I made the mistake of looking up the article you’re referring to and then spent way too long chasing all of the arguing back and forth.
BTW, why is the agent trying so hard to hide that the singer was born in Iran?
The admin who last edited the article has been trying to figure that out, ever since I pointed out the October 2014 edit of the same article on the Persian Wikipedia.
I’m letting him and the other three admins involved in this handle the situation now.
Weird - I went to the Teahouse to ask my question, and the format changed to the normal display.
Yeah, I’ve done that a few times- taken a section and rewritten a few particularly tortured paragraphs to make actual sense, and not look like they were written in Farsi, Google-Translated to Chinese, and from there, Google-translated into English.
And what happens? Some illiterate dickbag reverts the changes because presumably, they met whatever grammatical standards some non-native speaker told him in his home country.
What I find is that a lot of Wikipedia articles are very choppy. Stuff gets repeated because of multiple editors. The article mentions an upcoming event in the future tense, even though by the time I’m reading it, the date has already past. And there are plenty of articles that refer to something as happening “currently” with no clue as to when that is. I’ve written and re-written many articles but a full rewrite is a project.
Thats good - you’ve made change in a good way… I was surprised at the “citation needed” - they were either easy to find, or total fabrications…
If I had funds or manpower, I’d start a “non-profit” and get my agenda across via information, especially when its usually the first thing people “look-up”…
I was surprised at a “citation needed” for something that’s common knowledge. From The Doctor (Doctor Who): “[T]he longest-lasting incarnation is the Fourth Doctor, as played by Tom Baker.”
I know nothing about Doctor Who, so that’s not common knowledge to me. 
The point is that Wikipedia is meant to be a world-wide knowledge source. Nothing is “common knowledge” to everyone who will read the article.
I’ve seen differences-between-the-book-and-the-movie-type statements being declared invalid as “original research.” I find this kind of thing baffling.
I find the whole deletion culture thing hostile and cliquish. Salon has an article on the battle to prevent deletion of the article about Katie Bouman, one of the researchers responsible for the black hole image – The battle to save Katie Bouman’s Wikipedia page from deletion.
Of course in that specific instance, there is a lot of misogyny and links to toxic internet culture.
The “Original reseach” thing has become a sort of club to pound on articles that someone in the inner circle doesn’t like. For instance, one of them didn’t like one of the lists I’d compiled, and even though I’d referenced almost every entry, claimed it was OR!
I noticed that the article on Marion Bell said she only grew up with two sisters, so I added my late mother-in-law to the list. Not sure how to go about correcting the 1997 obit from the NYT that they used for the citation, though.
Fortunately, no one has called me out on it. Yet.
Wikipedia is a very good resource. I started making small corrections, typos and grammar fixes at first, to now more substantive edits. Wikipedia works pretty well.
There seems to be a lot of gray area here…
What if John Elway, in a live post-game TV interview said “Oh, and my birthday is June 28, 1960” and that interview made it to YouTube. Is that a reliable source? There was no journalistic fact checking.
What if Elway’s blogger friend (who has millions of followers) interviews him in Elway’s living room and uploads the video to YouTube. In the interview he said his birthday. Does that count?
What if he writes an autobiography this is “self published” by his wife (or a friend). Anyone can buy on Amazon. Can that be used?
I’ve made minor edits to articles for clarity.
Once, when I was working on a project that was very much in the news, I needed to get a sense of what the average person understood about the topic. I found that Wikipedia only had a stub. I decided to fill it out and improve public’s understanding. My content was good and I cited where I could but I struggled a lot with formatting. I had heard nightmare stories, like those above, about entire articles getting deleted for being original research and I figured that with too many citations, including to things not on the internet, and some unsupported but important statements that it would all be dismissed as “original research.” I gave up. The article is all filled out now and it seems pretty good. I don’t know how long it took to get there.
Oh, this is fun. In February of 2014, a Polish politician found himself in Dutch over some alleged remarks he made while allegedly drunk. Now an anonymous editor from Poland is claiming that entire incident never happened and has been demanding proof of the alleged drunkenness.
I don’t care to edit Wikipedia anymore, but the experience has revealed a great source of entertainment (and very occasional insight) to be had in reading Talk pages on culture war topics.
I did once edit the the entry for an obscure British comedy act of the 1930s, because they were in some ancient movie I was listlessly watching on TV, looked them up on Wikipedia and saw that the original entry had got wrong the one thing that made them famous enough to get into the movie and its plotline (such as it was), which was that the BBC had banned them from the radio for an off-colour joke. But I can’t now remember who they were or what the movie was.
I used to, a long time ago. Hardly ever do these days.
Here’s an interesting article on the ongoing edit wars to the Trump page:
Donald Trump’s Wikipedia Entry Is a War Zone
But at the end of the day, the article concludes that the petty infighting serves the purpose of getting an article that is reasonably balanced:
Made a few changes, and created a few articles. Nothing recent, though; I can seldom work up the energy to care enough.