[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.

[technothrasher]

The only few times I tried to make small edits, typo corrections, or similar, they just got immediately reverted as vandalism. So when I found a page that is largely wrong about a relatively obscure historical figure that I actually know a lot about and have plenty of source material for, I didn't really feel motivated to put the work in to clean it up.

[Arch-TK]

If there's a dispute and the person you're having a dispute with never materialises to argue their side of the argument, you're fine to just revert the banner.

[arjie]

For reasons unknown, I am much better than many at navigating this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989

https://x.com/arjie/status/1847046183342297498?s=46

If you share with me what your change is I might be able to get it done.

[paradite]

Seems like the story of Stackoverflow.

[Avamander]

If you revert someone's malicious reverts three times, you'll be forced into arbitration. They rarely bother with that though.

[the_mitsuhiko]

Would be curious to learn what you edited.

[GoblinSlayer]

I think it's an antispam bot, just rerevert.

[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.

[TimorousBestie]

Wikipedia is really, really bad at mathematics. The tone is all over the place, from “plagiarized from an undergrad textbook” to “crackpot with an axe to grind against Cantor.”

[Kim_Bruning]

A new layer of Citogenesis? ( https://xkcd.com/978/ )

Interesting. Do you have an example? I'll go look!

[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.

[potato3732842]

Exactly. It makes it basically impossible to get niche industry/trade information and history onto wikipedia unless it was so newsworthy it's covered everywhere.

[Animats]

That's a feature. Each article requires future attention and adds load.

Most of the important articles were in the first 100,000.

[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.

[bawolff]

> 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.

In fairness, this does mean the system is working.

[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.

[arrowsmith]

Yeah I stopped donating to Wikipedia once I learned where the money goes.

Even if it ends up supporting causes I agree with, why would I need the Wikimedia Foundation as an intermediary? I could just give money directly to the causes!