Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Watching Wikipedia's Extinction Event From A Distance

Wikipedia is a great resource but it's too bad that stories like this are fairly common.

Obscure articles like this are what make Wikipedia great, but they are also most at risk under the current bureaucratic calcification. At some point, someone replaced the entire article with copy-paste text from a book. That triggered a bot that flagged the article as a copyright violation. That in turn prompted an editor called KDS4444 to log the article for speedy deletion without bothering to check the article history. This in turn prompted yet another user named RHaworth to delete the article, thereby scrubbing any edit history of the article and making it look as if I were the infringing author to someone uninvolved.