Wikipedia policy – an object lesson in crazy

You may remove information that is unsourced or badly sourced (for example, to non-reliable sources such as blogs or tabloids). You may also add information that is sourced. Anyone may do that to any Wikipedia article. What is not acceptable is challenging information based on your own personal knowledge of the subject matter or events surrounding it. If you have sources for your claims then you should have no problem adding them to the article.

Lets examine this bit by bit, shall we?

1) You may remove information that is unsourced or badly sourced (for example, to non-reliable sources such as blogs or tabloids

So they are not wholly insane – they do allow you to remove stuff that is apparently wrong.

2) You may also add information that is sourced. Anyone may do that to any Wikipedia article.

Which is what Wiki was about.

3)  What is not acceptable is challenging information based on your own personal knowledge of the subject matter or events surrounding it.

So while you can remove unsourced material, you can’t do it based on your own knowledge of the subject matter.

So if there is an article about me – about my life – and there is something that is wrong in it – I can’t change it unless I can dredge up some source to prove what I am saying? I am 40 years old, so quite a lot of my life happened before the internet was around, and certainly before "valid sources" were around.

Which means that – despite the fact "you may remove unsourced matertial" – you can’t actually remove material about yourself even though you know it is wrong.

—–

Wikipedia is a joke. In trying to become the best source of information, it has crawled up its own backside and become locked in an insane crazy spiral.

I realise it is futile to try to change it – like Apple, Google, Microsoft and all the other monolithic groups out there, they are never going to acknowledge they are wrong, and they are never going to change it just because one or two people try to tell them they are crazy.

It would take a wide scale boycott of the site to get them to listen, and no one is going to do that, because quite honestly it isn’t worth the effort. There are far more serious problems in the world, and the fact that some jumped up power-mad whackjobs are in control of a site is the least of the problems facing this world.

But – just keep this in mind the next time you look something up.

ANYONE CAN WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT ANY TOPIC and if they write it about you, you have NO RECOURSE to fix things.

ANYONE CAN WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT ANY TOPIC and there is apparently very little validation done on what is written. 

 ANYONE CAN WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT ANY TOPIC and they can write whatever they like. It might be a lie, it might be wrong, but once it is there, it is nigh on impossible to get rid of it, no matter how full of bollocks it actually is.