Eric Corbett

[CrowsNest]

It is interesting that Corbett's defenders on Wikipedia used to argue that nobody had ever left the encyclopaedia because of him, and so his atrocious behaviour was ultimately not harmful to the project. Well, obviously people who have left are not going to come back and contradict them ... Perhaps Wikipediocracy, as a critical site, would like to devote some effort to nailing that lie -- for lie it is.

Some people explicitly blamed him, others the toxic culture. The key point in understanding why most didn't and wouldn't bother, is because it doesn't and never would make a blind bit of difference to him or his disciples. They are all liars or fools. As the great man just recently said......

my view is that most people are mostly wrong

In other news, water is wet.

[CrowsNest]

It should be very impolite to talk about Eric Corbett, Ming and others here, because I am in a discussion on WO with them at the moment.
But in general I am wondering about the fascination for Everipedia, not only by them. It is a startup, nobody has earned money till now, there is no inflation of the crypto money, what do they fear? It is just start up, there are many other wiki products, Wikipedia is in many ways a original Ponzipedia, where is it about? Or do they have to fear something....

And to be clear, I have no Tokens, crypto money in general, are not active there at the moment, so I am not involved.

They fear Everipedia delivering a killer blow to Wikipedia. They're not serious critics with any kind of great insight, they're just disillusioned Wikipedians, hoping against hope that their ineffectual whining on Wikipediocracy will one day reform Wikipedia to the point they're happy to stop criticising it and return (assuming neither is not still scribbling away, Eric as a sock, Ming in his supervillain outfit).

Eric would be especially horrified at the prospect that anyone can put anything on Wikipedia, just as long as they had a source, as Everipeda posits is the way forward. Being able to say no, that's not my idea of what an encyclopedia is, was one of the few ways he got enjoyment from the hobby.

He bridles at the thought Wikipedia exists to document popular culture, or should ever consider history as anything newer than a century ago. Ming probably agrees.

[Graaf Statler]

I told Ming already your arguments are yo momma is so fat arguments. Give the next time links. A discussion is not a do it your self kit, find the evidence of what I am claiming yourself. And for Eric it is the same.
And if Everipedia kills Wikipedia let it be, it happens so often, also on the internet. A new product represses a old product, and it is about time. Wikipedia is from the beginning of the internet, so what is the big deal? How many products of the beginning of the internet are not killed and forgotten? That is life, in IRL happens the same.

[CrowsNest]

Cross post to something of relevance.

https://www.wikipediasucks.co/forum/vie ... 5557#p5557

Another first impression of Eric reaps the inevitable rewards.

[CrowsNest]

Apart from MilHist I think the only really active project is the ridiculous Women in Red.

Creating poor quality articles on living persons that nobody has ever heard of achieves nothing except to add to the irrelevant, badly written, and soon to be out of date clutter already littering Wikipedia. To say nothing of the self-important self-appointed guardians who attempt to make other editors' lives a misery by throwing around liberal accusations of misogyny.

It appears for instance that every article on a female subject has to be approved by the egregious Slim Virgin and her cronies, but what makes her an authority on anything other than being a pain in the ass who doesn't listen to a word she's been told?

I don't see any "unfairness" in that imbalance, just a reflection of the wider society in which we live and the gendered-roles that people have historically adopted.

Change the record Eric. It isn't remotely hard to show WiR is creating articles on seriously noteworthy women who were mysteriously left out of the first draft of Wikipedia. Should they ever reach their goal of creating profiles for all the notable women who should have articles under Wikipedia's existing notion of noteworthiness, then it is without doubt there will still be an imbalance, and sensible people will gladly accept that is a mere reflection of the historical bias of history.

It has only ever been misogynist fucks who tried to make ridiculous claims like how this project supposedly aimed to create parity in the number of male and female biographies, or have whined from the outset that they are trying to subvert Wikipedia. You are a fine one to talk in such terms.

There are indeed reasons why focussing on just a single aspect of the gender gap is ridiculous, but as usual, you lack the capacity or the intent to acknowledge what they are. As was recently shown with your comrade in arms SchroCat, the willingness of the aggressive males of Wikipedia to tell those uppity wimmin to pipe down and stop having the temerity to have an opinion on their work, is a massive reason why Wikipedia has a gender problem.

[CrowsNest]

Like most editors on Wikipedia I too added a few categories to an article just to keep the bots at bay, as they were never really of much use.

Not sure why this basic fact escapes the great man, him being regularly feted as a great builder of the wiki, but nothing is guaranteed to ensure the Wikipedia category system is of much use more than if established editors just slapped a couple of categories on to keep the bots at bay.

Eric never was a supporter of those Wikipedians whose interests lay more in the maintenance and curation side of things. Indeed, that is being generous, open contempt is more like it. One job those people do of course, is to go through the bot identified lists of uncategorized articles, and do a proper job of it.

I like to think this was what was meant when it was famously said Eric is not a Wikipedian. Sadly, they only meant because of how much of an asshole he is. Which tbf, applied just as well. Being an effective Wikipedian is so much more than the unremarkable ability to write an article.

So here we are today. We can only guess how many articles he wrote or rewrote, which to this day, have perfunctory categorisation. Only now have I just realised that proper categorisation isn't even part of the GA criteria. So that explains why he felt comfortable doing GA assessments without any apparent knowledge of or will to categorise articles properly.

[AndrewForson]

Building a stable, usable, maintainable ontology is quite hard, even in a limited area, let alone the sum of human knowledge, and it would not be surprising therefore if an uncoordinated bunch of amateurs had failed to do it. But they didn't even try, they just made stuff up as they went along, hoping that the magic of crowd-sourcing would solve problems that philosophers have been struggling with for ages. Similarly building a system that would allow useful queries so that contributors did not have to struggle with arbitrary and inconsistent rules rather than using standard query format would have cost the WMF a trivial amount of time and money, but why would they bother? So they didn't.

Summary: categories would have been done completely differently by a planned operation to build an encyclopaedia, ergo, Wikipedia is not a planned operation to build an encyclopaedia. But then we knew that already, didn't we?

[CrowsNest]

Full implementation of useful categories on Wikipedia is one thing that could be done remarkably easy with crowd sourcing, using the software and manual they already came up with, which at this time is simply being followed piecemeal, because of lazy fucks like Eric and the hordes of novice editors who don't know any better.

All it would need to succeed is for there to be a will to do it (i.e. established editors recognising proper categorisation is a valuable aspect of their wiki based encyclopedia), and some way to prevent duplication of effort while ensuring categories are at least applied once and checked once.

Ergo, Wikipedia is not crowd sourcing. Or an encyclopedia.

For all those who don't see the point of categories, Eric included, consider how often you see people arguing to delete lists because they are duplicated by categories (which is, in fact, against policy).

[Dysklyver]

Turns out I barely scratched the surface of Eric's depraved history. He is busy trying to prove he has written more than 3 FA's and that my blog about him was a gratuitous hit piece, and in doing so pointed me to some stuff that included his previous account (Malleus Fatuorum), with it's long block long.

It's also possible he has been largely taking credit for others work.

[CrowsNest]

Anything you need to know, just ask here. Eric has a habit of misremembering his history. And those tools at Wikipediocracy have a habit of not really giving a shit, like he was some kind of nobody, or worse, that a single thing he says can be taken as read.