Unfortunately there was also so much bullcrap on there that it became impossible to identify the actual abuse from the durge added by people who simply had an axe to grind.

can't hang out here -- the stench of Wikipedia cult members is too strong...

Welcome to WR Marci.

The Voice of Reason.

Don't use a Wiki. Its the wrong tool for the job.

can't hang out here -- the stench of Wikipedia cult members is too strong...

When your earlier post consisted almost entirely of SQL commands I wondered if you could write. Now we know you can. You're not a easy read, but after a few rereads many significant ideas are contained in your post. Do you think software exists, or could be developed within our capacities, that could to some extent manipulate the information found in the en.wp SQL tables (e.g. the content of Wp) without the need to hand sift the information available concerning admin conduct?

That would be a godsend.

can't hang out here -- the stench of Wikipedia cult members is too strong...

I don't care if it can rear up on its hind legs and bark at the moon.

I have no idea what use a wiki would have cataloging and cross-referencing supposed abusive acts by Wikipedia admins and editors. Is this a make-work project for autistic and obsessive-compulsive editors banned from Wikipedia?

Who is the audience for this extravaganza? Does anyone actually give a shit whether the records of abuse, sorry, subjective data collection, are collected and stored in such a manner? Are these records more accessible than some other form?

Will it be useful in five or ten years, or will it die a death as the original impetus by a dedicated few gives way to lethargy and apathy? I know which way I'm betting.

The entire point of a wiki, any wiki, is that it must be self-sustaining and stand on its own merits. This one won't ever, because its wholly derivative. As such it will inevitably run into the sand as people realise that there are better uses of their precious lifespan than cataloguing the minor activities of a bunch of non-entities and no-hopers.

You'll excuse me if I don't sign up for this. I really, really, have better things to do.

can't hang out here -- the stench of Wikipedia cult members is too strong...

I guess I was hoping someone might have known of an existing web app that could be adapted for something like that... Obviously nobody is going to build something like that from scratch, nor should they. With all apologies to Marci, who sounds like (s)he's an IT person (like me!), writing up a database schema alone is probably more trouble than it's worth.

Nevertheless, every once in a while I surf about, checking on what's available... You never know, I might find something workable eventually!

Meanwhile, I'm learning how to customize WordPress. It's a much simpler system than this board is, and there are fewer gotcha's involved... Something might come of that too, I suppose.

Somey: WordPress is pretty easy to customise; I've customised 2 blogs so far

I think one of the most annyoing bugs of WordPress are the curly quotes.

@$#%&!! Hate the curly quotes! HATE HATE HAT!

At the moment I'm looking into a way to strongly-type comments, and maybe have them display things a little differently based on the type. I see how to add new fields to the form, but the other part seems to be trickier... I'll let you know if I get stuck on anything. I'm also ridiculously slow in general, of course.

can't hang out here -- the stench of Wikipedia cult members is too strong...

I am not the most technical person in this group. My understanding is imperfect. Are we talking about obtaining a "data dump?" I wouldn't mind some elaboration of exactly what that means---I think it means the contents of a MySQL database without the formating provided by MediaWiki Software---but I'm not sure. Then once we obtained it we would manipulate it through some sort of software filter? Or are we talking about populating some sort of database from scratch that would have the ability to identify and sort according to certain relationships?

Didn't Jonny want to pursue something like this?

can't hang out here -- the stench of Wikipedia cult members is too strong...

Sorry if I came off all rude and obnoxious there, Marci... I mean, putting aside the fact that I'm rude and obnoxious in general, I didn't want you to feel that your efforts weren't appreciated. System design and analysis is part of what I do for a living (albeit a rather small part), and I know these things don't just grow on trees!

Having said that, are you saying this is part of an existing software package somewhere, or adapted from same? I guess I wasn't clear on that point, but that would certainly explain the fields for addresses, employer information, and so on. If you really think that whatever it is could be easily adapted, it doesn't necessarily have to be freeware or open-source, of course - if this is a package that you'll endorse, that is, of course, unless the source is the famous Mister - oh, never mind.

Anyway, sorry about that.

can't hang out here -- the stench of Wikipedia cult members is too strong...

whatever happens, if WikiAbuse is resurrected it should always remain a wiki.

a wiki is far superior to message boards or regular websites in that any registered user can fix/add/delete/modify information that is later shown or revealed to be valuable, incorrect or malicious.

I agree with Sunlight: Wikis were built for online collaboration.

I think using forums or blogs, it would be difficult to collect all the needed information.

You can always close off registrations to approved people only so as to not invite trolls, difficult people, unconstructive editors, pick the phrase you want to use. You could even (though I don't know if you'd want to) close off viewing entirely to non-users - that one could be under debate, I think (I'm on the fence with that one).

I won't touch the technical details, although looking over what Marci posted leaves me thinking it looks promising.

There is absolutely a need for WR to take over WA, or to create something organized to list out this goddamned ongoing catastrophe that is Wikipedia.

I'm afraid I can't come up with a clever acronym like JC, but what we have are four components:

1) a readership who looks mostly at the data WP offers without knowing the complexities or slanted nature of the information

2) a general userbase that is equally ignorant of the realities of how fucked up the situation is

3) an outer core of well-meaning editors and admins who are more interested in making articles or a community than fixing the problems

4) an inner core of complete fucking pathological liars with tendencies toward narcissism, megalomania, clinical and functional paranoia, persecution syndromes, and about half of the DSM-IV. And yes, that's my "professional" opinion -- some people that are admins are of dubious sanity. No exaggeration.

The first three simply reinforce the perfidious nature of the things the fourth group is doing. I started editing Wikipedia as something to do when I was depressed and had a boring job with lots of empty time. I never swallowed a lot of the more pie-in-the-sky naive crap like AGF and civility and the five pillars, and I never bothered to give a shit what people thought . . . but I didn't realize the larger nature of just how BAD the situation was until I started really reading WR.

You people (since I don't think I'm on any trusted users list) -- you people who are the core of this place -- you have a responsibility to reveal this crap. The average person doesn't know.

How WikiAbuse went about it was complete garbage. The people causing the problem don't want to be involved in the solution since the solution is simply removing them and the mindset that created them. You can't reason with these people, and you can't sway them with logic or get them to cooperate to change things for the better. The hardcore lunatics should be treated like terrorists.

God knows how many people use WP each day, just to look up random facts. I know I still do, and hell, I know how frakked up the place is! I cannot stress strongly enough the fact that if WP continues like this -- untrammeled and uncalled out -- it will eventually blow up, and in blowing up will take down a potentially useful resource due to the ignorance of a group of immature idiots who think the site is their own personal fiefdom.

I think that one of the good things with a project like Wikiabuse is that Rootology had some wonderful ideas and set up a great foundation that made many people sit up and take notice. Yes, it was imperfect, and yes it had problems in that many Wikipedia administrators used it in an abusive way, and to some extent anonymous editors destroyed content (User: Person appeared to be the only one doing so, but I may be mistaken), and there was a lack of agreement as to some of the content, especially with regards to Outing. This is why we need to have some kind of a discussion as to how to do it better, and to set up good platforms to make sure that it works well.

Many people may not realise this, but when Wikipedia Review first started, it was created by a person called Igor Alexander, using a free ProBoards forum, didn't have its own domain name, and wasn't really sure about what it was trying to do. This changed a lot over time, had its battles, and eventually led to the creation of this forum, which in turn had more problems, but over time has become more stable. Even today it is far from perfect, but it is heading towards something, and the fact that we had to change to a new forum, and had to go through the difficulty associated with temporarily having 2 forums up at once has led to it ironing out those difficulties.

At Wikiabuse I think that the single biggest problem was that anyone could edit without any restrictions. We often comment that this is also a problem at Wikipedia. By attaching Wikiabuse to Wikipedia Review, and initially only having a handful of editors, who can then approve others, we can control this kind of thing, hence having more collaborative editing, and less fights. This wouldn't prevent someone like Elara from editing - she would simply need to ask an existing user if she could use it, and they would then make the decision - and probably say yes from what I can gather. But it would prevent some anonymous admin, or someone like Grace Note from creating an account, that we don't know is him, to mess up the whole place.

Should the wiki be visible to non users? I think that yes, it should be. The question rather is should the talk pages and in some cases edit history be visible to non users? Really, I think that talk pages could be in a private board on WR, with only public statements made in talk pages. Realistically, this is one of the great embarassments of Wikipedia - that it allows the whole world to see their petty little fights.

(500th comment/post)

Well, with MediaWiki (as far as I know), it's either "all or nothing". You can't hide specific things from non-users - it's either everything or nothing.

There's always the option of disabling talk pages entirely (AboutUs.org does this).

Congrats on your 500th Nathan.

Well, I would suggest allowing "all" as far as viewing, but just trying to encourage editors not to write in talk pages unless its something that they want the world to know.

can't hang out here -- the stench of Wikipedia cult members is too strong...

It is an interesting point that Marci makes - just because a given Wikipedia admin is found to have done something abusive, does it mean that they are abusive?

I don't think that we, as potential people writing wikiabuse.com, could ever accurately describe all abuses, nor could we accurately describe the proportion of abuses by a given admin. One admin may have had 50,000 positive edits and just 5 flawed ones, yet we may write 1 page about the 5 abuses. Is this fair on them? A second admin may have made only 5,000 positive edits and 50 flawed ones, yet we may not have noticed them and hence not written anything about them.

The thing is that in writing something like that, we have an inherent bias. By not needing to worry about NPOV, we only need to worry about accuracy, not worrying about bias. People who would read wikiabuse could then decide for themselves about the bias. The admins themselves could say that hey they are ignoring my 49,995 good edits, and so forth. And this would be legitimate.

Wikipedia Review is probably about 75% critical of Wikipedia, perhaps even more than that. We are all incredibly biased, towards our own individual points of view. I don't think that anyone who posts on this forum tries to pretend or hide what their individual bias is. We don't work in unison, although we do agree on some points. People who read this take that on board, and adjust what we say with what their perception of reality is. On some topics some people say that we are talking a load of crap, while on others some people say we are writing really good things.

The same would be true of wikiabuse. It wouldn't be something that we would expect people to write about in a high school paper, unless it was simply as a passing reference to something larger about Wikipedia, but it would be something that could be referenced to highlight to people some of the flaws on Wikipedia. Yes it would be biased. But it would also be accurate. We would reference everything. If Wikipedia deleted some evidence, we would either hopefully have someone who could provide the deleted revisions, or else we could use Google cache (etc) to find them.

I think that most people agree that what was happening on wikiabuse.com was mostly pretty good. Restricting who edits, and perhaps trying to discourage too much talk pages messages so that we can better coordinate what is written are two things that I think that pretty much everyone has agreed needs to be changed to help to improve it to a better level. This doesn't mean that people who aren't currently in the "WR trusted users" set can't edit. It just means that they'd have to write to request to edit, and then be approved first. They wouldn't have to get a copy of their driver's license, or even necessarily to join WR. It wouldn't be all that complicated. It'd just be a way to stop vandals or people who would want to destroy the site from getting in.

Nothing wrong with that! Wikipedia already has a public relations campaign... Outside criticism is essential, too. If you stifle criticism from within, and refuse to address critics on the outside, you end up looking like George W. Bush/Fox News...



There did seem to be some genuine support for WA on WP/the mailing lists. I felt like Rootology was doing his best to keep things neutral and sourced. The thing that appeared to be killing WA from the beginning was that a lot of editors on WA had already had previous difficulty collaborating on a Wiki.



Isn't there a WP admin on WikiTruth?

You should get up from the chair, get out and live a little.

What is the point of a wiki to catalogue "abuses" in Wikipedia? Of course you're going to give it away free, because who in their right mind would want to pay for this?

Nobody's answered these questions so I'm going to repeat them:



Any answers (I mean other than Marci who seems to regard having a point to an activity much less interesting than how it could be done)?

I think that the thing that was killing WA from the beginning was that there was open editing, and people like User:Person (probably Grace Note) was acting uncivilly. Additionally, there was some disagreement between Jonny Cache and Rootology about whether documenting some abuses by SlimVirgin constituted "outing".

I didn't see a single example of people who supposedly had difficulty collaborating on a wiki causing problems on WA.

According to Wikitruth, there are several WP admins on Wikitruth, and indeed as far as I know they are all WP admins.

At least one person on WA was a WP admin, as was obvious by them restoring deleted revisions.

You can make of that what you will. It seems that at least a few WP admins are secretly very critical of it.

can't hang out here -- the stench of Wikipedia cult members is too strong...

You don't say. How fascinating.

How about the rest of you who don't speak fluent bullshit? What is wikiabuse for?

Purpose of Wikiabuse:

1. To outline all misuses of administrative priveleges by Wikipedia administrators to the point where people get unjustly banned, articles get altered, and generally assist in creating an inaccurate encyclopaedia in which fact is displayed as fiction, and fiction as fact.

2. To outline all administrator activities for analysis if required to the purpose of 1 above.

3. To highlight people who assist administrators covertly, as secondary accounts or acting on their behalf for the purpose of 1 above.

4. To highlight people who have been prevented from editing Wikipedia due to their intention to produce accurate information, especially with regards to people who were banned for being experts in their given field.

5. To highlight web sites and organisations that have demonstrated examples where Wikipedia has presented fact as fiction, fiction as fact, and so forth, that have not been permitted to be represented in Wikipedia.

I mean the whole reason why we are here is because we feel passionately that Wikipedia is presenting a false view of the world, and we are concerned about the damage that this may cause to teenagers today, who will end up as adults in the future and bring to us a world that has a distorted version of reality. This is primarily why we are all here, and why this web site exists. Some of us got banned while trying to push truth on Wikipedia, but we aren't here just to whinge about being banned. So what if you are banned? You can always create a second account and secretly edit if you really want to. It isn't a big deal that you get banned from somewhere. You can go somewhere else, start your own wiki, and so forth. The issue is that of truth.

It is true that "history is written by the winners" and hence all history is tainted, but in reviewing history we can account for this inherent bias. We know that most everything written from the roman era is false and historians have spent decades, or even centuries, trying to correct their version of fact in to something a bit more accurate. We know that this kind of thing continues to happen today, especially with regards to the world's most powerful countries (USA, Russia & China) and to a lesser extent countries like UK, Japan & Germany. But we can all account for this. It may be difficult to account for your own nation's alteration of truth if you live within that country (or in many ways it may be easy to do this) but you can get perhaps a more balanced account from outside of that nation.

But for historians now to have to deal with the adjustment of truth through Wikipedia is something that is increasingly becoming a reality. Wikipedia has already changed truth on many important issues. They write something and that is copied on to Google, which in turn is copied in to many other web sites, which are used as sources, for newspaper reports, books, and so forth. And whilst there still do exist many people who go to lengths to research something properly, how many people really care to look through it all to check these things?

It may only be 0.5% of articles on Wikipedia that are deliberately false. I have no idea of the numbers. I do know of at least a dozen, however, that are false not simply because of vandalism, but rather because of ownership of the articles that prevents the article from ever becoming accurate. A falsehood that eventually becomes known as truth. This is truly Wikipedia's greatest flaw. Who really cares about momentary vandalism, even the likes of what happened to Seigenthaler? What matters more is if for some reason people really believed that Seigenthaler was an assassin, if that became known as truth.

Wikiabuse may have had different aims to Wikipedia Review, but they can be linked in a lot of ways. Wikitruth has different aims too. But we are all critical of Wikipedia, and I think that we can help each other out.

Only in that "They said you eat shit sandwiches but I told them you don't eat bread" way they have about them. Bet you can't provide one link to a WikiEn-l post where somebody voiced unqualified support.

It'd be difficult to provide one Wikipedia Review post in which someone voiced unqualified support of WA. In-general-type-support, but not unqualified support.

Not true. In the original thread on WA lots of unqualified support was offered even while offering suggestions. Here is one by me. Lots of other also offered this level of support. No shit sandwiches here. It was only after WP admins corrupted the project that criticism ensued on WR.

It hardly seems reasonable to expect "unqualified" support for such a venture from the Wikipedia folks, particularly under the circumstances...?

I suspect there are a few WP types who want to at least pay lip service to the idea that they can handle criticism and scrutiny at the same time without freaking out about it. They're shouted down, of course, by the others.

Such people are more likely to become admins than get bounced.



Wikis need a clear purpose , plus editors who can get along and work together toward a common goal. If we learned anything from Wikipedia, it is that conflict-resolution is such forums is extremely hard. Once the editor base goes beyond a handful of focused people, it becomes unpleasant.

Can't argue with that.

can't hang out here -- the stench of Wikipedia cult members is too strong...

Do you program anywhere much, Marci? You're programming speak is something that doesn't make sense to a lot of us here. I know of some muds that would love to have someone like you programming for them.

blissy: Unless he knows C, he wouldn't be of any help to them.

Ehh, I think that last bit was fairly understandable... S/he's saying that a wiki is general-purpose software, and the mere fact that it's general-purpose can lead to a lot of what may be pointless discussions regarding what the wiki should be used for, what its policies should be, ad nauseam.

By implementing a system that's designed for a highly specific purpose, you can at least reduce (if not eliminate) discussions about what the purpose is, and in the end you might be off the ground just as quickly - even if you have to code a lot of the system yourself.

Not that I'm volunteering for any such coding, mind you...

I can't disagree with that logic.

So what is the plan (if one exists)?

Well, at the moment we are experimenting with something. For the moment it is secretive, but we will let everyone know when we are ready to release it, and when we are sure that it is the right plan. At present, we are 99.99% certain of taking over wikiabuse.com, or at least of having something that achieves the same or similar aims to it. There are some things that need ironing out. Like the blog, this is an experiment. The blog seems to be successful however, so perhaps this would be too. Baby steps though.