One website to rule them all

Good, bad, biased, paid or what-have-you. There's an endless supply.
Post Reply
User avatar
CrowsNest
Sucks Maniac
Posts: 4459
Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:50 am
Been thanked: 5 times

One website to rule them all

Post by CrowsNest » Sat Jul 28, 2018 1:28 am

It a favourite topic of mine, exposing the sheer hatred many Wikipedians have for their so called wider community of volunteers, this mythical Movement they speak of. One big happy family. Yeahright.

For those who don't know, (English) Wikipedia is just one website in a whole suite of projects (i.e web domains) hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, but managed and built by volunteers. It includes all the other language Wikipedias, plus the media repository Commons, and interestingly, a news site, Wikinews. You have likely never even heard of it, and that is largely down to the fact the Wikipedians see the timely presentation of news as their job. They even have a section called "In The News" on their front page.

The Wikipedians have never liked the idea of Wikinews. They only tolerate Commons because, well, actually, they don't. If they could do it, the entire thing would be run in a way that was under the complete control of English Wikipedia. Which would suck for projects like WikiNews, since the ability to host one file and share it across multiple projects is a big benefit of having Commons as a separate entity, a shared resource, where no one project has effective veto powers over how another's images are handled. No surprise then, that wasteful duplication of images just because a selfish Wikipedian stamped their foot and said "keep local", is a real thing. They are children, one and all.

Examples of these attempts at fratricide by a thousand cuts abound, with Wikipedia trying to squish them all out of existence, or as a second best, make them take all their unwanted crap, including problem users. It is one of their best kept secrets, the wider world barely even understanding the second paragraph of this post. Don't expect the WMF to acknowledge it either. It would be like a parent admitting to strangers that their son actually beats his sister, and with proper malicious intent.

If you doubt the resolve of the volunteers of English Wikipedians to actively crush what they rather hypocritically call a "sister project", then look no further than these startling snippets of text, written as part of a current proposal to further limit Wikinews' visibility on English Wikipedia. Despite the following selected wording, with my italicized commentary, it is receiving almost unanimous support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Restrict_Wikinews_links_in_articles

Effectively, the English Wikinews is very often out-of-date, and cannot offer the quality, quantity, and timeliness of content that would make it a viable site for news.

Since professional news websites are still a thing, this sets an impossibly high bar with which to compare their sister project's fortunes. It shows the Wikipedian's ingrained arrogance, borne of being the only project which has so far succeeded in defeating its for profit competition. It also shows their unwillingness to reason why that might be.

This isn't new, the 2004-founded English Wikinews has had the same low-level activity since about 2012 (stats) - it is no longer a young project that just needs to find its feet.

Ouch. Someone better not tell the Wikipedian master race that, depending on what graph you look at, after the peak of 2007-8, they are either stagnating, or are in decline, themselves.

Functionally, the English Wikipedia is better at providing timely content than Wikinews and is far more comprehensive.

This proposition would never be false, unless or until Wikinews was more popular than Wikipedia, which it never has been, and arguably was never going to be, given they wisely don't just let any idiot edit and have that go live, they actually do their best, within the constraints of the movement's nonsense principles, to institute the closest thing a WMF website will ever have to fact checking and editing content prior to publication. A.k.a, responsibility.

Even if the Wikipedia page isn't as good as a news article, how often is a reader better served by Wikinews than one of the reliable sources cited on Wikipedia?

Irrelevant. A trick question, which belies their true motives, namely ensuring Wikipedia solidifies its position as the sole place in the entire movement where editors have the chance to cut and paste pieces of breaking news articles into WMF web pages, and call it serving the public good, because they done made free knowledge. Wikinews is not and likely never would be classed as a reliable source for Wikipedia's purposes, so by definition, no Wikipedia reader is ever better served when a reliable source is available.

While the English Wikipedia cannot decide which projects are kept and which are closed, it can "unilaterally" choose how it links to other projects. We are entitled to ask ourselves, are we serving our readers by giving Wikinews these prominent links?

Just as everyone else is entitled to ask, are you servig the needs of your so called partners in your so called movement with this duplicitous horseshit? It's worth noting, AFAIK, Wikinews articles have never taken up the option of linking to any other encyclopedias to explain terms to readers or as backgroiund information, even though there is arguably a benefit to their readers in doing so where there is a better alternative to Wikipedia. They were stuck with linking to Wikipedia, because of the so called sisterhood.
Don't get me wrong, Wikinews is a rather dead and thus pointless project, and it's failure is arguably due to their desire to be more resistant to fake news than Wikipedia. That said, it is disgusting that the Wikipedians, under this duplicitous nonsense that they are somehow not related to their sister project, that it is somehow just another news site, are effectively getting away with slowly hiding the body under the carpet, clearly embarrassed by the stink coming off the rotting corpse.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: One website to rule them all

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Jul 28, 2018 2:00 am

Wikinews was always a joke--the only people who really took it seriously were are small number of insiders who were also notorious for acting crazy: Cirt, Laura Hale, Pi zero, and that screaming freak Brian McNeil, who basically gave up in 2014. Pi zero is the only one still contributing regularly---along with a mishmash of IP addresses--wonder what the hell that is. The WP regulars didn't give enough of a damn about Wikinews so it was allowed to become "dysfunctional".

Commons, I could write a whole book about it. Anything that Erik Moeller started just HAS to grow up stunted and weird.

User avatar
NIDA
Sucks Fan
Posts: 136
Joined: Sun Jan 31, 2021 4:41 pm

Re: One website to rule them all

Post by NIDA » Mon Mar 29, 2021 7:35 pm

pi zero administrator is in wikihell, but why did wikimorons wikingrates block his account, not everyon will know he is worm food and again that is degrading as they did with stevenJ81 for trying to protect the innocent family name; WMF's gratitude rules@!!!! :lol: :oops:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special ... th/Pi_zero
https://incubatorplus.fandom.com/wiki/U ... :StevenJ81

Post Reply