I Co-Founded Wikipedia. Now I'm Banned for Life

Discussion (163 points, 6 days ago, 245 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643407

Larry Sanger has been grinding an axe against Wikipedia for nearly two decades. Some of his arguments are convincing, but it's hard to take them seriously when they're coming from a man who has tried repeatedly to undermine the site since the mid 2000s.

from what I know about how wiki is funded, and run, with like less than 5% going to the actual production and maintainence of the web site, it is absolutly no surprise that the rest is a mind boggling shit show,which it is, that we of course, cant actualy drag out and show and talk about in plain language

I have personal experience of being stalked by at least two administrators on there, leading me to go back to unnamed editing. They were clearly more interested in personalities than content. One of them tried to put copyright strikes on some of my articles even though it was clearly stated that the article used out of copyright material. (Which was on other websites.) In another case, an article of mine he tried to delete has been translated into at least ten other languages, so obviously people do not see it as worthless as he did.

There was no adequate complaints procedure against this, with admins just closing ranks. I edited Wikipedia for at least fifteen years. I was unpaid but I received numerous stars for good content. At the end of the day, I feel used, especially with commercial websites and LLM using Wikipedia for source material.

On some of the smaller Wikipedias, individuals have basically taken them over. This happened with the Greenlandic Wikipedia, resulting in it being taken down.

SO nowadays, you really need to grab your paradox of tolerance, and ask youself, is the person preaching "openess" or "diversity" or whatever through the looking glass opinion or proposal or whatever will actuall increase overall diversity, or will it just arm a very loud, belligerent and agressive set of people that if it were reversed, wouldn't dare to do the same.

Of course it's not perfect, but there's a lot this world trying to use "tolerance" to ply people out of systems that are moving towards progressive diversity that necessarily must exclude a subsect of destructive vices.