Admins

Admins run Wikipedia. They can block you and delete your stuff. You get to be an admin by convincing people who hang around the requests for adminship page that you're loyal, brave, trustworthy and clean. It also helps if you haven't tangled with anybody too poweful on WP.

You usually need about 75% of the votes to win adminship. But if powerful people on WP like you, a lower percentage will work. Once in, you almost have to be blasted out of the job with a tactical nuke. Occasionally an admin will p.o. Wikipedia bigwigs - there's a whole heirarchy of them above run-of-the-mill admins - so much that the admin gets "desysopped." But this is rare. Only 26 of the more than 1,300 admins have been tossed out of the job.

I don't want to be an admin, as I make painfully clear on my WP user page. I really don't want to block people and delete stuff, which is what admins mostly do. After all, these activities earn you a lot of serious dislike from people who get blocked and whose contributions get deep-sixed. Whole bitchfest sites have grown up where these people whine, spin conspiracy theories, and plot revenge.

So it's not surprising that admins themselves often complain about the crap they take. This is a typical example of WP admins moaning that nobody loves them. The sobs were prompted by one admin getting fed up and leaving.

To be fair, some admins take a lot of grief. But it's not like they were dragooned into the position. Last I checked, nobody was hauled kicking and screaming off the street and forced to accept adminship at bayonet point.

BADSITES

The title sounds like cheap sci-fi about an attack of killer Internet sites. Believe it or not, some people on Wikipedia actually fear such an attack from any site that badmouths a WP editor. They're pushing through a BADSITES proposal to prohibit anyone on Wikipedia from linking to a site that criticizes, or as the proposal calls it, "cyber-stalks" any WP editor.

Sounds Orwellian, and it is. But the proposal, renamed in a appropriately Orwellian fashion as MALICIOUSSITES, is on the verge of passing ArbCom, the supreme tribunal and poobah central of Wikipedia. The proposal currently has five votes from the august ArbCom panel and only needs two more. My guess is that this blog may someday land on the blacklist of forbidden MALICIOUSSITES.

BADSITES/MALICIOUSSITES has already been used to rip out many links on Wikipedia to sites run by left-wing moviemaker Michael Moore, sci-fi editor Theresa Hayden, and Hollywood producer Don Murphy. Each of these sites made the mistake of saying something not nice about a Wikipedia editor on one or two of its zillions of pages. The BADSITES/MALICIOUSSITES crowd then gleefully ripped out links to many pages on those sites, almost all of which had nothing to do with WP, much less criticized any WP editors.

This childish censorship will only get worse once ArbCom gives it the seal of high poobah approval. Sooner or later the story will get into the mainstream media, who love to trash a free competitor like Wikipedia. The headlines will be flattering: Wikipedia censors websites critical of itself. WP god-king Jimbo Wales will then step in after catching hell from the media and rescind the idiotic policy.

Stupid, silly, embarrassing...and highly entertaining.

Itsy-bitsy labor

Sometimes a few fixups can make a WP article look a lot better. Today I found the Ok Tedi River on the wikify list. All right, I found the article, not the river itself, which is located in some God-forsaken corner of Papua New Guinea…as opposed to the non-God-forsaken corners.

The article looked bizarre with loads of blank space, because the tagger had left the wikify tag in a particularly silly location. You can see the mess here. I googled around and found a lot about this river, mostly because there was an environmental hoohah, tinged with Aussie-hate and business-bashing, in the late 1990s about a nearby copper mine. The hoohahing was so intense that it blotted out sources about the river itself, but I finally found a website that wasn’t focused obsessively on the mine.

I put that source in an external links section and found a reasonably neutral source for the mine-related stuff, which I put in a footnote. I added headings to create a table of contents, fixed a few punctuation and spelling booboos, and tacked on a little prose about the latest mine malarkey. The result looks considerably better, and I will say so myself.

Times like these are when I feel a little lazy. For minimal effort I got a much better looking article. Seems like it should be harder.

The article too awful for Wikipedia

Yesterday I promised the article on Matt Ottinger that Wikipedia deleted. Well, Wikipedia didn't delete it - five guys voted for it to go, four voted for it to stay, and the closing admin (more about them later) thought 5-4 was a "consensus" for deletion. The admin said the story didn't have independent sources, though several were provided.

As Mr. Serling used to say, submitted for your approval:

Matt Ottinger is the host of the Michigan-based high school quizbowl show QuizBusters and its middle school equivalent, QB Jr. on WKAR-TV,¹ for which he received a Michigan Emmy nomination.² He is also known for maintaining three websites related to game shows:

The Game Show Home Game Home Page, which contains information about nearly all the game show home games ever produced in the U.S., including board games, computer and video games, and Internet sites with games.

The Game Show Compendium, which provides links to many game show fan sites around the world.

The Bill Cullen Home Page, with extensive information about the legendary game show host, along with many photographs from all stages of Cullen's long career.

Ottinger is also a co-founder of The Game Show Forum, which started in 2003 and is one of the principal Internet forums for game show discussions. The forum was established due to the large amount of trolling activity at alt.tv.game-shows. He appeared as a contestant on Jeopardy! on June 21, 2004, and faced Ken Jennings in the fourteenth game of his record run. Ottinger took an early lead on Jennings, and led by $2,400 after the first round of play. But Jennings took control in the Double Jeopardy! round and defeated Ottinger on his way to his record 74-game winning streak and a then-record $2.5 million in total winnings. During the show, Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek made an appreciative mention of Ottinger's Bill Cullen website.³ Ottinger is also involved in programming for the local Okemos Channel.⁴

Notes
¹Matt Ottinger: Producer/Host, WKAR 2007, retrieved on 2007-09-03. Meet Matt Ottinger, host of "QuizBusters", WKAR 2007, retrieved on 2007-09-03.
²Notables, MSU News 2000, retrieved on 2007-09-03.
³Quiz show host goes on other side of podium Triviahalloffame.com February 2005, retrieved on 2007-09-03.
⁴The Local Access Zone, Erik Adams, The Big Green: Bringing MSU to Size April 2006, retrieved on 2007-09-03.

External link
Matt Ottinger's personal website, with photo

Category: American game show hosts
Category: Internet personalities
Category: Jeopardy! contestants

Just awful, isn't it, and a disgrace to any online encyclopedia? At least I have the consolation of knowing that none of the delete voters - and certainly not the closing admin - will ever host a television show for nearly twenty years, be nominated for a statewide Emmy, operate an important web forum and several terrific websites, and give Ken Jennings a real run for his money on Jeopardy!

Irrelevant comments

If you checked my WP user page, you may have noticed the house newspaper, The Wikipedia Signpost. This paper is really better than Wikipedia deserves. Oh, you won't find any tough criticism of Jimbo Wales or other WP bigwigs. This is a house newspaper, after all. But the paper doesn't shy from covering Wikipedia controversies in a mostly unbiased manner.

I admit that a couple features mostly suck. The WikiWorld cartoon is an embarrassment. Instead of satirizing WP, it merely recycles some of the encyclopedia's more boring passages into equally boring cartoons. The cartoonist also shares the political biases common in the mainstream media - Ann Coulter was drawn dragging her knuckles, while mousy National Public Radio types were treated with gentle respect. The technical report, named for uber-techie Brion Vibber, is a dry-as-Sahara-sand summary of obscure glitches and even more obscure fixes.

But by and large, the paper makes for reasonably interesting reading. I copy the newspaper into my user page each week and attach "irrelevant comments" below each item. These are usually as unfunny as WikiWorld, but at least they don't take as long to read. My favorite Signpost item for my lame remarks is the weekly account of ArbCom activities, The Report on Lengthy Litigation (TROLL, ha-ha). ArbCom is WP's Supreme Court, where various miscreants are dragged for their just or unjust deserts. Their cases sometimes make unintentionally hilarious reading, as the latest BADSITES hoohah attests.

I was once asked by the then-editor of the Signpost if I would be interested in contributing. I answered that I would be too wise-ass for the job. God knows, I might get the paper closed down if they ever let me inside the place.

Good, bad and ugly

Now don't think that I'm always gonna whine about how bad and rotten and downright miserable Wikipedia is. Sometimes working on the encyclopedia is almost enjoyable. One of the ways I keep myself (allegedly) sane on WP is the "wikify" list. This is a bunch of articles that other editors have tagged as needing help. Usually I don't have much use for editors who tag articles instead of writing them. But I bless the wikify taggers because they give me the fun stuff to do.

Today, for instance, I wikified the article on the East Brother Island Lighthouse. If you haven't the foggiest, neither did I until I saw the article on the wikify list. Here is how the article looked before I got to work. By WP standards it really wasn't in terrible shape. There was lots of interesting information, though the format was a little haphazard. Some googling taught me more about this landmark on a bit of lonely island near San Francisco, so I added some history, links, sources, headings and general fixups to the article. The result is here. Which I hope is an improvement.

That's the good of Wikipedia, writing articles and helping little African kids learn more about some San Francisco lighthouse they couldn't give a flip about. (Jimbo Wales, WP founder and god-king, is always embarrassing us Wikipedians by saying that we're giving the world's knowledge to African kids. He never names any of the kids.)

But then there's the bad...

Today I found out that an article I had written about television game show host, critic and webmaster Matt Ottinger was deleted - made to vanish into the cyber-afterworld - because six spoilsports didn't think he was "notable" enough. Nobody can explain what "notable" means on Wikipedia. I almost mouthed off to the guy who actually pulled the plug on the article, but then I remembered about getting blocked, banned and executed. So I'll mouth off here. Luckily, I saved a copy of the article before the dirty deed was done. Later I'll post it on this blog, where it will remain safe until the Google servers crumble into silicon dust.

And finally, there's the ugly...

I try to stay out of the endless disputes on Wikipedia. These fights chew up enormous amounts of server space as loudmouths like me write nasty things to each other over the encyclopedia's endless reams of policy. I just want to write articles, which makes me an exopedian in WP-speak.

But sometimes I let myself get sucked into the yellfests. There's a beaut going on right now about whether articles can link to BADSITES, defined as any site that says something bad about a Wikipedia editor. I think the encyclopedia should link to anything useful, which sometimes includes the Orwellian named BADSITES. To put it mildly, others disagree. Two of the most prominent people on Wikipedia, Cyde and SlimVirgin - not their real names, of course, but on WP nobody knows your real name, or they pretend not to - are ripping each other over this issue. Another prominent editor, Fred Bauder (his real name, but he doesn't seem to mind) is suggesting proposals just slightly less bizarre than, oh, me. The talk pages for the dispute have grown to Andre-the-Giant sized collections of yelps and growls. Which is all creating much delight among the contributors to some of the BADSITES.

And dare I say it, I'm enjoying the fight, too.

Hi

If you don't know what Wikipedia is, start using the Internet. Oh, you are using the Internet. Then you know that Wikipedia is a massive online encyclopedia created by people with nothing better to do. I'm one of those people, and I've chipped in ten-thousand-something "edits" to Wikipedia (abbreviated WP when I get lazy, which is most of the time). Those edits range from spelling corrections to genuine content contributions. You can look at my WP user page here. This may help you decide how genuine my content contributions have been.

I use my real name on WP to keep myself from mouthing off too nastily. Wikipedia has all sorts of rules about civility and assuming good faith and not picking your nose. So if you attack other editors too obviously, you can get blocked, banned and executed. But this blog is different because I make the rules here. So I can mouth off all I want about WP without getting blocked, etc. Let's get started.