This is a good standalone example of the problems people (including a lot of comments on this site) have with Wikipedia. Admins who will rules lawyer you and use their accumulated social capital to manipulate outcomes based on bias.
This happens everywhere, but having it happen on what is considered the main source of truth on the Internet is especially bad.
The article is way way too long. Who would read +20 pages on a single Wikipedia editor? Feels obsessive if you need +20 pages to make a case.
But on the first issue brought up in the article -- I am not going to read all the rest, too long:
Removing things cited to Free Beacon seems fair game. It isn't a reliable source. I know it hurts when your favourite site is declared as unreliable, but it happens to both extreme left and right rags.
There is a list of potential sources on Wikipedia and collective decisions about their reliability here:
The first section on reliable sources isn't the primary focus of the article. It mainly serves to contrast how Gerard was willing to ignore rules on original research and conflicts of interest when it suited him. The post from another Wikipedia admin when he finally got banned is gold:
> “Seriously, everyone, what the fuck is wrong with us? … Reading through this discussion it seems that David has called the subject a neo-nazi, has significantly contributed to a NYT article described by other sources as a “hit piece”, disingenuously used Wikipedia to push his [point of view] despite a [conflict of interest] obvious to anyone with eyes, and we as a community are incapable of doing anything other than a warning? What the fuck is wrong with us?”
> After seven years, someone finally saw what was going on.
Wikipedia is a nearly impossible project and I can not believe it actually ends up working.
While simple articles are no brainer, Wikipedia has to deal with articles that are at the intersections of different interest groups who both are trying to control the presentation of facts. It is these articles where partisans are rampant and most engaged.
You'll never be able to make everyone happy on those articles at the intersections of different partisans.
It isn't a matter of keeping people happy. It's that 'facts' and 'truth' aren't as obvious and straightforward as people believe.
Take something as innocuous as calculus. Who discovered it? British say newton did. The germans credit leibniz. What should the editors do? Flip a coin. Credit both? Credit neither since neither discovered the concept of 'the limit'.
It's like this but far worse for many topics.
Everything seems simple because we lived in our own national propaganda ecosystem. But with the internet, wikipedia must try to pick 'truths' out of many 'truths'.
My comment already addressed that: '... Credit both? Credit neither since neither discovered the concept of 'the limit'.'
Neither newton nor leibniz discovered what we call calculus. If we are going to credit them for discovering calculus, we might as well credit the ancient greeks who developed similar 'calculus' and from whom both were 'inspired'.
> But yeah other things are trickier.
No. Even the simplest is tricky. As you just proved.
I don't submit my own articles here but always appreciate when they reach the HN audience. I admit I find the system here quite opaque and have a hard time understanding what gets flagged and why. Is it because my articles often explore controversies and might get undue attention over some of the more technical content here? Is there some way I could reach out to someone for more info on why my articles keep getting flagged?
In general, I agree with your complaints about the flagging system on this site. It seems pretty indefensible, to provide no disclosure at all about who the judges (admins) are, and to require no public explanation of judgements.
They often hide behind "users flagged it". How many users? Which users? Perhaps user flags should not be anonymous, perhaps even require a user to publicly state why they flagged it.
We wouldn't allow that in our court system in the real world, why allow that in this impactful online forum?
A big section of this is about neoreactionaries not being connected to LessWrong or readers of SlateStarCodex as they were "distinct and well-defined groups, neither of which particularly liked each other" and claiming that suggesting otherwise is basically a slander invented by the target of the article.
On the other hand, there was a question posted in the SlateStarCodex sub Reddit that asks "Why are there so many neoreactionaries in this sub?” and an answer, from someone who doesn't seem (like several other people answering) to be particularly averse to NeoReactionaries is:
> Anyway the reason is that neoreaction developed in the same Bay Area libertarian circles as LessWrong with a wide degree of community overlap
This happens everywhere, but having it happen on what is considered the main source of truth on the Internet is especially bad.