<story><title>Is Wikipedia for Sale?</title><url>http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/is-wikipedia-for-sale</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>tokenadult</author><text>My experience as a Wikipedian suggests that Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s administrators need to be much more alert than they have been to the possibility that the Wikipedians motivated by money (or by ideological bias) will stay with the project and persist in making edits contrary to Wikipedia policy. They edit more articles, and edit in greater numbers, than most admins guess or notice. And the point-of-view-pushing editors often inject so much wikidrama into discussions about how to improve articles that they drive away the participation of conscientious editors who know reliable sources about the article topics.&lt;p&gt;A current example is the article on Rupert Sheldrake,[1] which has recently been subjected to vigorous edit-warring, perhaps as part of a publicity campaign by followers of Sheldrake. (I just saw a new book by Sheldrake at a library yesterday, and perhaps that book&amp;#x27;s publication set the timing for the editing push.) But there are examples like this all over Wikipedia, and, again, I think most casual users of Wikipedia massively underestimate the percentage of articles that are edited mostly in the interest of pushing a point of view for commercial or ideological reasons.&lt;p&gt;The article kindly submitted here says, &amp;quot;Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but only a carefully vetted few are promoted to admin status on the site.&amp;quot; And that is laughable. Describing the current group of Wikipedia as &amp;quot;a carefully vetted few&amp;quot; does violence to the English language. Nothing has ever been careful about the process for checking the background of administrator candidates or choosing which candidates become administrators. There are some very, very, very good administrators on Wikipedia (just as there are many very helpful everyday volunteer editors), but there are other administrators who are power trips to maintain conduct contrary to Wikipedia policies for building a good, free online encyclopedia. The Vice article submitted here does, at least, link to an Atlantic article[2] reporting that Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s rate of bringing new administrators on board is slowing. At least some of the administrators have been caught taking payoffs for editing articles to publicize the persons making the payoffs, so it will take more than just the current administrators being more alert to fix this problem on Wikipedia.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Rupert_Sheldrake&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;technology&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;3-char...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ta_24278</author><text>My experience as a Wikipedian:&lt;p&gt;- provide content until an admin revert said content without explanation.&lt;p&gt;- try to engage discussion with said admin and get referred to a wp policy that actually states this admin was wrong.&lt;p&gt;- point the admin to his error and engage in wikipedia conflict resolution.&lt;p&gt;- said admin sneakily changes said policy to confirm his views, and unleash a small army of followers to intervene to support him in conflict resolution and revert my edits. get banned&lt;p&gt;- circumvent ban to protest, get banned for circumventing the ban. repeat until other admins take notices and discuss my case in secret channels.&lt;p&gt;- find out that this has happened before quite a few times, escalate to head of wikipedia. get dismissed.&lt;p&gt;- do as others did before, replace a specific high profile page with your story, revert the replace. now your story is there in wikipedia history for future investigators to find.&lt;p&gt;- never contribute anything to wikipedia ever again, use wikipedia as a better than google search engine for official websites until duckduckgo.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is Wikipedia for Sale?</title><url>http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/is-wikipedia-for-sale</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>tokenadult</author><text>My experience as a Wikipedian suggests that Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s administrators need to be much more alert than they have been to the possibility that the Wikipedians motivated by money (or by ideological bias) will stay with the project and persist in making edits contrary to Wikipedia policy. They edit more articles, and edit in greater numbers, than most admins guess or notice. And the point-of-view-pushing editors often inject so much wikidrama into discussions about how to improve articles that they drive away the participation of conscientious editors who know reliable sources about the article topics.&lt;p&gt;A current example is the article on Rupert Sheldrake,[1] which has recently been subjected to vigorous edit-warring, perhaps as part of a publicity campaign by followers of Sheldrake. (I just saw a new book by Sheldrake at a library yesterday, and perhaps that book&amp;#x27;s publication set the timing for the editing push.) But there are examples like this all over Wikipedia, and, again, I think most casual users of Wikipedia massively underestimate the percentage of articles that are edited mostly in the interest of pushing a point of view for commercial or ideological reasons.&lt;p&gt;The article kindly submitted here says, &amp;quot;Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but only a carefully vetted few are promoted to admin status on the site.&amp;quot; And that is laughable. Describing the current group of Wikipedia as &amp;quot;a carefully vetted few&amp;quot; does violence to the English language. Nothing has ever been careful about the process for checking the background of administrator candidates or choosing which candidates become administrators. There are some very, very, very good administrators on Wikipedia (just as there are many very helpful everyday volunteer editors), but there are other administrators who are power trips to maintain conduct contrary to Wikipedia policies for building a good, free online encyclopedia. The Vice article submitted here does, at least, link to an Atlantic article[2] reporting that Wikipedia&amp;#x27;s rate of bringing new administrators on board is slowing. At least some of the administrators have been caught taking payoffs for editing articles to publicize the persons making the payoffs, so it will take more than just the current administrators being more alert to fix this problem on Wikipedia.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Rupert_Sheldrake&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&amp;#x2F;technology&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;3-char...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rodgerd</author><text>&amp;gt; I think most casual users of Wikipedia massively underestimate the percentage of articles that are edited mostly in the interest of pushing a point of view for commercial or ideological reasons.&lt;p&gt;Yup.  I read a dicsussion recently around an article about Piers Anthony&amp;#x27;s obsession with pedophilia in his fiction, and a number of people were surprised none of the controversy around e.g. his scenes with 5 year olds havign sex with adults was mantioned on Wikipedia.  It&amp;#x27;s buried behind a couple of layers of Talk pages of course, likewise the whitewashing of Eric Raymond&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia is easy for obsessive rule-lawyers to show the information they want to show.</text></comment>