Hi

[zordrac]

I got a e-mail asking me to participate but I don't know what to say. I guess I'm a little bit surprised that Wikipedia still exists when most other places that started as long ago as Wikipedia did are long gone. Wikipedia is as old as Facebook, and, while Facebook still exists, it's well and truly on the way out with declining popularity, and Facebook was the biggest thing in the internet at its peak. So I guess that either Wikipedia is better than we thought it was, or else somehow they have managed to find a way to stand the test of time. Perhaps it's because people think it is so useful, which really starts with younger people using it in high school for research and then they think that what they are using is useful. As the old people get older and die they forget how important it is to have independent knowledge, and so we come to accept Wikipedia as the carrier of truth. Perhaps that's it. Or perhaps not. I am still banned 17 years after someone thought that all 10,000 people on my ISP were the same person, and thought the absolute worst of all of us, and they damned well refuse to apologise for the mistake. It's annoying but curiously I've never been banned from Simple English Wikipedia, where I've been for 16 years. I guess I never did anything worth banning there, or in either place really. But so be it.

[Bbb23sucks]

So I guess that either Wikipedia is better than we thought it was, or else somehow they have managed to find a way to stand the test of time.

It *is* dying, just slowly.

[Boink Boink]

Greetings. You raise some interesting points.

Facebook and Wikipedia have similar origin stories.....

Just as Mark Zuckerberg first created Facebook as a website for ranking the looks of Harvard’s women students, Glamour reported that Jimmy Wales helped co-found Wikipedia using money he made from a search engine that relied on “sexy pictures of women”' to increase advertising profits. It’s unsurprising, then, that Wikipedia earned a reputation as a racist and sexist space soon after it launched.

Founded in 2001, (English) Wikipedia's peak was years ago, and it has actually been declining since 2008. Some say it is now stable. The correct word is, flatlining. The signs of a critical lack of editors are everywhere. They have just enough to survive. But it is coming at a cost.

Their most recent corporate strategy acknowledges that it is young people they are losing these days. They don't think of Wikipedia, they don't recommend it and they assign little value to the "brand".

Wikipedia of course doesn't particular care, just like it didn't really care that as far back as 2015 researchers had quite literally proven what the problem was and how to fix it....

Almost immediately, they found that they could debunk the time-worn idea that anonymity* leads to abuse. Although anonymous comments are "six times more likely to be an attack," they represent less than half of all attacks on Wikipedia. "Similarly, less than half of attacks come from users with little prior participation," the researchers write in their paper. "Perhaps surprisingly, approximately 30% of attacks come from registered users with over a 100 contributions." In other words, a third of all personal attacks come from regular Wikipedia editors who contribute several edits per month. Personal attacks seem to be baked into Wikipedia culture.

The researchers also found that an outsized percentage of attacks come from a very small number of "highly toxic" Wikipedia contributors. A whopping 9% of attacks in 2015 came from just 34 users who had made 20 or more personal attacks during the year

They had proven what by then was already internally acknowledged as the Vested Contributor problem. A problem that nobody inside was all that concerned about. Those who were, were of course easily intimidated into minding their fucking business.

It is of course ridiculously easy for good Wikipedia editors to be intimated into silence. Their entire contribution history is public. It is the only thing of value a "Wikipedian" has, a sense that their time editing was worth it.

Wikipedia is as toxic as ever.

A Universal Code of Conduct ratified recently is having no effect, because of course, the leadership of English Wikipedia chose to view its creation as being about those other Wikipedias. The shithole ones. Not the shining beacon that is en.wiki.

The Code of Conduct is redundant to local Wikipedia policy. They literally said this, as official as it comes. You can't make this shit up. It's right there in black and white....

The Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) defines a minimum set of guidelines of expected and unacceptable behaviour. The English Wikipedia has developed policies and guidelines (PAG) that add to this minimum that take account of local and cultural context, maintaining the UCoC criteria as a minimum standard and, in many PAGs, going beyond those minimums. Therefore, the Arbitration Committee, as an identified high-level decision making body under the UCoC enforcement guidelines, may choose to evaluate compliance with English Wikipedia PAG, while still respecting the UCoC.

Passed 7 to 1 with 2 abstentions at 16:30, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

The opposes and abstention was bizarrely because this didn't go far enough in offering the laughably false proposition that English Wikipedia has defined and enforced minimum standards years ago, and so now local policy went much further.

English Wikipedia's Administrators are still mostly white, male, old, and think nothing of telling you to fuck off if you displease them.

Eric Corbett was the most toxic user in the history of Wikipedia. He joined in mid 2006 and by 2008 he had become a bitter twisted asswipe. He still managed to survive on Wikipedia until 2019. All of the Administrators who protected and enabled him, are still in post.

The culture still exists. They still value committed but abrasive editors over someone who has yet to prove their worth. It is no longer about them assuming you have good intentions and giving respect by default. For newcomers, it is now about how quickly they go from basic ambivalence to outright hostility, depending on your learning curve and willingness to assimilate into a deeply unfair deeply fraudulent culture where virtually everything you were ever told or promised it would be, was a fucking lie.

It has made it quite easy to fuck with them. Really quite enjoyable. Like a bloodsport.

The few who remain are paranoid, bitter and twisted. The few inherently nice ones are just so beat down, exhausted. The die hard toxics hate the fact they alone destroyed Wikipedia, all while professing to be the people who cared THE MOST. They're even more upset to realise that it was all a waste of their own time. Their content is worthless. It was already technically worthless, but it will soon be forgotten, living on only in really unattributed mirrors.

Wikipedia's owners only care now because the years of toxicity and the effect that had on editor numbers (both the numbers who join and the numbers who then stay) is now being seen in the reduced quality (which was never that great to begin with) and stagnating articles, and so is having an effect on the "brand" in terms of the actual the bottom line.

Donations are down. Budgets are being cut. People are getting fired.

This is all good news to the toxic volunteers at the heart of power on Wikipedia, because they have never considered the owners to be equal partners. They view the owners and their paid staff as servants, there to cater for the very people who have dragged Wikipedia down into the dirt, never to be clean again.

It is all crumbling down around them, wonderfully slowly.

Simple Wikipedia needs to get on the horn to the folks at Google, because there might be an opportunity here for them to supplant the Death Star in the prime ranking spots.

[Bbb23sucks]

The shithole ones. Not the shining beacon that is en.wiki.

Just like how the US government views other countries.

[ericbarbour]

I got a e-mail asking me to participate but I don't know what to say.

I do--first I want to thank you, again, for writing that summary of the Poetlister "witch hunt" in the 2005-06 period. It's very useful and I'm giving it out to journalists who show an interest in Wikipedia scandals. (It's been ten years already? Time flies when you're miserable.) Also for keeping Wikipedia Review going for a few years.

Second, let me give you the same offer: if you need any of the notes for the Wikipedia book, PM me and we can make an arrangement. If nothing else, you will get to see the real identities and histories of some of the lunatics who harassed you. Plus damning evidence that Wikipedia is in its terminal decline. SlimVirgin is dead and a long list of administrators have quit or been forced out, so it's not the same Wikipedia you were battling with back in the early 2000.

Third, I'm curious what you think of Poetlister being a "prominent member" of the Wikipediocracy forum? He CONTINUES to be a blindly positive fan of the "Wikipedia Way", despite being placed on the stupid "WMF Global Ban" list in 2014. Yeah, he was on Wikipedia Review for a while, but now he's practically a fixture at WPO. They're accepting "analysis and commentary" from Poetlister, as if he were a "valuable member of the community". Hilarious.

[zordrac]

Contrary to what a lot of people suggest, I had very little to do with Poetlister. I didn't know him at all, other than about 3 messages, before he was banned. I was not commenting at all based on what I knew of him as a person. I was solely investigating it based on the behaviour of his harassers, and I stand by that. Poetlister using multiple accounts doesn't change that in the slightest, nor does Poetlister being a male make any difference whatsoever. The reality is that Poetlister was harassed by abusive users, who were supported by SlimVirgin. This is fact. Multiple accounts and gender swapping makes no difference to any of that.

What I hated was that, after I was banned and no longer able to defend myself, certain people started to infer that I was best friends with Poetlister or even that we were flirting, for heaven's sakes, when we had no social interactions. I simply like to investigate things. I do this for a living, essentially, and so, because his harassers were unable to justify the abuse, they attacked his character, and then, when that wasn't good enough, they attacked mine, at least in my case by inventing things that simply weren't true and had no factual basis. It was used in the end to keep me banned long after they knew that their initial reasons for the ban were unjustifiable, and it has now been 17 years but apparently I'm too big a problem. I got banned from my own website (Wikipedia Review), they say, except that I wasn't really - I was hacked by Somey, with a little bit of help from Mistress Selina Kyle - who subsequently then pretended that it wasn't my site at all. I can give a history of Wikipedia Review, but put simply it was started by Igor Alexander (and we never found out who that was), and then Mistress Selina Kyle hacked it for "emergency powers" to "oust him as a Nazi". I am not convinced that he ever really was as he never said anything Nazi-like while he was there, before he was hacked, but suddenly he was saying things after he was hacked. My guess was that it was Mistress Selina Kyle saying it to justify her hacking - not that she is a Nazi either so much as she just wanted an excuse to steal the thing from him. Of course, it officially belonged to me, but then Somey hacked it further so that I couldn't even access it. They also got rid of all of the original members of the group too. I don't know who Somey is, let alone Cato, the guy who set me up, but yeah it was pretty nasty. I didn't pay much attention to it after that.

As for Wikipediocracy, I don't think I ever used it. I think that was the one who blindly believed Somey/Mistress Selina Kyle/Cato's lies about me and so wouldn't let me post a single thing. I'm not sure.

As for Wikipediocracy allowing Poetlister to post, I don't see what the issue is with this. It's not like oh no because Poetlister used multiple accounts and pretended to be female that he was suddenly this terrible person. He wasn't. The terrible were always the people who abused him.

[Boink Boink]

Poetlister is as thick as mince, and he gets quite upset when you point it out with detailed reasoning.

He was made for Wikipediocracy.

They can't hand!le criticism of their own words, so it's always been rather laughable that they have what it takes to beat Wikipedia. They are Wikipedia (more so than simply being home to a ton of Wikipedia Administrators). They respond to solid criticism with nothing but lame jokes, juvenile insults or obvious trolling, and if that doesn't persuade the critic to go away, they get the banhammer out.

[Ognistysztorm]

Cory Doctorow has coined the term "enshitification" to describe what happened lately at Wikipedia, Stack Exchange and so many other platforms.

[ericbarbour]

The reality is that Poetlister was harassed by abusive users, who were supported by SlimVirgin. This is fact. Multiple accounts and gender swapping makes no difference to any of that.

Agreed. I never said Poetguy was a "terrible person", just that I feel he is a somewhat unreliable narrator. A symptom of Wikipedia fanaticism. So letting him tirade on WPO is little different from letting Tim Davenport, or Beeblebrox, or Will Nicholes, or Ritchie, do little tirades on that bloody forum. You won't learn very much of real value and they ALWAYS spin everything to make WP look better (and themselves if possible).

This is why so many people on this forum are disgusted with Wikipediocracy. They are no longer even pretending to be a "friendly space" or claiming they are "shining a light" on WP. It's now a hangout for insiders and their suck-ups -- clearly certain people Billy Burns likes the best. The digging up of scandals and dirt has mostly ended, replaced by Tarantino's occasional catty asides and Vigina's stupid tantrums.

I can give a history of Wikipedia Review, but put simply it was started by Igor Alexander (and we never found out who that was), and then Mistress Selina Kyle hacked it for "emergency powers" to "oust him as a Nazi". I am not convinced that he ever really was as he never said anything Nazi-like while he was there, before he was hacked, but suddenly he was saying things after he was hacked. My guess was that it was Mistress Selina Kyle saying it to justify her hacking - not that she is a Nazi either so much as she just wanted an excuse to steal the thing from him. Of course, it officially belonged to me, but then Somey hacked it further so that I couldn't even access it. They also got rid of all of the original members of the group too. I don't know who Somey is, let alone Cato, the guy who set me up, but yeah it was pretty nasty. I didn't pay much attention to it after that.

You should seriously write all that stuff down. For posterity if no other reason. Post it on a blog, igve me a copy, whatever. Otherwise they will "get away with it".