he resuggested "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity", a group with the goal to make "Wikipedia more intellectually diverse" and "ensure fair and open decision-making and governance, broaden the range of permissible sources, reinforce genuine neutrality, rein in over-aggressive blocking while holding the powerful to higher standards of accountability", etc, with the implied undertone of preventing Wikipedia from drifting too far to the political left.
This is unpopular because people oppose this on various grounds (mostly that it might be vote brigading and tiling decisions in their favor just by showing up in an organised way around wikipedia). Also the same project was apparently suggested before and rejected in early stages
But then he made a tweet that basically just says "I suggested this, some people like it, some hate it". That's super against the rules, because it attracts people to the proposal who otherwise wouldn't have seen it. Probably in an attempt to sway discussion, because his tweets are obviously seen primarily by people who like his ideas
Which then lead to the vote to ban him from editing Wikipedia. With a total ban getting more votes than a more limited ban, like banning him from participating in articles namespaced for internal matters
Is that about right?
Changing the whole institutional culture at Wikipedia is more of a social challenge than a technical one, and I am not well-versed in that area. So, I would rather fork some wiki software, write code, and write articles for myself.
Will my wiki be able to compete with a giant like Wikipedia on the internet? I don't know. I don't even know whether mine is indexed by search engines yet. But I love writing articles, so I'll keep doing it as long as I can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noti...
Can someone here please help me understand what the issue is?
(I keep seeing stuff in that linked article about canvassing and "the left marching through institutions" but again I'm not following the overall argument / issue. Please forgive my ignorance if I'm missing something obvious.)
Ironically they might have amplified the reach of their articles to laymen and editors and made him a martyr in the process.
I quite like what he's going for with these 9 theses - the ideas of the public rating articles or enabling competition between articles seems like a clever compromise position - but frankly I don't see how the Wikipedia community could treat this as anything other than an attack whether or not the ideas are improvements. The parallel with Martin Luther and the Catholic Church was appropriately foreshadowed by Sanger.
Organisations eventually become corrupt. Wikipedia might already be there or it might have a ways to go, who knows. But this sort of change might require a new project or some sort of schism among the Wikipedia editors, it sounds pretty radical. Especially in the post-Trump era; I expect his presidency has been a traumatic era for the English Wikipedia project.
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.
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…
He talks of "undoing the lefts march through the institutions", as if he was fighting some sort of Maoist movement.
The guy has lost the plot and has become a troll trying to use the encyclopedia as ideological battleground.
Good riddance.