• CantaloupeAss [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    1 year ago

    I don’t really know how Wikipedia articles are written or updated, but isn’t the idea that if one of us doesn’t like the way an article is written, we can just… change it?

    • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      59
      ·
      1 year ago

      By and large Wikipedia is managed by autocratic administrators who simple got here in the early days. In 2019 they discovered for example that they had named a random Texas kid as admin of the Scots instance who just pretended to speak the language in the most over-the-top ironic way possible. He defaced hundreds of pages and got named as the admin when he was like 12.

      90% of their editors are men and most are white, so it’s like maybe 75-80% of their editors are white men yknow. There’s actually very few pages on notable women because they keep being deleted and women keep being chased away from the platform. Essentially if someone doesn’t like you writing on Wikipedia they’ll get their admin friend to ban your IP.

      If you make an edit you’ll have it reverted in a few minutes by hawks who watch pages all day long and claim these pages as theirs.

      The funniest example (funniest because it’s so sad you just laugh) was some guy who named his account after his Belgian Army grandpa arguing that the genocide in the Belgian Congo was not a genocide. I couldn’t even make this up.

      We cover most of it here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia and even then it’s far from being exhaustive.

      There’s a few people in this thread who edit wikipedia and managed to get some of their edits through but honestly even they explain you have to jump through hoops and understand how Wikipedia works to get anything done, like actually participate in the community before you even make any edits. The idea that wikipedia can be edited by anyone or is edited by people “like you or me” is a complete lie upheld by Jimmy Wales who wants to make it seem as though his weird Ayn Rand libertarian ideas actually work in the real world.

    • KiG V2@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      33
      ·
      1 year ago

      Wikipedia is notorious for cracking down on antinazism/prosocialism. For example, since the UKR war there have been many attempts to put truth in Wikipedia that is quickly labeled RUS propaganda and deleted.

      • CantaloupeAss [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        Hm, I didn’t know. Who is “Wikipedia” in this case? I always thought it was just other users. Is there a set of editors or writers hired by the Wikimedia foundation itself? Or do you just mean, like, an echo chamber of Wikipedia power posters? Are there mods??? lolol