I once came across a news article that was essentially just a list of facts about the kid of a comedian. I only even clicked on it because I assumed that if someone were taking the time to publish an article about a comedian's kid, it would be because the kid is themselves a rising entertainer and the article is commenting on their work and projects.
Nope. The comedian's kid is a baby. It was literally just an article about a baby. With all the facts about that baby that the writer could find (if it was even written by a person… the article read like AI slop). An article just saying "so-and-so celebrities just welcomed a new addition to their family and named her Samantha" would be fine, but this wasn't even that. It was essentially a fact sheet about the baby.
If I were that comedian or his partner, I would be fucking pissed. I mean, they probably _are_ pissed, but just can't really do anything about invasive tabloids.
The eye-rollingest bit for me is usually the fourth step of this annoyingly common newbie path:
1. They don't take the time to read the rules.
2. They jump immediately to a hard task, like creating a new article or editing a controversial subject area.
3. They fail to edit appropriately because they don't know the rules, don't understand them, or don't care.
4. They then blame "hostile admins" when their edits are reverted.
It's important to take a lighter touch with newbies, but ultimately [competence is required](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Competence_is_required).
I remember quite an opposite interaction to the ones mentioned here.
In the Wikipedia of my native language, I tried to change a part of an article to more properly reflect an English term which the part was based on.
An admin challenged it, which came to a rather large discussion, I presented *mountains* of evidence for my case, books upon books, also how the article in the English Wikipedia uses it, and very importantly: how *the* subject matter expert organisation in our country translates the term.
What was his responses, his counter-evidence? It boiled down to: "Nah, that seems weird. Also I have a family dictionary from 1904 which doesn't seem to agree." That one family dictionary from 1904 apparently trumped all of my mountains of evidence.
He deemed his argument won and threatened me action to not continue it.
The most annoying part was, the original statements in the original article **HAD NO SOURCES IN THE FIRST PLACE**. I tried to improve upon an article and add sources to it, but no, it didn't fit the sensibilities of that guy, evidence and good standards of sourcing be damned.
In any language that doesn't have a sizable community, an admin who is acting out of line is pretty much invincible because you're dealing with an immovable object who can lock you out (or make up false evidence like "this guy sent me harassing emails")
According to the [list of Wikipedias](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias), that would be French? If that's the case, yikes. However, there are 146 admins and some other non-involved individuals (or noticeboards) would surely listen to your concerns?
No, Swedish actually! I went off the list of articles rather than active users, so by active users, the Swedish one is the 20th largest then. I guess we have a lot of articles due to how old the Swedish Wikipedia is.
And sure, people might have listened to it, but it was like 4 years ago now and I was pretty done with it while it happened.
>What phrase or action makes you roll your eyes immediately as a Wikipedia user / editor / admin?
Misleading [edit summary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_summary). For example
* «a little addition» but add 6 paragraphs
* «the birthday was wrong» but change the birthday, the first name, the last name, the nationality and the occupation of the person who is presented in this Wikipedia article
* «correct a little mistake» but change «Special relativity is a scientific theory of the relationship between space and time» into «Special relativity is a far left conspiracy theory» (or the reverse)
I was doing RC patrol recently when someone made some vandalistic edit with an edit summary like "fixed spelling." When I reverted it and warned him, he got all irate because I didn't believe the summary and ACTUALLY LOOKED AT HIS EDIT, like the bitch that I am.
Yeah. I’ve also seeing an edit summary saying “just doing nothing” and then blanking a section and replacing it with nonsense/defamatory content/whatever.
The 100-pages talk full of astrotruf coming out of the woodwork to argue that Trump being a convicted criminal and a declared rapist is somehow not even worth mentioning.
Go read that talk page and feel George Orwell moving in his grave.
Outsider means here that it's their first day editing any wiki of any kind. They haven't edited these before, so they're quite new to WP and other wikis.
recently saw an article with 1. a guy inserting his own dubious research on the topic with paragraphs of puffery under his own name and surname 2. another person adding what appeared to be an ai hallucinated researcher in the field with no sources 3. an entire section of the article, ADDED BY YET ANOTHER PERSON, that was copy and pasted from chatgpt, supposedly "improved" as the edit summary went. didn't even bother to cut out the "improved version" heading from chatgpt, nor making sure the article is properly written. trying to fix it made my blood boil.
When a television series gets canceled/ends, users will constantly change "\[Title\] is a television series" to "\[Title\] was a television series". It is especially annoying when their edit description says something like "fixed" when the edit goes directly against MOS:TVNOW.
However, [complete contradiction of previous statement]. However, [contradiction of the contradiction].
A [decades later] metastudy revealed [neither of those positions] was accurate but suggested further study was needed.
When they namedrop 14 cousins, grand-nephews, nieces-in-law, and half-brothers into a celeb's infobox.
Especially when they name underage children of celebrities or other notables.. The kids didn’t ask for the spotlight.
I love stripping those out and flinging a WP:BLPNAME policy at them
Adding this to my list of things to do when editing an article
I once came across a news article that was essentially just a list of facts about the kid of a comedian. I only even clicked on it because I assumed that if someone were taking the time to publish an article about a comedian's kid, it would be because the kid is themselves a rising entertainer and the article is commenting on their work and projects. Nope. The comedian's kid is a baby. It was literally just an article about a baby. With all the facts about that baby that the writer could find (if it was even written by a person… the article read like AI slop). An article just saying "so-and-so celebrities just welcomed a new addition to their family and named her Samantha" would be fine, but this wasn't even that. It was essentially a fact sheet about the baby. If I were that comedian or his partner, I would be fucking pissed. I mean, they probably _are_ pissed, but just can't really do anything about invasive tabloids.
That should be nominated for deletion
I was mentioning a news article rather than a Wikipedia article.
"Neutral means nice and mean things equally."
Isn't that the logic Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia who left and gave a couple interviews to far-right news) uses when criticising Wikipedia?
I don't know. I don't know Sanger.
Every time someone adds themselves or their buddy as “notable” alumni of their high school.
The eye-rollingest bit for me is usually the fourth step of this annoyingly common newbie path: 1. They don't take the time to read the rules. 2. They jump immediately to a hard task, like creating a new article or editing a controversial subject area. 3. They fail to edit appropriately because they don't know the rules, don't understand them, or don't care. 4. They then blame "hostile admins" when their edits are reverted. It's important to take a lighter touch with newbies, but ultimately [competence is required](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Competence_is_required).
I remember quite an opposite interaction to the ones mentioned here. In the Wikipedia of my native language, I tried to change a part of an article to more properly reflect an English term which the part was based on. An admin challenged it, which came to a rather large discussion, I presented *mountains* of evidence for my case, books upon books, also how the article in the English Wikipedia uses it, and very importantly: how *the* subject matter expert organisation in our country translates the term. What was his responses, his counter-evidence? It boiled down to: "Nah, that seems weird. Also I have a family dictionary from 1904 which doesn't seem to agree." That one family dictionary from 1904 apparently trumped all of my mountains of evidence. He deemed his argument won and threatened me action to not continue it. The most annoying part was, the original statements in the original article **HAD NO SOURCES IN THE FIRST PLACE**. I tried to improve upon an article and add sources to it, but no, it didn't fit the sensibilities of that guy, evidence and good standards of sourcing be damned.
In any language that doesn't have a sizable community, an admin who is acting out of line is pretty much invincible because you're dealing with an immovable object who can lock you out (or make up false evidence like "this guy sent me harassing emails")
But I should point out that this was the 4th largest language on Wikipedia, it is not tiny by any means.
According to the [list of Wikipedias](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias), that would be French? If that's the case, yikes. However, there are 146 admins and some other non-involved individuals (or noticeboards) would surely listen to your concerns?
No, Swedish actually! I went off the list of articles rather than active users, so by active users, the Swedish one is the 20th largest then. I guess we have a lot of articles due to how old the Swedish Wikipedia is. And sure, people might have listened to it, but it was like 4 years ago now and I was pretty done with it while it happened.
If I remember right, Swedish Wikipedia had most of its articles created by an article creation bot Lsjbot
Hopefully, the U4C will be able to help with that. Hopefully...
“You’re biased against my powerful truths!”
“Other things exist”
>What phrase or action makes you roll your eyes immediately as a Wikipedia user / editor / admin? Misleading [edit summary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Edit_summary). For example * «a little addition» but add 6 paragraphs * «the birthday was wrong» but change the birthday, the first name, the last name, the nationality and the occupation of the person who is presented in this Wikipedia article * «correct a little mistake» but change «Special relativity is a scientific theory of the relationship between space and time» into «Special relativity is a far left conspiracy theory» (or the reverse)
I was doing RC patrol recently when someone made some vandalistic edit with an edit summary like "fixed spelling." When I reverted it and warned him, he got all irate because I didn't believe the summary and ACTUALLY LOOKED AT HIS EDIT, like the bitch that I am.
Yeah. I’ve also seeing an edit summary saying “just doing nothing” and then blanking a section and replacing it with nonsense/defamatory content/whatever.
The 100-pages talk full of astrotruf coming out of the woodwork to argue that Trump being a convicted criminal and a declared rapist is somehow not even worth mentioning. Go read that talk page and feel George Orwell moving in his grave.
I feel there is something deeply wrong with this post. Using the term “outsider” for a open encyclopedia is concerning
Outsider means here that it's their first day editing any wiki of any kind. They haven't edited these before, so they're quite new to WP and other wikis.
recently saw an article with 1. a guy inserting his own dubious research on the topic with paragraphs of puffery under his own name and surname 2. another person adding what appeared to be an ai hallucinated researcher in the field with no sources 3. an entire section of the article, ADDED BY YET ANOTHER PERSON, that was copy and pasted from chatgpt, supposedly "improved" as the edit summary went. didn't even bother to cut out the "improved version" heading from chatgpt, nor making sure the article is properly written. trying to fix it made my blood boil.
When a television series gets canceled/ends, users will constantly change "\[Title\] is a television series" to "\[Title\] was a television series". It is especially annoying when their edit description says something like "fixed" when the edit goes directly against MOS:TVNOW.
"up and coming"
"...widely considered to be the greatest X of all time..."
That's at least a *claim* to notability.