Guillotine

Wikipedia needs to hire or appoint some moderator hunters (I’ll volunteer right now). The place has gotten out of hand with a bunch of teenagers and bums living in mom’s basement who think they are Gods just because they have moderator status on Wiki.

Now I’ve heard of this before, but never really witnessed it. On a certain film maker’s message board the discussion came up that a moderator on Wiki who had a personal grudge against the film maker (Think he wouldn’t read the guy’s lousy script or put him in a movie), and took it upon himself to delete any info regarding that film maker from Wiki using the excuse that the person was “not well known, not popular”. Uh huh… The guy had 8 films theatrically released… Internationally no less. The film maker even had one of his employees updating Wiki while stuff was being deleted. So I’ve been aware of the practice, but as I said I’ve never actually seen it until now.

The other night I was looking up release dates on certain older animes when I come across several pages for anime series that were deleted with a message “not well known enough”, and one visual novel page was deleted with a message “This is not a game review site”. Now I can understand deleting info that may be someone’s personal opinion, but to delete an entire entry for any reason is kind of idiotic. I mean since when is an encyclopedia supposed to contain only well known or popular information? It’s kinda like whiting out Aardvark in a printed encyclopedia just because you dislike aardvarks.

Personally I’m of the opinion that (as I stated above) Wiki needs to appoint some moderator hunters whose sole purpose is to watch over the other moderators. Since most of these folks are not actual employees of Wiki or are particularly motivated to follow the rules I think it makes sense to keep an eye on them. I know Wiki currently expects the users to report the abuse by moderators, but honestly… Most people are on that site to research information, and do they really have time to stop to send a message to the site admin? Of course there are always busy bodies with nothing better to do and can’t resist getting involved, but I imagine most folk (like me) will simply back page to Google and find the information elsewhere.

It truly reminds me of a certain message forum I belong to where recently the site admin decided to appoint a slew of new moderators. Within a few days at least a dozen members were banned for no apparent reason, posts were deleted, locked, or moved to the wrong categories. I think the admin spent about 2 weeks cleaning up the site and wound up permanently banning the abusive moderators.