I’m Divorcing Wikipedia For Good

Now, I’m likely exaggerating a little bit here, but I was trying to make an article about a magazine that one of my friends (web design) publishes. It is a small digest, printed four times a year, but still.

I was denied as I would not be able to write about this digest without trying to promote it and you can’t self-promote. Yeah, I get that, but, how in the world does something get published on Wikipedia then?

I can suggest it to Wikipedia and they will vote on it. And I might get lucky and they write about it.

Wait, stop the presses, you mean that the “wikipedians” (the name that they call themselves) get to choose what they write about? (Which explains why the Dungeons & Dragons article is so damn long – same thing for the Pokémon article)

When you sign up for an account with Wikipedia, you are encouraged to play in the ‘sandbox‘ that they give you. The purpose is for you to learn about how their website and editor operate and have to interact with it. They state that it doesn’t matter what you are working on in the sandbox, it isn’t really public, well it is, but you need to know where and how to find it.

I had already drafted the article that I wanted to write about so I simply used that in the sandbox, and as soon as I did the very first save of the draft, I immediately started getting notices from Wikipedia editors.

The edits you made under the following username:redacted, gives the impression you have an undisclosed financial stake in promoting a topic, but you have not complied with Wikipedia’s mandatory paid editing disclosure requirements. Paid advocacy is a category of conflict of interest (COI) editing that involves being compensated by a person, group, company or organization to use Wikipedia to promote their interests. Undisclosed paid advocacy is prohibited by our policies on neutral point of view and what Wikipedia is not, and is an especially serious type of COI; the Wikimedia Foundation regards it as a “black hat” practice akin to black-hat search-engine optimization.

Further conversations indicated that I also needed to change my username, which proved to be very fun and interesting as the username that I normally use (it is not related to anything about me) is restricted for a handful of reasons. I ended up having them auto-generate a username for me, which resulted in my first and last name and a bunch of junk behind it.

Then I got accused of SPAMming as they considered the topic that I was writing about could be considered SPAM. I’m honestly still trying to figure out how an article is unsolicited or is mass, but whatever.

Not one single person asked me a single question or offered any real assistance, they just made demands. Well, that isn’t 100% factual, one person did talk to me like I was a person and that is where I learned I should start by suggesting edits for other articles first. That is where I also learned that a majority of any changes I might suggest will not be acted on as many of the wikipedians do not take well to others suggesting edits on articles (they are not pages, BTW, I even got scolded for calling them pages instead of articles)  that they wrote.

I was told that I need to start by finding articles already on Wikipedia and enhancing them, adding content, or better yet, fixing mistakes.

So you want me to search for my hobby, collecting hammers, and add more detail about hammers. But there is already an ungodly lengthy page about hammers already. So I just need to write useless dribble and the more that I write the more likely I will be able to eventually write an article on my own from the start. And if you go to the page on hammers, you will see that, well a bunch of “someones” has already written all the useless shit about hammers already (same with screwdrivers and wrenches).

And, wait, you will like this, all your edits will be approved by a board of editors (not a board per se, more like a virtual vote. So if they don’t like what you wrote about hammers you are screwed. And that is what happened to me. I published an entire post about the digest and instantly, I was getting verbally abused by all these people ‘still living in their parent’s basement‘, and let me tell you, they were aggressive to the point that his Jarhead got pissed off and also fell for the game. And I also quickly noticed that my political views (Wikipedia has been caught over and over ‘whitewashing‘) were not in line with theirs and they let me know it and they all hide behind usernames.

One of these basement dwellers is 38-year-old Steven Pruitt, who has edited at least 1/3 of all the articles (over 3 million edits)  on Wikipedia. And the way this all works is if editors like Steven don’t like what you are saying, in your article, they can change it with whatever they want. And, this guy makes an amazing $0.00 for his efforts. you can learn more about Mr. Pruitt here.

It’s not just Pruitt, there are thousands around the world who belong to this group. I tried, I really did, but I found that every edit I made and offer a citation for, was either edited again or removed entirely. I edited articles about things that I knew to be factual. I would make my edit and validate it with an authoritative outside source and move on. In seconds, I’m not exaggerating, seconds, I got feedback from these gremlins, who are all hiding in the dark musty basement like Sloth from the Goonies.