The Wiki Disaster

We've all been there. Well, if you're one of the three nerds reading this then, yes, you have surely been there. That moment when you finish your next witty yet clever retort to someone you'll never meet and realize, "Wait... No one cares about any of this, but me...". Nerdwars are quite hilarious at times, seen on almost all forums, Reddit, and the comment boxes of every major video sharing website that exists. If you come across one of these, you might stop to read one post, and think about how ridiculous these people are arguing over some inane point when both of them know that they will never be able to change the opinions of anyone, especially the person they're arguing with. Yes, it all seems quite trivial, that is, if you aren't in it.

My most recent of nerdwar escapades happened while doing a project for CS280. We had to publish some sort of article on Wikipedia or Citizendium that pertained to the class. I chose to research a group of buildings and companies that reside in the university area, and spent many hours sifting through the small amount of information that was available on these entities. I created these pages in a sort of test section of Wikipedia, and when I was ready to publish them entirely, simply created several new live articles to accommodate them. I felt quite good about what I had written, had made sure to provide sources for every piece of information I presented, and had no personal bias or 'advertisement-like' sentences in any of the articles. Unfortunately for me though, no one had bothered to tell me about something called 'notability' - a term with which I am almost painfully familiar with by now...

The day after I published my articles I logged back onto Wikipedia to check on them, and to my surprise, they had all disappeared. Every time I tried searching for them, various pages that I had as sources for the articles popped up instead of the articles themselves. I checked the article history, and sure enough, on every one of the articles an edit had been made removing every bit of html that I had written, replacing it with something like "#REDIRECT [[IBM]]". The comment about each of the changes was the same as well "no real indications of notability on its own". It appeared that a user had systematically gone through all of the articles that I had written, and removed the entirety of their content, redirecting any searches past the title of the article to a parent or associated organization page.

I immediately thought that this user, MikeWazowski, had just ignorantly removed the articles, and so reverted the change to get my articles back. I assumed this would be enough, and that my articles would be left alone from then on. As you might expect however, MikeWazowski was back within 2 hours, and had again redirected through all of the articles that I created with the same edit comment: "no real indications of notability on its own". I decided to look up Wikipedia's guidelines on notability, and after some time spent searching I found enough evidence to suggest that a he wasn't allowed to simply remove or redirect articles based on his opinion of notability. This is where flagging an article is used - a message is placed at the top of the article suggesting it has questionable notability. So I again reverted the edits, with the comment "Flagging articles is fine. Deleting them arbitrarily is not. Learn the rules." on each (I may have been tired and slightly annoyed at the time ;) . Again after a couple hours, MikeWazowski had redirected the articles. This time his edit comments read, "I can do what I like, and you have shown no real indications of notability for this on its own - it is up to you to convince us otherwise on the talk page". 

Oh, it was on now. I again went though Wikipedia's notability guidelines, and found out that without administrative privileges he did not have the authority to do that he was doing. I 'kindly' informed him of this on his user page, to which he responded with: "Unlike you, I do know what I am doing here. Unlike you, I know that what I was doing was a redirect, not a deletion. I do not need to be an admin to redirect pages that I feel are not notable." This, I still maintain, is entirely false. After deleting the redirection of my articles a third time, he posted a warning on my talk page about the 'three-revert rule'. This rule keeps edit wars from happening, and ensures stability of articles. 

At this point, the admins intervened. I got messages from some of them saying that my account would be suspended if I broke the three-revert rule again. Other ones started discussions on the pages that I had written concerning notability - the way it should have been done in the first place. I removed the warning that MikeWazowski had placed on my user page, as I found out he was not authorized to do this either. I defended the notability of the articles on some of the pages, but for some I knew it wouldn't hold scrutiny, so left them empty. Most of my attempts to prove notability succeeded, with little if any replies after mine, and none of the pages getting deleted. Another article was permanently deleted however, and since I stopped checking regularly some other ones have had the redirection restored. 

You may be surprised to hear however, that when I look back on my first experience as a Wikipedia editor, I'm not bitter at all. In fact, I believe it was a very beneficial experience for my overall opinion of web-based media and user regulated content. By looking through the guidelines and rules of the site, as well as observing the manner with which the editors and admins of Wikipedia conducted themselves, I have a new-found appreciation for it, and many other similar collective intelligence tools that exist. One thing to remember is that Wikipedia does not pay anyone. It exists as a sort of charity-based encyclopedia, counting completely on users donating their time to creating, editing, policing, and otherwise regulating the information that appears on it. With the sheer quantity of information on the site now and being generated by users every day, it's amazing that the standards that I observed are kept, and that enough individuals are available to keep only reliable and relevant information visible at all times. My difficulty with the site seems to be its strength, and to me it seems much less like the anyone can edit so never really trust it kind of resource that I saw it as before. I will now continue to use it, and have the certitude that the information contained on it is much more sound than one would at first believe. So, I guess my main point here is: long live collective governance!