* A claim on "Fisting" that "seasoned fisters can insert their arm up to the shoulder into the anus", "supported" by a deleted PornHub video.
* Fighting on a Production Car top ten list when Tesla announced that Ludicrous Mode was coming the next year and "expected" to have certain performance stats, where multiple editors fell over each other to make sure it stayed at the top of the list, even when they eventually had to add a column just for Tesla where every other result had "Actual Results" and the Tesla had "Projected/Expected Results".
* A collation of John Deere tractors that described multiple models as "light years ahead of the competition".
* An article on an Australian drug smuggler where exhibits from court case were being removed as "biased".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...
All making sense so far. But then:
Article title capitalization.
Somehow this is peak wikipedia.
* There aren't that many real historical accounts about him so people can argue all day about stuff like "Was Yasuke a real samurai?" without clear evidence about who's right.
But in the intervening years, Ubisoft and/or the entire AAA games industry is now seemingly driven by a need to conspicuously showcase diversity and inclusion (from some gamers' viewpoints). You could also view it as the gaming industry trying to broaden its audience and get out of the pigeonhole of catering to the base desires of sweaty manchildren, but either way, it's upsetting a certain type of game consumer.
So, when Ubisoft finally got around to setting Assassin's Creed in Japan, and they picked pretty much the only person around that time period who wasn't Japanese as the main protagonist, seemingly to meet diversity goals, capital-G Gamers went bananas over it, like it was a personal affront to them.
"In May 2024, it was announced that Yasuke would be a major character in an upcoming video game (Assassin's Creed Shadows). While onwiki disagreement about Yasuke's status as a samurai predates this announcement, the historical figure's Samurai status became part of a culture war around video games (J2UDY7r00CRjH evidence) that media sources have described as a continuation of or successor to Gamergate, leading to an increase in attention to the article. (Symphony Regalia evidence)"
The entire world's knowledge has some controversial topics? Oh my! Burn it! Burn it all!!
The librarians of Alexandria would have killed for Wikipedia. It's easily our greatest digital achievement.
This is a hill on which I would happily fight to my metaphorical death, here and now. If you disagree, let's discuss please.
Wikipedia is so open, that they even have their own "controversial" section! Is that not the coolest thing ever?
The chip on my shoulder is that there is a concerted effort to destroy and discredit Wikipedia.
The accomplishment of Wikipedia is not just beating the Library of Alexandria by many orders of magnitude, but doing so while keeping moderation logs in the open as well.
Ask @dang, or anyone that has ever had anything to do with forum moderation, if they would be cool with their moderation logs being completely open. Almost everyone with experience would say 100% no. They likely tried that and saw how much nutso drama it creates. Wikipedia actually does that, at the largest possible scale!
[0] Of course that exists, apparently it's called Baidu Baike
It takes a certain mentality. That's rare but I think it makes for much better communities on the whole.
However I think most participants, not just moderators, don't like the environment that sort of mentality results in. When anything and everything, including the moderation itself, is up for civilized debate that tends to foster an environment in which it's acceptable to question core parts of people's worldviews. There's little shared doctrine beyond "argue any position you'd like" which most people seem to find intensely uncomfortable.
There is at least one exception to that rule. Users who attract the ArbCom's attention may get a general block. If they ask what they're blocked for, the ArbCom rep will tell them to read their email. These moderation decisions are not public, not even in a form with PII redacted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight
There are also "office actions", where essentially the Wikimedia Foundation and/or its legal counsel have been required to do something. In most cases, the office actions are visible and logged, unless they've been required to use Oversight as well. But the main thing is that the office actions will generally not be explained to anyone, as it usually stems from some legal threat to Wikipedia.
Currently ROFL, given grokpedia or whatever objectively dumb shit to which we are now exposed. I should not have bitten my tongue. Self-censorship is the worst kind.
What did get reverted was a trivial [citation needed] fix, for a musician's page, for a sentence stating they were involved in scoring a film. I found a relevant citation and this was promptly reverted, for reasons that were explained but, at least for me, utterly incomprehensible