Hacker News Reader

Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

There are many anecdotal reports of tyrannical Wikipedia editors doing exactly this. They claim dominion over a subset of Wikipedia articles and then manicure them exactly to their own personal tastes. I'm sure the situation you describe happens often in various corners of the website.

View on HN

I nearly based my Master's dissertation on a topic I discovered on a wikipedia math page when I was looking for something to cover. Turns out that subsection was maintained by the 'inventor' of topic and essentially served as a vanity page. The topic itself had no recognition in the community and if I had forged ahead on it, I would have failed my dissertation pretty hard.

If this is a math topic, you should bring it to the attention of the WikiProject Mathematics talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mat.... They might do something about it.

Oh, I got rid of it years ago. Thanks though. Eventually a big-name mathematician (who some years later won a Fields medal) waded into the discussion and sided with me. I used my real name in that discussion so I won't give more detail than that :)

Well, I've personally contributed to small parts, and never encountered the problem. I don't doubt there are jerks on Wikipedia, but I would also bet that neither the author of this nice github repo or the praised youtuber mentioned in the comments even tried to commit anything into it.

Not that they should for some reason, but too often editing wikipedia is presented/thought of as something reserved to a happy few with deep social consequences, when it's in fact the simplest thing in the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com