Posted by FergusArgyll 14 hours ago
This is the list of articles Sanger contributed to in 2026: [1]
Compare that too all his contributions: [2]
Does it seem like this person is participating in Wikipedia in a genuine way? Or is he there to start political arguments on various internal pages?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContrib...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContrib...
Like arguing with cranks at a town hall meeting, ignorant high school group project classmates, and bureaucracy-obsessed nonprofit initiative zealots all wrapped into one.
in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't have an intimate knowledge of all the details of the editing bylaws, and seemingly infinite time to be able to litigate your case, it's almost impossible to get any of these edits through when the original page author is sufficiently motivated to prevent them.
Not to say Wikipedia isn't great + useful! But realize that it is owned by a distributed network of feudal nerd-lords that will defend to their death the contents of Wikipedia articles because they get off on being the dictators of what's true.
Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.
> Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.
Any insight into how these people all manage to dodge the policies against such behavior? Is it just too much effort to complain + favoritism towards frequent editors?
I still love Wikipedia, but mostly as a starting point to find deeper references. (Which, to be fair, is primarily how you should use an encyclopedia.) The degree to which you should trust it as your sole starting point for research in an unfamiliar area is anti-correlated with the length of the article's Talk page.
They know how to play the game 100x better than you do, and you don't want to waste your time learning to play the game at their level.
There is a Wikipedia rule for everything, and for the opposite of that, if you know the right buzzwords. If a "good guy" writes on a topic he is involved in, that's great, because he is a subject-matter expert; we need more heroes like him. If a "bad guy" writes on a topic he is involved in, that's a conflict of interest, instant revert and ban. You can accuse people of all kinds of bad behaviors, but if anyone does the same to you, you accuse them of not assuming good faith. You need to be very very patient and diplomatic, because if you lose temper even for a moment, you get banned. Shameless lying is perfectly okay if you stay polite and pretend to be too dumb to understand.
They would make for effective politicians if they could translate what they do beyond wikitext.
As I discovered later, I was just lucky to hit pages that weren’t possessively controlled by one person or a small group who want to control the page with a tight grip. That’s often true for pages for obscure topics that don’t have much text.
Get into a more mainstream topic or anywhere near a contentious topic and your edits will be reverted, rewritten, or debated by someone with more free time than you until the text goes back to what they wanted to control. It doesn’t matter how much you follow the rules, you’re at the mercy of what that person or group wants the page to say.
This could be true. But I saw it in histories of not controversial pages also. Some people feel they own articles they contributed to. Wikipedia made a policy against this because it was a problem.[1]
> You notice they almost never actually link to the reverts they are complaining about.
I noticed they said it was years before nearly always if they said when. And to find revisions of forgotten date in Wikipedia required more time than most people would spend for a comment. And anecdotal evidence changed beliefs rarely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content
It's absolutely fair that people aren't going to dig up old edits. At the same time, I'm not sure how relevant years-old anecdotal evidence is. It would be interesting to see some actual statistics on this; I guess the data is public, so it would be possible to do research on how often helpful edits are rejected.
unfortunately I was editing under my real name and I'd rather not dox myself so I can't link to the reverts. but the general area was in social choice / computational democracy. so if you scroll around the edit history of some of those pages maybe you'll get the picture?
Today, we already have free blogging platforms, newsletters, photo sharing, and microblogging, but we are in dire need of a free wiki platform (and maybe a knowledge base tool too).
I'm currently experimenting with building exactly that. So far, so good, but the setup is still too difficult for non-technical people, even though it is already free to register.
Take this.
Especially for math, were I feel like people generally agree on what is true and what is not, this seems unusual. Can you point to an instance of misinformation?
these contributors tend to have some kind of unrelated engineering / technical background, though never in econ or social choice itself, are often retired with lots of free time, and _always_ have incredibly stubborn and strong opinions. the demographic matches the [trisector](https://www.ufv.ca/media/faculty/gregschlitt/information/Wha...) very closely
if you look around on these pages in social choice and voting algorithms you will find plenty of inaccuracies, vague assertions about strategic manipulability, misunderstanding of the formalization of certain electoral axioms, and other misinformation.
As someone that has battled with this, I agree, but in my experience more often than not, the people that complain are complaining about basic rules like "stuff should have external citations". So I can't really pick either side.
The problem was, if you actually go read the content being cited, it did not at all conclude what the page author was asserting it did. In fact, it concluded the opposite. So the citation was "real" but the way it was being used with the implication that it supported the author's position was pure misinformation.
I tried to point this out and petitioned to unlock the page, but I was told that "consensus has been reached, and edit warring will not be tolerated" ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war
I'm not surprised that a cofounder is being shown the door. Radical propaganda can't survive open discussion after all. He could start a new one, but without some change, it will just devolve into the same state it is in currently.
And I'm not surprised that the article is locked. If it were open to edit, there would be massive partisan re-writing of it, from all sides (Democratic, Republican, Iranian, Israeli, probably Chinese...)
Still, at least it marks it as disputed...
Ironically they might have amplified the reach of their articles to laymen and editors and made him a martyr in the process.
At worst it can be a hive mind echo chamber where certain views are banished to the Abyss.
Certain topics attract the latter rather than the former…