Sunday, August 22, 2021

Raw Data: Wikipedians Editing the "War in Afghanistan (2001-2021)" Article

 The US war in Afghanistan is over (allegedly) and we decided to look at who is editing the "War in Afghanistan" article during the month of August, so we could see the edits unfolding in real time, and that's what he reader is looking at below.



We were shocked at how few 'bots were used.....some interesting editors here are WikiCleanerMan, whose userpage says outright "Wikipedia needs a massive cleanup" as the first sentence. The trick is, he will only clean up war and foreign policy articles, and we have no idea if the "cleaning" is a cover for editwarring. JackinthetheBox is a Malaysian rollbacker with a bizarre userpage written in this pseudo-middle English style. Smeagol 17 has been on Wikipedia since 2009, no userpage, just a user talk page with all his issues. I dare the reader to go through all of these entries to find odder stuff. This is Wikipedia in 2021, an odds-and-sods collection of hard-core editors, each with their own issues. Until Wikipedia is edited by actual professionals it will never rise to the level of a real encyclopedia.


                                                              




3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The edit summary shows all kinds of notorious cranks have been fiddling with this article in its TWENTY YEARS of existence. Note that our little fiend The Cunctator added 33k bytes of twaddle, albeit long ago. This is a case study of how bad WP article editing can be.

    https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%932021)

    This person is obviously South Korean--and obsessed with Korean military hardware.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kadrun

    ReplyDelete