User:Ynhockey/Wikimedia gripes
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On this page, I will list some of my major gripes with Wikipedia, Wikimedia, MediaWiki, etc. This is so as not to spam the main user page. They are as follows.
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[edit] Userbase and policy-related gripes
[edit] Researched content
Lack of researched content and alienation of experts - basically most Wikipedians use the internet as their source, or books that can be found on the internet (legally or otherwise), and therefore there is not much content on Wikipedia that can be found nowhere else online. And even if there is such content, it's often factually inaccurate.
Similarly, many experts on certain subjects come to Wikipedia and edit certain (often controversial) articles, and are immediately considered newbies and are told to go away (usually quietly, using a revert), sometimes because they didn't realize they needed to provide a source for a certain statement. I acknowledge that many such users really aren't experts but just want to stir up trouble, but IMO care should be taken when reverting information, as it is often factually correct. Likewise, I think factual correctness on Wikipedia should be much more important than the NPOV policy. Let the facts speak for themselves.
However, I also don't believe that having a book as a source constitutes a sure fact. Many, if not most, books cited on Wikipeda's political articles, were written by POV pushers - or whatever the equivalent non-Wikipedia term is. So if a source like Benny Morris is cited, it has to be taken with a grain of salt.
[edit] Unregistered users
Wikipedia still lets unregistered users edit articles. I don't think this is acceptable anymore - almost all vandals, intentional or not, are unregistered. Moreover, it's very easy to register at Wikipedia, and until recently there wasn't even a confirmation mail. Why did I say anymore? Because I realize that when Wikipedia started, it needed manpower to create articles to gain content and credibility, and making all users register right from the off would discourage many from editing. Now though, EnWiki has some 500,000 registered users (thousands of whom are active), and IMO there is really no excuse to still let IP users edit. Let the serious editors create more content without having to worry about annoyances like vandalism or some anonymous 'editor' screwing up their articles with incorrect info and/or original research.
Most of this vandalism I'm talking about is not immediately obvious and generally involves fancruft or original research (and usually poor writing). It is especially hard to detect, and almost impossible for users unfamiliar with the subject in question.
I do however support unregistered using editing and even creating articles on smaller Wikipedias and other wiki projects.
[edit] Redirects
The lack of 'additional spelling' redirects - there have been at least 10 articles which I've mistakenly thought absent because the most common (but possibly unofficial) spellings (usually more than one) did not return any search results. I think all article creators should either create redirects from obvious spellings or at least include the most common ones in the article for the Search to work. Admittedly, I've bypassed this myself on several articles, but they are about manga characters, which can easily be found using the name of the manga (for popular characters, I did make redirects).
[edit] Minor edits
Many if not most registered Wikipedians never bother to tag minor edits when they make them. While not a major gripe, this is often annoying as regular users need to check more edits only to see a comma or something similar added. I acknowledge however that many users have a different idea about what a minor edit is than I do.
[edit] Redlink fear
While I have only noticed this trend in 2007, it is prevalent in many articles - links to articles that don't exist (red links) are avoided and instead just omitted. Maybe a contributing reason to this is that the pages showing lists of most linked-to pages are mostly broken, so no one sees a reason to create red links, even if the subject is clearly notable. I oppose this and call on other users not to shy away from red links if they believe that an article should be written on the subject linked to.
[edit] Technical (MediaWiki) gripes
[edit] Lack of inter-operability
Lack of inter-operability between different Wikimedia projects - a user needs to create a new account to participate in each one (including different languages), and templates don't work across projects. If this wasn't a problem, I'd greatly support splitting current Wikipedia into several more Wikimedia projects. For instance, a Wikimedia that has only film summaries (but extremely detailed ones). The reason is that currently Wikipedia is gigantic and fairly unorganized.
[edit] Servers
Wikimedia server locations - OK, I have no right to complain about this since the site is free, but still think it would be useful to have at least one server in every country with unique languages, to host the corresponding Wikimedia projects (i.e. server in Israel for HE Wikimedia, server in Japan for JA, etc.) Hopefully this will come about some day.
The benefit is obvious - even one server in Israel for the Hebrew wiki would make the Hebrew wiki fly - because nearly all users who read the Hebrew wiki are based in Israel, and would get insanely low pings and super-fast page loading. This of course applies to all language Wikipedias based on just 1-2 countries. Similarly, if the English wiki was spread over more locations, I'm sure it would speed it up for many users worldwide.
[edit] Opera
Wikimedia projects don't display correctly on Opera. Actually it's not that bad, but looks weird, and I hate to see a site not work in Opera :(
[edit] Hebrew Wikipedia
I have several gripes related specifically to the Hebrew Wikipedia, which is one of the reasons I'm not very active there.
[edit] Admins
Although HeWiki admins are mostly civil and helpful, they are also mostly deletionist and very strict when enforcing the rules of Wikipedia (which often differ from and/or contradict the English Wikipedia rules). This is not only annoying to regular users who only wish to contribute, but also keeps away many experts, which is an important reason why the Hebrew Wikipedia has very little coverage of expert subjects (other than mathematics).
This brings me back to the whole Researched Content gripe, which is a huge problem on HeWiki, and is one of the reasons most Israeli professors and such who know Wikipedia consider it a useless and unreliable resource.
[edit] Deletionist/mergist policy
Adding to the aforementioned fact that most HeWiki admins are deletionist, it should be noted that actually most of the user base of HeWiki prefers mergism or deletion over inclusion. Nearly all articles that start out small, and can possibly be merged, are immediately tagged with {{merge}}, {{afd}}, etc. Sometimes the editor suggesting the merger doesn't even bother to use 'merge' and instead slaps a {{cleanup}} tag on the page, stating that he is suggesting to merge in the edit summary.
While in theory this would be a good policy of preferring quality over quantity, in practice the result is nothing but a bunch of small low-quality pages, most of which are taken up by ugly cleanup boxes and such. This is especially annoying because there's another HeWiki policy according to which a regular user can't remove a cleanup/merge/whatever template from a page unless they have taken visible steps to fix the problem (regardless of whether it existed from the start). Moreover, most visible steps are not considered important enough.
In addition, HeWiki admins make it clear on VfD pages that an article's worthiness should be judged based on its current content and not its potential content. So even if the subject is obviously broad and can even be turned into a featured article, they will delete it if the content at that time isn't up to their standard (whatever each admin thinks is their own standard).
Finally, notability on HeWiki is judged almost solely by paper encyclopedias - basically anything that's not fit for something like Britannica isn't fit for HeWiki, according to HeWiki's admins. This is in direct contrast to nearly every single idea put forth by Jimbo Wales, and is just plain annoying.
[edit] Opposition to lists
The Hebrew Wikipedia has an inherent and almost universally accepted opposition to lists. Forget the fact that the HeWiki omits many useful details by not having lists. The policy is still to use categories instead of lists, in a way that subjects that don't have their own articles yet will never be found on the wiki.
[edit] Redirects
While I'm not sure of the reason, it seems that the Hebrew Wikipedia has almost no useful redirects - EnWiki has a ton by comparison. Disambiguation pages or redirects for abbreviations especially are practically non-existent. Combined with the fact that search in wiki has a problem with Hebrew abbreviations (which are always written with quotes in the middle), you can almost never find an abbreviation if you don't know what it stands for.
