Any other encyclopedia like Wikipedia will likely tend to end up like Wikipedia. Any other encyclopedia unlike Wikipedia will likely not tend to end up like Wikipedia.

Add accountability and remove anonymity and much (probably not all, but likely most) of the problems will fade away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Monarchist_Party

Deletionpedia actually shows the article as currently active:

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=American_Monarchist_Party_(deleted_19_Jul_2008_at_00:42)

Sadly they don’t show the expanded version, where several other polisci students decided to let themselves in on the joke and expanded the article to be several paragraphs long, citing multiple references around the internet. It looks like content farms picked up on the article and there are several references to the fictional American Monarchist Party on the internet now:

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/monarchy-america

Take a look at the article on the Spanish Inquisition and you will find an article that takes great pains to explain how the Catholic church had absolutely no role in the torture or executions. It was the civil authorities and anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant and stupid.

Total nonsense of course. The Spanish Inquisition was performed under papal authority and the church had full knowledge of the torture and the judicial murders being carried out to enforce its doctrine. But there are always going to be more contributors determined to whitewash the involvement of the church than people willing to correct a rather silly article that peddles an obvious point of view.

Of course use of torture was routine at the time. Of course the Protestant critics were initially being hypocritical. But the Protestants had a point: A church that dictates its doctrine with the thumbscrews the rack and burning at the stake is corrupt, an abomination.

Its pretty effective propaganda too. Use of torture pretty much disappears from Protestant Europe round about that time along with routine use of the more grotesque forms of execution. The Bloody Assises following the 1685 Monmouth rebellion pretty much finished off James II rather than keeping him in power.

One day I found all the pages deleted along with my account.

Fuck Wikipedia.

Deletion is only one aspect of the problem. Bias is a much bigger problem.

Take a look at the article on the Spanish Inquisition and you will find an article that takes great pains to explain how the Catholic church had absolutely no role in the torture or executions. It was the civil authorities and anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant and stupid.

Yes, I have noticed that many articles, including those to do with the Catholic Church, are being systematically edited to conform to what the Catholic Church wants others to believe is true. Even the article on Jesus completely leaves out most of his teachings, especially the social justice part.

When you can hire people to revert an article every day to what you want it to say, eventually the non-paid people give up.

And editors are now being hired by outside sources to create or alter content on the site.

And more than one place offers to do so. http://www.knowmesome.com/featured/wikipedia-for-your-company/

I trust the people, in general, but once people are being hired to insert bias, wikipedia becomes no more useful than my old Encyclopedia Britannica, which has a very “rich, white, capitalist” bias.

I don’t know what the solution to this is. Even an occasional vendetta is nothing compared to paid bias.

Hardly, unless you are seriously suggesting that massive outside chritisism is an integral part of the Wikipedia system.

This was not “buisness as usual”, this was an exception since it spurred debate and drew attention outside of the regular, moderated Wikipedia forums.

For every incident like this, there is lots of biased editing and deleting that goes by completly unnoticed. Because it´s only called “vandalism” if people outside of the cabal does it.

Government secrecy is upsetting because there is a right to due process, etc…. AND the government can jail you.

Wikipedia secrecy is upsetting because there is a right to stick your own nose in your own navel, as seen in the Discussion Page of that article, but there’s nothing saying you or I have to pay attention to it.

That is a difference with a major distinction. I don’t have a better one to offer, I think I just disagree with your point about why people care about Wikipedia.

The menu page is broken and it hasn’t been updated since october!

2006 me is very sad.

Encylopedia Dramatica says it best:
“Wikipedia is full of people with no desire to improve what it is intended for, information. Instead, they want to grow their e-penis and one day become a mod.”
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Wikipedia

I once edited the Wikipedia page talking about George Washington and the Continental Army’s stay at Valley Forge by adding in the part about how they had to fend off attacks from vicious T-Rexes. It stayed up for more than three days. Read a book kids.

He’s a prime example of everything that is wrong with Wikipedia.

Shooting a puppy never house-breaks it and deleting an article *never* produces a better one than simply marking the problems for fixing.

But they know this. Talking to them like they’re rational people, instead of trolls, misses the point.

Step 1: Proclaim something. The more outrageous the better.

Step 2: Hold fast in your conviction

Step 3: Forget what you said and contradict yourself a week later.

So while the beef probably existed, people need to understand that you need to meet WP:NOTE to stay onboard.

*sigh*

There’s nothing to see here people, move along. Wikipedia is working as intended. Yes, someone with a grudge managed to get an article temporarily deleted. But you know what, the process worked. Other contributors pointed out that conflict of interest and wow, now the article is back!

I should also point out that, as far as Wikipedia is concerned, there is no such thing as permanently deleting the content of the article. The page was temporarily removed and inaccessible, but the content was still stored in Wikipedia’s database and in countless others, including the Google cache.

Having said that, you know, I just looked at the OMM article. It is rather lacking in content. Game criticism is a rather niche interest, but if it’s so notable perhaps someone might consider improving the article.

Anyone interested in seeing exactly what happened, rather than listening to a flock of dumbasses whine here, you might want to actually read the Nomination for Deletion on Wikipedia. See, that’s called transparency.

On the other hand, a dispute in Wikipedia that’s a flame war, and that causes flame wars about the dispute? Nothing new to see here.

When you say “dumbass” I think you mean “meatpuppet”.

And that discussion, and the fact that it resulted in a deletion, should be deeply embarrassing for Wikipedia’s editors. The fact that it isn’t, the fact that most people I’ve heard from associated with editing at Wikipedia think the process worked out good here, is really sad.

There’s a few bits of hope in the review discussion later – a few editors who seem to realize how crazy the situation is – but not many. The rest seem to only be able to see things through the lens of process and rules, and “why does it matter who nominated?”, and “what does thousands of people expressing dismay possibly have to do with notability?” and “if we let ‘them’ get this one back, they’re going to think that ‘they’ are in control of the site”.

Wikipedia is a great resource, but I think it has become a great resource in spite of many of these people. If it was a business, there’d be a lot of those people removed from doing any administration on Wikipedia – and a discussion reminding the remainder of why the site exists. As it stands, it looks like this will end in a lot of “glad that’s over – back to regularly scheduled infighting and harassing new users” and self congratulation.

If you read this discussion elsewhere, you’ll find hundreds of people who have a history of good contributions to Wikipedia who will never go back – people who got tired of fighting through a web of crazy to make the site better.

Yes, this is all part of the common knowledge of humanity and probably deserves to be recorded somewhere. Still, I wish you could tag individual factoids on Wikipedia with a “Stupid shit that no one but ten fanboys in Gothenburg gives a crap about” marker, and provide tools to let the user filter them out.

Wait – HSR is no more?

Noooooooooo!!!