On Wed, Apr 06, 2016 at 03:22:43PM +0000, Trond Arild Ydersbond wrote:
>
>
> Den Onsdag, 6. april 2016 14.20 skrev KatolaZ <katolaz@???>:
>
> >> So you think public interest is best served by leaving information cleanup after stupid vandalism to the Poettering squad. I don't.
>
> > What would you suggest as an alternative, that you or me go there and
> > do the clean-up instead?
> If we are competent Wikipedia editors for the actual field, surely yes.
> I'm not, but if I were, I would reverse that edit. But going in as an absolute amateur, it's easy to make new errors, in particular when we are not entirely neutral on the subject :-) Competence here is about (at least) subject, balance (/professionalism) and style.
>
> The administrators there usually have way more than enough to do with vandalism, edit wars etc. So generally, constructive help contributes to making it more of a self-cleaning thing and imporves quality. But they tend to be on guard against people "cleaning up" articles about themselves, their friends, employee, party etc. AFAIK that is generally considered a bad idea.


I am not a Wikipedia author, but If I have to be honest with you, I
don't understand why some people have a Wikipedia page at all. I think
it is just part of the collective illusion about the importance of
"fame" and "visibility", and has little to do with recognising the
actual contribution of people to certain areas of knowledge, science,
or technology.

I have always had a very high respect for Wikipedia and its enormous
contribution to create freely available content, but seriourly, I
would ponder how much better the world with be with or without another
Wikipedia page about a living person, before even thinking of starting
writing it. The good thing about dead people is that they don't have
any more minuscule interests to cultivate, or an ego to feed, or a
group of fans to cheer, and usually their contribution to society
speaks for themselves, since they can't do that any more.

But in this era where everybody claims its own 3 minutes of
popularity, here we go with thousands of useless pages, containing
tons of biased information about mostly unknown (and, honestly,
irrelevant) people, and tons of placeholders-like pages with just a
few lines of biographic information, to testify how little our
contribution to the well-being of this minuscule planet is on average,
after all...

HND

KatolaZ

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[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
[ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ]
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