Why I Don’t Think I’ll Contribute to Wikipedia Anymore

  • If any of you have made contributions to Wikipedia, I’m sure you’ve had all kinds of experiences. And I’m sure many of those have been negative ones. I’ve had some too, but for the most part I’ve managed to deal with them.


    I find it fun to read Wikipedia, and to throw in tidbits of information that others have missed, particularly on the subject of music. I’m generally good about including citations, but at any rate I avoid posting anything that anyone should have a reason to question. Sometimes something I’ve posted will get removed, but if there’s a good reason for it I’ll accept that.


    But some experiences I’ve had recently have taken all of the fun out of it for me. It seems that some Wikipedia pages have self-appointed “guardians” who, with all good intentions, go a little too far in dealing with what they see as “violations.”


    The following isn’t a real-life example, but it sums up (without much of any exaggeration) what kinds of things I’ve been running into.


    Let’s say the page for NURSERY CRYME gives an explanation for “The Fountain of Salmacis” that’s rather confusing and misleading. Being a stickler for accuracy, I change the entry to point out that the song is about the myth of Hermaphroditus. I include a link to the “Hermaphroditus” page.


    Then someone comes along and undoes my change, saying that I need to give a citation for my claim.


    ME: Um, why does this need a citation? The song mentions Hermaphroditus by name and recounts the myth in detail.

    HIM: It may be obvious to YOU that the song is about Hermaphroditus. But then it’s “obvious” to some people that “In The Air Tonight” is about Phil Collins seeing someone refuse to save a person from drowning, which of course is wrong!

    ME: Um… that’s not the same thing at all. “Fountain” is clearly about Hermaphroditus. It’s not like that “In The Air Tonight” legend. It’s more like how, say, “Return to Pooh Corner” by Kenny Loggins is about Winnie-The-Pooh.

    HIM: And how do you know that song is actually about Winnie-The-Pooh?? It could be about something else called “Pooh”!

    ME: Um…


    Here’s another odd thing I’ve run into. On a page about a certain album I added a short paragraph, regarding a CD reissue, that (1) was clearly and objectively observable by any listener; (2) involved things that fans might want to know about; and (3) was not something the artist or label was likely to call attention to.


    Well, some guy added the big “This section needs citations or it may be removed!” header to this. I disagreed, so I removed the header. He put it back.


    In an attempt to compromise, I replaced my paragraph with a single line that glossed over the details but seemed less likely to be questioned. He said “sorry, that’s not good enough”… and put back my original paragraph, along with the “may be removed!” header.


    Finally, I just removed my paragraph altogether. Again, he put the whole thing back, still with the notice that it “may be removed!” OK, whatever.


    Maybe these guys are right, and I’m not playing by the Wikipedia rules strictly enough. But it doesn’t feel like they’re right.

    Little known fact: Before the crowbar was invented...


    ...crows simply drank at home.

  • Time to vent a little more...


    Some of what I wrote about earlier was eventually resolved when someone finally found "acceptable" citations for the corrections I made. Now I'm running into a new thing. There's been a short statement on a music-related page that manages to be incorrect on multiple points, in spite of having a source that should be, but isn't, accurate, and I've been trying to post a simple correction to it. It's been undone several times, by more than one person, each claiming that my source is not acceptable. The problem is that (1) there's nothing I can find that would indicate it as being a "deprecated" source (as Wikipedia calls it); and (2) the source has, literally, indisputable proof of what I'm saying.


    Anyway, I found another source that hopefully will be acceptable. We'll see how it goes.

    Little known fact: Before the crowbar was invented...


    ...crows simply drank at home.

  • I wouldn't waste my time contributing to Wikipedia at all! It's a crap-fest of the highest order, along with their frequent begging for contributions to keep it going. Maybe if they improved it in the areas you suggest, I'd consider it, but they seem bent on making it impossible to get the information right, and hell-bent on having citation for things that a/ are just plain obvious, or b/ citations not being on the internet, thus un-linkable.


    An example (still present, I just checked, and got the begging note!):

    On the page about the Hyundai Coupe (or Tiburon, as they call it in America, as they wanted customers there to be able to pronounce at least one of the words correctly! ^^) it states "A popular modification saw owners of the first GK model removing the air-filter resonator box. The resonator box was located directly in front of the front left hand side wheel, behind the fender. This allowed for a greater airflow to the air filter, gaining a minimal increase of brake horsepower (bhp). Hyundai, seeking cost cuts, adopted this modification for 2004+ models." This is true, up to the "(bhp)" comment, the rest, about Hyundai adopting it is simply a lie. I've owned 2 x 2004+ models, both had the box, as had all the others when they left the factory. We (in the owners club) think this was added to Wikipedia years ago by someone who wanted to sell one with the box removed to someone who wanted an unmolested example. Presumably that change occurred before the tightening up of edits, but it means that now, they won't accept the truth instead of what's written there.

    Ian


    Putting the old-fashioned Staffordshire plate in the dishwasher!

  • All the above is a manifestation of the basic principle that if a number of people are gathered together, a certain proportion of them WILL be arseholes. The arseholery will take different forms depending on the nature of the 'gathering'.


    With wikis and suchlike it manifests as I KNOW BETTER and THERE ARE RULES AND I AM GOING TO ENFORCE THEM. The crumb of comfort to take from the above experiences is that their behaviour probably reflects a gap or shortcoming in their lives which they feel they must address by wielding some scrap of 'authority' and sieze the chance to do a bit of what feels like policing.


    I've had similar experience with Setlist.FM entries, including Genesis sets, where again people were simply being definitively wrong yet constantly de-correcting their wrong entries. One I wasn't directly involved in but amusedly observed was a battle between two guys who were adding and removing the '...' from In That Quiet Earth. Plus plenty of other wars of attrition on similar pernickety lines. I long since stopped contributing for precisely such reasons.

    Abandon all reason

  • All the above is a manifestation of the basic principle that if a number of people are gathered together, a certain proportion of them WILL be arseholes. The arseholery will take different forms depending on the nature of the 'gathering'.


    With wikis and suchlike it manifests as I KNOW BETTER and THERE ARE RULES AND I AM GOING TO ENFORCE THEM. The crumb of comfort to take from the above experiences is that their behaviour probably reflects a gap or shortcoming in their lives which they feel they must address by wielding some scrap of 'authority' and sieze the chance to do a bit of what feels like policing.


    I've had similar experience with Setlist.FM entries, including Genesis sets, where again people were simply being definitively wrong yet constantly de-correcting their wrong entries. One I wasn't directly involved in but amusedly observed was a battle between two guys who were adding and removing the '...' from In That Quiet Earth. Plus plenty of other wars of attrition on similar pernickety lines. I long since stopped contributing for precisely such reasons.


    =O. Sad and funny at the same time... As you say, arseholery.


    It's a like a fractal. No matter how much you drill down, there'll always be something people will disagree on.

  • =O. Sad and funny at the same time... As you say, arseholery.


    It's a like a fractal. No matter how much you drill down, there'll always be something people will disagree on.

    Hahaha! Fractal disagreement, I like it! (John Peel voice): "Next, turn it up for a rare b-side by Fractal Disagreement")


    Sad and funny is spot-on. Those ellipsis guys were hilarious. It was like the most weedy pathetic tug-of-war there's ever been.

    Abandon all reason

  • I wouldn't waste my time contributing to Wikipedia at all! It's a crap-fest of the highest order

    I know, but I really like reading Wikipedia and I have a hard time resisting the urge to add or correct information. I guess I should work on that...

    With wikis and suchlike it manifests as I KNOW BETTER and THERE ARE RULES AND I AM GOING TO ENFORCE THEM.

    One thing I've observed is that there's more "policing" going on with some topics than with others. Genesis-related pages seem to have a particularly high "policing" rate.

    Little known fact: Before the crowbar was invented...


    ...crows simply drank at home.

  • Genesis-related pages seem to have a particularly high "policing" rate.

    Hmmmm, interesting. I wonder if there's an unfortunately high proportion of nitpicking pompous wannabe authoritarians among Genesis fans.


    (Now wondering if everyone's going to cough and avoid eye contact)

    Abandon all reason

  • Hmmmm, interesting. I wonder if there's an unfortunately high proportion of nitpicking pompous wannabe authoritarians among Genesis fans.


    (Now wondering if everyone's going to cough and avoid eye contact)

    Perhaps we should start 'policing' comments on the forum beginning with Backdrifter ;):D:*

    “Without music, life would be a mistake”

  • I really love reading through wikipedia articles and it has become a hobby of mine to dig systematically through all wikipedia articles to a certain topic. Nonetheless, I am aware you can never rely 100% if wikipedia articles tell the truth or just madeup facts, or even if they don't simply omit important paragraphs. A friend of mine composes classical music and tried repeatedly to correct the list of his own works, which his wikipedia article, written by some obscure person, provides with multiple errors. Each time his corrections were "re-corrected" to the previous erroneous state.


    I once saw a web comic (have to find it again) that I guess tells some truth about wikipedia even if it was just meant to poke fun:

    Panel 1: Wiki user writes an article. Since he hasn't done his research properly he just makes up a whole paragraph.

    Panel 2: Scientist writes a paper, looks up stuff on wikipedia and includes the madeup stuff from above-mentioned article. Paper gets published.

    Panel 3: Another wiki user notices said article lacks reliable sources. He searches and finds the published scientific paper which confirms the madeup stuff.

    Panel 4: Wiki user #1 has done research in the meantime and tries to correct his own article - only to find his madeup paragraph is now locked for editing since a reliable source confirms it. Thus, some madeup rubbish has evolved into true facts.

  • Reminds me of the erroneous use of the collective nouns for Gorillas (Whoop) and Baboons (Flange), based purely on a sketch on the BBC show "Not the Nine O'Clock News" back in the late 70's/early 80's, the sketch, called "Gerald the Gorilla" featured Mel Smith as a scientist who had trained a gorilla to talk, and Rowan Atkinson as the gorilla (in a suit) who starts out with very limited vocabulary, but end up correcting the scientist on his grammar sever times. Scientist says "Flange of Gorillas", and Gerald says "no, it's Whoop of gorillas, it's a flange of baboons" after which they end up arguing about all sorts of things, including, bizarrely, the production on Johnny Mathis latest album. Clearly the sketch writers hadn't bothered doing any research (which would likely have involved a visit to a good library, and for what? Most people didn't know the correct nouns anyway), they just made a couple up. They may even have picked these for comic effect. Anyhow, it's quite hard to find the correct terms now, as most searches come up with the ones above.

    Ian


    Putting the old-fashioned Staffordshire plate in the dishwasher!