Wikipedia Sucks!

https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive ... an-gerbic/

And I repeat something I've said before on various fora and in email:

I still think she enjoys fighting with cranks on WP, because she IS a crank. I say again: this problem could be made to go away by talking the shitheads who run Wikipedia into changing their goddamn "policies" so that posting pseudoscientific beliefs is forbidden outright; Wikipedia being a beast of the internet, which would not exist without science. But that will never happen.

The turds who infest Wikipedia don't want to "fix" it. They are having far too much sick fun fighting with other lunatics.

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 05, 2024 12:25 am

https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive ... an-gerbic/

And I repeat something I've said before on various fora and in email:

I still think she enjoys fighting with cranks on WP, because she IS a crank. I say again: this problem could be made to go away by talking the shitheads who run Wikipedia into changing their goddamn "policies" so that posting pseudoscientific beliefs is forbidden outright; Wikipedia being a beast of the internet, which would not exist without science. But that will never happen.

The turds who infest Wikipedia don't want to "fix" it. They are having far too much sick fun fighting with other lunatics.

The longer the time goes, the higher the chances that the UAP community will branch out into wider anti-Wikipedia activism as they discover that the controversy about Susan Gerbic is not an isolated incident at all. On X, Rob Heatherly had initiated conversations with Kumioko in order to join forces against Wikipedia.

https://twitter.com/RobHeatherly1/statu ... 7041281107

Ognistysztorm wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 05, 2024 12:13 pm

The longer the time goes, the higher the chances that the UAP community will branch out into wider anti-Wikipedia activism as they discover that the controversy about Susan Gerbic is not an isolated incident at all.

I doubt their activism will go beyond trolling a selected fewish people. They correctly see Wikipedia as a huge opportunity to get their ideas out there, and the checks on them are tenuous enough to look possibly solvable "if we could just get rid of this Gerbic" etc.

Wikipedia policies say again and again that Wikipedia is not the place to write your original ideas. They say this because the structure of the platform says the opposite. That's the big attraction, just open an account and within minutes the internet says whatever you want it to say. Even when they are reverted the message is still that they have a chance.

Wikipedia is a different place in 2024 than it was in the glory days of the Guerrilla Skeptics -- a lot of their friends are inactive or outright gone. The Creationism wars are over*, the Scientology wars are over. UAP/UFO people are mostly outside of WikiLand, doing their podcasts, running their websites, writing their books. People like Susan Gerbic are too annoying to deal with if you like the things she finds unscientific garbage (even though she herself is not a scientist, she is a photographer by trade.) They can easily avoid Wikipedia, a site that now looks to outsiders like a very weird little club, like the Magic Castle in Los Angeles (the stage magicians' club/guild) or some crew of retired engineers who build and race replica Lotus 7 sportscars. Wikipedia only has power and prestige because the media and certain think tanks treat it with some respect; regular academia is still skeptical. RationalWiki does not help; it's like a skeptics' version of Encyclopedia Dramatica without the grossout imagery. I don't get why some of the UAP/UFO people are challenging Gerbic instead of running their own specialized Wikipedia -- Metapedia and Uncyclopedia prove that anybody with basic computing skills can run a Wiki.


__________
*Except for this guy, who is still fighting the Bible-bangers like it's 2004: https://www.youtube.com/@SirSicCrusader/videos

Strelnikov wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 07, 2024 3:23 am

They can easily avoid Wikipedia, a site that now looks to outsiders like a very weird little club, like the Magic Castle in Los Angeles (the stage magicians' club/guild) or some crew of retired engineers who build and race replica Lotus 7 sportscars.

Can confirm, have seen Lotus fanboys in action. Repulsive. Their hero Colin Chapman has been dead for FORTY YEARS and they keep trotting his corpse around and genuflecting to it.

And that's nothing. You should see what the collectors of Vincent motorcycles are like.