Journal Journal: nobody appreciates me. 3
someone had a sig that said (paraphrase)
'wikipedia is the type of thing that only works in practice. in theory it couldn't possibly work'
i've begun to doubt that the last few days. the first part anyway.
i wrote in my journal (and slashdot featured on the front page) a few weeks back about the takeover of Freenode, the FOSS IRC network, by hackers. It seemed a group called 'Bantown' were the most likely culprits. A few days later, I wrote an article about them for Wikipedia.
A few months back the same group had appeared to be responsible for a series of cross-site scripting attacks to LiveJournal.com. Back then, I'd become curious, and tried to find out more about them. So I did a few Google searches and so on and found out that not much about them was known, but what was out there was quite interesting for various reasons.
Now, when I was in the first year of secondary school I learnt what an encyclopedia was for. When you don't know anything about a subject you go there for the first and most important facts. Then you either know enough to be getting on with, or you have some idea where to look next. Wikipedia has become enormously useful to me in this respect. A year ago if I heard something mentioned and didn't have the faintest what it was, I'd Google it. Now I search wikipedia for it instead.
Having been i exactly this position with Bantown previously, and knowing a little more about them now, I decided to write a simple article about them, putting together the few concrete facts and the links that I'd stumbled upon.
All very well at first. Last weekend the article was nominated for deletion. Now, the subject isn't the most important in the world, and the article was far from being comprehensive or finished. But there were a few references, enough (I thought) to show that the subject was notable and back up the facts stated. The original work probably took around 3-4 hours all in. In the last few days I've probably spent 3 or 4 times that justifying myself repeatedly to users (and one wikipedia admin in particular) who want this page deleted. Perhaps 2 hours of that was adding to and improving the page a little bit in response to criticisms.
It seems that, not only do lots of people have nothing better to do than to browse and edit wikipedia all day (and good luck to them). Some of them have nothing better to do there than piss all over other people's work, form cliques, cabals and hierarchies, the better to do so, quote 'policy documents' to each other at length, and generally indulge in power trips. In my case I haven't given up yet on the article being kept. But the way this process has gone makes it clear to me that there are people out there whose contributions are being thrown out, for no reason than they don't have unlimited time to indulge in edit wars and discussion page pissing contests.
Now, there are definitely some articles I would recommend for deletion. But it shocks me that someone can put so much effort into distorting and abusing the deletion process, just to get rid of something that clearly isn't nonsense or vandalism, but that they happen not to like / approve of. In this case it seems that I am suspected of being a member of Bantown, promoting and aggrandizing my own organization in order to experience the giddy heights of being mentioned in a wikipedia stub! (This although I've denied it about 4 times).
I've never been someone who believed that human nature itself leads inexorably to power struggles and oppression of the weak by the strong, that cooperation and peaceful coexistence are ruled out by our very genes. This sort of thing does make me wonder though.
