It is my assertion that the Wikipedia project has existed for so long that its policies, guidelines, and enforcement have worked as a sort of 'selective pressure' to retain not so much the best and most dedicated editors, but instead to retain a number of sophisticated and unsophisticated bullies and bad-faith actors. They have learned to operate within the bounds of a bureaucratic system which is incapable of beginning to tackle the issue, and has decided the best response to this dynamic is not only to ignore it, but to actively defend the situation as it exists.
After an extended period of time working within Wikipedia to try and determine the extent to which this is the case – and indeed, prove my "hunch" wrong, since it's always easy to dismiss a system until you give it a shot yourself – my cynicism is reinforced. Even on fairly simple matters like stylization or non-contentious move requests, editors will use policy and guidelines as bludgeons for their preference in any one case, rather than actually read, interpret, and actually apply guidelines or policies.
Sources say what editors want to say. In one absurd case – and I limit myself to just the one not for lack of evidence, but simply for lack of time – an editor repeatedly insisted that a source did not say what it said it did, over and over and over, to justify their rationale to support a move request. This is a fairly lighthearted example, but there is no additional consideration or caution given for topics, regardless of the significance of the matter being discussed, edit being proposed, etc. There is no enforcement of logical consistency, no coherent guards against systemic bias, etc. Of particular concern, the project has become de facto dependent on difficult personalities who are unable and unwilling to work on building consensus with others – the people still left are the people who pushed everyone out. Even when a new editor attempts to disrupt the status quo with the best of intentions and work to rectify the situation, from the point of view of Wikipedia administrators, it's too risky – the current guy sucks, but he's our guy, and we know what he does and how he works, and he's done it for us for years. We don't know if the new guy will even still be around in two weeks.
Bludgeoning policy, gaming the system, outright harassing users – the system as it exists is incentivized to look away when senior editors engage in these behaviors, and it does look away when this happens. And so it is the senior editors who control the horizontal and the vertical, and in between their hundreds (often even thousands) of inconsequential edits – cleaning up comma splices and run on sentences, fixing the tags and templates of sources – they will every now and again rewrite reality. And this reality shows up on the front search page results of virtually every search engine today.
How consequential is this rewritten reality? It varies. Some of it is simple left reactionary over-correction to trademark systems ..consider who contributes to this Wikipedia – who can really be surprised that a project that has to have an explicit policy to tell its editors to stop including xkcd in every single article where it's even peripherally relevant would turn out to be "leftypol Linux nerds". Of course they'll make bad-faith arguments against observing conventionally observed trademark stylizations.. some of it is neoliberal garbage, some of it is up to and arguably including genocide denial.
What are you to do about this?
Consider the old, trite observation "Wikipedia is a bureaucracy". Sure. Always was, but that's not an immediately insightful observation. It doesn't mean anything in and of itself, but the immediate second-order consequence does: Wikipedia is comprised of bureaucrats. Bureaucrats do not respond to criticism from within, because they can always suppress, diffuse that criticism, or even redirect it to becoming a criticism of something else entirely that what was intended by the original criticism – the argument is reframed to their benefit, to get rid of things they always wanted to get rid of anyways. The 'complaint box' as set up in any bureaucracy does not empower you to fight bureaucrats, it only gives them ammunition for the war they were always going to fight anyways.
However, Wikipedia cannot control criticism that comes from outside of itself. SNS like Youtube, Twitter, etc. and the advent and maturing of LLMs such as ChatGPT, etc. provide effective alternatives to the reality these bureaucrats have written for themselves. When you find yourself, out of habit, checking this site – check the talk page when you see something that doesn't make sense. See what completely nonsensical rationale is provided for reasons for edits. Grammar is argued with to allow for some syntactically ambiguous statement – these people aren't stupid. They can't rewrite reality, but they can blur the parts they don't like a bit. And so on.
Make note of these things. Observe it each time. Over and over. Learn not to trust this project, learn not to take its claims at face value. Join in on those old arguments that never quite made sense – who cares, the ends justify the means. This is a project with contempt for you. You should repay the favor in kind – and be eager to give back a little more.
240814 Edit
editthose reviewing some of my recent edits to this site will notice a common theme. Editors are actively demonstrating they make up rationale for their edits and are not even consistent in respecting independent sources, simply cherrypicking information and mischaracterizing reality to suit their own biases. In this case, it is a conspiratorial thinking that respecting the preferred stylization of a group is some nefarious submission to ...copyright law? Who would've thought that even Encyclopedia Britannica is on the conspiracy to market PSY as PSY, instead of go along with Wikipedia editors virtue signalling by contradicting common name – and therefore Wikipedia's own policies – by stylizing it as Psy instead.
If this project can't be counted on to get the name of things right on something as simple as capitalization without injecting crude political ideations, how can it possibly be expected to cover sensitive topics correctly? What miserable and dishonest people!
240823 – muh "no consensus"
editI expressed my intention to leave this project some time ago. I am effectively already gone but wanted to watch the outcome of move requests I submitted and see myself as reserving the right to comment on their outcomes now that one of them has been submitted for move review.
That so many editors have learned to use no consensus to circumvent the requirement to ensure the project adheres to policies and guidelines is telling.
I understand that it's against policy to accuse others of bias, so I'm left questioning whether the outcomes here result from incompetence. After years of browsing Wikipedia and reading talk pages, I’ve noticed a troubling pattern. It appears that some editors have learned to manipulate the system to maintain control over certain articles, often resulting in "no consensus" outcomes. "No consensus" appears to me to be a tactic that many editors have learned by which to sabotaging any policy-based changes that challenge their preferences.
I have raised these concerns multiple times, both on talk pages, notice boards, official IRC channels, and in conversation with editors on other SNS, and was repeatedly reassured that Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines prevent such behavior. Wikipedia is not biased in the way I claim, you've all emphatically insisted, because editors always have to work to build consensus, and that consensus must be based on policy and guidelines.
I have been made expressly aware that it would be violating your policies on good faith to accuse you all of bias, so then if I'm not allowed to ask if it's not malevolent action by which editors have learned to game the system to get their preferred outcomes, then I have to ask: are you all collectively incompetent? Are you all cognitively impaired to a medically diagnosable degree? Because if I can't accuse you of bias here, I am only left to come to conclusions which will necessarily insult.
And yet if we look at the progress of the move requests which I submitted, in each case consensus to make an edit was sabotaged without any real merit in policies and guidelines. Oh, sure, an editor quoted a number of policies and guidelines, but they completely ignored that I already cited and discussed how the very policies and guidelines this person was quoting would necessarily support the move. Does the editor speak to that? Does the editor cite sources? Does the editor work to build consensus? Nope. The editor misquotes policy, claims that sources exist (which they decline to ever produce), and then engages in some conspiratorial speculation about the 'intention' of the subject of the article. They also, frankly, engage in colonialist chatter – in this case, the editor claims that the English Wikipedia should regard some English-language sources as lesser. Why, exactly, is never expounded on – but of course the editor also saw fit to attribute to the sources whatever they wanted, and selectively referred or didn't refer to them to support their argument.
And oh, how the "per [editor]" votes came in after! Did any of these editors explain their rationale when prompted? No, and in my experience more actively participating in this project none of you ever do. When the closers are prompted to explain themselves, they usually decline to do so. "If you disagree you may submit it to move review" is the common, friendly refrain – and while it's friendly in tone, I again can't help but wonder: if I can't accuse you of bias, is it simply incompetence?
The editor who submitted an incoherent rationale to oppose submitted several additional, nearly copypasted rationale to two other move reviews I submitted – [1], [2]. Never mind the fact I discussed at length the rationale for these requests on the talk pages of one [3] as well as on the Village Pump [4], the editor barges in, asserts their shoddily justified views, and the move requests are closed on the basis of no consensus. Those wishing to appeal may find the time to engage with the bureaucracy of Wikipedia or have to accept that there is no policy-based reason provided to the reader why these requests failed. The closer of this particular move request closed another one of the aforementioned derailed requests, and said they weren't "surprised" that someone would see fit to follow up. So why not be able to explain the rationale for rejecting the move request by speaking to policy?
The majority of my encounters with this project led me to come to the conclusion a great many of you have learned how to game the system. Why you do this, I don't know, but my impression has been that many of you do this for everything across the gamut – from virtue signalling some kind of anarcho-libertarian opposition to artistic expression to allowing editors to push genocide denial under the guise of "NPOV" – and in trying to follow up with you all to figure out what it is I'm not understanding, and why so many of you seem keen to look the other way. These move requests were me trying to figure out if I was misunderstanding something about you all, but I got the gist even better than I figured I did. And please, spare me the rhetoric about policies and guidelines – you can't even get the titles of articles right anymore without injecting your own sociopolitical narratives into them, you people don't follow any of them anymore.
Many of you should be held to account for your actions – the amount of time you've all collectively wasted in some masturbatory bureaucratic larp should be rewarded with time in a penal colony, as it's also served to enable historical revisionism and as mentioned earlier, genocide denial. Wikipedia delenda est.