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Comment by paulnpace | Hacker News Reader

> And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.

I became a Wikipedia editor not long after the 2nd version of the site, before they even had logins, IIRC.

I was banned from the site probably 7 years ago or so by a troll who collaborated with the admins. The review "process" was more like The Trial and the ban was quite terrible, because not only did they install some deep cookie in the browser, but they permabanned the IP address.

Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.

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Exactly this. People are holding up Wikipedia as some shining light in the free world. They obviously are not aware of all the controversies there have been over the years of both rogue editors and restrictive controlling admins. It has also been called out for censorship many times before. I think everybody still has the idea that Wikipedia is free and collaborative for everyone, when in fact it has changed significantly from what it was. Your experience is testament to that.

> Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.

The title evokes a romantic sense of wikipedia as a well governed, neutral egalitarian multicultural collaboration. But anyone who has been marginalized by the cabal knows it was not most of those things.

Apparently, this is entirely subjective.

"Whatever it was[, which was really was really not all that,] it is not [even] now."

May I ask what username you used?

Forgot to mention they deleted all of my edit history and comments on the talk page.

They provided an email address to send a message for appeal to the board, which I didn't bother.

The weirdest thing I've seen about wiki nowadays is that "they" (admins? editors? chief editors? dunno) get to decide what makes a "worthy" article for wikipedia. Which is bananas, in the era of "free" storage.

I get everything about slop/spam/etc. but deciding a page about a small band in SmallTown Canada isn't "worthy" of wiki is silly beans. That's the whole point of a collaborative, anyone can contribute wiki. Having people decide what "makes the cut" or not is silly.

They could have gone with a "edu" / "core" wiki that gets to include only certain articles, and the rest are "community" or something, but literally removing articles for anything other than quality/sources/spam is not what wiki started as. And it's not what I donated for, but that's another can of worms...

A while ago I thought it was some ploy to carve out business niche for these "fandom" wikis, or pokemon wikis, because list of all the pokemons was not noble enough for grand old wikipedia.

> because not only did they install some deep cookie

We dont use "deep" cookies, just normal cookies. If memory serves, 7 years ago Wikipedia didn't use cookies at all in the block process, it was purely ip based back at that point.

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