road-trip-girl

hit with the gay baseball bat

hi. i'm hanging out. i like fire emblem and comics and stories and women. i don't post very often.

i am over 18


my neocities website
road-trip-girl.neocities.org

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

god wikipedia is incredible. visited the page for color photography and found that it's nearly empty, skips 90% of the history and almost everything that most people would be interested in. check the history; it was quite thoroughly detailed for nearly 20 years until some editor with ten billion contribs and an enormous userpage with a thousand little banners on it deleted all of the info last year because it was Insufficiently Sourced

the color photography page now has no mention of Kodachrome, or in fact film whatsoever. it jumps from the three plate process to digital photography without even a mention that anything was ever in between. absolutely amazing work. the encyclopedia...... it is so much better now


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

if you edit more than 20 pages on wikipedia a year you should get IP banned for five years


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Holy fuck, I remember reading the original page and was so confused until you mentioned it was edited...

Erasing of accepted history not because it was disputed but because no one could back it up is wild. Edits like this shouldn't be allowed wtf

It's like ignoring 20 years of oral history

everytime i see a wikipedia article "vandalized in edit/correction" by some stuck up nerd im glad the version history exists
if all else fails i jump to another language version (often german as its my native language and usually well sourced and written because we are a nation of nerds) and translate the page if need be
wiki editors removing more than 500 characters shud be held to a vote, and like 10 other editors have to agree on the changes because nuking just shy of 50k characters from an article is just vandalism on its own

when i got big into soviet cameras and was trying to find all i could about them, in english a huge chunk of the writing online was... pretty bad to say the least. plenty of "under the iron yoke of the soviet union" style editorializing pretending to give context to a quick overview of some camera's external features. but once i figured out i could autotranslate german websites i started finding way way more stuff worth looking at. this webzone is particularly impressive: https://zeissikonveb.de/

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Why? Like, isn't reporting that something is not sourced enough a good thing? I Please don't hit me, I'm curious, I have never edited something on wikipedia nor looked at how it is edited, I just want to understand.

They didn't just report it; they vaporized an enormous amount of information, all in one go, and left no indication they'd done so. A person with no understanding of the history of color photography would now be absolutely baffled and possibly misinformed by this page. And to an expert, the info on the page was clearly mostly valid; that's why nobody had bothered to cite it, because it all seemed obvious.

Wikipedia's insistence on primary-source citations for literally everything is bizarre. Officially, they want cites even on topics where there is no sensible reason to lie, where the consequences of being slightly incorrect are not particularly severe, where the information is widely known and uncontroversial, and where experts are readily available to testify to its validity. The only way to bring back this page now is to chase down potentially hundreds of citations of facts that an immense number of people already know by heart and can testify to. It's been months and nobody has done it, so probably nobody is going to do it, and Wikipedia now has no page on color photography. Is this better than taking the risk that an innocuous page had an error on it?

It's not the page about 9/11, or a list of dangerous chemical interactions, or anything with any conceivable social or political ramifications. It was an extremely well understood and undisputed history.

I'm not saying it's the case here or that the editor did the right thing, but people get worked up over the weirdest things on Wikipedia. Pages on various mango varieties get dubious claims because people in India or Pakistan want to claim that their village has superior mangoes.

Anyways I've seen the same nuking on the Kalmar Union page and it can be very frustrating to see

the really frustrating thing is that wikipedia actually does not allow primary sources at all, only secondary sources, with the justification that they want to document the consensus on a topic, so as a result under-researched topics cannot be put on wikipedia no matter how noteworthy

the issue is they could've done that with [citation needed] tags or something like that but decided to just delete HUGE swathes of the page instead. so you would have no idea this information was ever there unless you looked at the version history and saw a huge deletion (tbf this was after them contending with like, an actual "i put ur mom gay on the wikiped page lol" vandal)

that part really enhances it. dollars to donuts this person has a trigger set up to warn them whenever any edit contains a slur or swear, so that attracted them to look at the page nobody had bothered to review in decades (because it was not causing any problems, so there was no reason to) with the obvious result. the vandal added six letters to the page, and the Diligent Editor amplified their vandalism into 35,000 letters.

I literally had to fight for weeks with a guy once to stop him using the RPG article as his own personal thesis on game theory, and lost, all over like three fuckin' paragraphs.

I think the thing is that Wikipedia has these insanely labyrinthine systems for resolution but the reality is consistently inconsistent anyway, partly because no one really understands them, except serial editors who use them selectively like a weapon.

I was also wondering the same thing and the fact that this guy is watching this page like this is just.. bizarre? Does he watch thousands of other pages like this? Why does he feel like he can't go find the sources himself if it's just that important? I guess hitting "delete" is easier than doing actual research.

By chance I was looking at it just a few days ago and I was surprised it didn't mention things even I (not a professional photographer in any sense) knew about colour photography.

Looks like it's been restored, but man. Hope it lasts this time.

I ran into an article recently where the citations were extremely busted, and you know what I did? I tracked down the actual citations and fixed it, instead of just deleting everything. So many wikipedia editors are comfortable with just deleting shit, and I hate it.