As ever, it falls to serious critics to take the view from 50,000 feet, and see if the claims made on Wikipedia/ocracy have merit, or if they are the same usual BULLSHIT from entitled little pissants who know nothing of their chosen hobby and have long forgotten their own experiences as newcomers.
"Hemiauchenia@Wikipediocracy" wrote:At the very least, the contributions should be vetted by the instructors before being added to mainspace, but I really do think WikiEdu could be completely canned and nothing of value would be lost.
Vigilant@Wikipediocracy wrote:Quite frankly, I suspect if real metrics were done, WikiEdu would clearly show as a net negative for wikipedia and the editors who end up fixing these articles.
Challenge accepted.DFlhb@Wikipediocracy wrote:Check this out. Third-year college "advanced writing class". "a study of the rhetorical process, practice in writing essays, and consideration of teaching composition". Well no, it's just WikiEd. 11 students. 3 did nothing. one added unsourced trivia, two added nonsense (or ChatGPT), one added stuff cited to YouTube, one did a minor copyedit, one added a citation, and one created an unsubmitted draft with two unsourced advert sentences.
I worked back from midnight on December 1st and picked a sequence of consecutive account creations (ignoring automatic creations and accounts blocked as socks) until I had a sample size of ten to compare with the findings of Professor DFlhb of Wikipediocracy University ....
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... &limit=500
23:59, 1 December 2023 User account EminentRising talk contribs was created
23:59, 1 December 2023 User account Skampy12 talk contribs was created
23:58, 1 December 2023 User account Jacobusswart23 talk contribs was created Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit
23:58, 1 December 2023 User account Zolasumption talk contribs was created
23:58, 1 December 2023 User account Teekayfray talk contribs was created
23:57, 1 December 2023 User account Emon1970 talk contribs was created automatically
23:57, 1 December 2023 User account Saraheganncad talk contribs was created Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit
23:57, 1 December 2023 User account RussiaBall12 talk contribs was created
23:57, 1 December 2023 User account Ankitsubedio talk contribs was created Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit)
23:56, 1 December 2023 User account Nebbevien talk contribs was created
Here is what I found...
Seven editors (EminentRising, Skampy12, Jacobusswart23, Teekayfray, Emon1970, RussiaBall12, Nebbevien) did absolutely nothing with their new found freedom of being a registered editor (I checked, they didn't even have any deleted edits).
Three editors made a single edit (and no deleted edits):
* Zolasumption added a See Also section and link to actress Ann Dvorak to the biography of actress Ann Rutherford. It isn't immediately obvious why a reader should be told of this association. It feels like a test/suggested edit. I'd maybe even pure silliness, given a subsequent edit to Ann Rutherford was another new user adding a link to actress Anne Baxter. It is hard to tell because a "Recent Changes patroller" Karl334 just blindly reverted the addition of Anne Baxter, but not Ann Dvorak.
* Saraheganncad made an edit to Palestinian artist Emily Jacir with the summary "Added an achievement by the artist". It reads "In 2023 Jacir was awarded an honorary doctorate in fine art from the National College of Art & Design Dublin." Within three minutes, it has been reverted by Yoshi24517 (40,000 edits, Wikipeidan since 2013), with the summary "Reverted edits by Saraheganncad (talk): not providing a reliable source (WP:CITE, WP:RS) (HG) (3.4.12) undo Tags: Huggle Rollback", so clearly an automated edit (and an abuse of Rollback).
* Ankitsubedio starts a new talk page discussion on Virat Kohli, titled "Virat", stating "he is good cricketer of india.and complete his 50 century. Ankitsubedio (talk) 23:59, 1 December 2023 (UTC)" it has not been replied to. At time of writing, the biography has conflicting information, reporting Kohli's number of ODI centures as 49 or 50, depending on where you look. Both numbers are apparently world records.
And that is all she wrote.
So, comparing two sample sizes of ten new recruits to the ranks of registered editor, WikiEdu has a 20% success rate in getting them to make actually useful edits (adding a citation, making a copy edit), and that could rise to 40% depending on whether or not the YouTube citer or the unsourced promo draft creator were doing things which could be turned into useful edits.
Compare that to the ZERO success rate of the wild editing model. And that study revealed that all the problems that programs like WikiEdu and other hand-holding means of on-boarding are designed to avoid, still exist.
Wikipedia is clearly still so amazingly baffling to new users, a whopping 70% don't even make an edit, not even one that needs deleting. It should be noted this 70% failure rate I just measured with a very simple survey, matches what appears to be widely accepted.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... 2-04/Essay
Explaining the rest of that essay, is what happened to the three editors who made an edit.....
Zolasumption may or may not be a useful editor, they may or may not have just vandalised a biography of a dead actress viewed 400 times a day. Nobody really knows or cares. Welcome to a typical edit on Wikipedia.
Saraheganncad is most definitely a useful editor. It took me all of five seconds to find primary source verification that what they added to Wikipedia is true. But because their name is not Jess Wade, who does exactly that kind of edit to that kind of page (sourced invariably to primary sources) day in day out, they didn't get media plaudits or a medal. They got the usual Wikipedia welcome, and It had the usual effect.
Jess Wade was recently out there in the left wing media wondering why it is still very easy to be shocked that notable woman X or notable black guy Y don't have a Wikipedia page. This is why you dumb bitch. Someone taking an interest in keeping the biography of a renowned Palestinian artist up to date, adding information at the first available opportunity, was essentially told to fuck off and don't come back until they are a Wikipedia expert. They did not come back.
You are nothing but a Useful Idiot. The hostility you complained about In left wing newspapers, still exists. Wikipedia are protecting you because you are helping them FOOL THE WORLD into thinking they have changed. People like Giraffe Stapler at Wikipediocracy who are claiming this focus on you and what you represent is an unhealthy obsession of mine, are probably the exact kind of asshole patroller who scares off clearly useful new recruits who could help Wikipedia fix its large gaps in coverage.
Even Ankitsubedio might have been a useful editor. Having someone notice a potential problem with a Wikipedia biography of a legit famous person, and figure out how to start a discussion about it, is no mean feat. Bonus points for this being evidence that Wikipedia is of interest to the brown people on the other side of the world with limited but functional English skills indicating a socio-economic disadvantage. But of course, nobody noticed or cared.
Unsurprisingly, the biography is on permanent lock down, fixable only by trusted editors. If WikiEdu started a program training Indian editors how to keep the biographies of India cricketers internally consistent, people would no doubt laugh at best, or say something deeply racist and offensive at worst.
You're not saying anything now are you, white boys? You Proud and Defensive Editors of the World's Greatest Encyclopedia of the World. Last I checked, India is in the world. The English speaking world.
So, for those who want to pillory WikiEdu as a net negative for Wikipedia, all they have to do is prove that when you scale up the wild model until you get two editors who actually successfully did something useful and went on to make a second edit, that the rest of the editors in that necessarily large catchment group (and according to the SignPost, that could be as high as 10,000 editors) haven't created a comparable amount of clean-up work equivalent to the time it takes to properly deal with 1 editor adding trivia, 2 adding ChatGPT text, 1 adding a YouTube citation and 1 adding an unsuitable draft.
Good luck with that, white boys.
I of course already knew this wouldn't even be close, and anyone who knows Wikipedia/ns just knows that what Vigilant said was PURE CRAP, the product of his deep psychological trauma from having been kidnapped and anally probed by the Foundation one dark and stormy night while he was fiddling with his keyboard in his mother's basement.
But apparently it still needs to be proven.
And I had fun doing it too, reminding me as it did that Wikipedia is an evil place full of evil people and anyone who defends it or the supposed saintly volunteers who are its lifeblood, is also evil.
Stay in school, kids.
Hanging out with the cool kids gets you nowhere. Unless they are so cool they have access to chainsaws and stuff.
Wanna have a look at my chainsaw, rnu?
VROOOM VROOOOOM ZZZZAAAZAAZZAAAZAAZAZAZZAA
