Thanks!
Like arguing with cranks at a town hall meeting, ignorant high school group project classmates, and bureaucracy-obsessed nonprofit initiative zealots all wrapped into one.
in the area I was trying to contribute (a math subdomain) to there is sooooo much technical misinformation. but if you don't have an intimate knowledge of all the details of the editing bylaws, and seemingly infinite time to be able to litigate your case, it's almost impossible to get any of these edits through when the original page author is sufficiently motivated to prevent them.
Take this.
Not to say Wikipedia isn't great + useful! But realize that it is owned by a distributed network of feudal nerd-lords that will defend to their death the contents of Wikipedia articles because they get off on being the dictators of what's true.
Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.
Wikipedia is the wrong place for opinions
The meta-pages where people discuss the pages and the sites are full of opinions and debate.
He talks of "undoing the lefts march through the institutions", as if he was fighting some sort of Maoist movement.
The guy has lost the plot and has become a troll trying to use the encyclopedia as ideological battleground.
Good riddance.
And then you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School and leave confused...
Edit: for example, here's a passage from the wiki page on frankfurt school.
Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, written during the Institute's exile in America, was published in 1944. While retaining many Marxist insights, this work shifted emphasis from a critique of the material forces of production to a critique of the social and ideological forces brought about by early capitalism.
So, culture? and marxism?
If I misunderstood your comment, I apologize
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noti...
Can someone here please help me understand what the issue is?
(I keep seeing stuff in that linked article about canvassing and "the left marching through institutions" but again I'm not following the overall argument / issue. Please forgive my ignorance if I'm missing something obvious.)
I learned about wikipedia rules before learning about actual law, it's interesting to see exactly how the mechanisms of modern democracy protect against the specific ways in which Wikipedia fails:
1- Separation of powers between rulemakers and judges. In practice many Administrators who have the power to enforce rules and bans are actually editing articles themselves!
2- Ignore all rules, certainly crazy, it makes the rules an afterthought, it reminds me a bit of the Common Law focus on Case Law as opposed to Napoleonic Civil Law's focus on codified laws, but way stronger.
3- No or weak procedure. Imagine you are in a legal fight with another editor, and you say a bad word, woops, turns out that's a 2 day ban. Maybe there's a parallel with contempt of court? But what happens in wikipedia is that the whole edit war is lost on that technicality, Administrators don't rule in favour of one edit or the other, they distribute penalties to one part or the other and if one party is temp banned, they can't edit the article anymore and the article state the other party desires has a stability and consensus advantage. The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be.
There is also something analogous to the political world: users can petition for an administrator recall, if the issue is a rogue admin abusing their privileges, or even just the admin is trying to hold onto their privileges when it's clear to others that they don't actually need them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RECALL
So while I don't think Wikipedia is perfect, it does better than your summary implies.
At worst it can be a hive mind echo chamber where certain views are banished to the Abyss.
Certain topics attract the latter rather than the former…
Ironically they might have amplified the reach of their articles to laymen and editors and made him a martyr in the process.
he resuggested "WikiProject Intellectual Diversity", a group with the goal to make "Wikipedia more intellectually diverse" and "ensure fair and open decision-making and governance, broaden the range of permissible sources, reinforce genuine neutrality, rein in over-aggressive blocking while holding the powerful to higher standards of accountability", etc, with the implied undertone of preventing Wikipedia from drifting too far to the political left.
This is unpopular because people oppose this on various grounds (mostly that it might be vote brigading and tiling decisions in their favor just by showing up in an organised way around wikipedia). Also the same project was apparently suggested before and rejected in early stages
But then he made a tweet that basically just says "I suggested this, some people like it, some hate it". That's super against the rules, because it attracts people to the proposal who otherwise wouldn't have seen it. Probably in an attempt to sway discussion, because his tweets are obviously seen primarily by people who like his ideas
Which then lead to the vote to ban him from editing Wikipedia. With a total ban getting more votes than a more limited ban, like banning him from participating in articles namespaced for internal matters
Is that about right?
After that, Larry Sanger remarked: "What people don't realize, actually, is the number of people who are actually at work on Wikipedia on any given day is not really that enormous. It's more in the hundreds or low thousands, not in the millions. Well, there's a lot of people in India. There's a lot of educated people in India, right? There's a lot more educated people in India than there are in, say, England. Just due to sheer numbers, you can field a lot of good writers on Wikipedia, and if you quite simply learn how to play the game..." (33:54).
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
I quite like what he's going for with these 9 theses - the ideas of the public rating articles or enabling competition between articles seems like a clever compromise position - but frankly I don't see how the Wikipedia community could treat this as anything other than an attack whether or not the ideas are improvements. The parallel with Martin Luther and the Catholic Church was appropriately foreshadowed by Sanger.
Organisations eventually become corrupt. Wikipedia might already be there or it might have a ways to go, who knows. But this sort of change might require a new project or some sort of schism among the Wikipedia editors, it sounds pretty radical. Especially in the post-Trump era; I expect his presidency has been a traumatic era for the English Wikipedia project.
The problem with the "competing articles" is that the end game is quite obvious - the far-right wants to get crap like Musk's "Grokipedia" or "Conservapedia" out of the gutters where it belongs and into the brand protection of Wikipedia.
And that, frankly, is an existential threat.
Changing the whole institutional culture at Wikipedia is more of a social challenge than a technical one, and I am not well-versed in that area. So, I would rather fork some wiki software, write code, and write articles for myself.
Will my wiki be able to compete with a giant like Wikipedia on the internet? I don't know. I don't even know whether mine is indexed by search engines yet. But I love writing articles, so I'll keep doing it as long as I can.
This is usually not a problem, but given how aggressively vague the WikiProject's goals are (eg. "We hope to open Wikipedia up to using more sources" - which?) and Larry Sanger's prior conduct (eg. advocating for whitelisting of sources like Fox News[2]), it seems the real goal was organizing conservative editors. I'm not sure whether the fact that this is not clearly written is deception or trolling, but it's not a good look for Sanger either way.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/WikiProject_...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Cou...
[2]: https://san.com/cc/wikipedia-co-founder-says-site-has-libera...
This is the list of articles Sanger contributed to in 2026: [1]
Compare that too all his contributions: [2]
Does it seem like this person is participating in Wikipedia in a genuine way? Or is he there to start political arguments on various internal pages?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContrib...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AContrib...
> Saying this as a former Wikipedia admin + nerd.
Any insight into how these people all manage to dodge the policies against such behavior? Is it just too much effort to complain + favoritism towards frequent editors?
As I discovered later, I was just lucky to hit pages that weren’t possessively controlled by one person or a small group who want to control the page with a tight grip. That’s often true for pages for obscure topics that don’t have much text.
Get into a more mainstream topic or anywhere near a contentious topic and your edits will be reverted, rewritten, or debated by someone with more free time than you until the text goes back to what they wanted to control. It doesn’t matter how much you follow the rules, you’re at the mercy of what that person or group wants the page to say.
As someone that has battled with this, I agree, but in my experience more often than not, the people that complain are complaining about basic rules like "stuff should have external citations". So I can't really pick either side.
Especially for math, were I feel like people generally agree on what is true and what is not, this seems unusual. Can you point to an instance of misinformation?
Today, we already have free blogging platforms, newsletters, photo sharing, and microblogging, but we are in dire need of a free wiki platform (and maybe a knowledge base tool too).
I'm currently experimenting with building exactly that. So far, so good, but the setup is still too difficult for non-technical people, even though it is already free to register.
We've been here before, this exact same conspiracy theory was created by the Nazis to justify the unjustifiable.
The slight rebranding of "Cultural B̶o̶l̶s̶h̶e̶v̶i̶s̶m̶ Marxism" is what Anders Breivik used to justify his acts of terrorism.
We've gone done this road before. It doesn't lead anywhere good.
I'm not putting ill intent on you, but I would implore you to reconsider your stance on this.
In general Wikipedia takes an anti censorship approach regarding articles which can cause evil.
So why is the aspect of Marxism which deals with culture completely taboo and not represented? I'm not even sure if it's due to something bigger I just think the article on cultural marxism might be one of the worst on Wikipedia.
I'm not sure why you were so opposed to said article, I read it and it seems to lay everything out pretty well, including full sourcing. Could you tell me what exactly you take issue with?
Separation of judge and party is enforced pretty consistently, it is official policy that people shouldn't participate in a decision if they were involved in the kerfuffle in any way. You can edit articles and enforce rules, as long as these are separate. And then, rules can be proposed by anyone, but they're not just created on the fly because it's convenient. That would obviously be objectionable.
In fact this isn't limited to admins, regular users have the power to decide on a ban. An administrator is only needed to close and enact the decision, and this is what happened to Larry Sanger here.
>The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be.
Admins don't have a special power to decide what should be in important protected articles. It is not like a government where people are elected, and then citizens don't have any say until the next election.
The community tries to reach a consensus, and admins are part of the community. They get an input like everyone else plus special powers to enact decisions. But any "ruling" better reflect consensus, or you better bet you will wake up to the Noticeboards on fire with about 50,000 words of heated complaints and discussion.
To be clear: it would be equally bad if you swapped left and right in that sentence. He doesn't sound like someone who wants to make Wikipedia more neutral
How would this in any way be against the rules? Wouldn'tan open and democratic process like wikipedia want as many eyes as possible on a vote or rule change?
That sounds completely backwards from the open and free spirit of wikipedia. If even wikipedia has gone full mob rule then hwo do any projects stay open and free to everyone?
I stopped engaging with Wikipedia because my experience of their administration is that it's deeply toxic. This specific instance doesn't seem too out-of-hand to me, since the rules are clear in this instance. It's where there are grey areas that their behavior starts to get unhinged.
if you bring in a bunch of non-wikipedia people (i.e. people who haven't previously cared about or participated in wikipedia discussions at all), all from 1 person's twitter following, you aren't getting "open and free spirit"-ed discussion. you are getting a bunch of larry followers who want larry to "win"
The core idea is, Wikipedia has internal mechanisms to make these kinds of notifications, and making these decisions needs some knowledge and experience about how Wikipedia works.
Recruiting inexperienced people to bias decisions which requires knowledge is effectively converting that proposal to a blunt instrument and trying to force your way in (aka bludgeon).
When the mechanisms in place and requirement of experience (i.e. competence), whistling the town square and calling people to force a gate is textbook brigading, and brigading is forbidden everywhere (maybe except 4chan/8chan).
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:IS_NOT_A_DEMOCRACY...
Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy or any other political system. Its primary (though not exclusive) means of decision making and conflict resolution is editing and discussion leading to consensus—not voting. (Voting is used for certain matters such as electing the Arbitration Committee.) Straw polls are sometimes used to test for consensus, but polls or surveys can impede, rather than foster, discussion and should be used with caution.
Off-site petitions and votes have no weight in the formation of consensus on Wikipedia.
It's perfectly acceptable for them to charter their own rules and keep these kinds of matters internal until they agree it's best, for their goals, to involve the public.
Frankly, they strive to be some of the greatest practitioners on neutrality. This is not the kind of organization that needs the kind of public correction you are wondering about.
And if it was, I think we can all understand why modern day Twitter is the wrong place to exclusively inspire that discussion.
Of course, some editor decided it was 'marketing' for starlink so it got deleted despite loads of people protesting. It was the only source I could find easily for showing which country got starlink when.
A huge list of prose is still on the page (not marketing?) showing the updates in a very hard to read and not comprehensive way. Something is really quite wrong over there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminis...
xacky•1h ago
Heidaradar•1h ago
mijoharas•1h ago
Can you explain the reason? from a brief skim he is promoting some project he wants to start in wikipedia from outside wikipedia, is that it or did I misunderstand?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noti...
jasonlotito•26m ago
He broke this rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
This is fairly straightforward, with the result (blocked from editing) mentioned clearly. It doesn't matter the topic.
Being a cofounder is immaterial.
xacky•9m ago
rsynnott•1h ago