Molly White on Better Offline: Wikipedia Is All The Web Has Left

[Zoloft]

Wikipedia Is All The Web Has Left ft. Molly White

Wikipedia, a non-profit encyclopedia that anybody can edit, remains one of the few trustworthy and reliable websites left online. Ed Zitron is joined by critic, researcher and 18-year veteran of the Wikipedia editing community Molly White to discuss how Wikipedia actually works, and why you should care about its future.

Molly White is the well-known crypto gadfly and long-time member here GorillaWarfare.

[Vigilant]

Is there a transcript?

[TheSpacebook]

Is there a transcript?

https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/bett ... transcript

[The Blue Newt]

Does it ever get past the level of “Best there is, thanks to…well, modesty forbids?”

[Vigilant]

Does it ever get past the level of “Best there is, thanks to…well, modesty forbids?”

'Vapid' comes to mind.

[Randy from Boise]

Well, you know, that was pretty, you know, boring.

t

P.S. Lest you think I am being, you know, mean — I count 145 instances of "you know" in an interview that runs less than 36 minutes, which works out to one "you know" every 15 seconds.

[Bezdomni]

[...] I am being, you know, mean [...]

[...] which works out to one "you know" every 15 seconds.

[Zoloft]

The transcript is a formless horror, so I edited out 146 instances of 'you know' - broke it up into readable chunks, and tried to fix the transcription errors. Trigger warning for Greg Kohs, there are dozens of sentences in this transcript that begin with the word 'So.'

All Zone Media.
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host Ed Zetron.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia used by over a billion people a month, one that, despite being maintained entirely by an army of free and at times anonymous contributors, remains one of the most reliable sources of information on the Internet.

Wikipedia's sixty-two million articles are edited by over one hundred thousand contributors, and these contributors have somehow done a better job maintaining the quality and validity of the information than any of the information provided by any of the major platforms today.

Wikipedia is funded entirely through the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization funded through public donations and grants, and has the staff of over seven hundred people. Yeah, and I'll thank you. Most people have absolutely no idea how intricate the web’s encyclopedia is.

And today I'm joined by Gorilla Warfare, a Wikipedia editor that's made over one hundred and thirty thousand edits in the span of eighteen years across two accounts. You'll likely know her better as researcher and critic Molly White, the creator of the Citation Needed newsletter and Web Three Is Going Great.

All right, Molly, thank you for joining me, Thanks for having me. So, I don't know how I was to ask this book, Why should people actually care about Wikipedia today?

Well, I mean, I think Wikipedia is one of the highest quality resources there is on the web today. I think everyone uses it sometimes without even realizing it. Given that Wikipedia data powers so much of AI chat, GPT responses or home assistants that are answering your questions or Siri. So I think keeping the quality of information on Wikipedia high, or even improving it even further, is one of the most important things that we need to be focusing on.

But one of the big critiques of it. And I know, and this is very much a podcast for people who might be techy, but people also who are just being exposed to tech outside of the consumer realm. How is it reliable? Because that is the big that's the big question. How is this something you can trust?

Well, I think, like a lot of things, you need to take it with a grain of salt and understand that there is variation on Wikipedia between some very high-quality articles that have been reviewed by hundreds of people versus some that are fairly new and being created still.

So I think it's important to realize that there is the possibility that whatever you're reading is not reliable, and there is some onus on the reader to verify that what they're reading is correct. But I think that generally speaking, the quality control and Wikipedia is actually pretty good. There are a lot of editors who are constantly maintaining the platform, making sure that the material on there is well sourced, it's coming from high quality, reputable publications, and that it is meeting the criteria that Wikipedia puts in place.

And I think the result of that is that the content on Wikipedia tends to be very high quality. And how does the actual moderation work, So what goes into a Wikipedia page? Well, it's a little bit ad hoc. There's not really a process in which every page has to go through a set of criteria or anything like that. Generally speaking, anyone can edit Wikipedia and contribute to the best of their ability, and when someone does something that is not in line with Wikipedia's requirements, then hopefully, the idea is that hopefully someone will come along and notice that, revert the change or improve it.

So that it does meet the criteria. And I realize that sounds very like slap dash, and it is to some extent, but because of the sort of processes that have developed over the years, it actually works pretty well. Where most pages do you get a fairly strong set of people who are taking a look at the changes that are coming in, making sure that they are appropriate for the encyclopedia and allowing them to remain or discussing them and reverting them if necessary.

Talk to me a little bit about that process though.

What happens well if someone goes and makes an edit to a page. Generally speaking, there are a fair number of people who are patrolling recent changes to the encyclopedia, not necessarily even watching that page specifically, but just looking at new edits that are coming in and checking them for reliability. is there a source included, does the edit past this, the smell check.

There's also some automated processes involved that will try to filter out edits that are abusive or match certain patterns. And then there's a lot of editors who have various pages that they're interested in or they have expertise in on what's called their watch list, and so they take a look at changes to those pages every once in a while and see if everything looks all right or if there needs to be improvements or edits to what's been added to bring them back into line with the quality that we expect.

So is there an organization? I know there's the Wikimedia Foundation, we know that, but is there is there a moderator chat? Is there a place where people congregate or is this just entirely I don't want to say decentralized, but disorganized.

Well, it's certainly disorganized there. Yeah, so there are there are actually kind of a bunch of places where people congregate, and some people use some of them and some people don't. But there are various places on the encyclopedia that are project specific pages where people discuss issues that are coming up or flag things that need more attention.

Not everyone has the ability, for example, to block an editor who's being disruptive, So editors who can't do that themselves will report it for people who can and then there's more real time places. We still use IRC, believe it or not.

For listeners, by the way, IRC is what, like a thirty year old shareware product?

Yeah, it's basically one of the first online chat protocols. I was a Polaris IRC guy. But for listeners as well, Discord is very very much - I believe Discord is actually somehow built on IOCA. That's a different episode though. I'm not sure if it actually is or if it just interoperates well with it. But there's also a Wikipedia Discord now for people who don't want to go figure out how IRC works.

So there's a bunch of different places where people can chat and talk about working on the project, different formats. And there's no compensation of any kind.

Correct, not unless you are an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, who is writing the actual media wiki software or performing one of those tasks. But that's a very small organization in comparison to the number of people who edit the encyclopedia, the vast majority of whom do so for free.
Technically, there are some people who edit Wikipedia articles for pay as a part of like PR strategies and stuff. But that's a whole can of worms and it's somewhat controversial.

Well, that's actually a good question. I know that that people will come along on both sides and say, can you get me a Wikipedia page? And then others will say for this incredibly large sum of money, I can do this for you. And it feels like those people are fighting a losing battle. It's one of the rare cases where capitalism can't really win.

And how is it that Wikipedia is so resistant to that kind of stuff?

Right, So there's a lot of resistance from the Wikimedia community towards people who are editing for promotional purposes, because the whole point of the project is it supposed to be an encyclopedia, not an advertising space, not a resume, not a place to promote your business or your product.

But of course people want information on Wikipedia about them, and so there are some people who are able to sort of tread that line where they understand Wikimedia policies very well. They understand what is allowed as far as writing about, a company - without being promotional - they understand what that organization or company or person would need to accomplish in order to achieve those notability requirements, and then they can write about them, and they do so very transparently. They disclose that they are doing so for compensation, that they've been hired by that person or organization, and they go through the process and it's very carefully orchestrated.

But there are also a bunch of people who do so sort of on the on the sly and they don't really disclose that they're doing it for pay. Those are often the people who will sort of cold call you, like if you've gotten emails, they're like, hey, I can make you a Wikipedia page. A lot of those are sort of scammy, uh, not so reputable organizations, and generally speaking, they actually have a pretty hard time doing what they claim that they can do because they don't tend to understand the policy as well. They try to shoe horn articles into Wikipedia about subjects that are not notable or that are too promotional, and so they tend to get taken down, much to the dismay of the people who pay them. Quite a lot of money.

So if you're listening to this and you've heard from one of those people, I would not recommend hiring them. Just become more important, which I guess is kind of the question. How does Wikipedia actually judge notoriety? What is important?

Yeah, So, generally speaking, the notability requirements is, it basically goes on how much coverage a subject has received in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. So if a big newspaper or several newspapers write about you in detail, chances are you might be notable, and not just for a Wikipedia article.

On the flip side, if you're just publishing press releases that's not independent of you, that probably doesn't qualify. If there's just one brief mention of you in a reliable source someplace, that's probably not sufficient. So that's sort of the general guideline.

There are other sort of more specific requirements for some specific types of topics, like sports players and things like that. But generally speaking, even if someone meets one of those guidelines, they've already met that general guideline, where it's just about the amount of coverage in reliable sources and that can be press, that can be academia, that can be books, anything that sort of qualifies as a reliable source.

Now recently we’ve seen that one of the largest tech sites actually found itself downgraded in reliability or were you aware of that situation? Did you see that happen?

I saw the conversations about it. I wasn't a participant in them, but I sort of watched it happen.

Yeah, So for the listeners - it has hundreds of that hundreds of millions of views a month. It's one of the most notable websites, frankly, and has been for decades. So what happened there? Why was this significant website considered less reliable by Wikipedia? Yeah?

So Wikipedia has these discussions pretty frequently about different sources and whether or not those sources are generally reliable or sometimes reliable or usually not reliable. And in order to sort of prevent people from having to have that same conversation every single time they want to cite a source that's heavily cited, like CE or the New York Times or something like that, we have this list of very commonly discussed sources where we just discuss, we outline the general reliability of that source.

And what you're referring to is a recent discussion where some editors decided we really needed to revisit the general reliability of CNET, which was previously considered fairly reliable for sourcing on Wikipedia, and the reason for that is that there had been a pretty noticeable change in the quality of the UH material that they were publishing, where it, it no longer had the level of accuracy that it once did. The articles that were being published didn't seem to be being edited well or fact checked well. And so we decided that, if you're just if you're planning to use CNET as a source, you should really consider this, and consider that it's probably not even as reliable as it once was, and maybe use something else, because they've started using AI generated content and stuff like that that has noticeably affected the quality of the articles that they publish.

And what is the what are the ramifications of that downgrading? What does that mean? Practically?

It means that, for if you're writing a new article in Wikipedia and you want to use CNET as a source, you are somewhat discouraged from doing so. Now, it means that where c net has been used as a source already, editors are going to be looking to improve that sourcing, generally by swapping it out with something that's more reliable. Although, as notability changes in these publications, sometimes older content that was written or published prior to a change at the organization will be considered reliable, whereas newer content that's being created now and might be using AI or other tools, is not considered reliable anymore.

So, for example, we have a couple of sources where we'll say that, anything they published before twenty fifteen is fine, but anything after that you should take with a grain of salt. So I think that's partly the case with CNET now as well.

Why do you think that Wikipedia is so much better at quality control than I don't know, Google?

Well. I think there's a very different set of incentives at play. Google is a profit driven corporation. They have other motivations besides providing the person who is using their search engine with the most relevant results. that is ostensibly what they do, but they also have motivations around generating ad revenue and clicks for different groups that are using their service or advertising with them. Wikipedia doesn't have those sometimes-conflicting incentives. the goal of Wikipedia is to deliver the highest quality information that we can, and there are no advertisements.

We're not trying to surface some specific set of content for people based on who is paying, or not paying. It's really just that one incentive, and I think that simplifies things because we can all sort of get behind that one goal and we aren't trying to juggle multiple things that are sometimes very much in conflict with one another, as I think we've seen with Google, where that goal of providing the highest quality information to the search user has been very much challenged by the other incentives at play.

So you've edited Wikipedia for about eighteen years. I think the simplest question is why do you still do it? Why did you start? Why do you continue? Well?

I started because I was a curious kid who discovered that I could and that was exciting for me. I think there are just some people out there who have like a very specific type of brain where Wikipedia just like sort of tickles it just right, and like doing that kind of editing and curation just appeals to me. I find it really enjoyable. But I also think that, the project is a really wonderful, uh creation, and I think it provides a really important service to the people who have access to it, which is almost anyone.

I mean, it's anyone with an Internet connection, and there are even ways to get access to Wikipedia without an Internet connection. And so I think that, maintaining a quality source of high reliability material is incredibly important and arguably getting only more important as other sources of that same type of content, are becoming degraded in the way that you just described with Google for example. So I'm very passionate about it. I think providing high quality information to everyone is one of the most important things that sort of humanity needs to achieve, and so I find that very strongly motivating.

And is there any pressure at all from the Wikimedia Foundation? Do they push people around at all - not going either way. I'm just wondering what influence they have on the platform.

Yeah, it's a kind of an unusual relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the editing community. It's sometimes a little bit adversarial, which is sometimes a little confusing to people who are new to the project.

But I would say no, the Wikimedia Foundation generally takes a pretty hands-off approach towards the projects that it kind of supports. The Wikimedia Foundation almost never comes in and says, hey, you need to delete that, or you need to do something very specific with the content. There are some very edge cases with like legal requests and things like that where they can sometimes do that, but they are very conservative on when they will do that, and for the most part they take that very hands-off approach.

The Wikimedia Foundation is mostly concerned with paying the bills, keeping the site online, developing the software that actually powers the encyclopedia and the editing infrastructure and all that, and then trying to contribute and grow the editing community and that type of thing.

But they are pretty hands-off when it comes to editing, which I think is actually quite good. It allows the community to organically develop its own policies and protocols and things like that, and without the Wikimedia Foundation sort of putting its thumb on the scale.

So more practical question, as an editor, what do you do? Is it just editing? The reason I ask this is you've provided me with your Wikipedia editor page, and there's things like on block reblog, blog thanks. What do you do as an editor? What is what are these numbers about? Because it feels like there's kind of a niche social network and inside it.

Yeah, there's a lot that happens behind the scenes besides just opening up a page and writing something new. I do some of that, I do write pages from scratch once in a while, or I'll go in and edit something if a page is missing something or need something. But there's also a whole bunch of other sorts of administrative work I guess that goes on behind the scenes, where I will sometimes patrol articles.

That's sort of what I had described earlier, where people will watch the recent changes to the project and try to just filter out anything that looks abusive or disruptive or honestly just less than productive. Sometimes I try to go around and welcome new editors who are just joining the projects and they need help, and so I'll try to sort of show them the ropes a little bit. And then there's the blocking and deletion and things like that, where people who are known as administrators on the project can block an editor who is regularly being disruptive or delete a page if it doesn't meet the requirements that we have defined in our policies and things like that, and so I do some of that as well.

So how does one become an administrator?

So there's a whole process called Request for Adminship where you either put yourself up, you nominate yourself as a candidate, or someone else who thinks that you would be a good administrator will do so. And then there's a long process where you answer some questions and then the Wikimedia community votes pretty much on whether or not you have the experience, the mindset basically, the right attitude towards contributing, and then there's a vote pretty much and if you pass the threshold, then you become an administrator at that point. So it's something that happens, fairly regularly. I did it in twenty ten, I think but various people go through it pretty often.

Have you seen more people joining as editors or is there more people or less people editing these days?

I would say there's been sort of a slow decline in the number of people who are joining if you look at people who join as like a user and then continue to edit somewhat frequently versus not. I'm not just talking about people who like correct a typo once in a while, but the sort of like regular contributors is sort of yeah, it's either flatlining or declining to some extent. Uh, and it has been for a really long time, and so it's sort of this continual discussion that happens within Wikipedia about what, what do we do about that? How do we encourage more people to join, how do we make the project more welcoming to new people who want to get involved? This is something that I try to focus on as well, just because I think it's really important to not only contribute to the encyclopedia, but make sure that other people are aware that they can and doing so if they have the desire to do so.

Are there training materials? Is there an onboarding process?

There are. In fact, there are many such things that different people have created, and the Wikimedia Foundation themselves has gotten a little more involved in recent years and trying to make that sign up process a little bit more friendly, so when you first create an account, it doesn't just drop you into the editor like “Good luck!” which is kind of what it used to do. Now there's some little widgets and things that will guide you through making your first edit and finding an article that maybe needs some improvement so you can give it a shot. Those types of things are being developed, and then there's community resources to try to encourage people to do the same, which are just created by different editors for various purposes.

Is there any automation?

Yep, there's quite a lot. There are Wikipedia editing bots that perform various tasks, everything from fixing vandalism to introducing archive links so that if a source link goes down, you can still get a copy of that source material, all kinds of things like that. There's anti-spam stuff, where it looks for spammy links and removes it. So yeah, there's quite a bit of automation, both by community members. Some of it's community members who create bots and maintain them. There's also the MediaWiki software itself, which is maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation, but they don't really do much of the editing side of things, so most of the editing stuff is community based.

Has there been any discussion of AI or integrating AI or anything like that.

There has been quite a lot of discussion of AI, and it's mostly been around two things. The sourcing situation. So can you consider AI generated material to be a reliable source? Generally speaking? The answer has been, know that you have to be very cautious when typing something into ChatGPT, because a lot of times you'll get back something that is not accurate at all.

And then there's also been discussion around can you use AI generated content, as can you tell ChatGPT or something like that to go make an edit for can you use content that ChatGPT has written, as content that you put into a Wikipedia article? And the answer there has largely been yeah, you can, but you have to be really careful about it, and you have to sort of take full responsibility for anything that you have generated and put into a Wikipedia article, because it's still up to you to fact check it and things like that.

As far as integrating AI into Wikipedia to generate article content or something more generally, that is not something that the community has seemed particularly interested in doing, and I suspect it would introduce a lot of problems. There were some sort of past attempts at doing things sort of like that in the translation space, where the Wikimedia software would try to encourage people to translate articles from one version of Wikipedia to another, and that was a largely unsuccessful experiment, I think, where too many people were just pasting in machine translation or not doing the right kinds of quality control. So we have to be really cautious around that type of thing.

So I think it was a year or two ago Elon Musk said he wanted to buy Wikipedia for a billion dollars. Just so make clear that is impossible.

Right, yeah, I mean Wikipedia is not for sale. I don't think there's any genuine interest on either side for Wikipedia to be sold. I think Elon is also particularly not interested in it. He just has a long-standing beef with Wikipedia. Which understandably because they tell the truth, which is not a big thing for mister Musk. Now, so you've done a lot of advocacy recently about editing and saying why people should become editors, but I kind of want to hear your sales pitch. Why should the average person edit Wikipedia?

Well, I mean, I think, honestly, there's probably one hundred answers for that, and it depends very much on the person. I do it because I love it. I find it really enjoyable. Some people do it because they think that the resource of Wikipedia is incredibly important and needs to be maintained. that's also a factor for me. But I think it's okay to also just do it just for fun. I think you don't have to have some big driving motivation behind it. But I do think that, especially now as the web is somewhat under threat from this sort of AI generated junk that's being becoming so prevalent in search results in any particular website that you go visit, it's really important to make sure that there is this human reviewed material out there that is as high quality as possible and that really values the quality of information, accuracy, reliability, neutral point of view, those types of things above just spitting out as much content as possible with little regard for its accuracy or reliability.

And so I think that now more than ever, projects like Wikipedia are incredibly important, and maintaining them as other parts of the web begin to degrade, is going to only be become, a more important thing to do. It kind of feels like as this prevalence of AI generated content grows, we kind of need user generated content well, never as it's being killed off. Yeah, it's kind of ironic, I think, that we're starting to see this proliferation of this AI generated content that's really just quantity over quality, and in doing so, it's sort of killing the quality content that is often the source material for the AI itself.

We're seeing this decline in journalism, for example, where some outlets are laying off their media teams, and instead hoping that they can use AI to just churn out articles. But those same AI tools that they're using were trained on journalism. They were trained on the types of stuff that is no longer being created, and so you end up with this potentially really circular situation where AI could start ingesting AI generated content and entering this really massive quality spiral. I think that is what Jason Sadowski calls Habsburg AI.

Yeah, the inbreeding about it, keep going, sorry.

Yeah, no, it's a great term. He always has great terms for things. But yeah, I mean I think that really people are very excited about AI, and they believe that AI will just continue to get better and better and better without really thinking that critically about what is required to create like a high quality large language model, and something like Wikipedia is honestly, incredibly important to creating any quality large language model. I mean, I think every large language model out there pretty much uses Wikipedia as a source material.

Yeah, ChatGPT was trained on it, right.

Yeah, I mean I think basically all of them were. And so if you enter that very circular loop where that training material gets worse and worse and worse, I think AI will get worse and worse and worse. And so making sure that there is very high quality information out there that is not being in shittified, to use Corey Doctorow's term, by this AI junk that's being created is I think very important just to general knowledge, but also I think it should be very important to those people who care so much about AI.

Yeah. It's ironic as well because the sources of information we've come to rely upon, like Google and Being to some extent I guess, are so dependent on user generated content. But really it just they've choked it. They're choking it as we speak. Is Wikipedia seeing less traffic or more traffic? Is it? How is this affecting it?

I honestly don't know. I guess I could look at Wikipedia traffic that's my dub. Yeah, But I mean I think there is, to some extent, with Google and these various software projects that ingest Wikipedia data, sometimes they do draw that attention away from the source, where they'll just highlight the first paragraph of Wikipedia and search results and people never click through to the Wikipedia article. That's a pretty common phenomenon. You know. News sources are sometimes upset about that also.

But I think one thing that's useful about Wikipedia is that it doesn't really have the same incentive to draw clicks as an ad supported news source might, and so.

To be selected on search.

But it is, yeah, exactly, it’s like to some extent, as long as the information is getting out there, we don't really care how and so I guess there's some question of like, is it actually bad for traffic to be redirected away from Wikipedia? I could probably make that argument in both directions.

Well, Molly, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

You can find me at mollywhite.net. I also write a newsletter at citationneeded.news.

Well, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

Now, listeners, I'm going to do something a little bit off based, if you will. Molly and I just talked about Wikipedia, and I realize it feels weird to advocate for something on an objective media platform, though I think we all agree that I have my biases and my things that I care about more and that I'm angry about, and I think we all do. But I must state how important keeping Wikipedia alive is. This platform, despite the fact that's editable by everyone, is more reliable than Google is at the moment, it's more reliable than a lot of media publications. As we speak, the user generated Internet is being destroyed, it is being sold off for parts, it's being turned into a rot economic catastrophe. Something like Wikipedia is truly important. Really. Again, it's weird to advocate for any product or thing, but I encourage you, and I know it's weird to say, but please go and edit Wikipedia. Please sit down and edit whatever it is. Learn the ropes. This is one of the few community-organized Internet things that actually exist that we can help with. It's a thing you can do today to change the Internet, to fight for what's right.

And yeah, these publications are funded in part by tech publications. The Wikimedia Foundation has taken money from Google. But as you've heard from Molly, who I trust deeply and you should do, they do have a firewall between them. This is one way you can fight back, and I implore you to do so, even if it's one editor, even if it's one page. You keep an eye on, follow the training documents, join the party. Please try. I understand that it's impossible to ask for money, and I should never do so, but your time, your attention on Wikipedia is genuinely important. It sounds silly. I know we've all kind of thought it's just Wikipedia, anyone can edit it.

But I'm worried. I'm worried for the Internet as it stands. I'm worried the Internet sources are going to become more centralized, more focused on the big take platforms. Please protect what's left of the good Internet. Edit Wikipedia today. I'm serious. At times, it can feel a little hopeless out there. It can feel like there's nothing we can do against these trillion-dollar enterprises, and to some extent, there's nothing we can do. We really can't. We can't stop Sundar Pashai, we can't stop Sam Ortman. What we can do is help reinforce what made the Internet great. What we can do is contribute to open source.

What we can do is edit Wikipedia, even a little, Even those little contributions matter. This is what made the Internet what it is today, and we can fight for it and we can protect it. Thank you for listening, thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or check out betteroffline.com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[rnu]

Well, you know, that was pretty, you know, boring.

t

P.S. Lest you think I am being, you know, mean — I count 145 instances of "you know" in an interview that runs less than 36 minutes, which works out to one "you know" every 15 seconds.

Link
From Disjointed (T-H-L).
P.S. I can't believe people are still recording TV with cameras. Probably using a device that could just stream and save it.

[Kraken]

It suffers from the usual problems of such things. It comes across as sheer propaganda. The are no facts or statistics, just vague claims and blind assertions. Does she even know the true state of play on Wikipedia. The true size of problems such as content that doesn't even have a source, let alone a source Wikipedia considers reliable? Or that doesn't reflect the source given? And how long, on average, a typical source-text mismatch persists on Wikipedia?

In my experience, the media facing Wikipedians don't care about such things. Don't even bother to avail themselves of the facts and stats. Why? Because the project is so complex, the dumbshit interviewers don't even know these are pertinent questions to ask the propagandists. The recruiters. These are how you test the truth of claims such as..."there is the possibility that whatever you're reading is not reliable." and "the content on Wikipedia tends to be very high quality".

In accepting these claims as read, going on to advocate for Wikipedia even, makes it pretty clear the interviewer has no idea just how much of a fool is being made of by "the creator of the Citation Needed newsletter".

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as they say in Wikipedia. I'd settle for a single piece of evidence.

All we get here is "the possibility."

That could mean anything. It's a possibility that I walk out the door today and get kidnapped by a Martian. It's also possible that I go to the supermarket. I know which one of those possibilities more closely reflects the risk someone takes when reading Wikipedia in the expectation of being served with content that is "well sourced, it's coming from high quality, reputable publications, and that it is meeting the criteria that Wikipedia puts in place."

I mean, it's not like it's even hard to get a handle on the quality of Wikipedia. There's literally a button on every page that makes it possible for any armchair enthusiast hosting a podcast to get a rough idea of it's quality.

Special:Random (T-H-L)

Click it ten times, and see what you get.....

* Pigskin 621 A.D. (T-H-L), a 1990 arcade game.

Specific quality issue: Includes a totally unsourced but very dubious claim (WP:V)......

At one time, the makers of Pigskin 621 A.D. offered tickets to the Super Bowl as part of a sweepstakes promotion associated with the arcade game.

General quality issue: Article is mostly a plot summary, offering little analysis and no cultural context. Even though it already has a source whose title suggests it contributed to the violent urges of American children.

Conclusion: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a Video Game Fandom Wiki. It would require significant work to improve this article to meet the minimum quality standards for video game articles, let alone any higher standard.

------

* Alexis Caron (Lower Canada politician) (T-H-L) (died 1827)

Specific quality issue: The primary reason why anyone would care who this long dead person was....

He was named King's Counsel in 1812.

....isn't mentioned until the third last sentence (WP:FIRST)

General quality issue: This is a very short biography (WP:ARTICLE), without a single inline citation (WP:BLP), and only one given reference (WP:N).

Conclusion: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a database of biographical dictionaries entries of obscure historical figures. It would require significant work to improve this biography to meet the minimum quality standards for a biography, let alone any higher standard.

----

* Moderantism (T-H-L), 19th Century Spanish political ideology

Specific quality issue: This article contains a list of people identified with this movement ("Moderados"), but with no clear inclusion criteria and very little sourcing, with some entries who don't even have an article (WP:V, WP:CRUFT, WP:LIST)

General quality issue: This is a relatively long article which features entire sections that lack a single source. (WP:V) It's pitched at a high, possibly graduate level reader, with a discussion style, even though it is poorly formatted. (WP:ARTICLE, WP:STYLE) Only a handful of references are given, some of which are being quoted at extreme length. (WP:CITE)

Conclusion: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a textbook written by undergrads for other undergrads. It would require significant work to improve this article to meet the minimum quality standards for political science topics, let alone any higher standard.

-----

* Eloise Stenner (T-H-L), field hockey player.

Specific quality issue: Includes an unsourced claim about a living person's current employment....

She plays club hockey in the Women's England Hockey League Premier Division for Surbiton.

General quality issue: This is a biography of a living person with only one source given, and that specific url appears to have moved (if it was ever correctly cited). So this is currently an entirely unsourced biography of a living person. (WP:BLP)

Conclusion: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a database of professional sports people whose inclusion on grounds which, while not arbitrary, are so generous that they may never allow for such articles to meet the minimum quality standards Wikipedia sets for biographies of living persons.

-----

* Government House, Chișinău (T-H-L), a building in Moldova

Specific quality issue: This article has a collection of images of somewhat questionable relevance (WP:GALLERY)

General quality issue: Despite being a very short article with four references, there is nothing to immediately indicate why this particular building is notable. (WP:N) Based on the title and the info box entry for "tenant", it's quite possible this is the building that houses the executive branch of the government of Moldova. But I can't be sure, it would require me to leave Wikipedia to do my own research. Although Wikipedia has no requirement to use English language sources, you would hope they could find one to at least support this basic fact in English.

Conclusion: Wikipedia is not a very good encyclopedia. It would take minimal effort to turn this into a minimally useful stub article on a presumably notable building. Nobody gives a shit. It's Moldova. It's worth noting you can't even verify the fact Chișinău (T-H-L) is "the capital and largest city of Moldova.[8]" very easily using Wikipedia. And I don't know. It's Moldova! /John Oliver.

----

* Giuseppe Fabrizio (T-H-L), Australian electrical engineer

Specific quality issue: Despite being a short biography, the primary claim to notability is yet again left to the end of the page (WP:MOSFIRST).

Fabrizio was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016[2] for his contributions to adaptive array signal processing in over-the-horizon radar systems.

General quality issue: This is a short biography of a living person that is exclusively sourced to the IEEE, the very institution this person is a member of and whose selection criteria of Fellow is what presumably underpins their reason for inclusion in Wikipedia. It is barely more than a reprint of their IEEE bio page.

Conclusion: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a database of professional engineers whose inclusion is dictated on grounds which, while not arbitrary, are so generous that they may never allow for such articles to meet the minimum quality standards Wikipedia sets for biographies of living persons.

----

* Fairmont Orchid (T-H-L), a hotel in Hawaii

Specific quality issue: The article features a picture captioned "pool at dusk, 2006". It's barely legible personal snap, and whether you believe this really is an image of this hotel's pool in 2006 as is claimed, rather depends on whether you think random Flickr uploaders are reliable photojournalists.

General quality issue: This is a short article about a "luxury" hotel that contains very little information about the hotel itself, and most importantly lacks any indication why it is included in Wikipedia at all (WP:NOTE).

Conclusion: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a random collection of articles that often have the feel of either (exceedingly poor quality) promotional material, or (exceedingly poor quality) obsessive documentation of the world around us, for no clear purpose.

-----

* Gusinje (T-H-L), a town in Montenegro

Specific quality issue: The article includes a list of notable people without a single reference or any clear inclusion criteria (WP:BLP, WP:LIST).

General quality issue: This is a seemingly quite good article, by Wikipedia's very lax standards. It's well structured and seems to be referenced to some extent, with proper sources too. It would certainly take a lot of work to figure out how much of it might be false, either totally made up or biased. It is odd that Wikipedia has such a good article for a town with only 1,673 residents in 2011. I fear the reason for that might be it's location and history. It apparently had a crucial role in the the Albanian National Awakening (T-H-L),

a period throughout the 19th and 20th century of a cultural, political and social movement in the Albanian history where the Albanian people gathered strength to establish an independent cultural and political life as well as the country of Albania.

Conclusion: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia in the traditional sense. It's often hard to figure out why they have better articles on some things compared to other similar things, such as random small towns, and the reasons for this disparatity are often not very nice.

----

* Council for European Studies (T-H-L), a non-profit academic organization based at Columbia University

Specific quality issue: The article currently features the entirely unsourced and very in-universe sounding 16 item list section that begins with the line...

The following research networks are currently supported by the Council for European Studies:

General quality issue: This is an article about an academic organization which is entirely sourced to itself, making bold claims about itself. Literally every single one of the thirteen references provided, are to the organization's own website.

Conclusion: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a low risk way to promote your organization in a pseudo-academic way that gives a thin veneer of respectability and independent recognition. It would require significant work to improve this article to meet the minimum quality standards for non-profit organizations, let alone any higher standard.

-----

* Sisurcana pascoana (T-H-L), a species of moth

Specific quality issue: The article has surprisingly vague language for a scientific topic:

The wingspan is about 22 mm

General quality issue: This is a 29 word article about a species of moth. It's unclear why anyone would be reading it, or who can even make use of it but the kind of experts who might understand whether the two given references, an academic paper and moth database, are even being used correctly.

Conclusion: Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a catalogue database of insect species. Worth noting the Wikimedia Foundation already has a project for that, WikiSpecies, "The free species directory that anyone can edit."

So after just an hour or two of work, I have shown Wikipedia is by and large full of short articles that have major and very basic quality issues. Most of which call into question whether Wikipedia even is an encyclopedia, let alone whether it can be trusted.

And quite disturbingly I found that it is 20% a clear and blatant violation of its supposedly most sacrosanct quality standard - the responsible handling of material concerning living people. More broadly, the rest appears to still be what most criticism has always said it is, and specifically studies have even identified as flaws. Wikipedia is a bloated and sometimes indiscriminate collection of trivia skewed by systemic biases, of dubious value and questionable origin.

A place where even the content that could be reasonably be said to be educational, and long enough to be of actual use to a student, suffers from the fact it is clearly being written by students. Students not even clever enough to edit Wikipedia very well. Unable to grok the manual.

Interestingly, the Moderantism article wasn't as I first assumed, a long abandoned student written article. It's a very recent creation, literally days old, translated from Spanish Wikipedia. Who presumably have their own historical problems with poor quality student editing, leaving articles like this abandoned.

From the user page of its creator Srr9810 (T-C-L)......

Disclaimer: I receive a small stipend from the Open Knowledge Association (OKA) to support my work on Wikipedia. However, the contributions I make are my own.

OKA is a non-profit organization that seeks to improve the coverage of content from non-anglophone countries, which is typically underrepresented in Wikipedia. Translators are free to work on any article they want, without obligations towards OKA. More information about OKA can be found here.

So it appears even the work of correcting systemic biases in the Wikipedia universe isn't being done organically. It needs the support of a non-profit. Which presumably gets its funding from the likes of Google, not the average citizen giving up their cup of coffee.

But now that this article is here in English Wikipedia (the problem of me having highlighted it aside), it's still highly likely there's nobody left on Wikipedia who cares enough to lick it into shape this side of the AI apocalypse. The students have their Tik Toks. The experts and retirees were never really interested. And for a general editor, it's a hard slog. It's perfect for the WikiEdu initiative. But that doesn't seem to be working too well.

This is why the propagandists avoid facts and statistics. They do not paint Wikipedia in a good light. Especially not when comparing it to a resource like Encyclopedia Britannica. Which still exists. Not that these people seem to realize that.

[Randy from Boise]

THANK YOU to Mr. Zoloft for the edit.

Here is the money quote for me:

So you've edited Wikipedia for about eighteen years. I think the simplest question is why do you still do it? Why did you start? Why do you continue? Well?

I started because I was a curious kid who discovered that I could and that was exciting for me. I think there are just some people out there who have like a very specific type of brain where Wikipedia just like sort of tickles it just right, and like doing that kind of editing and curation just appeals to me. I find it really enjoyable. But I also think that, the project is a really wonderful, uh creation, and I think it provides a really important service to the people who have access to it, which is almost anyone.

That nails something I have long contended — that "Wikipedians are born, not made."

If true, if there are "people out there who have a very specific type of brain where Wikipedia just sort of tickles it just right," this has an important implication, to wit:

Timbo's Rule 30. Edit-a-Thons do not work. Long-term Wikipedian content people are simply not "made" by assembling random crews at a university for a few hours one afternoon and feeding them pizza. (Sept. 2019)

The issue becomes: how does one find these people who are, by nature or nurture, hardwired as potential Wikipedians?

I don't at this moment have a great answer for that, but I do sincerely believe that is the great question.

t

P.S. I will also further theorize that the fact that such a high percentage of Wikipedians are male despite a decade of concerted effort by WMF and the community itself to 50-50 things out a little is not accidental. Nor is it likely accidental that seemingly such a high percentage of Wikipedians are on the autism spectrum.

That's a super un-Kumbaya way to look at things. Fluffy bunny rainbow sunshine isn't gonna move the editor count a whit.

[Vigilant]

I think there are just some people out there who have like a very specific type of brain where Wikipedia just like sort of tickles it just right, and like doing that kind of editing and curation just appeals to me. I find it really enjoyable.

What a verbose way to say, "autism."

[Randy from Boise]

I think there are just some people out there who have like a very specific type of brain where Wikipedia just like sort of tickles it just right, and like doing that kind of editing and curation just appeals to me. I find it really enjoyable.

What a verbose way to say, "autism."

Close, but not exactly. I think it has something to do with the brain's production of dopamine, but I'm just spitballin'....

t

[Randy from Boise]

There is probably something also to the notion of building that is part of the allure of Wikipedia to Wikipedians.

I'd be super-curious to learn how many Wikipedians are hardcore collectors. To me, at least, there seems to be a really close parallel to WP content-building and collection-building. It generates a similar brain-tickle, to adapt GW's term.

And collectors also like to share their collections, that's another little brain-tickle. There is some aspect of collection-sharing that is intrinsically part of Wikipedia development.

t

P.S. Bear in mind, this ramble is about content writers. The power-trippers are another category of brains.

[Vigilant]

There is probably something also to the notion of building that is part of the allure of Wikipedia to Wikipedians.

I'd be super-curious to learn how many Wikipedians are hardcore collectors. To me, at least, there seems to be a really close parallel to WP content-building and collection-building. It generates a similar brain-tickle, to adapt GW's term.

And collectors also like to share their collections, that's another little brain-tickle. There is some aspect of collection-sharing that is intrinsically part of Wikipedia development.

t

P.S. Bear in mind, this ramble is about content writers. The power-trippers are another category of brains.

For them, the endorphin producing cells are wired to cruelty and control.

[Randy from Boise]

There is probably something also to the notion of building that is part of the allure of Wikipedia to Wikipedians.

I'd be super-curious to learn how many Wikipedians are hardcore collectors. To me, at least, there seems to be a really close parallel to WP content-building and collection-building. It generates a similar brain-tickle, to adapt GW's term.

And collectors also like to share their collections, that's another little brain-tickle. There is some aspect of collection-sharing that is intrinsically part of Wikipedia development.

t

P.S. Bear in mind, this ramble is about content writers. The power-trippers are another category of brains.

For them, the endorphin producing cells are wired to cruelty and control.

I am afraid you are right. And there is a big gender correlation there, almost certainly.

t

[Kraken]

It's no more complicated than Wikipedia was addictive, but not nearly as addictive as having social media in your palm. The first iPhone was released in 2007. Wikipedia peaked in 2008. The facebook was going viral just as Wikipedia peaked, but its users did look rather sad to normal folk (non-nerds), chained to a monitor watching other people live their lives.

To many nerds of that era I guess, it felt less embarrassing to say you were building an encyclopedia. And to be fair, it was for a while there looking like this Wikipedia thing might actually work. We know differently now. It's now a very sad thing to be a first generation Wikipedian. You have to say absolutely delusional things like "the content on Wikipedia tends to be very high quality", and probably believe it. Have to believe it.

Quite why anyone joined post peak, is the real mystery. It's informative to see things like the Clovermoss survey, and see how few of those people genuinely believe they're changing the world, much less saving it. Newcomers are still hooked because they look something up, usually for really quite trivial unencyclopedic reasons. They notice an error, and try to fix it. They don't typically go on to be Rockstar Wikipedia editors churning out Featured Articles or fixing major issues like referencing at a rate that genuinely makes a difference. Which was of course true of Wikipedians in the peak years too.

[The Blue Newt]

link

It's no more complicated than Wikipedia was addictive, but not nearly as addictive as having social media in your palm. The first iPhone was released in 2007. Wikipedia peaked in 2008. The facebook was going viral just as Wikipedia peaked, but its users did look rather sad to normal folk (non-nerds), chained to a monitor watching other people live their lives.

To many nerds of that era I guess, it felt less embarrassing to say you were building an encyclopedia. And to be fair, it was for a while there looking like this Wikipedia thing might actually work. We know differently now. It's now a very sad thing to be a first generation Wikipedian. You have to say absolutely delusional things like "the content on Wikipedia tends to be very high quality", and probably believe it. Have to believe it.

Quite why anyone joined post peak, is the real mystery. It's informative to see things like the Clovermoss survey, and see how few of those people genuinely believe they're changing the world, much less saving it. Newcomers are still hooked because they look something up, usually for really quite trivial unencyclopedic reasons. They notice an error, and try to fix it. They don't typically go on to be Rockstar Wikipedia editors churning out Featured Articles or fixing major issues like referencing at a rate that genuinely makes a difference. Which was of course true of Wikipedians in the peak years too.

Asked and answered: link

[Yngvadottir]

Ooh, nice discussion developed! I have to open my big mouth now, but I'm sorry, too many different posts I'd want to quote and too many crashes, so I'm not going to assemble quote boxes.

It seems Molly White is not a good spokesperson in unedited audio. But one thing she is, is an example of a prominent Wikipedian (and a vocal one) who's female. I've said before that I consider "Wikipedia editors are overwhelmingly male" to be a myth nurtured by the WMF for its own purposes based on its own flawed research, so I'll repeat that now. But whatever the statistical truth (and I suspect the sex ratio differs depending on geographic location and even to some extent age), when alluding to that widespread assumption it doesn't do to ignore the sex of those prominent Wikipedians who are female, esp. when they've emerged as spokespeople, and especially when discussing an interview with one of them. (And Gorillawarfare (T-C-L) isn't the only one; for instance, Rosiestep (T-C-L) recently came up in another discussion.)

The autism thing that Vigilant raises in response to Randy is also shopworn. These days, the autism "spectrum" as popularly discussed is so broad, almost anyone who isn't an avid clubber can be shoehorned into it. And Wikipedia is more accurately seen as a honeypot for people on the spectrum, then they run into bad trouble because they have problems with the social backend, especially given it's text-based, which can be deceptive. (I won't mention any names.) Anyway, I'm bad at armchair diagnoses of head conditions, partly because I grew up considering them rude, but wouldn't OCD also be a useful concept?

Which brings me to a larger point: yes, Kraken, I agree with the substance of the view you express in a thoroughly hostile manner, that the types of people attracted to Wikipedia editing have changed over time. In the first flush, they were clearly mostly going to be people who started articles on the Atlantic Ocean and Impressionism, and a little later, participated in efforts to identify "vital articles". But possibly from the very beginning, the project was also attractive to fixers: both people who saw a typo or a factual error (famously the pipeline to getting involved in article writing, but for some people, that's pretty much all they do) and people who wanted to code (and less famously but importantly, the more capable of those largely didn't subsequently go to work for the WMF, both because it doesn't pay as much as decent programmers can get, and because it sees itself as above the volunteers, particularly in IT, so it hires from outside and shuts down things like Toolserver).

Yes, the projects all draw people in by getting them addicted, and yes, the personal narratives that Clovermoss has collected illustrate that. (Yes, I'm hopelessly addicted.) But it was never an addiction to article creation or even to writing for everyone, and I think it's clear that that's a minority motivation now, and has been so for a long time. For one thing, as Vigilant points out, there are the ambitious and authoritarian people. For another, the promotional editors and POV pushers tend to have quite a limited focus: creating and tending a walled garden, adding lots of references to a group of writers, puffing up the coverage of their political party or making the coverage of their country or political philosophy as adulatory as possible, or even just writing an autobiography. For another, disparagement of "content creators" isn't just code for Eric Corbett and friends.

There's a real sense in some quarters that people who write a lot of articles are stressing the quality maintenance system. Partly this arises from real disagreements over notability, and the ongoing problem of retroactively imposing standards of verifiability (I understand from discussions on Iridescent's talk page as well as here that when references, or at least sources, started to be expected around 2007, it was a big shock and some editors left). But you can see it also in the jokey WikiDragon page; editors who make lots of big, bold edits as fire-breathing monsters that knights go out to slay? Hmm. German Wikipedia evinces this attitude to a ridiculous extreme, or did: new articles are discouraged except from experienced editors, because those experienced editors have to spend time checking them.

Not unrelated, there's the meme that the encyclopaedia is largely complete and the main focus now should be on improvement and maintenance of existing articles.The two are not mutually exclusive, and the WMF contradictarilly promoted that at the same time as promoting getting more women and more people from under-represented populations to edit so that they would create articles on topics the existing editors hadn't thought to create because bias. But that viewpoint also arises naturally when someone encounters the encyclopaedia as it is now, considerably larger than any previous encyclopaedia and containing whole classes of articles that no previous encyclopaedia included. And very far removed from its original high percentage of editors who like writing articles (I may be unusual even among those in never having run out of article ideas—if it weren't for Framgate, I would still be writing 2 or more a month).

The thing is, "contributing to the encyclopaedia" takes many forms, and not only do people see it in a variety of ways, the variety of ways has become greater over time. There are different kinds of nerds and geeks—I'm a book nerd, otherwise known as an absent-minded professor. And yes, there are generational differences. The Blue Newt, since you linked to XKCD 386, here's a link to 2111, which I see as relevant on many levels, not least the assumption of the cellphone generation that we of the PC generation don't use the internet similarly, only on decent-sized screens (which seems to me to be the same assumption you're making about social media in people's palms, Kraken). The common element here and on other forums is "someone is wrong on the internet"; the common element on Wikipedia is just the edit button—modifying a corpus of published text. Randy, on the whole I agree with you, Wikipedians are born not made; not everyone feels the burning itch to correct typos on the internet, or in paper publications (I considered several times tearing off the front page of the Sunday New York Times, marking it up in red pen, and delivering it to their offices with a résumé and cover letter; the main reason I didn't is I understood they required their copyeditors to also be fact checkers, which did not interest me at all back then).

But I'd rephrase it as "lured in". External inducement doesn't work (even, demonstrably, for getting competent paid editors). When somebody posted to an e-list I was on, in 2001 or 2002, suggesting we all edit Wikipedia to mould its coverage, creating an encyclopaedia sounded boring. (:Þ) But neither the fact that Wikipedia editing is attractive to nerds and geeks—including people on the spectrum—nor the fact that there are a variety of activities included in editing Wikipedia and they appeal to a wide variety of people are dark crevices in the underbelly of Wikipedia. They make it unusual, and are good things about it.

Edit to above after adding 2½ dozen superannuated eggs to the compost: I should probably have said "drawn in" rather than "lured in" and "the sucking end of the pipeline" rather than just "the pipeline".

[TheSpacebook]

It seems Molly White is not a good spokesperson in unedited audio. But one thing she is, is an example of a prominent Wikipedian (and a vocal one) who's female. I've said before that I consider "Wikipedia editors are overwhelmingly male" to be a myth nurtured by the WMF for its own purposes based on its own flawed research, so I'll repeat that now. But whatever the statistical truth (and I suspect the sex ratio differs depending on geographic location and even to some extent age), when alluding to that widespread assumption it doesn't do to ignore the sex of those prominent Wikipedians who are female, esp. when they've emerged as spokespeople, and especially when discussing an interview with one of them. (And Gorillawarfare (T-C-L) isn't the only one; for instance, Rosiestep (T-C-L) recently came up in another discussion.)

What is the actual data on the amount of male:female editors? How can it be certain? Everything I’ve read about this is just mere assumption, and attempts to profile people based on their edits to stereotypically gendered subjects. I find it odd that people on Wikipedi(a/ocracy) assume I’m male, and have only referred to me using male pronouns, and titles like "Mr".

[Zoloft]

It seems Molly White is not a good spokesperson in unedited audio. But one thing she is, is an example of a prominent Wikipedian (and a vocal one) who's female. I've said before that I consider "Wikipedia editors are overwhelmingly male" to be a myth nurtured by the WMF for its own purposes based on its own flawed research, so I'll repeat that now. But whatever the statistical truth (and I suspect the sex ratio differs depending on geographic location and even to some extent age), when alluding to that widespread assumption it doesn't do to ignore the sex of those prominent Wikipedians who are female, esp. when they've emerged as spokespeople, and especially when discussing an interview with one of them. (And Gorillawarfare (T-C-L) isn't the only one; for instance, Rosiestep (T-C-L) recently came up in another discussion.)

What is the actual data on the amount of male:female editors? How can it be certain? Everything I’ve read about this is just mere assumption, and attempts to profile people based on their edits to stereotypically gendered subjects. I find it odd that people on Wikipedi(a/ocracy) assume I’m male, and have only referred to me using male pronouns, and titles like "Mr".

Well, we don't have a 'Preferred Pronouns' entry in our profile. Perhaps we should.

[Kraken]

Fixing an error has always been the hook, for every generation. Building an encyclopedia has never been the main driver, only an excuse. The very fact so few people even care about the very belated effort to identify Vital Articles, and more still deride it, is proof of that.

Articles like Atlantic Ocean (T-H-L) and Imressionism (T-H-L) were created in Wikipedia's pre-history, well before it went viral. Both were created in 2001 and yet neither is even a Good Article much less Featured. This is the truth behind the claims of Molly. We can all see what Molly White (T-H-L) means when she says Wikipedia is important, so get involved. Save it!.

Does Molly even realize things are so bad now, their priorities so conflicted, there are certain articles where a newcomer literally isn't allowed to even make a comment, By Order of the Management. But that talk page isn't protected. They still see an edit button. Oh for sure, they did this to prevent disruption. A psychoanalyst might have a different view.

The current status quo is not going to result in an encyclopedia anyone can trust. Molly will forever come across as totally deluded. Trolling even. Certainly dishonest by means of a lack of candour and clarity. A political operative. A representative of the Wikipedia Party. Perhaps that's a good way to picture it. No politician has ever admitted to spinning, much less spreading propaganda.

These people, if not the vast majority of Wikipedia's active editors, couldn't really give a monkeys that clicking Random Article ten times revealed not one but two BLPs that don't just have issues, they are fundamental violators of their most sacred policy. Because they're not doing a damn thing about it.

They're playing. Fiddling. Signalling. Wasting everyone's time, including their own. The reason Rosie's name came up recently, proved that in a very clear and obvious way. They're happy in their delusions. Perhaps don't even sufficiently know the policies themselves, such is the insanity of Wikipedia now.

[TheSpacebook]

Well, we don't have a 'Preferred Pronouns' entry in our profile. Perhaps we should.

Also on this, which phpBB version are you running? I think some threads like “Crap articles” and “Personal touches” could benefit if they were flipped, and sorted with newest at the top, but discussion threads stay as is.

[rnu]

It seems Molly White is not a good spokesperson in unedited audio. But one thing she is, is an example of a prominent Wikipedian (and a vocal one) who's female. I've said before that I consider "Wikipedia editors are overwhelmingly male" to be a myth nurtured by the WMF for its own purposes based on its own flawed research, so I'll repeat that now. But whatever the statistical truth (and I suspect the sex ratio differs depending on geographic location and even to some extent age), when alluding to that widespread assumption it doesn't do to ignore the sex of those prominent Wikipedians who are female, esp. when they've emerged as spokespeople, and especially when discussing an interview with one of them. (And Gorillawarfare (T-C-L) isn't the only one; for instance, Rosiestep (T-C-L) recently came up in another discussion.)

What is the actual data on the amount of male:female editors? How can it be certain? Everything I’ve read about this is just mere assumption, and attempts to profile people based on their edits to stereotypically gendered subjects. I find it odd that people on Wikipedi(a/ocracy) assume I’m male, and have only referred to me using male pronouns, and titles like "Mr".

There are some studies about it. I think they are mostly based on user surveys (which of course introduces the self selection bias of who answers this kind of survey). And I think most of the data is several years old by now. You can find some of it by searching for "Wikipedia" and "gender gap" on google scholar (in a regular search you'll have to wade through the WMF propaganda and its parroting by the media).

[The Blue Newt]

It seems Molly White is not a good spokesperson in unedited audio. But one thing she is, is an example of a prominent Wikipedian (and a vocal one) who's female. I've said before that I consider "Wikipedia editors are overwhelmingly male" to be a myth nurtured by the WMF for its own purposes based on its own flawed research, so I'll repeat that now. But whatever the statistical truth (and I suspect the sex ratio differs depending on geographic location and even to some extent age), when alluding to that widespread assumption it doesn't do to ignore the sex of those prominent Wikipedians who are female, esp. when they've emerged as spokespeople, and especially when discussing an interview with one of them. (And Gorillawarfare (T-C-L) isn't the only one; for instance, Rosiestep (T-C-L) recently came up in another discussion.)

What is the actual data on the amount of male:female editors? How can it be certain? Everything I’ve read about this is just mere assumption, and attempts to profile people based on their edits to stereotypically gendered subjects. I find it odd that people on Wikipedi(a/ocracy) assume I’m male, and have only referred to me using male pronouns, and titles like "Mr".

Well, we don't have a 'Preferred Pronouns' entry in our profile. Perhaps we should.

At the risk of being Athenaeraed off the site, perhaps “birth pronouns” might be more useful.

[rnu]

It seems Molly White is not a good spokesperson in unedited audio. But one thing she is, is an example of a prominent Wikipedian (and a vocal one) who's female. I've said before that I consider "Wikipedia editors are overwhelmingly male" to be a myth nurtured by the WMF for its own purposes based on its own flawed research, so I'll repeat that now. But whatever the statistical truth (and I suspect the sex ratio differs depending on geographic location and even to some extent age), when alluding to that widespread assumption it doesn't do to ignore the sex of those prominent Wikipedians who are female, esp. when they've emerged as spokespeople, and especially when discussing an interview with one of them. (And Gorillawarfare (T-C-L) isn't the only one; for instance, Rosiestep (T-C-L) recently came up in another discussion.)

What is the actual data on the amount of male:female editors? How can it be certain? Everything I’ve read about this is just mere assumption, and attempts to profile people based on their edits to stereotypically gendered subjects. I find it odd that people on Wikipedi(a/ocracy) assume I’m male, and have only referred to me using male pronouns, and titles like "Mr".

Well, we don't have a 'Preferred Pronouns' entry in our profile. Perhaps we should.

At the risk of being Athenaeraed off the site, perhaps “birth pronouns” might be more useful.

You were born with pronouns?

[The Blue Newt]

Well, we don't have a 'Preferred Pronouns' entry in our profile. Perhaps we should.

At the risk of being Athenaeraed off the site, perhaps “birth pronouns” might be more useful.

You were born with pronouns?

As much as I was “born” with a name.

[TheSpacebook]

As much as I was “born” with a name.

That's quite interesting. My pronouns were merely an assumption based on the genitals I was born with, and I got given my name on my birth day. I think it was my first ever birthday present.

[Midsize Jake]

What is the actual data on the amount of male:female editors? How can it be certain? Everything I’ve read about this is just mere assumption, and attempts to profile people based on their edits to stereotypically gendered subjects.

They did an online survey of users back in 2013 or 2014, as I vaguely recall, and they've done a few since then. So if you put any stock in self-reported survey responses, they started with a roughly 85-15 split, and now they're saying it's more like 80-20. There may have been some independent academic studies like what you're describing, but I'd say the folks here usually treat those with even more skepticism than the WMF survey numbers.

Another thing they like to do is talk about the split between male-subject biographies and female-subject biographies in such a way as to confuse people into thinking that's the real "gender gap," as opposed to the one that exists among the users. Some of us think they do this because they believe they have a better chance of closing the biography gender gap eventually than the user one.

I find it odd that people on Wikipedi(a/ocracy) assume I’m male, and have only referred to me using male pronouns, and titles like "Mr".

Well, first of all, I'm the guy who keeps using "Mr." when referring to you, because I do that with everybody who doesn't specifically indicate their gender at some point or other. Its what makes me seem "quicky" and "charming," even though I'm actually neither quirky nor charming. So, if you were to meet me in the "real world" I probably wouldn't do that. As for the rest of us, many of us are aging inveterate grammar-stickler types who go by the old style-manual convention of using male pronouns by default (i.e., when you don't know for certain). And because of the aforementioned 85-15 split, and the fact that most of our members started out on Wikipedia before showing up here, for good or ill it ends up being a safe assumption more often than not.

We can definitely add a "preferred pronouns" field to the user profiles, but the reason we haven't (yet) isn't because we're afraid of being called "woke," it's because Wikipedians — including many who are members here — don't like being asked anything that, if answered, might help identify them.

[Yngvadottir]

In this "Can/should Wikipedia be defended" thread, I'm going to go back to a very negative post and pull out 2 points that I somewhat agree with.

Does Molly even realize things are so bad now, their priorities so conflicted, there are certain articles where a newcomer literally isn't allowed to even make a comment, By Order of the Management. But that talk page isn't protected. They still see an edit button. Oh for sure, they did this to prevent disruption. A psychoanalyst might have a different view.

I do see the increasing number of protected articles, and especially the addition of the two added tiers of extended-confirmed protection and "contentious topics" (previously "discretionary sanctions") as a bad thing. Quite apart from its being a slap in the face to good-faith newbies (not all of whom are either clueless or bad-intentioned), this increasingly unwieldy bureaucratic structure interferes with the wiki-process of hashing out a best possible version, it gives the advantage to skilled and experienced operatives and effectively encourages gaming the system to accrue enough experience and cred, both of which tend to favour POV scheming ... and it makes it difficult to fix even obvious English errors in the articles. (The effect of aggressive gatekeeping can be seen in medical articles, many if not most of which contain passages of not-quite English; in some cases the poor syntax is more of an impediment to understanding than the jargon, which at least can be and often is wiki-linked.) I'm not sure how sincerely you meant this point, Kraken, since several of your posts make it clear that you would prefer an encyclopaedia written with top-down direction, but I'm sincere about regretting this encrustation. And from my perspective it does say something pretty bad about the exercise of power on en.wikipedia that despite vastly improved automated detection and reversion of vandalism, rather than rising to the remaining challenge of POV editing, they've chosen to lock down entire categories of the encyclopaedia.

These people, if not the vast majority of Wikipedia's active editors, couldn't really give a monkeys that clicking Random Article ten times revealed not one but two BLPs that don't just have issues, they are fundamental violators of their most sacred policy. [SNIP] The reason Rosie's name came up recently, proved that in a very clear and obvious way. They're happy in their delusions. Perhaps don't even sufficiently know the policies themselves, such is the insanity of Wikipedia now.

"These people" are not all-knowing, nor operating in lock-step. I think the more useful generalisation is that almost no one—not even long-term power users—edits existing articles holistically. I don't know how common it ever was to look at the whole article rather than just an aspect like whether it's already been updated with the development one just read about that brought one to the article, whether it's referenced to more than a database, whether it has an infobox, whether it has coordinates, whether it's adequately categorised, whether it inappropriately capitalises subjects of study, whether it makes a specific spelling error ... But anecdotally, there are even fewer of us now. Partly because of the decline of the "fix it yourself" ethos (WP:SOFIXIT): I think it's now widely acceptable to just tag an article as an orphan instead of trying to find something to make an incoming link, tag an article as containing bare links instead of covering the links (there are even automated tools for that now!), or even sling it onto the trash pile of draft space. To think that at one time some article creators would leave the article with bare links, or under-categorised, or not linked to from other articles, trusting that other editors would help out, or even so as to give other editors something to do. Different mindset :-)

A couple of steps from the article that was flagged here as careless BLP work by Rosiestep back in 2020—and that as noted in that thread has lots of little edits by bots and non-bots—I found Yosef Yechiel Mechel Lebovits (T-H-L), which has been PRODded by Boleyn (T-C-L). I considered de-PRODding it; he's a prominent rebbe and as such may be notable, and there may be usable sources in the Yiddish article, but I can't read Hebrew-alphabet Yiddish. I scoured the net for sources I could read, distinguishing him from another rebbe with a similar name and noting variant spellings of his own last name, but in English there's more coverage of one or two of his sons and of a now dead brother who served a prison term. (There appears to be bupkis about either brother in the New York Times. Maybe I need a local subscription to see most of the Rockland County news.) And it's very clear his community keeps to itself. in that light, this series of edits delinking stuff, introducing material on the Nikolsburg, Monsey as a whole, and replacing the one source, the bio of him on their website (listed as the external link), with the homepage, may have been completely deliberate and for privacy. (Whereas the article creator, הסרפד (T-C-L) (Hasirpad), also wrote up Nikolsburg, Monsey as a separate article, with several images, clearly wanting the information to be out there.) So since this is a BLP, I wound up endorsing Boleyn's action; I backed out and left the article unedited, not even restoring that source and removing the unreferenced BLP tag. All I did was remove the plausible but unverifiable birth year at Nikolsburg (Hasidic dynasty) (T-H-L). But maybe that series of edits were not intended for privacy, but the editor didn't realise they were making the article deletable by removing the only supporting reference. I've seen similar unintended undermining of articles in many histories, often when someone replaced referenced text with promotional text and left the article with inadequate evidence of notability. And if I had gone ahead and removed the PROD, I'd have not only used that bio to make footnotes, I'd have edited the text to add informational links and to tighten it up based on sources. Not as a "flex" (which I presume in this context means showing off?) but because otherwise it's just a ping-pong match of tag placement, tag removal, eventually redirection (which is what happened to the article on Nikolsburg, Monsey) or an AfD. And much of that goes for non-BLPs, too (this person appears to be still alive but in his 70s). Often I find the PROD or the tag was not correct, the article got mucked up and needed unmucking, or it's a bad translation or doesn't explain the topic clearly. All of which is more a matter of incompetence and laziness than malice or heedless negligence.

And now I need to categorize the photos of Nikolsburg, Monsey over on Commons.