Technically it isn't a news feed, but a place to showcase good articles which have some relevance to significant world events of a current nature. People thinking it is a news feed causes untold problems in the entry selection process, but the farce has played out for years because the Wikipediots are disorganised morons who can't think of a better title, or don't even accept there is a problem.
The issue with this part of their so called encyclopedia is that the Wikipedians who oversee the selection process, are some of the sickest, and thickest, people you will ever discover on the site. And that is saying something, given a lack of intelligence and empathy appears to be one of the criteria used to select and breed Wikipediots.
I'll use one recent example which handily covers both issues very well, but you'll have no trouble finding others on the selection page, that is if you can stand to read that much stupidity for long. It concerns the Miami bridge collapse. You'll have heard of it, because it is international news right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... e_collapse
As you can see, after just three hours of debate, if you can call it that, the Wikipedians concluded there was not a chance that a consensus would emerge to post this - consensus of course being a weighted summation of arguments. So let's examine the arguments.
Firstly, there is a real fucked up thing about this section when it comes to posting about tragedies (which, despite their best efforts, forms a disproportionate amount of their output). I'll just quote them, and let you figure it out.....
Sick fuckers. Still, they're not totally heartless.....the death toll is too low for ITN
I don't feel that a sufficient number of people have died for this to merit posting.
Although there is no written rule, in my experience accidents with low death tolls usually don't make it onto ITN. Our motto is not "if it bleeds it leads." It has to bleed a lot.
Support. Number of fatalities isn’t currently large, but.....
Much like a robot trying to simulate what it means to be human, this is a good approximation, but still frighteningly wrong.certainly a tragedy
Prayers for those affected...
Tragic, but.....
although undoubtedly a tragic event, .....
tragic but consensus is almost entirely against posting this event.
Moving on to the issue of intelligence, here's how the Wikipediots dealt with the issue of whether this incident was unusual enough to warrant posting -
As you can see, the Wikipediots put as much intellectual effort into the exercise of demonstrating this is actually not important enough to make the news section of Wikipedia, as you might do at a drive-thru pondering whether to have fries with that. All you can really infer is that, if this assessment of triviality is based on anything at all, it is indeed based on death toll. Nice.trivial accident
ultimately a minor accident at best
Relatively minor incident
things break and people die
More likely, it is simply blind assertion based on the poster's own personal views of what should and should not be front page news on their precious Wikipedia. As such, if Wikipedia worked as designed, it should carry no weight at all, since the outcome isn't predictable at all, it only depends on who turns up on the day. A quality encyclopedia would be trying to ensure a consistency in their collective editorial decisions - it is not a mistake that most professional institutions achieve this by having a single editor.
The best evidence that this wasn't a trivial incident, is the international nature of the news coverage. These people studiously avoided addressing that. Which is normal - if Wikipedians can't rebut something, they just ignore it and hope the person judging consensus doesn't notice. Theoretically, they're supposed to notice and downgrade accordingly.
Furthermore, deliberate ignorance is against the site's own behavioural rules, and since all participants were informed in advance that the international nature of the news coverage was part of the case for listing, it can be assumed their avoidance of this point was deliberate.
Astonishingly, where the Wikipediots did lower themselves to actually framing their comments on the specifics of the incident, they were eye-wateringly ignorant in their assessment.
I can only wonder at the dangerous world these freaks live in, where total collapse of a new structure is a mere "problem" to be expected.If it is a new construction method, glitches or problems are to be expected.
bridges especially new ones tend to have problems within days after they open, take the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge for example, it had problems almost immediately after it opened, and as a result it collapsed several months later.
To be clear, as any reasonably intelligent person would be able to figure out, in the developed world at least (and arguably even that is unfair given the now global nature of the construction industry), in places which have established standards for engineering like the USA, catastrophic failure isn't normal or expected, not even for new structures.
As is normal for Wikipediots, they don't even realise when they're contradicting their own arguments (unless there's some other reason for why Tacoma is remembered?).
Absent any higher brain functioning being on display, there was of course some simple guesswork gumming up the works too.....
The latter comment, made by the same person in different places, shows the muddle headed nature of Wikipediots - does he know or doesn't he?No long-term impact.
It doesn't mean this accident will be the death of this method. I don't think we even know if the accident was related to the construction method......not generally significant enough based on what we know now.
It should be obvious to anyone with a brain that a defining quality of a current events section is that it is going to have to post items where there isn't any certainty over what happened, and thus what the impact might be. If that incident can fairly be described as significant, and is the sort of thing that could likely have a wider impact than its immediate effects, then you have to assume readers will benefit from reading the article now. Structures collapsing without warning seems to me to be a slam dunk for that assumption.
This is even more true given the fact that they routinely refuse to post items where all that has happened is a report has been published months if not years down the line, detailing once and for all the reasons and thus impacts. Ironically this is because of the lack of accompanying news coverage to demonstrate significance (but remember, they're insistent the section is not a news ticker).
This is not to say there wasn't already evidence that this particular incident might have the required potential for long term impact and thus significance in the now - it is the first bridge to use self-cleaning concrete, and it is the largest ever (in the US) use of the fast installation technique.
These next comments have to be grouped in a class of stupidity all of their own, as while you can somewhat understand why they were made, they clearly have no bearing on the specific incident due to their astonishing ignorance.....
It being Wikipedia, there was of course also an old favourite technique on display, namely this classic strawman...Just a small bridge.
the bridge was also not fully completed
unfinished bridge.
If Wikipedia worked as designed, if their conduct rules mattered at all, you'd have to work very hard to avoid being blocked for this sort of deliberately misleading behaviour, which shows an astonishingly high level of disrespect, even beyond the sort seen by those who just casually ignored the nominator's case.We just can't post every fatal accident that garners some short term, even if sensational, news coverage.
The main strawman here was the idea posting this represents posting every fatal accident that garners coverage. He invented this as a proposition, just so he could knock it down. And given he was saying this a mere five hours after the incident, his claim the coverage was short term has to also be assumed to be a made up point of contention. So all he has here in terms of relevance, is this idea the coverage is sensationalism, and he provides no proof of that. Since Wikipedia doesn't work, you'll not be surprised to learn that the person who delivered this comment, is actually one of their Administrators (the people who do the blocking).
Lastly, in this part of Wikipedia, there is an ever present issue of some weird manifestation of anti-US centrism. Sometimes this is entirely warranted - systemic bias is a well known issue and this section particularly has a problem with being overloaded with items of interest only to USicans.
But the Wikipedians of a reactionary bent in this place take it to ridiculous extremes......and the outcomes are truly perverse, where they are happily cutting off their own nose to spite their face
The international nature of the coverage is pretty conclusive proof that certainly if this had happened anywhere else in the entire Anglosphere or western Europe, it would have got an article and thus would have been nominated. That it may not have done so had it happened in say China, or any other non-English speaking country which would be using advanced construction techniques like this, is hardly a compelling reason to say readers of the English language Wikipedia don't need to hear of it.if this had occurred anywhere else on planet Earth it would be universally greeted with "meh", so ... "meh".
If it happened elsewhere, it would likely not even have an article - we must avoid bias, even if it means letting nominations like this fall to the wayside.
If it were not in the US, it may not even get article talk less of going to main page.
So there you have it. In this debate, as with all debates on Wikipedia, but something which is particularly marked in this section of it, the people who actually talked sense and addressed the issues at hand in a logical and systemic fashion, were in the minority. By a long way.
