this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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I think it’s a bit ironic that Wikipedia hasn’t succumbed to the modern era of misinformation the way other information sources have, particularly given the warnings about it that have been given in the past. Not saying those warnings aren’t warranted, just that the way things have played out is counter to said expectations.
It definitely has, just not to as large a scale.
In practice it’s ran like a heirarchical aristocracy, where a admins control articles they care about and are very picky about the changes they allow.
One article about an illness contains false information related to alternative medicine “treatments” and I edited it, this was removed by the person who made most of the page. I got into an argument with them, and turns out they have the same username and come from the same country as an account on other platforms selling alternative medicine products, which are subtly advertised on the page they control. They also are a wikipedia admin.
Anyways I reported this to the admin team, and my report was immediately deleted by the admin I was reporting, and I got a three year ban. Mind you I have over a thousand wikipedia edits and have made some big contributions so this was quite annoying.
And this is far from the only incident. The people who are most likely to edit wikipedia pages are those who really care about, or could really benefit from the topic. So you end up having situations where companies hire agencies to improve their image by changing the wikipedia article about them and their products, same thing for celebrities.
Interesting anecdote. Though to judge by your username, it seems you may have an agenda yourself.
This is a major problem that takes up a lot of time for the editors. It explains some of their trigger-happiness.
That said, you have a valid point. I once tried to water down what I considered to be excessively POV language in an article about diet. This earned me an official warning for "extremism" or "conspiracism" or whatever. My impressive account pedigree also counted for nothing. So there's definitely a bit of the political bias, the power-tripping and gatekeeping that you see in any online community. But it's a bit of a conundrum too, because they are fighting an uphill battle against people with strong incentives and sometimes money too.
This wasn’t the ME/CFS article (the illness I am personally disabled by) and anyways all this happened before I became disabled.
Anyways my ban is over now, but I can’t get myself to edit wikipedia anymore. It was a pretty shitty experience and I don’t wanna go back.
And it wasn’t the only one. So much NPOV-violating stuff on most the fringe articles and whenever you edit to make more neutral tone or you remove something unsupported by citations you end up in an insufferable straw man argument chain on the talk page.
The main fun part is filling out abandoned articles and making new articles yourself. But anything showing problems in other people’s work becomes really tiring really quick with all the talk page nonsense and endless reverts.