Our Love/Hate Relationship With Wikipedia 244
netbuzz points us to a somewhat snarky Washington Post article about the Wikipedians' work in upholding a minimum standard of "notability" for the collaborative encyclopedia. Here's his take on the Post's bemusement from a NetworkWorld blog: "The Washington Post this morning gets its snickers at the Wikipedians who do the best they can to apply the minimum 'notability' standards needed to keep the online encyclopedia's 1.5 million English entries relatively free of worthless junk. 'It's also safe to assume these are people with a lot of time on their hands,' the Post writer notes... These are people doing a truly thankless job... and they deserve a few thank-yous."
It's not thankless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not thankless (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's not thankless (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's not thankless (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is cruft a problem???
If somebody publishes a 15,000-word wiki on the 1970s NBC show "Cliffhangers", it's not like Wikipedia suddenly takes up more space on my bookshelf. Personally, I love that there's so much obscure crap on Wikipedia. Somebody on Fark mentioned some way-out there pop culture reference I never heard of, and Wiki has me up-to-speed in a matter of seconds. How can this possibly be a Bad Thing?
(Unless you are a journalist for a dying media with an axe to grind, that is...)
Re:It's not thankless (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the biggest advantages that Wikipedia has is that it can have a much larger scope than any print publication ever could, and it seems silly to squander this.
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After years of research, we have decided to expand your planets entry from "Harmless" to "Mostly Harmless".
Have a good day!
The Editor, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe
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Because there are still limits on the system. If you let each person, group, and event in the world have a page on Wikipedia, you'll have serious problems telling them all apart. As an example, there are 38 people on Wikipedia named John Smith, and more with some variant on the name, like Johnny or Jon. And that's after trying to eliminate nobodies. If they let anyone with that name have a page, it would be a nightmare to tell them all apart.
Then there's the problem of how t
Re:It's not thankless (Score:5, Insightful)
My opinion exactly!
However, disappointments come when an important (yeah, whatever that means) topic is dealt with in a sub-par article. Happens rarely, but it does happen. Some argue that time should be spent on improving the "less obscure" articles instead of putting up lengthy Star Wars character descriptions. But that's just a misunderstanding of how Wikipedia works. The people spending all that time on obscure Star Wars topics couldn't produce a decent article on Wittgenstein or sauce béarnaise. However, the philosophers and chefs who can aren't well-versed in that galaxy far, far away. And if I do want to learn about Han Solo's early years, I know that Britannica will turn its back on me and where to look instead. So everyone should describe the things they know really well and everyone will gain from that. (Mostly weight, in the case of the sauce, but hey, there's always Dieting - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [wikipedia.org].)
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I agree with everybody's points - ordinarily, there is no reason to strip "non-notable" articles and information and "cruft" from the encyclopedia. But there are some other points to consider. For one thing, Wikipedia is supported by user donations and has no advertisements. All that hosting money has to come out of somebody's pocket. If the powers that be have a choice between paying to host large amounts of information on topics of very limited appeal/use, and saving money on bandwidth and storage by remo
Re:It's not thankless (Score:4, Insightful)
If somebody publishes a 15,000-word wiki on the 1970s NBC show "Cliffhangers" - Depth
some way-out there pop culture reference I never heard of, and Wiki has me up-to-speed - Breadth
My personal view is that Wikipedia shouldn't be shy of breadth. One of the things I think it has going for it (versus traditional encyclopaedias and "knowledge stores") is that it can document that trivial, the everyday and the disposable, which would not be deemed worthy enough to be worth the paper-space in Britannica or book-length analyses by academics, but may still be very interesting to future generations.
On the other hand, when it comes to depth, I think pruning is probably for the best. A 15,000 word dissertation on a niche topic doesn't really deserve to be in Wikipedia - it deserves to be published in full elsewhere, and summarised / referenced / linked as appropriate to an encyclopaedia article.
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Wikipedia also has many valuable tidbits of information. Example: They have a wonderful artic
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It's not. That's why there is already a Wikipedia with all the cruft you want. It's called The Google.
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Re:It's not thankless (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, what happens in theory and in practice may be two different things, especially with a user-editable project such as Wikipedia. Political articles in particular tend to get biased easily (thanks in no small part to PR departments, I'm sure), but Wikipedia has no reason to downplay would-be competition.
Re:It's not thankless (Score:5, Informative)
Without the cruft? Your definition of non-cruft would seem to be very broad.
"Nice" or not, most Wikipedia editors I worked with had very set notions about the "right" way to do things. Even if you have the official guidelines on your side, it's very hard to get anybody to change their minds. When I participated in the "request for deletion" discussions (I think they're called something else now) people mostly had their notions of what was notable and what wasn't, and that was that. Sometimes they'd even refuse to explain their opinions.
It really doesn't matter whether the discussion are polite or not, because they never go anywhere. It's a myth that Wikipedia is edited by consensus. Content is controlled by those who outstubborn everybody else.
Re:It's not thankless (Score:5, Interesting)
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Is the society notable? Well, maybe not. It's the largest university computer society in the UK, is (or possibly was) the only one that maintained its own 24-hour computer lab, and it
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Re:It's not thankless (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia policy itself is a joke. They have rules and policies set forth to suit most editors' purposes, but when their agenda doesn't sit nicely with established policy, they pull this card out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IAR [wikipedia.org]
Repeating the same mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia critics miss the point, or do they? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't put Wik into the encyclopedia box. It's really a social knowledge network where opinion is just as entertaining as fact. It's engaging and addictive, especially around controversial topics. I think I spend more time on the Discussion pages than on the main pages. I enjoy (like many, I suspect) anonymously correcting l
Re:Wikipedia critics miss the point, or do they? (Score:5, Informative)
The Wikipedia project tried VERY HARD to put ITSELF into that box, beginning with its very name and slogans. Don't get pissy now that people see it in that box, and have certain expectations as a result.
"Main Page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"
"Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit."
And from the about page:
"This Web site is a wiki, which means that anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia..."
It may be all those things you mention IN ADDITION to an encyclopedia, but an encyclopedia is CLEARLY what they are trying to be.
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You called Wikipedia 'wik'. Wik is actually the name of a user on Wikipedia... a banned user, as a matter of fact. (And somewhat controversial in his day.) But even more than that, even when people call it 'Wiki', it's roughly analogous to calling The New York Times 'Newspaper': "Oh, hey, did you see that cool article in Newspaper the other day?" Wiki [wikipedia.org] is a variety of software. There were wikis before Wikipedia.
Appropriate terms for Wikipedia include Wikipedia (but please not WikiPedia - or do you sa
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You're assuming that everyone who criticises Wikipedia hasn't had much to do with it. This isn't exactly the case.
There's communities that have had articles deleted for 'notability' reasons when they've been notable to the community, while articles on similar subjects have stayed intact. They start to wonder that if it happens to them, how many other subjects does it happen to? Is notability defined by how much that one editor cares about a subject?
There are people who have seen Wikipedia arguments spil
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Thanks.
The language nazi says: (Score:3, Informative)
"Bemuse" is a synonym for "confuse". It is not a synonym for "amuse".
Yes, yes
Re:The language nazi says: (Score:4, Informative)
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Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
What would be the harm of being a repisotory of every article that somebody had the energy to write?
Because we already have the web at large for that. The point of an Encyclopedia is not be the repository of all knowledge, but to be a summary of all notable subjects. The "repository of all knowledge" IS all published knowledge.
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Because we already have the web at large for that. The point of an Encyclopedia is not be the repository of all knowledge, but to be a summary of all notable subjects. The "repository of all knowledge" IS all published knowledge.
Back when we didn't have an Internet and people actually turned routinely to books and encyclopedias for information, the point of an encyclopedia was its breadth and accuracy.
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And yet... notability as a criterion for inclusion is not and never has been an official policy of Wikipedia. It is, at most a disputed guideline [wikipedia.org], and the Wikimedia Foundation's own fundraising materials [wikimediafoundation.org] include the statement, "Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." Not "the sum of all notable human knowledge" or
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that as I see it now the whole thing is a cluster fuck in terms of notability
Wait, something created by humans is not perfect? GOOD LORD!
I personally laugh at the webcomic entries as by wikipedia's OWN standards 99% of them shouldn't be there.
The question is notability. If they have sufficient readership (or links, based on Googling, for example), then they probably belong there.
If your web comic isn't getting enough people thinking it's notable and campaigning for it, then yes, it probably isn't. Sorry about that. Keep working on it...
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I'd prefer a limited wik
That's the only valid reason. (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of the benefit of Wikipedia is that it has articles on a wide variety of things, far more than a paper encyclopedia ever could. If I wanted to read Encyclopedia Britannica, I'd just
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That is a much more serious problem because it undermines good articles if they become filled up with references and sections about unimportant events, people and places.
slashdot entry (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't see why there can't be room for any kind of articles as you only come across what you search for - it's not like you are holding a 1 metre thick book where you have to wade through a million random articles to find what you want. Although initially sceptical of Wikipedia I do actually find it quite useful these days as a starting point for many a piece of research.
Funnily enough, the slashdot subculture section has become a victim and been removed. It's through that article on Wikipedia that I got a
Re:slashdot entry (Score:4, Informative)
One important requirement for articles on Wikipedia is that they are verifiable. That means providing sources for the information in the article, allowing others to ensure that the article is accurate. If there are no published sources which contain information on the subject of the article, there would be no way of evaluating it. I doubt that the authors of an article on some kid's garage band could provide a reference from outside of their circle of family and friends.
Wikipedia is a tertiary source. Not a primary source, not a secondary source. Articles on Wikipedia are written about what is already published elsewhere. This is an attempt to keep Wikipedia neutral, and minimize the influence that a particular editor's biases might have.
Re:slashdot entry (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like Wikipedia needs to study a few ideas (Score:4, Insightful)
First among them, The Long Tail, and why it would benefit the site to take advantage of it rather than ignore it.
The whole "notability" criteria seems very much like 1980s thinking. So many lessons of the internet being ignored there.
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(And to argue that the non-notable information is available on the internet anyway is strange: in that case we don't need Wikipedia at all, as we have Gooogle.)
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It's akin to "feature bloat" in computer programs. Yeah some of those whiz-bang features might be useful to a handful of people, but to the majority they just clutter up the interface and can potentially slow the program down. Encyclopedias should give you a brief
Re:Sounds like Wikipedia needs to study a few idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The concept of "notability" was created because Wikipedia is constantly bombarded with new articles about someone's significant other, garage bands who have yet to relase an album, businesses looking for free advertising, and crackpot theories. Some people think that having an article on Wikipedia is a passport to fame & credibility. What we try to do on Wikipedia is report what other people believe is notable. And most -- I'll freely admit, not all, we do make mistakes -- of the articles that fail the notability guidelines are obviously of no interest except to a very few people -- if anyone beyond it's original author.
We are not an arbitor of importance: we're just trying to write an encyclopedia about topics people want to read, not include every last possible scrap of information conceivable. Unfortunately, with Wikipedia's high Alexa rating, too many people think that an Wikipedia leads to fame.
Geoff
Re:Sounds like Wikipedia needs to study a few idea (Score:2)
Believe me, Wikipedia understands the long tail. They have over 1.5 million articles in the English language encyclopedia alone, dramatically outpacing every other available encyclopedia. They built their entire model on the long tail.
However, in an effort to be a reliable source of information they have standards like "verifiability". Some topics are too obscure to be able to be indepen
The reasons for a notability requirement (Score:5, Insightful)
It amuses me that most of the people complaining about the "notability" requirement are the same people whose vanity-based Wikipedia articles were seen for what they are - self-aggrandizement - and subsequently removed.
Also, for the record, I don't have a cat.
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OK, how about we take a cat, and write a Wikipedia article on that cat, and THEN we put the cat in a steel box with a
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You wouldn't expect that from an encyclopedia, would you? I mean, somewhere hidden in that shelf full of dusty volumes might be an article about some Britannica editor's cat. And while you may not care about the cat - and might not ever see that article - you still expect everything in that encyclopedia to be true, whether you can personally verify it or not.
Well, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia also. By its wiki nature, the truthfulness (t
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Interviewing the subject of an article would not be sufficient to be considered verifiable, unless you got your interview published in a reputable external source. There's a rule against putt
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For what it's worth, the set of topics that are Notable is a subset of the topics that are Verifiable... they're not the same thing. [1] [wikipedia.org] Verifiable facts include that 923049123581435834435803984 is an integer, the data on my passport, and the gross income of Walmart in February 1982. However, most of those aren't generally considered encyclopedic, and if we open up the possibility for storing all those, Wikipedia would eventually have over a billion pages, and it might be hard to maintain all of them (ra
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This may be true. But it has no bearing on notability. I assume the point of "notability" is to prevent Wikipedia from morphing into a social networking or advertising site.
Wiktionary defines Notable as "Worthy of notice; remarkable; memorable; noted or distinguished." Note there are two alternative definitions within this definition: a normative one ("You should take notice of George Orwell") and descriptive/empirical one ("Jango Fett is a noted fictional character in
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In the webcomics world, they've butted heads over notability so much that most commentators have advocated abandoning Wikipedia for a dedicated webcomic wiki.
The problem appears to be that a webcomic is usually considered notable by reputation and influence, things that traditionally are hard to provide sources for (not least because the first response when someone asks about it is "you don't know Girly?!") This has led to several entries of exceedingly notable webcomics being deleted from Wikipedia, incl
Missing the important news (Score:5, Informative)
The big story at the moment about linking to external videos on YouTube [wikipedia.org] (and other video sources).
This is all started with Fox serving takedown notices to Quicksilverscreen [quicksilverscreen.com] for linking to YouTube videos, under the assertion that linking to copyright infringing material is, in itself, illegal. Hence the repercussions for Wikipedia (and, pretty much any site governed by US law).
C'mon slashdot, keep up!
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Notability isn't enforced strictly enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia's problem is bloat. Most of the articles about anything important were created before article 500,000. At 1.5 million, most of the articles are junk. It's bottom-feeder stuff now.
Popular culture is a significant problem. There are far too many Star {Wars|Trek|Gate} articles. There's a Wikipedia article for every Star Wars comic book. For a while, someone was trying to create one for each character in each story in each comic book, but that was beaten back.
Then there's the ongoing effort to put every musical composition available in Wikipedia. A wiki is the wrong tool for that job. CDDB/Gracenote and IMDB have real databases for that sort of information, with useful linking and searching, but Wikipedia doesn't have the structure for that.
Wikipedia bloat impacts quality. It takes a huge number of contributors just to undo vandalism and clean up messes. Those contributors are now stuck cleaning up a mountain of dreck. They're falling behind.
That's hard on a volunteer effort. There are a few editors for whom Wikipedia is their day job, but the only one known to be full time is a political lobbyist. The thing just isn't staffed to deal with all the dreck.
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Re:Notability isn't enforced strictly enough (Score:4, Insightful)
If some music nerd wants me to know John Lennon was wearing green socks on 4 April 1967 when he recorded A Day in the Life, it's not going to change dramatically the price of the Wikipedia. Heck, if I clicked through the hierarchy until I reached the article "Clothing of John Lennon during the SPLHCB session of 4 April 1967", I may be the only person who ever clicks the links, so it's virtually costless.
What if that data was actually in the "Great Britain" article because the music nerd thinks everyone who is interested in Great Britain should know about the colour of the socks of John Lennon during each recording session of Sergeant Pepper ? Guess what, YOU can edit the page to remove it (most authors won't actually mind) or move it to a more appropriate page (most authors would understand).
IMO there is no such thing as too much information.
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"Anything important"?? That's a completely subjective measure. The first 500, 000 entries were probably the most obvious ones. But much of what's "important" isn't obvious. (I'm sure you haven't scanned the next million articles to ascertain that they're "bottom-feeder" stuff. And equally sure that you're not qualified to make that judgement for al
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Wikipedia helped me to select my DIVX in the Stargate Season 10 torrent.
I found their summary quite helpful. There are few episodes completly disconnected from the main plot and I didn't want to see them.
I have also used Wikipedia to document myself on Ottoman Invasions in Hungary. And Alliances between Polish and Hungarians crowns to face it.
The great thing about it is that it gives information about anything you wish. And in my case, I prefer it remains that way.
I'm notable (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the strictest definition of Wikipedia's notability guides [wikipedia.org], I'm apparently notable by Google. Searching for my real name shows mostly matches for me, and a few hundred of them at that; that's a specific notability criteria [wikipedia.org].
I've also published 4 LWN.net articles; but that's not a direct route to fame. Also I'm Security+ certified; apparently CompTIA claims that over 25,000 people hold the cert, which is fewer than Mensa can claim (I'm part of a small but well-known group in the market?).
On the other hand, I'm jobless and have no real achievements. I speak a lot on mailing lists and publish articles and such and sometimes get a little attention. Be careful how you define "Notable."
The question is, why is this noteable to the WP? (Score:4, Interesting)
Admitting there are checks and balances? (Score:3, Interesting)
You do have to wonder if they chose their examples to try and give them the notability they lack.
Washington Post gets its facts wrong--twice (Score:4, Informative)
here's what their policy really is (Score:2)
Spam (Score:2)
When has having time on your hands become a sin? (Score:2)
Copies of answers.com and howstuffworks.com (Score:2)
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Wikipedia Becomming Elistist (Score:3, Interesting)
If they want to give special status or marks to citations of published material, that is fine with me. However, deletion of non-published material is going overboard. Status: okay. Deletion: Not.
Time for a wikipedia revolt.
I'm not notable and they refuse to delete me (Score:2, Interesting)
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Fair use images (Score:4, Interesting)
Bureaucracy is slowly turning Wikipedia into a not-very-fun place. Editors are ruining great articles by being too overzealous. The notability thing is just one example.
Perhaps because (Score:2)
Info Junkies (Score:3, Informative)
As I noted... (Score:2)
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I find it hardly surprising that the people who complain most about Wikipedia know so little about it.
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That's hardly an inaccurate assumption. For example if myself and other AC's came to a consensus that you are a asshole, I'm sure that would be accurate.
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The anarchical approach fails the moment it gets into a contentious subject or when facing with a well organised system hell bent on putting their side of the story through. Articles
Shit Casserole My Arse! (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO the problem with wikipedia is that they included the prefix -pedia in their name. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It's more a global store of knowledge - a wiki - and ideas of varying quality will creep in much more than a published encyclopedia. Claims that anarchistic editing makes for higher accuracy than a published book are just unrealistic - when you set up such expectations and they are dashed you get very vocal critics of wikipedi
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Let's suppose for a second that America is sometimes called a democracy for real reasons, not just to snow the untutored. We've never been a democracy, nor are all men (treated) equal, nor did the slaves enjoy life, liberty, pursuit.
And yet the ideal remains: it's a work in progress. In the same way, the founders and workers of Wikipedia would like to see it approach -pedia stature, if asymptotically. In some (more empirical) areas it already are one.
Those who sniffle about its lack
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Just an FYI: "-pedia" (Greek paideia) means "education".
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Then you could have a Special page for all anonymous edits done, with a diff so it'd make it easy to find vandalism.
It still keeps the barrier to edit low so people can fix typos and bad grammar, but it doesn't let them post/remove entire articles/paragraphs. Also prevent page creation and deletion. Seems reasonable to me.
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Re:To avoid Vandalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should I prove that I know how to drive in order to edit Wikipedia ?
More generally, you are assuming that anonymous editors, people younger than 21 and people without a drivers license/ID currently bring more bad things than good things to Wikipedia. You may be right, but I don't see any reason to believe it just because you say it. Many anonymous editors make excellent contributions to Wikipedia, as do a lot of teenagers. What is the point of cutting down vandalism if we lose more valuable content simultaneously ?
Zorglub
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If you don't want your comments screened first then register. Though I agree, requiring a Driver's license may be a bit much.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh dear god, no. Yes, but noooooooo.......
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Vandalism happens, and would whether or not accounts were required. I don't really understand why people have such a hard time with anonymous edits. Fully open editing, which includes spontaneous anonymous edits, are exactly how Wikipedia got so huge in the first place.
Wikipedia entered mainstream consciousness by adopting a radically open position. Why is that now, that is
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Actually, not even regular administrators can do this. There are only some 15 wikipedians on English Wikipedia with checkuser privileges [wikipedia.org], and they may only use that privilege for very specific circumstances (basically deal with serious abuse).