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Great Perfect Thanks - Wikipedia and Living persons
billetdoux
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Wikipedia and Living persons
I am newly obsessed with reading the discusison page on living people who are trying to get their bios changed. There's a great one at Jaron Lanier's page - all he wants is to not be called a filmmaker, but everyone treats him like a criminal. Over and over, Wikipedia beats into people's heads that they are supposed to assume good faith when someone tries to edit their own bio, and they are supposed to take their word for things. This NEVER happens. Someone ALWAYS gives them a lecture about how an encyclopedia entry is not a bio and how they shouldn't be here, which is direct contradiction to Wikipedia's guidelines. Poor Phyllis Shlafly's son has been embroiled in one of these forever about the opening paragraph of his mom's Wikipedia entry. It's totally biased, but because she's a conservative (ostensibly), he can't get anything changed through the liberals that are wikipedia's editors. Actually, checking hers today it seems to be changed, but the pathos and sadness in his plaintive, ineffectual complaints has been fascinating.

All you basically have to do is go to any living person, read their bio, and if there's a discussion page, read it and the odds are better than even that they will be offending the subject of the entry somehow. It's a huge problem, and Jimbo Wales is all too aware of it, and USUALLY there's at least one person trying to say "let's listen to the person" but it never works. And Wikipedia has such a steep learning curve for novices, that the subject inevitably does something horribly wrong like re-write the whole bio that they go and piss everyone off, despite the guidelines pointing out that this might be happen and people should assume good faith. This happened with Kramer, and it was pretty funy, though he never came out and admitted it was him.

Those are REALLY hilarious too - like the owners of Anna's Taqueria are doing it CONSTANTLY to their page. WTF? Not a living person, but also kind of entertaining.

I swear, you could spend hours on it. And actually, I do. Every night I'm home, once I'm too tired to coherently answer emails, I lay in front of the computer reading random Wikipedia pages and editing them sometimes. I've started a few stub articles too - I'm working my way up to writing a nice article on Ian Hugo on the next few days.

I cleaned up a piece of vandalism yesterday on an entry about a Lukas Moodyson film, A Whole in My Heart. The entry said :

Lukas Moodysson has expressed disapproval over the future [[VHS]] and [[DVD]] releases of the movie (the decision to release it was out of his hands) — he would preferred theaters-only release, to avoid children being exposed to it. He has also said that "in a perfect world, this movie would not be made". Lucas Santos has expressed disapproval of a different sort, stating "no one should be exposed to smelly vagina, they sell products for that."


Now who, pray tell, is Lucas Santos? It was up for at least a month. Ha.

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Comments
dutchmodernist From: [info]dutchmodernist Date: December 20th, 2006 04:55 am (UTC) (Link)
I just got involved in a 2-hour long brou ha ha over at wikipedia just this evening. It SUCKED. And I have to agree with everything you said. The editor immediately treated me like an idiot, and when I tried to explain why I made the edits, oh crap I don't even understand it enough to explain it to you.

But I think the good faith rule gets broken too often by the valiant warriors against spam, npov, garbage, etc. It lacks balance between newbies and power users, and moderate users like me are kind of left going, "huh?"
dutchmodernist From: [info]dutchmodernist Date: December 20th, 2006 04:56 am (UTC) (Link)
sorry for typos/grammar. beer + tired.
billetdoux From: [info]billetdoux Date: December 20th, 2006 05:01 am (UTC) (Link)
Yeah, it's pretty maddening. I remember winning one of those battles once and I was like "YES! IN YOUR FACE!"

I spend all my time on stubbed out articles or non-existent ones. I get agita trying to work on large articles, though I did add the entire biography to the George Sand article. They handled that pretty well - I was surprised.
humglum From: [info]humglum Date: December 20th, 2006 06:31 am (UTC) (Link)

Wikipedia is evil.
So are crackheads who throw rocks through windows to steal dying iBooks.

But. Wikipedia is evil. Cait uses it to wake up in the morning a lot.
billetdoux From: [info]billetdoux Date: December 20th, 2006 06:50 am (UTC) (Link)
I totally went to her article to see if she had done this, but, sadly, she hasn't. I am bummed. That would have been brilliant.

What do you find evil about it?
humglum From: [info]humglum Date: December 20th, 2006 06:58 am (UTC) (Link)


Oh, just that it's another of those things that are WAAY too easy to spend vast amounts of time getting sucked into.
pat_man_ta From: [info]pat_man_ta Date: December 20th, 2006 02:35 pm (UTC) (Link)
i have a lurv.h8 with wikipedia.
it's nice to look at for information... SOMETIMES
but i'm often not terribly trusting of the content as being even close to impartial. i feel the "culture" of wikipedia, which you are addressing here, is on one hand just another net.dork 133+ snobbery/"brave behind a keyboard" waste of time and the other, a potentially detrimental vehicle of misinformation... wait, those are both bad...

Ok, so, getting info on The Venture Bros. cartoon is about all I'll trust it for without references.
billetdoux From: [info]billetdoux Date: December 21st, 2006 09:34 pm (UTC) (Link)
I dunno. I do like it. I'm pretty impressed it works as well as it does, and it's exponential growth is definitely something noteworthy and shocking. And by and large the articles are... okay. It's great for a general overview of something you don't know anything about. The internet needed something like that - some place where you can get the lowdown on just about anything and at least TRIES to be impartial.. but yeah... a lot of the editors are patently insane.
pat_man_ta From: [info]pat_man_ta Date: December 21st, 2006 09:51 pm (UTC) (Link)
I suppose that I fear it to an extent.

The reason being that there are SO many nasty people on the internet tubes that I am hesitant to even think about submitting any wikis for, say, events I produce or anything I'm involved in really.

I think that is perhaps a sign of our times though.
Once upon a time people had the freedom to 'straighten someone out' when they mouthed off. Now our society is cluttered with a cancer of assholes hiding behind keyboards and lawyers.

wow am i all doom and gloom today or WHAT?!?
billetdoux From: [info]billetdoux Date: December 21st, 2006 11:41 pm (UTC) (Link)
God, it's so true. There are so many. I think it was why I loved wikipedia to begin with - it was a bastian of levelheadedness and evenmindedness. But I guess what I'm learning is that that is really only on first blush - once you dig, you find those nasty internet people are still there.
dinaofdoom From: [info]dinaofdoom Date: December 20th, 2006 05:26 pm (UTC) (Link)

it's cleaned up now but...

a few weeks ago i looked at gloria allred's profile and it said "she's also a really fucking annoying jew who must die".
that was my first experience with vandalism, believe it or not.
billetdoux From: [info]billetdoux Date: December 21st, 2006 09:41 pm (UTC) (Link)

Re: it's cleaned up now but...

hahaha! wow. I wonder how long that stayed up for. Let's look. Hrm, amazingly, it looks like it was only up for 40 minutes! You lucked out!
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