What I am doing to save this site.

[grandmaster-huon]

Why isn't the foundation doing anything about this? They are mainly PR now.

I spent the last 15+ years telling people, IN PUBLIC, that the WMF is rotten and the WP insiders are even more rotten. You are delusional if you think anything will "change" suddenly. Or ever. I still expect the WMF will crash and burn before there is serious "reform".

How did it become so bad?

[Ognistysztorm]

But quality over quantity, all the time.

Deletionism often leads to systemic biases, which ironically means a decline of quality.

[Archer]

Wikipedia appears to function as intended i.e. as a tool for manipulating public opinion. I think any serious critique of Wikipedia should make this point very clear and disabuse the reader of the notion that Wikipedia merely suffers from some sort of inevitable, garden-variety corruption or cronyism. Nobody can really call you a "conspiracy nut" - despite the constant media exposure and universally-negative depiction this trope receives, most people know a serious argument when they see it and won't give you any lip. Only the propagandist is shameless enough to make an ass of themselves using ad hominems, which are easily dispensed with by pointing out the fallacy. So much bogus critique (e.g. the drivel on wikipediocracy and most academic papers) replaces one illusion with another (usually more cynical and fatalistic) illusion. This serves no purpose except helping the Charlatans triage the people who see through their lies and habituating people to their criminal behavior. The credulous masses are not nearly so wretched as the poor, gutless bastards who yield to this second deception. The people who run Wikipedia (or any other propaganda apparatus) have no intention to address the obvious problems (often having equally obvious solutions) outsiders see, nor will they allow the general public to do so. At the very least, doesn't it seem a bit silly to write a critique for the sake of Wikipedia itself? Surely most of what we can observe is not news to the Wikipedia administration. WP:AGF is mind-poison because they intended it as mind-poison, not because everyone in Wikipedia's administration are too stupid to write effective policy.

[grandmaster-huon]

But quality over quantity, all the time.

Deletionism often leads to systemic biases, which ironically means a decline of quality.

But the vast majority of articles are stubs that are left to rot.

[grandmaster-huon]

Good luck getting any attention from the deranged MMO players. They will fight you tooth and nail.

Oh look, you got a comment. Someone accusing you of being an AI.

If for anything else, I'd like to hear your further answers to topics of AI neutrality and implementation. One last question, was this proposal written by a large linguistic model?

You're right.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Re ... _Wikimedia

[Strelnikov]

In case it all vanishes, I copypasted both the proposal and the AfD to my other blog. We cannot let Wikipedia bury things over and over, like they tried with the Patrick Bet-David BLP (which is still standing....for now.)

[ericbarbour]

We cannot let Wikipedia bury things over and over, like they tried with the Patrick Bet-David BLP (which is still standing....for now.)

Agreed. That was the THIRD AFD for Bet-David's article. Obviously the insiders dislike him and want to "vanish" him, and obviously (made inescapable when the Bushranger crawls out of his hole to vote DELETE, he is still one of the pettiest assholes they ever had around) it is for political reasons. They despise video bloggers like this, who give plenty of time to right-wingers and conspiracy freaks.

Remember, they tried to do the same to Joe Rogan......REPEATEDLY. This is not "writing an encyclopedia", this is "trying to disappear somebody we don't like". And it is practically a daily occurrence. But you have to dig around to find cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... Experience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... Experience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Rogan ... Everything
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... s_in_Space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiny_Happy_Jihad

Need more examples of petty wiki abuse? Look thru the AFD log since 2005. You will find plenty of tiny little wars, conducted by tiny little nobodies, buried in a haystack of angry typing.

Huon, you should know by now that various outsider people have proposed Wikimedia "reforms" before you. Not a single one of them led to anything. THEY ARE A CULT, and cults always operate in a top-down manner. Insiders "invent" something (Wikidata, Flow and Visual Editor being obvious examples) and they try to cram it down everyone's throats. Sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Visual Editor was a giant disaster, and we know exactly who pushed it: James Forrester. One of the WMF's longest surviving employees. Also one of the most evil little bastards I've ever seen in wiki-land. The finest of Jimmy Wales's retinue of deep-embedment ass-kissers. HE SHOULD BE FIRED. But he remains.

[Strelnikov]

We cannot let Wikipedia bury things over and over, like they tried with the Patrick Bet-David BLP (which is still standing....for now.)

Agreed. That was the THIRD AFD for Bet-David's article. Obviously the insiders dislike him and want to "vanish" him, and obviously (made inescapable when the Bushranger crawls out of his hole to vote DELETE, he is still one of the pettiest assholes they ever had around) it is for political reasons.

Huon, you should know by now that various outsider people have proposed Wikimedia "reforms" before you. Not a single one of them led to anything. THEY ARE A CULT.

They despise video bloggers like this, who give plenty of time to right-wingers and conspiracy freaks.

This is the final hurrah of the CSICOP/Skeptical Inquirer style of skepticism; they could not stop TV shows like In Search of.... in the 1970s, nor The X-files in the 1990s (I remember all the bitchy articles about that show in Skeptical Inquirer), so they fight YouTube by denying Joe Rogan exists, somehow. I don't think Rogan or Bet-David are brilliant guys, but they have large audiences and have had famous guests (Alex Jones did Bet-David's Valutainment show, while Elon Musk has been on The Joe Rogan Podcast.) Vaporizing these articles just creates weird holes in the wiki due to all the overlapping articles.

To use a complicated example, It's not like cutting out of the Phoenix Program article that one of the employees of Pacific Architects and Engineers (the CIA cutout firm that built the provincial interrogation/torture compounds that Phoenix ran on) was Colston Westbrook, who went on to work at Vacaville State Hospital (Prison) where one of his prisoner-patients was Donald DeFreeze*, who escaped and became the ostensible leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army, "General Cinque". Westbrook was in South Vietnam doing work for PA&E that has never been disclosed. Or that of the USAID programs that overlapped with Phoenix was Public Safety, which brought police from NATO/"Free World" countries to hotspot countries to train the locals in basic counterinsurgency**. One of the employees of PS (though never in Vietnam) was an ex-Indianapolis cop named Dan Mitrione, who was friends with Reverend Jim Jones of the Peoples' Temple back when Jones was a teenaged street preacher. According to Jim Hougan, when Mitrione was killed in Uruguay in 1970, the CIA destroyed their files on Jones. Hougan thinks that Mitrione was Jones' CIA handler.***

Everything I wrote above breaks "WikiPOV" in multiple ways beyond style, mostly in my use of sources (which the editors would tsk-tsk at and roll their eyes) and willingness to create higher-level connections between subjects than the blatantly obvious. With deep enough research, what I just did can be done to multiple subjects.

____

* DeFreeze, like Westbrook was Black. DeFreeze was a known police informant for LAPD, had a long rap sheet and was the one person you would not think would start an urban guerrilla organization, but then Westbrook was running a "Black Cultural Association" inside Vacaville, and DeFreeze was a member.

** This was following a "tradition" laid down by the Michigan State University Group of the 1950s-1960s, which was doing counterinsurgency training and advising.....until Ramparts magazine exposed it all in 1966. The United States Agency for International Development did great humanitarian work, but it was always a CIA cut out, and if it is revived by force of law under Trump or rebuilt under a Democrat, it will still be a CIA cut out, it's too useful.

*** Hougan has a deep suspicion of the Peoples' Temple's stated goals at Jonestown. It was a perfect way of discrediting communes and non-Marxist Left organizing and multi-ethnic organizations and new religious movements. Mae Brussell (I used her 1975 The Realist article as a source on DeFreeze above) was also a firm believer that the Symbionese Liberation Army was a set-up to discredit the anti-war groups including the ones run by ex-draftees (the SLA had ex-Marines), also Black Liberation groups like the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground Organization, and so on.

[Ognistysztorm]

But quality over quantity, all the time.

Deletionism often leads to systemic biases, which ironically means a decline of quality.

But the vast majority of articles are stubs that are left to rot.

In the age of deepfakes, lies are just as likely as to result from the absence of info than the presence of it. There were past proposals not entailing deletions as how to do with those stale articles, such as locking/archiving.

I have to agree with Eric here that Wikipedia is a cult. It's more likely for a HTD moment to happen than a comprehensive and complete reform of Wikipedia's structure.