was right.”

Generally speaking, when you actually read (and try to stick roughly to) the style guides, and when you reference everything that sounds even remotely arguable, you don’t get into edit wars.

That’s not much to expect from people contributing to a project of this nature and scale.

I don’t know if having a single editor is the best solution, though. That ensures that what ends up on the page is not the internet’s consensus, but one editor’s view. That editor might be right, they might be wrong, but either way the system is no longer working and Wikipedia becomes exactly as accurate as any other source.

rtfa. seriously. r t f a.

Wikipedia isn’t a democracy. If you don’t like how things are run you are simply overruled.

A democracy, then.

Dequeued has no chance to “make it better,” except to give up in a huff and make his own wikipedia somewhere else.

A Wikipedia Tea Party? Encyclopedia Dramatica? What are you talking about?

Seriously, though, that hasn’t been my experience, nor others’. There would seem to be more than one way to experience Wikipedia.