I don't know how it is now but back in the late 00's/very early 10's I had attempted to correct some obvious mistakes in some articles I came across. Some edits were immediately reverted -- seemingly by a bot while others were reverted to some editor. On some, I tried using Talk to discuss why the reversion is incorrect and had put forth better sources (the actual source) instead of some 'scientific journalist's' article that got it wrong and was basically threatened that I'd be banned.
These weren't some esoteric or difficult subjects but fairly well-known and straight-forward data. It was such a hassle that I just gave up after my very short foray into Wikipedia editing for 5 or so years. I gave it another go for some subjects in my industry and learned that editors are not only territorial but take corrections personally. Sources be damned. What I've seen is so-called scientific journalists for news articles/blogs are just anecdotes pulled from paper abstracts. An abstract of an abstract with opinions not derived from the actual data. How is something like theregister, CNN, MSNBC or Fox News more reputable than the sources that they sourced from?
With that, the well-known advice of "Take Wikipedia with a grain of salt and actually read the cited sources." and more importantly, the cited sources' source, rings true.
In other words, in my opinion, Wikipedia is more a summary of blogspam than it is an encyclopedia, though there are some exceptions of course.
Aatube@kbin.social 1 year ago
That doesn't sound normal to Wikipedia at all
Kid_Thunder@kbin.social 1 year ago
Well, this was back in the late 00s/early 10s. So circa 2008 - 2010. I don't remember the exact year.
I'd assume they had to make a policy against territorial editors because it was already a problem though. I definitely experienced it.
Aatube@kbin.social 1 year ago
The policy had been around since late 2003.
Kid_Thunder@kbin.social 1 year ago
Is there also a policy against evading blocks/bans? If there was then perhaps the subject in this article would have never happened.
Perhaps the takeaway here is that we could all learn from writing policies that would definitely solve every instance of a problem. For example, if a company could have policies against sexual harassment it could all stop.
In another example on a bigger scale, if countries would sign a treatise of some type with other peoples and nations then we could all get along far better. A great example of this could be when the US signed various treaties with different Native American Tribes such, as happens, this Wikipedia article describes.
Thank you, I believe the world could learn much from our discussion and I know, I feel that my own experiences and opinions have been rightfully invalidated.