Things Wikipedia "editors" do that annoy you

In My Humble Opinion
1

Consider this article on Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To be more specific, consider the character info box; and to be more specific than that, consider the “Notable Powers” section. I won’t criticize the inherent – oh, let’s just call it insanity – required to commit as much time as the contributors must in creating this article – but have they no idea what the purpose of an “information box” is? Apparently the person responsible for this info box does not, for he or she has piled every bit of trivia about Giles’ abilities imaginable into that box, in the process making the info box take up half as much vertical space as the body of the article?

Who are these people? Why are they allowed to access the internet? And what about Wikipedia annoys YOU?

You guys know I’m only interested in that last question, right?

2

That what information goes into a box on the Buffly the Vampire Slayer article is of any significance there. :dubious:

3

I’ve pretty much quit contributing to Wikipedia because I got tired of fighting the erasers - the people who are continuosly trying to “improve” Wikipedia by eliminating everything they consider “bad”. In my opinion most of these people are unable to add anything of value so they are forced to make their mark by subtracting the work of others. I got to the point where I found I was spending as much effort trying to keep people from deleting information as I was spending adding new information. And it became too disheartening for me to spend hours writing or revising an article knowing that some fool would probably soon come along to delete it in a few seconds because of some voice in his head.

4

Hmm…was that aimed at me?

I don’t object, in fact, to including all that information about Giles’ “powers.” I object to doing so in the INFO BOX, for two reasons. First, the box is meant to be a summary, not an exegesis. Giving his “powers” such prominence distorts their importance in Giles’ character–he’s basically a non-powered character, a scholar (though admittedly a bad-ass scholar when he wants to be) but the long list of this abilities makes him seem like one of the X-Men. Compare the info box on Professor X, whose powers are much more important to his character, but which manages to get the point across in much less space.

I’d write more but the oven’s pinging.

5

But, since there is an archive of your contribution, it takes only a minute or two to revert it to what you posted. No?

6

You were asking Nemo, I’m sure, but that way lies edit wars, which tend to be won by the most obnoxious and most patient.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking–“No one’s more obvious than you, Skaldie, not even [SDMBer name deleted for obvious reasons]”-- but I lose patience.

7

I hate it overlinking, when people make wiki-links out of completely irrelevant words on the page.

From a prevous post of mine on the topic:

But what’s even worse than that is when they make a wiki-link out of something that refers to a specific topic, but point it at a generic topic.

For instance:

I’ll click on the link, expecting to see a nice, detailed article about the collapse of the bridge in 1989, only to find myself at the damn article about bridges in general. Why even bother? Just link the term bridge if you must, or better yet, don’t link anything at all! If I’m so stupid as to not know what a bridge is, I can type it in myself.

8

A-fuckin’-men.

9

I hate that people seem to consider it a reliable source as a reference. When I see someone use Wikipedia as a cite for a factual reference, it irritates me to no end, because it is a constantly-editable reference, it lends itself to not being a reliable source.

10

Wikipedia, like most unregulated things on the Internet, has hit the “anti-sweet spot” and is going downhill fast. It’s like Usenet and email: Starts off great. People love it. Then the vandals, jerks, and whatnot move in.

The system as it is strongly encourages people to delete fixes. The worst of the worst “editors” are getting more in control. Banning people with different views, locking pages, deleting records of their activities, etc.

While no one reasonable person would have ever considered it a definitive cite, it was at least good for a jumping off point for looking up stuff.

But I was looking up some things about India lately. (For example.) Apparently most Indian ethnic groups are responsible for founding one or more of the ancient cultures of the middle east. (Which in most cases requires time travel in order to found a group predating their own.) These pages will never be fixed.

11

I agree on the declining quality of links in Wikipedia. I made some comments about my dislike of the inappropriate use of verb phrases as links.

My other big, big thing is that people are posting tons of adjacent links. You can’t read a Wikipedia article with your eyes anymore, you have to mouse over every single link. You see two blue words, but you cannot tell if it’s one link or several. For instance, you might see “[American] [government]” where the first one is on the US and the second is on the US gov’t; it’s not needed because the US-gov’t article will have a link on the USA right at the freaking top of the article. My archived comments on that are here.

12

Wikipedia is incredibly bad. The “editors” usually have no idea what they’re talking about and edit almost exclusively on the basis of how it “sounds” to them rather than whether it’s right. In my experience if you know how to phrase it blandly enough, you can say whatever you want and not get called on it. Conversely even if what you say is factually bulletproof, if you don’t word it to blend in, it’s liable to get deleted. So the thing has a strong bias towards supporting the common wisdom - however wrong, and is ultimately saturated with errors.

13

One specific thing that I have noticed about Wikipedia is that whether a guitarist is supposed to be described as a virtuoso is constantly being changed. Originally, Eric Johnson and Joe Pass were bothed described as virtuosi; now, they are not. However, Django Reinhardt is now listed as a virtuoso musician! These people need to make up their minds.

14

Hey! Don’t you dare slam Usenet! It is, after all, the home of rec.arts.books.tolkien, and talk.origins, and tons of chicken recipies…
Um, I mean PORN! Yes, definitely porn. I’m WWWAAYYYY too manly to go online to download chicken recipes.

15

I agree with the basic idea you are expressing but I have found that if an article includes citations Wikipedia can be a reliable source. It has pointed me to several articles online I would have never found on my own. The reliability of the article or source it links to is usually apparent. For example, using someone’s blog or fanpage as a citation is most likely useless. A citation from a professional journal, online news organization or something similar would indicate the editor(s) working on the article have a good idea what they are doing. Also, Wikipedia has recently added new restrictions concerning articles about living people. They are reviewing as many biographical articles as possible and insisting that reliable sources be cited for most of the information these articles contain.

Of course, the “anybody can edit” feature will always make this a complicated process.

16

I wanted to edit out a reference, because someone had given a citation that was an exact duplicate of someone else’s site, without attribution and presented as his own I.e., entirely plagiarized). I was told that references couldn’t be edited.

17

Where do I start?

Link spammers and vanity page editors.

I realize that in the grand scheme of things, none of these issues are that critical. But the pages cannot become unwieldy collections of links and the enclyclopedia cannot become a place for people to live out their delusions of grandeur. Otherwise it loses what I thought was its greatest attribute which was a really nice little reference guide on many different subjects.

People who consider their opinion to be a fact.

I used to edit quite a lot and I thought I did a reasonably good job of trying to re-word a lot of NPOV type stuff. There are a lot of reasonable folks out there and you can often come to an agreement that everyone can live with. But eventually you run into someone whose personal mission is to make sure that a page about X reads exactly like it does in their own mind. At that point I abandon it since I just don’t care enough.

Unchecked bias towards recent events.

You can have a country that has 2,000 years of recorded history and if a major figure is assassinated or arrested, that segment ends up taking up half the page with conspiracy theories, biographical information on the victim, etc. There has to be some balance. And the admin crew hasn’t decided where to define that boundary.

Someone mentioned usenet which is an good parallel. If the owners declare that Wiki is a complete anarchy devoid of rules and (most importantly) enforcement of those rules, then the entire project is fucked.

18

Not at all. In fact I agree with you concerning the article in question.

But here’s some situations I ran into personally.

I’ve seen numerous cases where somebody votes to delete every single article proposed for deletion. They cut and paste their response so they don’t have to waste time writing each vote seperately. If these people are that desperate to maximize their deletions do you really think they bother taking the time to read them first much less actually consider their worth?

I’ve seen people repeatedly go back and try to delete the same articles over and over. They usually try to draw as little attention to their proposals as possible. If they lose the vote they wait a month or two and try again, knowing that eventually one of their attempts will attract no attention and with a 2-1 vote they can finally delete.

I’ve seen numerous occasions in which people simply delete an article rather than put it to a vote. If they get caught and called on it, they claim they thought the article was suitable for one of the “speedy delete” causes. Their reasoning for this is usually strained. It’s clear that most of them just want to delete and see voting as, at best, a delay or, worse yet, a possibility of having the vote go against them.

A series of list articles were proposed for deletion. Several people claimed that they were copyright violations. I explained, with legal cites, that this belief was wrong and the articles were not copyright violations. But the majority never bothered to learn the facts and the articles were all deleted.

An article I wrote was deleted. It’s gone and can’t be restored. But from the comments that remain it’s clear that the person who deleted it hadn’t bother to even read it in its entirety (it was only about five paragraphs long). He scanned it over, made an incorrect assumption based on his brief perusal, and then deleted it.

I’ve written several articles about the TV show Survivor. It’s a popular show that’s been on for several years and has appeared in numerous countries. But to some snobs it’s network television and it’s common. I’ve seen comments like “these are unimportant people on an unimportant show that nobody will remember in ten years”. Of course if the show was genuinely obscure and had been broadcast on one station in Bulgaria in 1966, these same people would embrace it as part of the underground or counter-culture or something and insist on including an article about it.

I had a situation where one person had a personal phobia about the subject of the article. He simply deleted the article. It was restored and he was told he had to go through the proper channels. It soon became clear he was not going to get a majority. He first tried to claim he didn’t need a majority but when that didn’t fly he quite frankly became hysterical. So he just went ahead and deleted everything he didn’t like anyway. Efforts were made to restore his deletions but he quickly made it clear he was willing to spend whatever amount of time it took re-deleting the material that offended him.

I once wrote an article about a female celebrity and mentioned she had given birth at the “remarkable” age of 51. Another person deleted it - the adjective not the age - because I hadn’t cited it. I told him it wasn’t necessary to cite an adjective. He disagreed and told me that it was a POV opinion (although he admitted he agreed with it) that 51 was a remakable age for a woman to have a child. So even though he wasn’t disputing the fact itself or my observation on the fact, he wanted me to find an online source that specifically stated that 51 was a “remarkable” age for giving birth.

I’ve realized that the only way I could fight the fanatics was to become as obsessed as they are, constantly prowling Wikipedia like Batman defending helpless articles from their muddleheaded attacks. And I’m no Batman - I know that fools have numbers on their side and I usually lose when I’m outnumbered. So I decided to stop contributing to Wikipedia so at least I wouldn’t have to personally see these termites at work.

19

Now I spend a certain amount of time editing non-English Wikipedias. More room for useful contributions, and fewer dorks.

20

Of course you shouldn’t have to cite things like that, but I agree with him that it’s POV. Just state that she gave birth at 51 and leave it to the reader to decide whether that is remarkable or not. There are far too many adjectives in the average Wikipedia article!

I also share the feeling that there is, in general, too much pop culture minutae on Wikipedia. A Survivor page should be just a couple of paragraphs, followed by links to some good web sites about the show. Every article I have seen about TV shows, sportspeople or teams, rock bands, etc. seems to go on for pages, reciting trivial details that only somebody who is already a hard-core fan would care about, and liberally peppered with words like “legendary” and “amazing”. Leave all that stuff to the fan sites.