[crmrc114]

Delete Nazis killed a number of good deeply technical pages, always citing some obtuse wikilaw. There was a time when contributing was encouraged and assisted. Now if you make a new article one of these pricks will delete all of your work no questions asked with their fake voting process where they pull in their little cadre of friends.

Now I just add data to places like GitHub and subject specific wikis. I treat wikipedia like Pinterest at this point.

Curious if I am the only one that has such a dislike for wikipedia?

[unleaded]

I just posted this because I thought it was interesting how Minecraft is now a huge phenomenon but I definitely get it. Here's an example I quite like: the article for the ADX file format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_(file_format)

It has a detailed description of the file header, and C code samples to help decode it. That's awesome! But there used to be a note saying basically "this should be removed and put somewhere else, and someone did remove it (click View history) but then someone put it back. I imagine if this wasn't such an obscure subject (it's a music file format used in a few Sega games around the early 2000s that was never visible to end users) the deletionists would have gotten their hands on it years ago.

I think the reason they do this is the same reason forum mods and discord mods act like they do: For some people this kind of thing is fun. It's like a game of whack-a-mole or something, trying to catch them. People do it on stackexchange too, e.g. I've seen questions get voted to be closed because they think it's too complicated to answer (for them). (Why not just leave it without answers until/unless someone wants to?) And I've done it on discord servers before when I was like 13, there was this server for basically support with hacked nintendo consoles and they had a rule against piracy so you would sort of interrogate people to see if they were using pirated games, and it really was kind of fun to "catch" them. Not very proud of it now of course.

Further reading: https://gwern.net/inclusionism

[firewolf34]

Maybe you aren't proud of it now, but that experience (in a minimally dangerous manner, it appears) clearly gave you valuable experience in that you are not only aware of the pitfall but able to share your story constructively here, today! Many people (like the Wiki deleters we are currently discussing) likely never were able to receive the same education, or at least never arrived at the valuable conclusion.

[daedalus_j]

You are not. I distrust almost everything on Wikipedia and verify from other sources because I've found so many examples of heavily editorialized content in the past. (and never mind actually trying to contribute, trying that years and year ago burned me for good.) A wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Which has always made me wonder how to do it right. Or if it's even possible to do it right. Perhaps some iron law governs a project becoming impossible past a certain number of people involved. Maybe smaller subject specific sites are actually the only possibility?

Or maybe I'm just holding on to the dream of the order internet. I don't know. I'd like to know. But I wouldn't trust whatever answer to the question was on Wikipedia.