Michael Everett wrote:The way that certain people are trying to redefine reality through words rather than actually try to solve real-world problems does not bode well for the future...
You mean, like the way certain people (who you are citing in this complaint) are willfully misunderstanding the way Wikipedia works in order to make some bullshit point about how "the liberals are trying to redefine reality" or some nonsense like that?
Let me quote from the Recession
talk page (a talk page, for those unfamiliar with wikipedia's intricacies, is a page associated with another page that is used to discuss matters pertaining to that page and its maintenance - proposed edits, discussions about phrasing adjustments and other administrivia are usually found there):
ATTENTION NEW VISITORS TO THIS PAGE
Hi, people from online. I'm JPxG. I agree that censorship is bullshit et cetera. Allow me to address a few things:
I read online that Wikipedia changed the definition of a recession.
The thing that is getting shared around everywhere is no longer the case. The sentence "Though there is no global consensus on the definition of a recession, two consecutive quarters of decline in a country's real gross domestic product is commonly used as a practical definition of a recession" is currently right there in the lead section. Additionally, it wasn't there for very long to begin with (it was added for the first time a few days ago). The screenshots of the stuff getting removed are out of date.
Okay, so what, someone tried to remove it?
The article always said something about "two down GDP quarters". The first section of the article, titled "Definition", has mentioned it since 2011. As far as I can tell, nobody ever messed with this. The entire current dispute is over whether it should say this in the lead paragraph and the definition section, or just in the definition section. Right now, the article gives both that definition and the NBER definition, and takes no position on which is "correct". The NBER definition is "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales".
And now it's locked?
It is semi-protected for a few days, so in order to edit it you need an account that's autoconfirmed (one that's at least four days old and has ten edits). So, for most people reading this, the answer is probably "yes". Starting on August 3, non-autoconfirmed users will be able to edit it again, but their edits will be held for human review before being visible to most readers.
What's the deal with there being a million edits on this page in one day?
Articles get edited a lot, for all kinds of reasons. If you go to Special:RecentChanges, you will see that about a hundred edits are made every second. Most of them are stuff like fixing spelling errors, adding/removing hyperlinks, rephrasing sentences, or improving the formatting so the page is easier to read. Oftentimes, people will expand an article that's already been written, because they found some book or article or paper somewhere that's got information (for example, last night I went and found out what the last movie was to be released on VHS, and added it to the article because it wasn't there). The fact that a page is being edited doesn't itself mean something crazy is going on. It usually means someone is replacing a colon with a semicolon.
How do I see what edits have been made to an article?
You can see every old revision of every Wikipedia article in the "history" tab at the top of each page (for this article's history you can click here).
Why are there all these administrators saying weird stuff here?
Almost nobody commenting here is an administrator. Most of us are normal contributors. Anyone on here is allowed to just go to talk pages and say stuff. This means that, a lot of the time, some guy will show up on a talk page and start saying ridiculous stuff about how we need to delete every article about a Democrat, or block all Republicans from editing, or whatever. It is just some guy saying stuff. This is not our policy.
Why is Wikipedia paying you to do this stuff?
It isn't. Wikipedia contributors are not paid employees of Wikipedia, we "do it for free" as they say (some people get secretly paid to write propaganda or spam articles; we delete their stuff and block them).
I heard you guys are all head-over-heels in love with that politician guy.
I have never really been a big fan of politicians in general. I can't speak for everyone else.
Okay, well, I have some stuff I want to say.
If you want to participate in the discussion regarding what the content of the article should be, you are of course free to do so. An encyclopedia written by millions of people requires a lot of bureaucracy in order to function at all without immediately descending into chaos, though, so I will warn you that it will probably be difficult to participate (especially on a political topic) without a bunch of people saying stuff like "Strike per WP:NPA, WP:NOTFORUM and WP:TPG" unless you are willing to read a lot of boring guidelines beforehand. In general, if your comment is not about improving the Wikipedia article titled "Recession", it probably does not belong here. jp×g 22:22, 28 July 2022 (UTC)
So digging into the actual revisions that are at issue in this thing, it is pretty apparent (going by the tone of the changes and edit messages) that the people doing the editing (i.e. removing the whole "two successive quarters of decline" bit) are more likely to be ptrolls using wikipedia to make digs at the Biden admin (see
here or
here), not democrat supporters trying to keep wikipedia in line with whatever the Biden admin said.
In other words, Michael, please consider this: You are not properly equipped for online culture wars. You apparently do not have the inclination or ability to accurately judge for yourself what is and is not relevant (an edit war on wikipedia spurred by a few trolls resulting in the tamest of locks isn't). You are reading takes from some outrage merchant who is only interested in getting you to buy into this idea that there is a real war on in public culture, to get you fired up and reposting nonsense like this.
