Sunday, December 26, 2010

Sometimes Wikipedia really irritates me

I have a love/hate relationship with Wikipedia.
As an academic I like it because it is a nice starting point for any topic, but hate it for anything close to "real" research.   As a  teacher I would never accept Wikipedia as a source unless there were plenty of other sources to back that up.

As a gamer I like it since it usually gives me what I need fairly quickly. 

I also like the "every one works together" aspect.  But that also gets on my nerves.

Today though the wikipedia community is getting on my nerves.  Long story short, some articles I worked on are up for deletion.  Not only that, the editor that put nominated them for deletion chose to do it over Christmas where it is likely that he will get them deleted since no one can help me "save" them.

I used to be a very active editor on wikipedia.  I even donated money.  But it seems more and more that there are some people there with personal agendas to have articles they don't like deleted.  I just spent a a couple years waiting for one such person to get banned, and now others want to take up his crusade.

Maybe I'll just post stuff here instead.  The audience is smaller, but at least I get the feeling that it would be better received.   Though some of the stuff I work on wouldn't fit even the broad range of topics I cover here.

6 comments:

Porky said...

Been there. I'd say the blog is still a good place to do it. The pages should be found by a search engine, especially if they're on niche subjects, even though they might be lower down the list. If they're marked up to make them recognisable and potentially avoidable for regular readers, why not?

Canageek said...

What articles? Just in case some of us wanted to take a gander and argue for their preservation.

ze bulette said...

I'm curious about the pages in question too. Maybe we can save them or at least begin a discussion there about it and bring more attention to a potential injustice.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Here is the one irritating me the most.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/User:Webwarlock/Nadia_Nyce_2

It's for two pages in my user space.

The guy puts them up for deletion on Christmas and doesn't even bother the ask me if I was still working on them.

Anonymous said...

I know what you mean. And the English language Wikipedia is much more liberal than the German one.

I stopped contributing to German Wikipedia. It's not worth the effort.

Darius Whiteplume said...

I prefer Wikia sites, as they are typically theme-based; so while an article on "topic x" might not meet Wikipedia's commitment to excellence [smirk] it would be more accepted on a Wikia devoted to the grander theme "topic x" falls under.

Wikipedia's moderators are largely a bunch of trolls.