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- My work on Wikipedia has rarely been wasted utterly, but when it runs up against the issue of inclusionism, then it's a gamble: if it's accepted then it seems to hold up pretty well and even be improved, but if it's deleted then too bad for me (and for the world at large too, of course).Oct 15, 2013
- >One article was deleted, so I do not know if my edit was reverted
It was not. In fact, only two edits followed; the first added {{subst:prod blp}} (which caused the deletion), and the last was a bot fixing ISBN formatting.
I have had admin status on en.wikipedia since early days; and while I assume that this will disappear someday in a purge of inactive admins (as happened to my admin status on meta), until then I am happy to report the content of deleted edits (and anything else visible to admins but hidden to others) upon request.Oct 16, 2013 - +gwern branwen Isn't that an entirely different argument? A WP article is in a sense public domain, if you want artistic control over your work, then clearly, WP - or any wiki - is the wrong place for it.
Here's a example of what bothers me:
A sexual population is a set of organisms in which any pair of members can breed together
This is clearly and obviously wrong (or at least a completely useless definition for biology), and earlier I would simply have corrected it. Now I expect a barrage of opposition and rules slinging and reversion, especially since it is blessed with a reference. It will be a struggle, and with the current WP rules, it is deemed more important to have the proper references than to be correct. So I don't bother. It's what you were saying in the article about barriers - it's just too much work, and no real benefit (to me).Oct 16, 2013 - Toby: thanks for checking. I will update that bit.
Ketil: what I'm talking about is not 'artistic control', minor disputes about wording or organization, disagreements with reference to RSs, or issues of OR. I'm talking about serious quality issues afflicting my articles: subliterate cretins, who objectively cannot spell or capitalize, rewriting my articles; I'm talking about entire articles being deleted, about entire well-referenced sections being deleted, about key quotes from primary sources being badly paraphrased (when they're not deleted); about things being justified with respect to policy when the person cannot even state which part of the policy is relevant; about people peddling falsehoods that just a little checking would have exposed; and so on. I've got 99 problems with Wikipedia, but being unable to find references ain't one of'em!Oct 16, 2013 - All right. But that's part of being a wiki. I don't see a very coherent argument here: one one side you lament the lack of editors, and the lack of reactions to your deletions etc - on the other side, you complain about people hacking your articles to pieces. I'm not sure what exactly you want.
(And just to make that clear, when I talk about references, I'm talking about my own challenges with WP, not implying they are the same as yours. Edited the last comment here to add emphasis.)Oct 16, 2013 - No, it's not part of being a wiki. I did not use to have these problems. My research and writing approach has not changed from 2005, but the treatment of my articles and work have changed drastically.
My complaint is the absence of competent editors, replaced by incompetent or no editors at all. This is a coherent complaint. Not reacting to deletions is part and parcel of deleting, they're two sides of the same coin: for every editor who successfully deletes something, there must either be no other editors involved or the other editors permit the deletion to happen.
What I want is basically for the Wikipedia editing community to return to the norms and culture it held in 2006, before Seigenthaler.Oct 16, 2013
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