The Deadweights

For serious discussion of the "major" forum for Wikipedia criticism and how it fails.
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Abd
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The Deadweights

Post by Abd » Fri Jan 03, 2020 11:38 pm

I'm planning on starting threads where when I see any activity on Wikipediocracy with something that might be worth commenting on. Peeps banned from WPO may comment here, and if someone with a WPO account thinks it worthwhile, they may take it there.
This thread:
The Deadweights
Post by tarantino » Sun Dec 29, 2019 8:17 pm

A group of 20 hoax articles and several images relating to the fictitious punk band The Deadweights were discovered and deleted today. They were added to wikipedia more than twelve years ago.
There was talk of administrative incompetence and Beeblebrox commented:
This hoax is only impressive in that it lasted so long. The refs are obviously not reliable sources, this is exactly the sort of thing that would almost certainly be caught right away in recent years. That wasn't the case in 2006. A lot of new tools have been developed and there's an army of new page patrollers who basically only do that.
To do what would take one responsible person a few minutes instead occupies an army and is still unreliable. It's ridiculous to talk about the alleged incompetence of someone who has no responsibility. Nobody is responsible for ensuring that articles are vetted.

Something that could have created that, flagged revisions, where a reviewer tags a page as acceptable and therefore could be held responsible if this were done incompetently or worse, was essentially killed. There is no real supervisory structure. Human organizations learned long ago to create bureaucracies, and bureaucrats are held responsible to the sovereign. In a genuine democratic organization, the generality elects a representative governing body that appoints executives who supervise workers, who are responsible to the governing body which is responsible to the community.

Nothing like that was set up. Nobody is responsible. In that context, reliability is impossible.

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Kumioko
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Re: The Deadweights

Post by Kumioko » Sun Jan 05, 2020 12:14 pm

Honestly WPO has become a Wikipedians only forum at this point. Zoloft has banned pr driven off all the critics and banned editors so it's just him, his friends and some admins and arbs now.
#BbbGate

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Abd
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Re: The Deadweights

Post by Abd » Sun Jan 05, 2020 7:02 pm

I'd hesitate to make such a claim without documentation. It is too easy to fall into bias from a limited set of cases prominent in one's mind. In any case, their loss is our gain. If it's a gain. That kind of depends on what those banned end up doing here. If it's just fluff and flames, it might not last here either. People get tired of it. People even get tired of substance if it doesn't fit their beliefs, that's a human issue.

Kumioko, that comment was off-topic for this thread, simply using the occasion as an excuse for tossing mud at WPO. Please don't do that. If you want to criticize WPO, with substance, please use an appropriate topic or create one. Putting it here accomplishes nothing and makes this forum less readable. I'm considering moving this.

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