Comment on YSK that editing Wikipedia is easier than it looks (and where to start)
ultranaut@lemmy.world 5 weeks agoI’ve tried multiple times over the years and had the same experience. As far as I can tell Wikipedia is dominated by a weird clique of power tripping dicks. If you’re not in the clique they will revert anything you do, even fixing really blatant and obvious typos or misspellings will get reverted.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
If you don’t mind, I’d be interested to take a look and see what the reason edits got reverted. Obviously it’s stale enough now that I can’t ask anyone involved to not bite the newcomers or tell them why reversions they made may not be correct, but I’m still curious to see what kinds of edits by new editors commonly get reverted.
ultranaut@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I’ve only ever tried to fix blatant mistakes like typos and misspellings. The most recent was several years ago, I think 2020 or 2021. If you want to see it happen just find a typo and try to fix it.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
That’s mainly why I’m curious to see specific examples: I’ve fixed hundreds if not thousands of typos and can’t remember this happening, even long before I had much experience editing. I’m long past the point where I’d be considered a new editor, so any results I’d get now would be bullshit anyway short of violating the rules and starting a smurf account.
Regarding “in the clique”, people give a shit about who’s who a lot less than you’d think. Despite having 25,000 edits over 8 years, I’ve interacted with maybe three people in the top 100 by number of contributions (let alone even know who they are). I’m not a social butterfly on there, but I’ve interacted in hundreds of discussions when needed.
The only instance I’ve seen of someone trying to play king shit of fuck mountain and not immediately failing is in our article for San Francisco, where they were insistent that there was a strong consensus for using only one image in the infobox instead of the usual collage we do in 99.9% of major cities. The image used was a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge in front of the San Francisco skyline – neither of which were represented well. They’d been shutting down ideas for a collage for years, and when other editors found out about this, it turned into a request for comment (RfC). Despite their now having 500,000 edits in about 18 years (this ought to put them in the alleged “clique” even though I’d never heard of them before) this swung wildly against them to the point of the RfC being closed early, and the article now has a (I think really nice) collage.
(TL;DR: the policy against trying to dictate the contents of an article isn’t just there so we can say “but c it’s agenst da rulez so it dusnt happin!!”; it’s there because the wider editing community fucking hates that shit and doesn’t put up with it.)