Comment by eezurr
4 years ago
Interesting that you've had problems with someone with that many sources/public image.
My project has stalled, but there was a point when I was putting together a Wikipedia page for notable composers of the 20th and 21st century. I came up with some criteria that would filter out most of the composers listed on their respective "list of 20th century composers" and "list of 21st century composers". If you haven't seen these lists, they are HUGE and thus pretty useless IMO.
I started going through each composer and so many of them were unknown, barely sourced/dead sources, no website, no music online, recently graduated college, etc.
I flagged a handful of pages and all of them were rejected for deletion. Sometimes the page creators popped out of the blue and fought me on it (and got to vote on the page remaining). I think someone of them had direct connections with the composer.
There are so many tiny pages dedicated to forever-invisible composers, it's awful.
You can see my progress here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:List_of_20th-_and_21st-c...
I did this for about 4 months for my own field (information security) and I was astonished by how much energy people would put in to keeping their vanity pages. There was a whole cluster of articles about a non-notable IT security person, their podcast, and their "hacking group", membership in which extended notability to all sorts of other random people. Somebody in the clique was friends with a particularly aggressive admin, which made it especially difficult to roll any of it back.
The German Wikipedia article on random/urandom still claims that entropy depletes and using urandom may allow an attacker to "calculate" the random numbers after the fact (whatever that means).
Several people tried to correct it, but since the article author considers the article "his", all discussion attempts were shut down (with gems like "the random number subsystem was programmed by T'so, so it doesn't matter what Torvalds says about the subject"), and all edit attempts were reverted as "vandalism".
This article will claim urandom to be insecure until eternity.
I mean, to be fair, that's a common belief in the industry as well! T'so held it as well!
I’m sure there’s a whole marketplace around “thought leader” promotion on Wikipedia.