Wikipedia Sucks!

This story comes from WikiInAction. The user Whowrote created a Wiktionary account on May 12 and changed a large number of Moabite pronunciations. Chuck Entz banned him for "abusing multiple accounts" without a proper sockpuppet investigation. When Whowrote appealed, Metaknowledge deleted his talk page. As I see it, none of the three justified their actions.

Without the opinion of an expert in Moabite we can not know whether Whowrote may have been a vandal or a student of a different school than whoever wrote the original pages.

An update from Salvidrim in the reddit thread:

The account User:Whowrote was blocked on en.Wiktionary as the result of this short investigation.

So there was, in fact, an investigation that confirmed Whowrote as a long term sockpuppeter.

This was a false alarm.

Thanks, we almost never hear Wiktionary news. Its history is even more sadistic, paranoid and heavily censored than Wikipedia's was.

I can prove it.....

Quote from Kelly Martin: "I was a guest checkuser on enwikt for a while. They, like many other English projects, have a number of enwiki refugees, and have a great deal of animosity toward their larger cousin. In addition, like many small projects, the project is basically controlled by a small ingroup, all of whom know one another. Enwikt got hit bad by a vandal who managed to score at least one, if not several, adminships, and then badly vandalized the project. Since then, they've taken a much more authoritarian stance on most aspects of the project."

A typical example of how Wiktionary mishandles editing problems: A massive dispute between Brian Speer and Kwamikagami, one of many over the years. Just like English Wikipedia, but worse -- admins on Wiktionary automatically block and disable all access by users they don't like. They also evidently censor the record, as the linked discussion on Speer's talkpage has completely vanished. The two have fought many times, but the only record remaining is virtually always on en-WP's noticeboards.

Quote: "I can't speak to Kwami's actions at Wiktionary, not having reviewed them. The language Kwami used here is certainly too harsh, but I can honestly understand his frustrations having had a similar experience with EncycloPetey on Wiktionary. (I was blocked for an hour for trivial matters and then reblocked when I challenged his actions as being contrary to Wiktionary's published guidelines.) It was an insightful experience, as I learned (through extensive discussions with another admin there) that Wiktionary's standards for punitive actions are far, far stricter than here. Blocks are handed out in a manner that would certainly lead to desysopping on Wikipedia. --Ckatzchatspy 05:00, 22 September 2009 (UTC) "

I would tell you about Brian "EncycloPetey" Speer, but it's like something out of Catch-22 or maybe a ketamine-induced nightmare. He's still running Wiktionary as if it were his private website.

You don't need a sockpuppet investigation to ban someone on English Wikipedia for abusing multiple accounts, so I doubt it would be a requirement on a small project like Wiktionary. As Salvidrim points out on Reddit, there is a process trail of sorts......

https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?t ... f=49486218

Deleting a blocked user's talk page however, that's just bizarre. It happens on bigger projects, but not typically as part of what seems like a standard sock block.

It all ties in with the idea that these smaller projects, due to their extreme vulnerability and lack of oversight, are just run by a couple of hardliners who treat it as their personal fiefdom.

I would however take the words of Wikipedians about the shortcomings of their so called sister projects with a pinch of salt - a lot of them cannot stand the fact the movement is bigger than just Wikipedia, and resent the fact that the governance decisions of Wikipedians and indeed what they consider best practice in a whole host of issues, are often completely ignored by other projects. Many Wikipedians are quite open about the fact that view sister projects at best as merely a place to dump unwanted content and users, and at worst, actual enemies.

Certainly at least half the things I've seen said about Commons by Wikipediots is complete and total bullshit. And only some of that can be down to just ignorance.

The single biggest reason Wikinews died, is because Wikipedians want their encyclopedia to be the goto news site of the cult, and thus interprets NOTNEWS so liberally as to be simply redundant to NOTE (which is the complete opposite of what is meant to happen - NOTNEWS is meant to trump NOTE).

The ongoing wars with WikiData illustrate their absolute horror at the idea anyone but Wikipedia could be the go to repository for semantic data. Using the laughable excuses that Wikidata doesn't have the robust and effective policies Wikipedia has to ensure data is correct, non-harmful and neutral (stop laughing), they are rejecting all attempts at interconnectivity.

Unsurprising then, that all these projects and up working quite differently to Wikipedia. The WMF needn't have even bothered including English Wikipedia in the unified login system, there will be very little crossover in the populations, and those that do will largely be either global functionaries or bot monkeys.