Wikipedia is dominated not by the truth, but by two things:
- people who treat articles like their own fiefdoms and have obsessively memorized every sentence of policy and can drown an edit they don't like with subjective assertions that an edit violates a particular policy
- no-life basement neckbeards who do thousands and thousands of edits on subjects they couldn't possibly have knowledge or experience on and respond instantly to edits to "their" pages
Further, in disputes, it essentially comes down to who the rest of the community likes more. The ultimate ad hominem is that some random IP address vs an established 'wikipedian', even if the 'wikipedian' is full of shit? The wikipedian wins.
The page for AA is a great example. There's a dude who is completely unhinged and suppresses any negative information about AA, such as the problems with abuse, predation, and sexual assault. Or studies showing poor efficacy compared to science-based treatment.
I posted a HN comment as such and was more than a little surprised to come across a reply made barely a few hours later, apparently from that dude, accusing me of being someone he'd had a tiff with on wikipedia.
You look at the edit history and his behavior is clearly gatekeeping and enforcing a particular viewpoint. Yet, curiously, he's never been subject to any censure?
100% this, same as you get with reddit moderators and those types of people. There are a lot of people there with agendas who use "the rules" to kill any opinions they don't like.
Look up anything even mildly controversial, e.g Gender, Marxism, Capitalism, Globalism, Election Laws, Freedom of Speech, Racism, and then compare 10 years ago to today, using archive.org or by looking at edit history. It feels like a parallel universe, as if history was totally re-written.
- people who treat articles like their own fiefdoms and have obsessively memorized every sentence of policy and can drown an edit they don't like with subjective assertions that an edit violates a particular policy
- no-life basement neckbeards who do thousands and thousands of edits on subjects they couldn't possibly have knowledge or experience on and respond instantly to edits to "their" pages
Further, in disputes, it essentially comes down to who the rest of the community likes more. The ultimate ad hominem is that some random IP address vs an established 'wikipedian', even if the 'wikipedian' is full of shit? The wikipedian wins.
The page for AA is a great example. There's a dude who is completely unhinged and suppresses any negative information about AA, such as the problems with abuse, predation, and sexual assault. Or studies showing poor efficacy compared to science-based treatment.
I posted a HN comment as such and was more than a little surprised to come across a reply made barely a few hours later, apparently from that dude, accusing me of being someone he'd had a tiff with on wikipedia.
You look at the edit history and his behavior is clearly gatekeeping and enforcing a particular viewpoint. Yet, curiously, he's never been subject to any censure?