This post is written on behalf of the LabPlot team. It’s different compared to what we usually publish on our homepage but we feel we need to share this story with our community.
Wikipedia is great when there can be no controversy but as soon as there is anything that can be controversial I wouldn’t trust it as far as I could kick it. 50% of its content is next to useless.
It is sad as the original concept was good but it is no longer my go to site for information.
I second that. Nowadays wikipedia is extremely biased and has a very strong “political” agenda. Good choice of words indeed, “…when there can be no controversy…”. Yet, even then…
I mean, I know people trust Wikipedia, just like they trust that one reporter, that website, their best friend, Pastor Phil, Aunt Elise and their cousin Vinnie. It takes experience, skills, education, and hard work to sift useful information from the nonsense, propaganda, and biased agendas that surround us, but that’s always been true.
Amen (let’s say, cause I’m agnostic 
).
Kind regards.
It’s a shame to see a good effort go to waste, but if I were you guys I would give up. You’ve got better things to do than fight vindictive little Hitlers. They always find a niche where they have some power they can wield and in this instance it’s Wikipedia.
When I was in school they taught us not to trust Wikipedia and forbade us from using it as a source. Now Wikipedia is used to “fact check” politically charged news. Lots of ideological capture occurred under Katherine Maher.
There is nothing new about this, except, perhaps, the efficiency of the censorship.
You can start by looking at the page for Jimmy Wales which fails to mention that he started his career running adult websites and that there are allegations that he traded sexual favors for enhanced treatment on Wikipedia.
Holistic health has always been treated as witchcraft.
The Cardano page was deleted and then locked up with bad information for years until someone facilitated a conversation directly between Mr. Wales and Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano.
These are just the instances I know about. I have heard of many more.
Wikipedia needs to be replaced by a decentralized alternative. Apparently, it does not want to improve itself or make things right.
While I agree with the core principle that Wikipedia isn’t to be blindly trusted, and that internal politics and super-editor biases diminish the quality of the product…I don’t know that LabPlot, or the process described in the blog post, is the best example to use to point that out.
Without any outside context, the initial “ask” was to have the editors basically trust that a website created by a project team to promote the project is objective information (when the first version submitted was heavily promotional in tone), and that KDE-provided information should be valid as the only source for the article.
Looking at articles for other programs, I’d argue there’s still an over-reliance on sources written by the subject of the article, but articles for LibreOffice and Microsoft Office at least show that some statements are being sourced by third-parties who are theoretically providing more independent validation of their contents.
None of that is perfect, and I do agree with the ultimate premise that Wikipedia’s principles aren’t consistently applied and aren’t handled well with potential new contributors, leading to folks being driven away who could have contributed positively to the project.
This comment was mistakenly previously addressed to another person. Before making any final conclusions, we suggest reading the latest updates to the blog post.
While Wikipedia is a valuable resource, its open-edit nature means that some information may be inaccurate or biased. It’s generally trustworthy for general knowledge, but it’s always a good idea to cross-check important facts with other reliable sources.
I get the “promotional” part if someone was getting in there saying we’re better than xyz and using false information regarding xyz. But practically every piece of software in existence compares themselves to their competitors. In fact if you look up any sw category on wikipedia they have an article comparing all the known players. Who better to provide information on a piece of sw than the actual people who have produced it?! If they objected to the tone of your update and gave you pointers on how to rewrite it ok but drawing you down like that and deleting your article is completely unacceptable in my view. It is very sad that basically the entire internet has become this way due to analytics, seo and the never-ending greed so many of these companies are persuing now. I just laugh when I watch the financial news and everyone is so high on AI. Very few of them if any mention the old GIGO concept and that most of these things are being manipulated to produce the behavior they want with no regard at all to “intelligence”. I sure miss the “good ol’ days” of the internet. 
The article about LabPlot on Wikipedia (we are talking about the ‘EN’ version here, but the situation is similar for other languages) was completely outdated and still containing the information about LabPlot1 from Qt3/KDE3 times. The article became largely wrong with the introduction of LabPlot2 and with further developments in recent years. Among other things, the feature set described on Wikipedia was very far from being correct and complete in comparison to the description for other applications of its type.
Well, this (outdated info) is a general issue on any technical info you search and find on the internet. I always advise new linux users that when they are looking for a solution about an issue they are facing in linux, they should always verify that what they read is posted in the last 2-3 years, otherwise it will be non-applicable and they’ll make things worse.
(I’m a long-time Wikipedia editor, nothing major, and I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation 2012-2015.)
I’m really sorry your well-intentioned article improvement ran into the demolition derby that is Wikipedia edit patroling. But you also need to assume good faith and look at it from the other direction. There are 7 million articles on English Wikipedia, and only 42,000 active editors. Actual bad actors and trolls are constantly trying to vandalize and degrade the quality of articles, hype living persons and companies, remove damaging information, etc. One of the key defenses against that are automated and semi-automated tools that simply revert bad-faith edits. The volunteers who run these tools and then have to respond to the fallout are doing overall necessary and good work, and English Wikipedia would be far far worse without their efforts. It may feel good to characterize them as power-mad little Hitlers but that won’t get you anywhere; I prefer to see them as overworked unpaid contributors (hmmm, kind of like KDE developers!). I don’t have the interest in figuring out where MrOllie lies, but I guarantee that only one of those attitudes is productive.
It sucks that you can’t edit the article about your own product because of an undeniable conflict of interest. But overall it’s a good rule. The problem is apparently among those 42,000 editors there isn’t a LabPlot user who’s interested and able to improve the article. And now that you’ve dug in, accused a Wikipedian of vandalism, and written an inflammatory dramatic post here and another on Reddit, how are you going to get Wikipedians to ever trust you? Again, imagine this kind of behavior in the KDE community; would you want to work with some of the people in Phoronix comments?
I’ve had my edits on Wikipedia summarily reverted. It sucks. Your choices are let it slide and move on, or humbly and unemotionally write on the talk page and the user’s talk page “I think there was some good stuff in my edit, how can we move forward?” It may feel good to rant how Wikipedia sucks so bad, and there are hundreds of aggrieved people (many of whom are outright kooks and conspiracy nuts angry that an encyclopedia correctly shuts them down) who will reliably pile in to agree with you. But again, it’s not productive and does nothing to improve the quality of the LabPlot article.
Just got around to reading the blog post. We had a similar bad experience trying to make a new page for Subtitle Composer. It is now simply five lines in the KDE page.
I personally don’t think Wikipedia itself has a political agenda… rather that many political actors take advantage of its editable and community nature to push their own agenda. Sometimes they’d get into battles in certain political pages and it’s funny to look at
Personally, apart from these politics heavy pages, I trust Wikipedia more than most places. It’s pretty well self-governed in my opinion, and that’s honestly amazing if you think about it.
It’s the very reason why its co-founder, Sanger Larry, left wikipedia. It’s a heavily biased site nowadays. If it doesn’t fit a certain narrative, it won’t be on it or, at best, be a measily footnote. It’s not just politics an sich, but even , for example,history facts that will not be published on that site. And even if they have no other option, as in, “you can’t just ignore these events”, they’ll give a “twist” to it.
