Proudly Geekly

Friday, October 22, 2021

Wikipedia is not a reliable source

 Wikipedia's administrators treat the platform as a complex tabletop RPG rather than a source of information that can be edited. If you don't "play nice" you are chided on your talk page and blocked, especially if you are not logged in.


If you are logged in, they will be a bit more lenient but not by much. The worst example of this is the Baseball Mogul article that I worked on for years: Baseball Mogul: Revision history - Wikipedia

For several years, a useless user (sadly now an administrator) named Sro23 would repeatedly revert my work on updating the article because he disliked me. Every time I updated the information and even cited sources, he would immediately revert it. I kept at it, so another nasty admin, Favonian, actually locked it for "sock puppetry" which means fake/alternate accounts editing it.

Wikipedia is a terrible place because they run guilty until proven innocent rather than the other way around. They will always take the side of an administrator, and if a regular user tries to report an admin for poor behavior, they will be granted a "boomerang block" which means they are blocked for reporting the admin. 

If Wikipedia actually was used by decent people, it could be useful. But that's not likely, considering the terrible person (Jimmy Wales) that founded it. Everyone else seems to idolize him as some sort of hero, but he's a loser who spent his early 30s playing MUDs and talking to girls less than half his age on message boards.

Oh well. Wikipedia will never be useful, but I guess the useless administrators will have fun with it.