boberoo.blog

I spend a fair amount of my free time contributing to Wikipedia. These are some cultural quirks that aren't immediately obvious to the casual user:

1. Guidelines govern what tone, substance, or lack thereof is acceptable. When citing a guideline you would typically end with its shortcut, for example, "Violates neutrality (WP:NPOV)".
2. There is a schism between two factions over the direction of the platform: the inclusionists and the deletionists. The inclusionists envision the ideal Wikipedia as being the sum of human knowledge and are wary of instutional bias against niche and minority topics. I consider myself a deletionist, and with them, am more worried about unnecessary bloat and attack vectors for trolls and advertisers.
3. This might be reductive but the way I see it, Wikipedia's epistemology is basically "whatever the mainstream media reports". Wikipedia doesn't hire professional journalists, so it doesn't make sense for it to allow original research. The media is also what determines which topics are notable enough to be included.
4. Publishing an article is not simple, especially for niche topics for which reference material can be scant. The New York Times has probably not covered your favorite city event. I once had to wait for six months before my article could be published, only for it to be rejected for notability and then reviewed for another three months. This process takes so long because there are thousands of submissions and only so many reviewers. The published article is graded based on how complete and useful it is.
5. It is a lot easier to make the case for deleting an article than for making a new one. There are many smalltime establishments and wannabe celebrities that get away with three-sentence articles because they were made in the 2000s. A common retort when one of these article is proposed for deletion is, "well what about all those other articles that exist?" which doesn't hold up, because we would like to see them deleted as well.
6. An edit war is when editors keep trying to override each other with no resolution in sight. There's a policy called the three-revert rule, which blocks editors from making more than three reverts on a single article. (A revert is like an undo button for a specific contribution.) You'd expect to see this in controversial articles but in my experience this is more of a problem when dealing with stubborn trolls.
7. Copyright can be a pain. Newly uploaded images must contain proof that they are in the public domain or have explicit permission for usage in an article or else they are automatically removed. For this reason celebrities' articles do not always use the most flattering photos.