Wikipedia Sucks!

While Midsize Jake of Wikipediocracy wastes his time trying to "beat the Genderdesk Lady to the punch just this one time" by writing about shit that nobody outside the Wikipedia bubble is going to care about, I thought it might interest our readers to learn something about Wikipedia that is pretty significant.

For years, fifteen to be precise, the Wikimedia Foundation, the legal owners of Wikipedia, have tried to convince the world that their non-profit organisation did more than just host an encyclopedia, that they have a bunch of other sites in their movement offering different types of free knowledge that anyone can edit, and they were all theoretically independent of and co-equal to Wikipedia. It is and always was, horseshit.

Primarily because Wikipedia was the first, and has always been by far and away the most popular with users, the public never even really knew there was any other projects, much less even knew what the Foundation was. The press seems to know, but only because regurgitating press releases is basically all they do as far as covering Wikipedia goes, unless something majorly bad happens. In which case the only newsworthy scandals were either about Wikipedia or the owners of Wikipedia, so that hardly helped.

The volunteers in the movement knew, but they were by and large at best apathetic, at worst, entirely hostile to the notion of this family of co-equals, with Wikipedia's editors fighting the unwanted upstarts, or seeing them as garbage dumps, and the editors of the downtrodden sister sites reacting accordingly. The Foundation never tried to act as peacemaker or coordinator, indeed they showed their true colours when they were the first part of the movement to ditch the wiki technology they all run on, in favour of a bespoke website whose contents they have sole control over.

Rather hilariously, while being largely ignorant of the actual sister sites, the public has always been rather persistently confused as to what relationship Wikipedia has to WikiLeaks, and the large number of people who have tried to cash in on the wiki brand by claiming association with Wikipedia where there was none, has included none other than Jimmy Wales with his private company WikiTriubune, which seeks to deliver the last stomp to the head of the already very dead Foundation owned site, Wikinews.

And if anyone still cared to read it, the same confusion might still apply to the supposed critic site Wikipediocracy, although that has less to do with the name and more to do with the fact most of its posters are Wikipedians saying less critical stuff than is now regularly seen inside the cult, mostly directed at the poor old Foundation or the scum at the other sites (and seriously, scum is one of their less offensive words for their brothers in arms). We here at Wikipedia Sucks! have unsurprisingly never been confused with Wikipedia or the Wikipedians.

And so it now appears the Foundation are ready to admit defeat. Rebranding proposals are in the works, and it looks likely the Foundation will seek to rebrand itself as the Wikipedia Foundation, possibly even just Wikipedia, and rename/reposition all the sister sites as being very much smaller and subservient to the super-brand, Wikipedia.

This has all the makings of starting a huge fight within the community, but since the unpaid volunteers will have nothing better to suggest except do nothing, and since the Foundation seems quite ready to admit the status quo really isn't worth persisting with even if it means starting a fight, and since the Foundation are now well used to being screamed at by the community, it seems like the fight will be in vain. And since the rebranding seeks to put Wikipedia front and centre, it is sure to find plenty of support within the large group of Wikipedia editors who have always believed this was the natural order of things.

Those who know how the Wikimedia Foundation operates will be unsurprised to learn two things - a) that they needed external consultants to tell them their current branding strategy was useless, and b) a chief driver of their concern is how brand confusion affects their ability to raise money

While it may be tempting to fear this move as potentially strengthening the cult, I propose it would actually weaken it, since it shows that despite all their recent attempts to push this idea they really are more than an encyclopedia, when it comes down to it, they have no real ambitions other than to keep playing on the massive con-trick that is pretending Wikipedia is a useful starting point for research.

Secondly, there is already an internal groundswell of opposition to using a supposed neutral world encyclopedia as a combatant in the ongoing social-political battles of our time, and this will only harden that opposition, positioning it as the act of Wikipedia.

And significantly, the whole point of them diversifying was because they could see what we can see, or so we thought, that the writing really is on the wall for them if they are really only ever going to be all about supporting and promoting Wikipedia, since it can and will be destroyed either by a superior technology, regulation, or even a distant hope that one day its uselessness as an encyclopedia might be realised by the masses, perhaps in the aftermath of some huge scandal where a kid dies because Alexa gave them bad medical advice. Or even some as yet unseen threat. Single points of failure, and all that.

If they box themselves in, if they retreat into what they think works well for them, then when the time comes, it will be easy to just scoop them up and toss them in the trash, like so much 20th Century junk.

HTD.

Timely example of a Wikipedia Administrator trying to start a "campaign" to destroy a sister site simply because they enforced their own local policy, and not host a copyright violation just because the ignorant big shot from the big city wants them to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =875910982

Taking his ball home, he swears he will never upload anything to the sister site again, putting his own personal feelings above the clear and obvious benefit to the whole movement of him uploading his photos to that sister site, assuming they are of course not copyright violations.

Nothing will be done to the Wikipedia Administrator by his other Wikipedia colleagues of course, certainly not his nominal bosses the Wikipedia ArbCom, except perhaps to be offered congratulations for standing up to those assholes from Eurasia. The Foundation won't do anything either, leaving it up to the volunteers, specifically the Administrators, to protect them from copyright violators in the first instance.

One big happy family, my arse.

yeah they're dumb.

Wikipedia is the only brand name worth anything.

MediaWiki was one of the first wikis to make adding pics and sound clips easy. So it might have made some sense back in the day.

Wikimedia was just nonsense garbage. Confusing.

Wikimedia Commons and WikiSource are good projects. They could be renamed Wikipedia Commons and Wikipedia Source, but then it will be massively confusing that some pics are stored in Wikipedia commons and some are stored on Wikipedia proper. Not that it isn't already confusing.

CrowsNest wrote:If they box themselves in, if they retreat into what they think works well for them, then when the time comes, it will be easy to just scoop them up and toss them in the trash, like so much 20th Century junk.

HTD.

Yeh, that's true of course. It's a 20th Century product and all they are trying to do is to turning the internet back to that 20 Century what is of course a lost battle. And special if you try to do that complete uninformed with a bunch of half crazy Pirate Party puddinheads there in Brussels.

And I said it many times before, it is all because of the law of Statler, every uncontrolled wiki will destroy itself at the long run because of replacement, every total idiot will be replaced by a even bigger idiot till you have a Mdd and Romaine wiki as the absolute bottom-line. I have seen the whole proces with my one eyes happen on WP-NL.
And what the most fascinating in this whole process is, they never give up. It doesn't matter how big the decline is, how hard the wiki-Titanic hits the rocks, they learn nothing out of it. WMF not, and the wiki community's not. They just welcome every time a new, fresh orchestra on board, ignore every evidence there course was wrong, and there they go again! With still the same total idiots on the wheel, on the same wrong course and that happens over and over and over.

Inside WMF is no proces of learning, they are solidified, total fossilised in the 20 century. They just close all there windows and curtains so they don't see the rest of the world and trow anyone overboard who is saying what they don't want to hear and o what a surprise they hit the next iceberg. Over and over and over and over. Harder and harder and harder in the believe the money will flow in for ever.

Wondering how it will work out. Should this just be a form of badge engineering or will they really reform Wikipedia into a modern product what fits in this century? We will see here on sucks and follow the proces in our well known critical, unplugged way.

CrowsNest wrote:Timely example of a Wikipedia Administrator trying to start a "campaign" to destroy a sister site simply because they enforced their own local policy, and not host a copyright violation just because the ignorant big shot from the big city wants them to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =875910982

That kind of petty shit happens around Giano all the time. Every attempt to "reform" Commons has been a shitshow and a flop. Ignore.

Wikimedia Commons and WikiSource are good projects.

They both have a lot of usable content that should be saved. Most of WikiSource isn't original material but I can let that pass. Wiktionary is okay, Wikiversity is 75% shit (at best), and most of the others are useless or dead or might as well be dead.

I've already said that WikiQuote is massively inferior to other quotation sites because of the "house nerd bias". They give people like Douglas Adams and Iain Banks far too much space. Wikinews is an outright embarrassment and they are damned fools to keep it going. But it will probably be kept just because a couple of their resident lunatics want it.

This is all assuming the WMF actually manages to make major changes in their little psychiatric ward of a "community". People will fight it just because they're the craziest ones. No "rational reason" is ever needed.

Classic Kumioko.....

This could also cause some confusion in some cases like Wikidata that doesn't need to be specific of Wikipedia and has a lot of things that in fact aren't in Wikipedia. Making everything Wikipedia-X will make people think all these other projects relate directly to Wikipedia and that will lead to confusion.

All the other projects have purposes outside being adjuncts to Wikipedia. It has never mattered, never entered the public consciousness. A big part of that might be that the vast majority of people involved with any WMF project by simple percentages, i.e. Wikipedians, either don't know themsleves, or actively resist, the idea that the relationship is not a master-slave one.

How many times have we seen a Wikipedian, even the most experienced and longest serving, lose their fucking minds when Commons does something that benefits their mission, to be the largest possible free educational media repository available for use by anyone, if it somehow conflicts with what the Wikipediot wants, namely for Commons to be merely the place they store their images for use by Wikipedia (something they now often don't like to do because of the massive levels of mistrust between the two).

Commons is a perfect example of the project with arguably the least direct dependence on needing to be associated with Wikipedia. They link to Wikipedia articles in image descriptions and categories as a courtesy, a fraternal gesture. If they didn't do it, nothing breaks. It would still be an image repository.

On the flip side, Wikipedia has the technological and organisational means to host every single image it is using itself in their own sever allocation, and more besides I am quite sure. That is what allows some of the dummy spitters to create the absurd situation where there is locally hosted file, and as copy of it on Commons, and neither can or should be deleted, because something somewhere will break.

But if Commons simply said, here you go you fucking pricks, here's every image you are currently using, you just host it yourself and we'll delete our copy, then nothing on Wikipedia would actually break, no filenames even need changing. They wouldn't do it, because that would harm Commons' mission (without actually breaking anything either).

They called it "Wikimedia Commons" and not WikiCommons precisely because it was, and arguably still is, the case that "Commons" and "media" carries more relevance to the potential users of it who are not remotely interested in the relationship to Wikipedia, than the "wiki" part of other project names. Poeple did (or rather didn't) seek out Wikinews because it provides "news", rather than it being somehow a wiki thing that does news, and therefore most likely a Wikipedia type thing that does news. As Jimmy is trying to now exploit with WikiTribune.

It is actually Wikidata that is most dependent on being tied to Wikipedia and all the other sites. Sure, they will argue they can stand alone, but the whole thing is technologically, financially and strategically positioned as an essential tool for the entire WMF family. Take it away, and shit breaks, massively, if they ever get around to using it the way they intend (and said hostility is a good bet it won't). Getting Wikipedia and everyone else back to a time when Wikidata didn't exist after that point, regardless of whether it is called Wikidata or Wikipedia Data, would be a massive ballache.

Quite how anyone outside the cult is meant to make use of Wikidata for their own purposes, without having to be seriously involved with all their bullshit, getting their pockets picked for donations or expected to get seriously involved in the minutiae of the transaction, is anyone's guess. Contrast that with how easy it is for the average joe to reuse a Commons image, or a Wikiquote, in a way that is far removed from the influence or even the notice of the Wikipedia Death Star. If they can't do it, then it likely means they can't do it from any other source either. That won't be the case for consumers of databases.

Kumioko would just know this without even really thinking about it, if he knew anything about anything. The advantage of being an observer of these freaks and the cult ship they all sail in, rather than being an active participant (or love struck ejectee), is that you see the big picture.

The big picture is that a "Wikipedia Commons" would bring in far more money for the Foundation, and indeed far more images for Commons, than if they persisted in trying to pretend the public know what we know about what they originally meant it to be, and how the reality of the cult, the sheer dominance of Wikipedia, ensured it never occurred.

ericbarbour wrote:I've already said that WikiQuote is massively inferior to other quotation sites because of the "house nerd bias". They give people like Douglas Adams and Iain Banks far too much space. Wikinews is an outright embarrassment and they are damned fools to keep it going. But it will probably be kept just because a couple of their resident lunatics want it.

And don't forget to mention this resident wikiquote lunatic Eric. Mdd. But in general wikiquote is a total useless project, because at it's best you can upgrade it to a advantaged quotes bundle like Whaledad and I did.

Graaf Statler wrote:And don't forget to mention this resident wikiquote lunatic Eric. Mdd.

Oh god, please let's not mention him. He's so "autistic" I seriously wonder why he isn't being forcibly medicated. His blog just stinks of pure ego. I can tell even though it's in Dutch. I suppose "his art keeps him sane" or somesuch.

CrowsNest wrote:How many times have we seen a Wikipedian, even the most experienced and longest serving, lose their fucking minds when Commons does something that benefits their mission, to be the largest possible free educational media repository available for use by anyone, if it somehow conflicts with what the Wikipediot wants, namely for Commons to be merely the place they store their images for use by Wikipedia (something they now often don't like to do because of the massive levels of mistrust between the two).

Commons is a perfect example of the project with arguably the least direct dependence on needing to be associated with Wikipedia. They link to Wikipedia articles in image descriptions and categories as a courtesy, a fraternal gesture. If they didn't do it, nothing breaks. It would still be an image repository.

On the flip side, Wikipedia has the technological and organisational means to host every single image it is using itself in their own sever allocation, and more besides I am quite sure. That is what allows some of the dummy spitters to create the absurd situation where there is locally hosted file, and as copy of it on Commons, and neither can or should be deleted, because something somewhere will break.

But if Commons simply said, here you go you fucking pricks, here's every image you are currently using, you just host it yourself and we'll delete our copy, then nothing on Wikipedia would actually break, no filenames even need changing. They wouldn't do it, because that would harm Commons' mission (without actually breaking anything either).

May I quote you? this is a good summary.

ericbarbour wrote:May I quote you? this is a good summary.

I think you just did.

Permission granted.

The whole thing is a gift from the Gods. A picture perfect example of their dysfunction.

The thing was absurd from the outset, but the sight of Iridescent now advising people not just to keep their images local, but tag them GFDL so they explicitly cannot be copied to Commons under any circumstances, elevates this to Gold Standard critic fodder.