[sedev]

I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention. Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.

[flask_manager]

I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now;

Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected.

There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia about a cameras development process simply deleted. Maybe it is truly for the better, but it is not really that easy to add to the meat of the project, without someone else's approval.

Third, the begging banners really feel a bit gross; I know the size of the endowment, and how long it would be able to sustain the project (forever essentially)... It really feels like the foundation is using the Wikipedia brand to funnel money to irrelevant pet causes. This really puts me off contributing.

[webstrand]

I made an edit last year, it immediately got reverted and I got a banner on my user page for vandalism. I complained about that, other people agreed with me but the person who reverted my edits never responded. So there it sits.

[zbobet2012]

I've had basic facts about mathematics which are wrong deleted in revisions by editors with no knowledge of the subject beyond having asked ChatGPT (which repeats the wrong shit on Wikipedia). It's hard to be worth it. Wikipedia's biggest problem is the editors.

[20after4]

I think the "deletionist" tendency is one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia. At least it's the main thing that prevents me from making significant contributions. I say tendency, but maybe it really is more of a crusade. Deletion and rejection definitely seem to be the default "predisposition." I've seen a lot of examples of apparently well meaning contributors being pushed away by the need to establish "notability" for a subject and the expectation that all information must be referenced to a fairly limited number of approved reliable sources. These are norms which have been built over a long period of time so it would be incredibly difficult to change them now.

[YZF]

I've also edited random things in the past. Like inaccuracies in Comp.Sci. topics.

I used to like Wikipedia but I'm changing my mind. One thing amongst many others was seeing some company that competed with the startup I worked in basically introduce marketing material into the site. It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.

I'd need some serious convincing to restore my trust in it. There are still some good technical/science articles I guess. It kind of sucks that instead of getting more reliable information on the Internet we're trending towards not being to trust anything. It's not clear how we fix this since reliability can not be equal to popularity.

[psychoslave]

Not everything meets Wikipedia editorial goals, but you still have a lot more of latitude in Wikibooks and Wikiversity, the latter also admitting original researches.

[kyzx]

I've tried to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects but they block Tor, e-mailing admins to get an account manually created always results in them telling you to follow some other process, but that process is only for "established editors", so it seems there's no realistic way for me to contribute.

[gotoeleven]

It really feels that way because that's what they're doing. There's a legit non-profit internet encyclopedia barnacled with a bunch of generic left wing political stuff, except the barnacle is bigger than the boat.

[myself248]

I've done a fair bit of editing over almost 20 years. Some of my photos are featured in small articles, and I've only had a few of my edits reverted, always for sensible reasons. It's easy to get started, and the pitfalls (chiefly, adding commentary without a source) are well documented.

So on that basis, I agree. Please edit. It's easy. Start small.

That said, I've watched entire articles vanish under the banner of non-notability, which were clearly notable if one bothered to find some citations. The deletionists have a process and a timeline, while the contributions come slowly and sporadically. This asymmetry is a cancer. If there's a treadmill belt pushing articles off the site which fail to run fast enough, then it's impossible for small articles, which are just learning to crawl, to survive long enough to survive. It's not a test of notability, it's a test of Wiki-savvy among an article's supporters.

The best way to make a new article actually stick around, is to basically build the whole thing elsewhere, which takes weeks or months of effort for a single person since it's not collaborative, then plonk it into Wikipedia fully formed, and maybe, just maybe, it might have enough citations to pass the test of notability. But this means that, from the outset, it represents a single author's viewpoint.

Deletionists eviscerate what makes Wikipedia interesting, and they're the main reason I haven't edited more.

[kurtreed2]

This needs to be talked by a lot! However per my experiences and those of others if you go to either the "front page of the internet" or Lemmy the competitor you'll get side-eyed and harassed by people who thinks that you're a "far-right obscurantist" for simply criticizing Wikipedia.

[iwontberude]

I tried to get interested in Wikipedia and the crazy level of gatekeeping over topics these editors had no clue about was frustrating to me. They don’t know what is notable and they have no business telling people what to do in many instances (esp with more obscure topics).

[Kim_Bruning]

Interesting how so many people are answering that they've had trouble!

How about I look at some of those cases? Especially if it's relatively recent, I can take a look. Leave me a message here, or at my email address (see my HN info) , or on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kim_Bruning

I'm not very active anymore, but I'll check in the next couple of days and see what I can do. Really to be able to help I generally need links to revisions, but if you have a username, a page, and a reasonably short time frame (a concrete date) I might be able to figure out the relevant revisions from there.

To onlookers: When I investigate cases like this, there's often a "catch." Sometimes contributors really did break Wikipedia policies — and just don’t mention that part when telling their side of the story.

Now I'm certainly not saying every case is like that, so I will look, and if you don't get what the issue was, I'll try to explain. In some cases if it was recent and it somehow wasn't fair, I might even be able to'fix' it within the bounds of Wikipedia policy.

[teddyh]

> How about I look at some of those cases?

Please note that, although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them. It’s always like this with Wikipedia detractors; I don’t know why, but it is. Complaints and horror stories galore, but nobody will link to any of it, preventing anybody from investigating what actually happened.

[zahlman]

There are multiple entire websites out there criticizing Wikipedia and what they have to say tends to revolve around the editing process, specifically the social/cultural aspects. Have you attempted to research this yourself?

Are you familiar with what Larry Sanger himself had to say about the bias that has emerged in Wikipedia (https://unherd.com/newsroom/wikipedia-co-founder-i-no-longer...)?

e: another comment elsewhere on this post brought up another source: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... . I've read a bit of it and can generally endorse what's being said there. In particular, some specific usernames are cited and I recognize most of them, which in itself is telling. Other comments here suggested that Sanger's personal views are less than scientific, to say the least. I have not looked into this personally, but I don't think this in any way negates the argument about bias. (Nor is any political camp immune to pseudoscience.)

[raphman]

To offer a counter-example to the many anecdotes about being gatekept(?) by veteran Wikipedia editors: I have the opposite experience.

I occasionally contribute to various topics, and in many cases experienced editors silently fixed formatting errors I made, allowing me to focus on contributing to Wikipedia without having to keep up with the best practices.

I also participated in a deletion discussion once, and - despite being inexperienced and in the minority position (keep) - the experienced editors considered my arguments and responded to them.

[tonymet]

I agree with this as well ( I wrote a critical comment above). I’ve had the most enjoyment fixing typography & typos (aka copy editing). It feels more like a casual (video) game that way.

Some of my edits to technical articles were well received.

You’re right it’s good to highlight the good and bad, but given the amount of goodwill that was burned , the bad did outweigh the good for me.

[moritonal]

I created a page, it got declined because the guy who two films have been made about didn't count as important enough. I kind of get it, but still, did kill the energy slightly.

[terribleperson]

The notability requirement is a real bane, but it also kind of makes sense when there's really insufficient manpower for the articles they already have. But then, maybe they'd have more manpower if they loosened the notability requirement.

[strogonoff]

If you care about a topic and want to edit Wikipedia but do not want to deal with the process, you can simply talk about what you want to change on the discussion page. Is there an equivalent workaround when it comes to creating new pages?

[moritzwarhier]

What's the issue with naming the person if you think there should be an encyclopedic article about said person?

If it's about anonymity / not wanting to publicly link your HN and Wikipedia profiles, well fine, but the fact that there are two films about a person does not say much.

People can make films about themselves, too.

[j4coh]

I’ve tried, but every article even the most inconsequential seems to have an angry bird in the roost enforcing whatever their particular vision of the article is.

[Hamuko]

It's even worse when you add a source and you get reverted for reasons quite clearly disproven in your source. I had to make a single edit three times because it got undone twice by two separate administrators. A less stubborn person would've just given up on the first baseless revert and never edited Wikipedia again.

[undersuit]

Edits are public so other members of the community can eventually make a case against or for the actions of a dedicated maintainer. Keep trying.

[thaumasiotes]

> please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think!

Last time I tried to do that, I flagged a citation that went to a book saying the opposite of what wikipedia was citing it in support of as "failed verification".

This attracted the attention of an editor, who showed up to revert my flag, explaining that as long as the book exists, that's good enough.

Wikipedia could improve noticeably by just preventing the existing editors from making edits.

[3036e4]

I edited mostly a single page many years ago. It wasn't a controversial subject really, just one where there is a lot of garbage popular history and some light revisionism that made it a bit of an effort to remove unreliable sources and add some better sources. Never any issues or fights over it, but I got bored eventually and just let it be.

Recently I edited a page or two, then tried to edit more, but everything is so complex now. All the special markup and stuff to consider is really off-putting. Took me forever to figure out how to properly fix the year of death of a person and some other data I just ignored because it was too much red tape. Wish it was more simple plain text. Makes quick drive-by edits too much work.

[phrotoma]

I spent like 30 minutes trying to fix a busted citation link a while ago before giving up. I write code and markdown for a living. :shrug:

[Terr_]

I tried on a completely uncontroversial page that documented a certain idiom and examples of where it was used.

My edit was reverted, twice, because apparently there is no such thing as a notable source for lines from a 1980s British TV episode, not even a fan website that has a transcript for all of them. Gave up after that.

[card_zero]

That's an error, because episodes can be cited directly, and the template "cite episode" exists for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_episode

It can be seen in use for instance on the Beavis and Butt-head article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beavis_and_Butt-Head where the citation looks like this:

"Werewolves of Highland". Beavis and Butt-Head. Season 8. Episode 1. October 27, 2011. MTV.

[pbhjpbhj]

Sounds like that might have been a copyright issue? In the UK a transcript of a show would need permission of the writers/owners to be reproduced. I can see Wikipedia would be sensible to disallow infringing works as being bad sources.

Ironically an excerpt of the script/transcript would be allowed by UK copyright - but a site with only excerpts would probably but be a good source for Wikipedia's purposes.

[qingcharles]

I've been an editor since 2004. It's getting really, really hard now. Like, it is really off-putting and no longer enjoyable.

[Paracompact]

Curious, as a longtime editor, what's gotten harder for you recently?

As a casual, very infrequent editor, I echo everyone else's complaints that it's intimidating to have your additions reverted by the old guard who seem to have an increasingly particular vision of the site.

[joenot443]

21 years of editing, that's awesome! I'm curious though, what's changed? If I were to maybe guess, I'd imagine it coincides with the rising temperature of the online culture war?

[antegamisou]

> Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.

Wise that you omit adding other credible sources that do not agree with the main editor's views. What you're describing sounds like already preserving their work, no matter if it happens to be provide info based on multiple convergent sources or not.

[Matthyze]

Since so many commenters here have bad experiences, I'll provide a counterweight. I've made numerous edits and have run into little to no resistance. I'm sure asking people on a forum does not evoke a representative response.

[klntsky]

I don't want to contribute to this giant propaganda machine by making it more valuable. Structural problems must be fixed first.

"If your solution consists of 'everyone should just X', you don't have a solution"

[tim333]

People say "propaganda machine" but I have yet to see much example of that. The Trumpists don't like it because it fact checks their lies but I'm not sure it's fair to call that propaganda? Any examples like a link to an article or section that you feel is propaganda?

[sokoloff]

{{Citation needed}}

/s

[tonymet]

I tried volunteering and contributed a few thousand edits, and ended up brigaded into hours of silly reviews by sock puppets and their crony admins. The bureaucracy is nuttier than a Monty python sketch. Endless futile debates on talk pages.

It’s not supposed to have many rules (according to the Jimbo gospel), but admins apply policy pages as law , and given how many inane and convoluted policies there are, you can be censured for practically anything with the right quote. You can see these sockpuppet brigades watching and pouncing on the edit history of any semi controversial page.

It’s a pathetic monoculture that lacks any self awareness or sense of introspection. Critical discussions are quickly shut down and the authors are put into a penalty box.

Leadership needs to address the power dynamics, and come up with a better self regulating structure. Editors need to identify themselves and their agenda. Networks & brigades need to be monitored and shutdown using activity tracking.

Wikipedia’s social network is operating with 1990s era protocols but their influence via syndication on every common news surface means they are way too influential. Google, Alexa, LLMs and mainstream media all syndicate Wikipedia content as gospel. But the content is completely unregulated.

And don’t get me started on Wikimedia Foundation.

[guywithahat]

It’s not easy to do at all. They have extensive blacklists to reputable conservative papers, and I’ve been cussed out for trying to link things. There are a lot of topics that can’t even be discussed because the pro-left bias is too strong that any reputable source is banned, and many non-political pages which are monitored so tightly by a single individual it’s impossible to edit.

[standardUser]

Have you tried using sources that aren't explicitly "conservative papers"? And if so, have you considered the lack of evidence found outside of overtly biased sources might indicate the position you are defending is not defensible outside of a strictly partisan perspective and worldview, and is buoyed only by other strictly partisan sources?

[t1E9mE7JTRjf]

Tried many times, nothing sticks. Lots of resistance.

[mystified5016]

Every time I've tried to edit Wikipedia I've been called names and bullied off the platform.

[mlindner]

I used to edit wikipedia until I got permanently "community banned" because of some poor choices of words and even my apologies were ignored. The site is full of people who are chronically online and like to witch hunt and destroy people's lives. That wasn't the case almost two decades ago when I started using the site, but now it's full of the type of people that passionately use reddit and bluesky and that were formerly on twitter. (It's worth noting that a "community ban" is a special type of ban that's basically a lynch mob where a bunch of people dog pile and if there's enough "consensus" you get banned, which can happen by the person proposing it simply calling forth all their friends. And this type of ban is considered "stronger" than an actual administrator ban so cannot be overturned by an administrator. It's mob violence at its finest.)

I was a very active editor who'd been using the site for a very long time, but they don't care. One major mistake and you're gone forever.

The site also has a huge bias toward "media" sources rather than actual scientific content or primary sources in general. They treat the media as vetters of the truth and ignore all of the group-think/mass delusion that is common among mainstream media where they all re-report each others stories. That causes a huge blind spot. It didn't used to be that way too, it used to be that most notable sources were books, but nowaydays with everything online and the quality of media reporting going down and down it's caused Wikipedia itself to decline in quality.

I used to encourage people to edit Wikipedia like you, no longer. The site needs a hard fork, at least for the english speaking site.

[Xelbair]

With how hostile userbase is on wikipedia, no - i would rather not. especially in my native tongue.

[Animats]

I used to edit Wikipedia actively. I was was active on the conflict of interest notice board and involved in pushing back against a few self-promotional scams. The worst one involved the "binary options" industry, before it was shut down. "Better Place", a hype-based electric car startup that went bankrupt, was another.

A few years previous, most heavy promotion on Wikipedia was music-related. Then business hype dominated. Then political hype took over. Trying to push back in the "post truth" era is valuable but painful.

It was worth doing for a while. But not for too long. It's wearing.

[noosphr]

I'll add: please edit in areas where you are an expect. Over the last 20 years I have racked up a few thoudand edits, rewrites, new articles, etc.. Don't contribute to the low effort noise everyone is screaming about. In a century an edit in transcendental number theory with a citation is going to be a lot more important than whatever the current culture war is.

[thallium205]

Why is their editor so awful to use?

[arrowsmith]

I don't know, but it's definitely not a lack of funding.

[card_zero]

Designers happened.

[zelphirkalt]

Years ago I tried adding a weblink directing to a community, to an article about a game, where there were already weblinks to other communities, which were in no way any more official or proper than the community I linked to, but this edit never made it into the page, because someone played gatekeeper there, probably a person of the already linked communities. Since then I don't even bother editing wiki any longer. It is gatekeeping by people with their own agenda. What else I read about edit wars did not inspire confidence either.

[immibis]

I've tried this but my edit is either auto reverted for some bureaucracy violation, or the article requires extended confirmed status to edit at all.

[Trixter]

I used to, until entire notable topics within a certain culture were deleted as "not notable" by editors unfamiliar with the topics.

"not notable" is the cancer within wikipedia. You can't claim to be the sum of human knowledge but also arbitrarily remove articles to meet some imaginary criteria.

[xvilka]

They block VPN use that makes editing impossible for people from some of big countries with so called "firewalls".

[brightball]

I always wonder why certain topics are locked.

[sedev]

For most things the talk pages will explain why it is restricted, but if someone forgot to put a notice there, there's also a giant list of "the following topic areas reliably attract disruptive editing and get people angry, so admins move much more quickly to restrict editing than they would otherwise." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions#Ac...

[DyslexicAtheist]

wikipedia means different things depending where you are. Content in English looks a lot better than browsing content in other languages like Spanish, French, Italian, ... Especially when it is about non Tech subjects in these languages, there seems to be a strong difference in quality, and the utility you get from Wikipedia varies with how many languages you speak.

My biggest beef is that any contributions volunteers make will be stolen by sama and similar scam artists & SV dweebs so they can improve their AI (and while Wikipedia is free AI which requires login/authentication and maybe even paid subscription in future).

[seanhunter]

I tried making some contributions and ended up getting totally put off by passive-aggressive rules-lawyering and BS. There is a certain sort of person who edit-squats pages and fights remorselessly over every change and it just wasn’t worth the time and emotional energy to try to get over that hump.

[wormius]

I've seen such bad editing lately. Basic grammar rules being missed/capitalization issues, personal opinions and hearsay cited as "fact", lack of references. Seemingly unrelated topics except in whoever made an edits eyes.

So yeah, you don't even have to be an expert. What's weird is that there IS a lot of edits by ideologues of many kind. And it doesn't have to be "foreign agents" and this Trump attack reeks so hard of yet another attempt at authoritarian control and NewSpeak. Biden gave in with the TikTok to Trumps initial games, and now it just feeds the game. We have to resist this sort of thing from below.

I wish people had a good "sniffer" for bullshit. I'm not saying I'm perfect (we all have our blind spots) but after a while you can tell when certain things are trying to put a spin on something... It's especially odious when it comes to national identities trying to put a spin or tie either themselves or their enemies to a particular view point. The worst part is it's not necessarily obvious, to a lot of people if you don't have the knowledge, or the ability to critique and ask questions.

So we need people to keep asking questions for sure, and sniffing out this sort of thing. But it has to not be "IN THE NAME OF NATIONAL SECURITY" but rather "IN THE NAME OF OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL". Otherwise you just become a front or spokesthing for a given state, and that's no better than fucking Pravda.

[bagels]

Why? Bots reverse every edit.

[nulld3v]

You can usually just revert the revert if your edit was legitimate. I think the bot will say this too in the message it sends you.

[leephillips]

Please do not edit, write for, read, or cite Wikipedia. If you care about or know about a topic, consider writing a book or article about it.

[firesteelrain]

Understand the sentiment. Less reasonable people that edit Wikipedia will continue to make it a hellscape for the rest. Please try to edit and create.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

In the past, I have done so, and won't, again.

First, my (quite correct) edits in existing pages have been reversed within minutes. No explanation as to why (I assume because I was not "known" enough). I have heard this complaint numerous times.

Second, when I tried to create a page about a system that I had originally authored, has become a well-known, worldwide tool, managed by a large team that does not include me, the page was rejected. I think it was because I had been involved in the creation of the tool.

I decided that it wasn't worth it. I didn't get upset, but it was clear that my input wasn't wanted.