Comment by webstrand 8 months ago
I made an edit last year, it immediately got reverted and I got a banner on my user page for vandalism. I complained about that, other people agreed with me but the person who reverted my edits never responded. So there it sits.
I made a small edit to fix a mistake once and it didn’t get called vandalism but I sort of got a harsh message telling I did it wrong and didn’t follow processes
There must be some admin-level expectations of how things should be done but the editor flow gives you zero warning or indication. This was a while back so maybe they changed the flow
How are people supposed to understand these hard to follow and shifting rules?
The base rules are actually not very complicated.
But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction. That's a people problem, to some extent, not purely a Wikipedia problem.
(BRD is my favorite pet-peeve)
BOLD, revert, discuss, for those unfamiliar:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...>
> The base rules are actually not very complicated.
> But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction.
I think this a feature/bug of a (litigious) society that works on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.
For reasons unknown, I am much better than many at navigating this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
https://x.com/arjie/status/1847046183342297498?s=46
If you share with me what your change is I might be able to get it done.
The only few times I tried to make small edits, typo corrections, or similar, they just got immediately reverted as vandalism. So when I found a page that is largely wrong about a relatively obscure historical figure that I actually know a lot about and have plenty of source material for, I didn't really feel motivated to put the work in to clean it up.