Recently I looked at the English Wikipedia article about /e/ and was amazed at how unneutrally /e/ is reported there. In the reception, only sources are quoted that comment negatively about /e/. In addition, as many problems as possible or similar are written about, such as the data leak in the Murena Cloud. Changes to neutralize as I saw in the version history are rejected by a certain user and sometimes even called “vandalism”. Fortunately, in other languages, reports are relatively neutral.
Bad example. The data leak was a pretty severe cloud incident, user data was synced to other users. What more do you want as a failure? Public user data access from the internet perhaps? Deserves a mention in my book.
Hmmm … no Google cloud outages in Wikipedia? Well, there’s still the internet.
In the end it’s better to be aware that Wikipedia isn’t neutral.
I’m not too familiar with the inner workings of Wikipedia … question is whether there’s a mechanism which over time would level out a possible bias of over-diligently redacting Wikipedia users?
Good point. There is a history behind the biased Wikipedia /e/OS page. I created the original page way back in 2018. At that point of time I was not an /e/ employee but more of a volunteer. Once I became an employee in 2019 I had to stop as it involved a conflict of interest. If you look at the change history on the page, most of the changes are made by one particular user. This person was at one time banned from our channels and this forum for attacking other users or anyone who made a positive comment about /e/OS. He has even tried to get /e/OS and Gaël’s page deleted !!
There’s a reason why colleges won’t accept Wikipedia as a valid citation and why Michael Scout had so much praise for it in The Office; it’s actually not that great of a resource.
We know that /e/ is a good system, and others are catching on. Over time, that should be enough.
I think one problem with the English Wikipedia is that changes are published immediately instead of being “sifted” first. Such a mechanism exists in the German Wikipedia (whether it is the same in other languages, I do not know. This also limits the “edit wars”.
@AnotherElk You were right, that was not a good example. Another example would be, mentioning Advanced Privacy as proprietary software (which we know is wrong). Reference was made to a strange link to the E forum. Later this was changed to Andvanced Privacy being proprietary until the first final version, but now open-source.
/E/ includes a proprietary maps app.,{{Cite web |title=Maps application |url=https://support.e.foundation/maps |access-date=2022-04-19 |website=support.e.foundation |language=en}} and a proprietary privacy app.{{Cite web |title=Advanced Privacy? |url=Advanced Privacy? - #9 by Manoj |access-date=2022-04-19 |website=/e/ community |language=en}}
The wrong or outdated information is being pulled from web archives, which is weird. I thought the idea on Wikipedia was to display up-to-date, correct and balanced information.
Linking to live sites will reference current information, which can change at any moment.
Possible problem: The reference can go defunct, can simply become unhelpful, or can go contrary to what it was originally intended for … until checked and corrected.
Linking to web archives will make sure the referenced information doesn’t change.
Possible problem: Referencing outdated information, which should tend to be unhelpful, but will not go defunct and will fit to the text which uses the reference as long as text and reference are left unchanged.
Both methods can easily lead to weird situations if not checked and corrected in time, but using web archives seems way more robust.
Broken by design as soon as humans were needed for this .
I had the same problem with another Wikipedia topic. There a product (and its producer) is presented in a very … being polite “angled” … way.
Being aware that Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, which means that it has to be as objective as possible, I tried to fine tune the wording in that way.
It got reverted back instantly with the notion I would distort the content. I got really angry but decided not to waste any more life time on this issue.
So, also here a user clinged to the topic showing the habit “there shall be no editor beside me”. You can live better with people who understand the encyclopedial principle better. Sigh.
So, you may try to trigger a content resolving discussion for the very topic at Wikipedia. But you can also forget about it (but some pain will stay - I can tell you) …
The issue here is a “editor critical mass” issue. We can hardly do the job ourselves because we would probably considered as “non neutral” editor.
On the other hand, this wikipedia page is literally trapped by a specific user (you will easily find who…) who spends all his time on wikipedia, knows all the possible tricks to achieve his goals, and this guys has shown to be a long date /e/OS hater and is possibly even sponsored for his activities and backed by another biased editor.
His work on the /e/OS wikipedia page is very subtle because he is always “bordeline”, just selecting press articles and/or information that are pretty negative about the project, and mostly removing the big, positive, rest. All this with no or few objections to his activities, but Manoj who has tried multiple times to raise this concern. So until some real neutral editors kick this infamous editor out, we will still have this outdated, non-factual and negative-tone English page about /e/OS.
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