Comment by tux3
19 hours ago
Anyone can edit Wikipedia, editors are not employees. Even the admins are not employees.
(As far as I know you only have to sign any kind of formal documents if you have one of the few roles (as a non-employee) where you may have access to sensitive personal data, which is very few people.)
>Anyone can edit Wikipedia
Hasn't been true in a very long time. Plenty of politically charged articles are locked so that only Wikipedia's editors can edit them, and you can guess which side they're taking. It's not a democracy.
> only Wikipedia's editors can edit them
Anyone can be a Wikipedia editor, assuming you haven't done something egregious and gotten a lifetime ban.
It takes no time at all to set up an editor account and you don't even have to divulge your real identity to do so. The Wikimedia Foundation appears to go to great lengths to defend their editors and has gone to court to defend their editors' rights to pseudo-anonymity.
Note: I am a former employee of Wikimedia and everything I saw while I worked there supports that the vast majority of staff, including management, care a great deal about protecting editors, promoting free knowledge, and making the project as open and inclusive as possible.
>Anyone can be a Wikipedia editor, assuming you haven't done something egregious and gotten a lifetime ban.
Firstly, not all articles are open to editing by gen-pop. See: Extended confirmed protection on many.
Secondly, some pages that are hot on the political side can then become subject to broader Wikipedia contentious topics / discretionary sanctions rules, so even eligible editors who qualified for extended confirmed protection edits, must fall in line with the approved narrative or risk sanctions and have their edits reverted to what the WMF staff admins and Arbitration Committee or ArbCom decide who gets to have the objectively correct viewpoint in certain cases and who doesn't.
>The Wikimedia Foundation appears to go to great lengths to defend their editors and has gone to court to defend their editors' rights to pseudo-anonymity.
OK, but why are you bringing this up? I never claimed otherwise. All I said wikipedia is very selective with who gets to edit some topics and what its admins and arbcom consider as "valid sources" and which not, leading to entrenched biases on political topics. Wikipedia defending editors is a good thing but an offtopic derailment addition to what I was originally talking about which had nothing to do with this.
Could you give an example of an article that was protected for reasons other than preventing vandalism? I've seen other people bring this up, but never with evidence.
Someone's opinion is always gonna be someone else's vandalism.
I could bring an example, but then what protection do I have from the HN mob flag-bombing it?
2 replies →
Yeah makes sense. I was wondering if there was special meaning to “editor” that made it non obvious that they wouldn’t be unionized.