Update: What Else Is Wikipedia Missing? 2020-01-25

The last couple of days I have been hammering through my old posts and switching out wikipedia links for other links. It is actually pretty time consuming and requires going and looking up a new link for every wikipedia.org href I had (which turned out to be a couple hundred). As it turns out I found that Computer Hope is really quite good for tech related definitions, and I used them for a bunch of the links that I changed. I have also been refusing to click on Wikipedia links in search results, which has been going better than I expected. I find it mildly frustrating, which is a big deal for a prick like me who is very easily frustrated. :-)

What Else Is Wikipedia Missing? 2020-01-11

So I have this other web site that I seem to be in charge of. It isn't as well known as say Quad9 or Cloudflare but it (well the service it describes) is probably more private than either of those two. I may not be getting rich off of it (in fact it is a money losing adventure) but I like to think it is important to the people who choose to use it. Wikipedia however isn't interested in that. Wikipedia is interested in rules... and those rules are probably keeping you from getting the full story.

I have been running dnscrypt.ca for a few years now and a few months ago I decided to add my service to the list of public recursive resolvers at Wikipedia. The listing generated a little bit of traffic on my web site but I think that was probably just some people checking up to make sure that "something" was there rather than a dead web site. It didn't really seem to have any effect on the number of queries per day being sent to the servers. For months the entry stayed there and I felt a little pleased to have my insignificant name next to big corporate stooge wankers. Kind of a nod to say that maybe you giant assholes are not the only ones who can play ball. Then on New Year's Day a wanker named MrOllie decided to clean up the page. He simply deleted all the entries that did not have their own Wikipedia page. This included mine and a number of others who offer what I would call important alternative DNS services.

What Merrygold thinks of MrOllie.

I figured that this was obviously just an oversight and I added my entry back. It wasn't long before MrOllie re-deleted my entry and left a comment at the "talk page" for my IP address telling me that Wikipedia list pages should only contain items that are noteworthy enough to have their own Wikipedia page. Now stop right here and think about what that means. Since dnscrypt.ca doesn't have its own Wikipedia page then it is not worthy of being on any Wikipedia list. I tried to contact a few of the other people who run similar services and who were deleted off the list and I heard back from a couple of them. One said that they would probably create a page for themselves and then put their entry back on the list. But this is a bit of an unreasonable amount of effort required to simply be listed. In order to do this, they must first understand the Write The Article First page, then have a firm grasp of Wikipedia's Notability policies and List policies. If they qualify for their own Wikipedia page they can learn the Markdown syntax and create their page which must conform to the Policies and guidelines set out by Wikipedia before they actually get to the How to create a page page. Now they can add themselves to the list of DNS providers. Fuck off. This is clearly wankery when held up to the notion that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. Yeah, anyone autistic enough to go down the rabbit hole of figuring out how.

As it turns out MrOllie actually has archives and archives of people asking on his talk page why he deleted their shit. He has been doing this since 2008 in fact. That's right, easily more than a decade of being a steaming asshole who goes around looking for shit he can delete from Wikipedia. Dude, fuck you.

I was thinking that I would go down the rabbit hole, create my own page, and then add myself back to the list. It seems like the right way to go eh? Well no. For now I am just going to try to avoid using Wikipedia. Doing all the work to add myself back does not [seem to] get me any more traffic and does not improve Wikipedia at all. It just goes along with the status quo and continues to let people believe that Wikipedia is too good to ignore (that's a cut at the American "too big to fail" banking bullshit). I urge you to think about what other information has been removed by douches like MrOllie and think about what other information you are not getting when you look at Wikipedia articles. Don't worry, I know that most people will be way too pussy to read this far, let alone actually try to avoid Wikipedia... but if you decide to try it please let me know so I can increase your street cred a little on my abbacus of cool.