Couple of years ago I had a colleague who was obsessed over getting his name on Wikipedia. So he had someone add a page for his town. Then he edited the page to include about how he was the star captain of a local league. To play a practical joke on him, we edited the page to remove his name. Soon it devolved into a cat and mouse game of editing and re-editing the page.
I don't know if wikipedia now strictly monitors page edits. But, if they don't I hope Youtube also adds a big red warning on the page - Do not believe everything on the internet, even if it is wikipedia.
Depends on the article but I've seen some moderators take it way too seriously to the point of rolling back an edit simply because you didn't ask them, the person you're somehow supposed to know "owns" the page. Kind of defeats the purpose of a wiki and has turned me off contributing to it.
I think what youtube should do is just put a disclaimer on videos saying "This video is related to an unproven conspiracy" or similar. I doubt linking to a wikipedia page is going to change anyones mind.
I doubt someone literally said "you have to ask me first". One thing I've noticed in every thread on Wikipedia on HN is that no one has the faintest clue about what admins do [0], and what's going on when they're trying to edit a page. It's more likely that they changed something that was against consensus, and likely had past discussion. They were also probably told something to that effect in the edit summary. And for some reason whenever people share their grievances, they never provide more context like the page it occurred on or their specific edit. Just because it's the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, doesn't mean it's obligated to take each and every edit regardless of content, quality, or conformance to guidelines and consensus. Wikipedia is also extensively documented, [1] so there's even less reason for a forum that prides itself on being programmer/engineer types to stay so ignorant.
[0]: Wikipedia doesn't have "moderators". Anyone can revert edits and just because they opposed your edit, it doesn't automatically mean they're an admin, of which there are only around a thousand.
Granted it was a while ago and things may have changed, trying to do a simple typo correction lead to what I described. I really don't have time to dig through their documentation just to do something as minor as fixing spelling. It was obvious the editor took offense to it. So thats that from me, sorry for helping I guess.
Also run into problems where pages on companies are wrong and edits are prevented even though the information is outright inaccurate. Apparently having the info on the company website isn't cite-able? Seems stupid to me.
The fact that it was a "simple typo" makes me sure there was more to it than that because no one would revert that if it were so. It's likely that it was something you saw as a typo such as the spelling of colour vs color. [0]
> Apparently having the info on the company website isn't cite-able? Seems stupid to me.
Depends what you're trying to cite. Most small pieces information can be cited just fine to primary sources, though secondary sources are preferred. [1] However, more controversial statements or claims of notability require a reliable independent source, [2] or else any company could claim "we're the best" on their page and include it on Wikipedia.
Anyway in both these cases, you fall into the trap I listed before, where you're soooooooo certain that you're in the right and the stupid encyclopedia and its editors are power hungry. Have you ever considered maybe there's more reasoning to it then? Again, I almost guarantee there were reasons given in both cases to which you didn't give the least attention. You wouldn't go making a pull request to an open source project full of code that goes against their style guide, introduces a regression, and is suboptimal and then get righteous that it wasn't accepted without question would you?
I don't know if wikipedia now strictly monitors page edits. But, if they don't I hope Youtube also adds a big red warning on the page - Do not believe everything on the internet, even if it is wikipedia.