Comment by MikeTaylor
4 years ago
I love Wikipedia to pieces, but I have given up trying to contribute to it, because only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. I assume these are many of the same people as the Deletion Police. A pox on all their houses.
What kind of thing have I had reverted? For example, often when I have just watched a film, I like to read its Wikipedia page. Often I spot minor errors in the plot synopsis while the details are fresh in my mind, and make minor edits to fix those errors. Often, they get reverted. So now I don't bother.
Reverters and deleters may achieve what Big Content longed to do but couldn't -- kill Wikipedia.
People say things like this, and I believe them. But can you provide some examples of edits you've made that didn't "survive the Reversion Police"? One very good thing about Wikipedia is that most of what happens on it is logged; Wikipedia Jurisprudence works for the most part the way people HN say real jurisprudence should work: with version control. Let's talk about specific examples! You should have a bunch, given what you just wrote.
Most of Wikipedia --- probably the most intellectually impressive project on the entire global Internet --- was built during the reign of the deletionists, just in case you're concerned about them "killing" the project.
> only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police.
Could you provide three examples?
Huh, do you think the parent comment was lying?
Wikipedia is like, well, a lot of social knowledge tools where there's special roles (e.g., Stack Overflow, GitHub projects) - some people build prestige by contributing content, some people seek to build prestige by gatekeeping the contributions of others.
What tends to happen is that someone makes this complaint and either (a) provides no examples or (b) the examples show that reverting them was clearly a good idea. So I'm asking for three examples that make their case, because it might be even slightly convincing - because the bare statement tends to case (b).