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Someone’s gone and wiped some of the characters pages off Wikipedia etc?

Started by metalmarc, 20 January, 2020, 10:26:43 AM

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IndigoPrime

Quote from: Tomwe on 20 January, 2020, 04:14:19 PMThis is what happened to the entry for Transformers The G1 Collection from Hachette.
What baffled me is that one was cut, but other partwork pages survived. No consistency.

Professor Bear

Isn't Wikipedia a lost cause to far right astroturfers these days?  Jimmy Wales all but admits that he curates the site to support his libertarian views.

sheridan

The judge death website has been updated in response to accusations from this forum:

Quote2020 Update:  WIkipedia, in a display of absolute stupidity, have relegated the Judge Death wiki to a mention on a page of 2000 AD characters.  We don't know what sort of massive brain aneurysm caused them to make a move that stupid but it's a disgusting move.  I've seen a suggestion that I could have somehow done that to get more traffic to here but I was gutted to see the wiki go as I was relying on their bibliography a lot (until I remembered Wayback Machine) and, honestly, this is the most niche site ever and I'll be glad to get any readers!  Think of it as a resource that I always wished existed and ended up making myself.



sheridan

Quote from: sheridan on 20 January, 2020, 04:22:24 PM
*ahem*

2000ADopedia

SMF is messing about with formatting again - that should have gone to this wikia/fandom page: 2000ADopedia.

Batman's Superior Cousin

I can't help but feel that Godpleton's avatar/icon gets more appropriate everyday... - TordelBack
Texts from Last Night

Richard

Deletionists have been going after Judge Dredd related articles for years, on and off. This was just the first time they got their act together and did it in accordance with Wikipedia policies (which they completely ignore when it comes to articles about Marvel and DC characters). So Batman's utility belt gets its own article, but Judge Death doesn't.

(The last version of the Judge Death article is here.)

gurnard

Quote from: sheridan on 20 January, 2020, 04:18:48 PM
Wikipedia has its uses, though use as a fictional encyclopaedia isn't one of them

Yeah it is fantastic for a factual resource on the world around us. The fact that articles are backed up by their sources makes it reliable enough for me when tacking questions from the kids :-) 

Dandontdare

Quote from: gurnard on 21 January, 2020, 01:22:01 PM
Quote from: sheridan on 20 January, 2020, 04:18:48 PM
Wikipedia has its uses, though use as a fictional encyclopaedia isn't one of them

Yeah it is fantastic for a factual resource on the world around us. The fact that articles are backed up by their sources makes it reliable enough for me when tacking questions from the kids :-)

The problem is that journalists use Wiki, creating a feedback-loop -  someone posts a complete lie, a journalist sees it and uses it without saying where it came from - hey presto, there's a second credible source in a mainstream publication that makes the 'fact' even more reliable, so more journalists quote it etc....

TordelBack

Quote from: Dandontdare on 21 January, 2020, 01:42:46 PM...someone posts a complete lie, a journalist sees it and uses it without saying where it came from - hey presto, there's a second credible source in a mainstream publication that makes the 'fact' even more reliable, so more journalists quote it etc....

A.k.a. "history".

Professor Bear

Yeah, that's how British journalism has long worked, though nowadays they pretend the lie comes from "Sources".

With Wikipedia it gets a bit more complicated: someone will publish a lie on Wikipedia and cite an online source for the story, then someone will come along and edit it saying "actually, what happened was" and cite a more up-to-date source, then the editor who published the original lie - who most likely has notifications turned on to alert them about edits - will come along and undo the edit saying the news source cited for the update doesn't meet Wikipedia's standards for notability or reliability, so the original lie stands.
Where it gets fun is that there are dedicated deletionists who spend all their time making sure that off-message sources aren't allowed to be used by making sure the website/author aren't "notable" (usually by getting their Wiki page deleted), and the vast majority of these unreliable or non-notable sources are - unsurprisingly - left wing, though the Daily Mail has also been named as an unreliable source.

Then, of course, you have to remember that there are Wikipedia editors who work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.  One - Philip Cross - was noted as working for five straight years without a break, and after this was pointed out, it became a bannable offence on Wikipedia to try and make a page about him or the ensuing media controversy where people tried to "unmask" who he really was, which in retrospect was probably just a bunch of pundits calling Wikipedia's bluff that Cross is a real person and not a shared account taking advantage of the open-source nature of the site - something they've long been warned about.

Funt Solo

++ A-Z ++  coma ++

IndigoPrime

Wikipedia does my head in. Some of the retrogaming stuff is more or less copy-and-paste from articles I've written. Huge chunks just lifted wholesale. But then when factual stuff is suggested, they flip their lid. (One example is Lode Runner, which remains entirely inaccurate, because they don't believe the person who created the game did, and so go with the person who reworked the original for the Apple II version. Idiots.)

TordelBack

You wouldn't want to look too closely at many of the archaeology pages on there either. A huge number of articles seem to draw solely on 19th C to 1950s secondary sources, loosely glossed with hugely complex and generally misinterpreted DNA data. It's like 70 years of careful grounded research and rigorous interpretation never happened, and good luck getting any of it stuck back in there.

CalHab

Quote from: TordelBack on 21 January, 2020, 06:33:03 PM
You wouldn't want to look too closely at many of the archaeology pages on there either. A huge number of articles seem to draw solely on 19th C to 1950s secondary sources, loosely glossed with hugely complex and generally misinterpreted DNA data. It's like 70 years of careful grounded research and rigorous interpretation never happened, and good luck getting any of it stuck back in there.

At some point someone decided it would be a good idea to upload out-of-copyright 19th and early 20th century encyclopedias. You come across this stuff on history pages a lot and it clearly displays the biases of the era.

Professor Bear

Quote from: TordelBack on 21 January, 2020, 06:33:03 PM
You wouldn't want to look too closely at many of the archaeology pages on there either. A huge number of articles seem to draw solely on 19th C to 1950s secondary sources, loosely glossed with hugely complex and generally misinterpreted DNA data. It's like 70 years of careful grounded research and rigorous interpretation never happened, and good luck getting any of it stuck back in there.

A lot of modern sources might be copyrighted, behind paywalls, or just too dang hard to dig out from the interwebs, thus making outdated information in the public domain the only sources Wikipedia will/can accept as legitimate - but a cynic might ask if a notably far right body of anonymous editors has any ulterior motive in creating a system of validating articles whose long term effects are to keep the scientific consensus of Wikipedia somewhere in the distant past.