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wikipirates

Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 12:01 pm
by jimmylegs
hey someone is cleaning up after me on wikipedia. and by cleaning up i mean completely deleting. particularly where i point out things like: that such and such company's trial pharmaceutical product is actually just something that raises serum uric acid which you can do by eating certain foods. howdya like them apples.

how so

Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 4:00 pm
by gwa
How can someone delete youir posts?

gwa

editing wikipedia

Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 7:37 pm
by jimmylegs
you can edit whatever you want on wikipedia. and i'm not talking the discussion page, i mean the main article. you don't even have to log in, they just track your IP. just the other day i noticed a huge chunk of one page missing and i had to go through the edit section (which fortunately still contained the original text) to locate an html "start comment" tag:

<!--

which effectively hid the rest of the original entry from viewers. i deleted the comment tag and saved, and the info reappeared.

i recently edited the original wikipedia uric acid page to include ms info in addition to gout info, and the changes that have been made to that entry were entirely valid. but those changes were to subdivide the page section "medical issues" into two sections entitled "medical issues" and "sources of uric acid".

the changes to the "multiple sclerosis" and "therapies for multiple sclerosis" pages were more of the deleting variety. grrrr! but when information is "vandalized" sections can be locked. i have seen this on pages describing highly controversial subjects. i intend to write another entry, (and save it this time), then copy it to the admin folks, and if it gets deleted maybe they'll lock the section to editing.

grrrowwrrr!!!! hack the planet!!!!

ps. is this why no-one answered my "let's fix wikipedia" post? (or whatever i called it)

Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 8:12 pm
by Shayk
ps. is this why no-one answered my "let's fix wikipedia" post? (or whatever i called it)
Unfortunately, I'm IT and wikipedia ignorant but I thought it was (is) a great idea.

Sharon

Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 9:01 pm
by jimmylegs
thanks sharon! henceforth, i'll keep all posted on relevant wikipedia changes!

Re: wikipirates

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 1:20 am
by NHE
jimmylegs wrote:grrrowwrrr!!!! hack the planet!!!!
I'm sorry to hear about your troubles with wikipedia. You might do better with your own webpage. Most ISPs allow for a personal webpage. You can get a decent free wysiwyg html editor which makes putting together a webpage not much more difficult than editing an MS Word document. One such editor is called NVu. It's based on the Mozilla source code but is more advanced than the Mozilla web page editor. Some other good resources are the HTML Code Tutorial as well as a couple of books that I've used such as Creative HTML Design and Learning Web Design.

NHE

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 6:37 am
by jimmylegs
hiya, ya i can make/host websites no prob but imho people have a right to find more relevant MS facts right at those two wikipedia entries without being expected to know about some random person's personal site.

MS entry on wiki is controlled by a

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 10:40 am
by art
I've had a similar experience. There's a guy who seems to consider himself the police for the MS page. He removes things I put up there too. I've tried to engage him in discussion via the "approved" mechanism, but he just avoids the questions and states he knows best. I don't have the patience to fight it. He's a jerk.

wikidorkface

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 10:49 am
by jimmylegs
well at least i'm not the only one. what an ass. we should let the admin at wikipedia know he's controlling input by others. if we can back up what is said with journal citations it should be there for others to read.

wikifixi

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 11:25 am
by jimmylegs

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 1:02 pm
by Lyon
Hey jimmy....do you sign in with a guy's name on wikipedia too? Wouldn't it be ironic if you and Art were the two who keep changing it on each other?

The only thing I'm an expert on is picking boogers so I've never signed up for wikipedia but what if you got things the way you wanted it and saved it...either "save page as" and keep it in your hard drive or copy and paste to a document to keep in your hard drive and every day at the same time change it back to the way you want?

Same thing with you Art. Every day about 10 minutes after jimmy :twisted:
Bob

wiki wars

Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2006 12:09 am
by jimmylegs
haha, that got a real "lol", no i'm an anonymous wiki user so far.

about the save and post idea, yea i think that's what they call edit-wars and i'm pretty game for it, not the predictable timing though or it'd be too easy for art to figure out.