> It's all very 1984-esque; I'm seeing shades of "We were never/always at war with Oceania/Eurasia".

This is an hilarious take.

There's little things less 1984-esque than a small self-structured collective organization enforcing the preference of an individual on how they should be named.

It's the opposite of “a dictatorship imposing its views on individuals through propaganda”, it's a collective of people helping an individual, dead for not being as society wanted them to be, have their personal wish fulfilled even after death. People who want to dead name the victim, are the one who want to erase the individual to make it fit the mold of society, they are the totalitarian hivemind, they are the Tom Parsons of our reality.

Orwell being a lifelong anarchist socialist, there's very little doubt on which side he'd be in that debate.

Pretty much every married woman (who changed/added to her last name) has her birth name written there, even if she was never notable/known as Knavs or Skłodowska.

More info is usually better than less info, if you personally don't need to know something, that does not mean that that info should be removed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melania_Trump

> There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.

Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things. Using the fact that the former is seen as rude by some to avoid the second is in my opinion just an example of the level of extremism of the pro-trans activists.

But if in fact it made sense, shouldn't we completely remove any reference of the previous name also from the pages of people like Yusuf Islam [1] or Muhammad Ali [2] ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali

"if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again"

Writing someone was called XYZ, is not calling the person by that name again. It is just stating a historic fact.

Its omitting information which seems antithetical to the whole point of Wikipedia. It makes it harder to find other sources of information on someone. it makes it harder to make connections between things you know.

Its really not very different from a Wikipedia article using an author's pseudonym mentioning their real name.

Should all Wikipedia articles on people omit information that the subject of the article does not want mentioned? Even if they find it distressing?

I don't think what should be neutral account of factual events should take into account if it would be rude to an individual.

> The secind option used to be the norm on wikipedia even 15 years ago, but Anti-trans activists using dead-naming as a slur against trans people triggered the shift from the second option to the first.

Just to clarify, I think you mistook the order of the first option and the second option? I was confused by this statement

these snowflakes who think the world revolves around them always ruin everything

always offended by something

This is a naive take that belies the reality of pages with a lot of traffic, and is the reason why there can be controversial discussions in the talk pages. I know nothing about the history of this page, which is why I said "if it's intentional" regarding any deliberate scrubbing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...

EDIT: On further inspecting the page history, this definitely looks intentional, or at least is a controversial page.

Not when someone with connections and better knowledge of the WP bylaws weaponizes the Arb Com against you.

Here are some of the things you can get banned for:

- Having a too large fraction of your edits be reverts.

- Updating raw references to <ref cite> references (without changing the contents of the reference).

- Saying something on a forum that could be construed as telling people to edit a particular article in a particular way.

The Arb Com doesn't have to open up a public discussion about the matter. They can simply pronounce judgment in private and ban you. There's no prior notice, no representation, and no independent appeal. For a "supreme court", that's quite a low bar.

The page is protected, the general public can't edit it.

There was already discussion on the talk page, "Should Nex's given name be included?" with consensus of "no." That discussion was archived, but you can see it here [0].

From what I can see, the word "Dagny" has been retroactively redacted from all history of the page and its talk page.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Death_of_Nex...

Saudis controlled media by assassinating of Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, that is proof the Saudis kill to control media.

Because I believe in understanding, forgiveness, and redemption.

I have a responsibility not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible. I also have a responsibility to tell people not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible.

At the same time, our understanding of the science of the mind, as described by Carol Dweck in "Mindset", is that people are not fixed and can change. That is why understanding, forgiveness, and redemption matter. They are essential for helping other people through the process of repentance -- the changing of a mindset.

unquestionably. i'm not sure when we all decided to be hush-hush about people doing ethically dubious work.

i'm allowed to judge you based on who you take money from.

More transparency around the admins and the hierarchy above it would be a good start, as would some kind of countervailing pressure to the ballooning of meta rules (bylaws). For instance:

- Oppose the "Super Mario" effect: if admins do something ordinary users would get banned for, they get banned too, they don't just lose their admin title.

- Implement restrictions on Arb Com to make it worthy of its "supreme court" moniker. Provide prior notice, allow representation, access to evidence ahead of the case, and require the Arb Com to disclose the logic of any automated scripts they use for mass judging (e.g. counting proportion of edits being reverts, or that counts every change to a reference as "reference vandalism"). Grant defendants the ability to force the Committee's judgment to be disclosed to the public, with PII redacted if necessary.

- Require that precedent be recorded for unclear meta rules: what counts as a violation of e.g. canvassing? When do reversions become evidence or proof of "ownership"?

- Create an independent appeals body for Arb Com decisions. Like the Arb Com itself, the logic or source code for any scripts they use to aid their decisions, should be public. Ideally, choose the independent appeals body by different means than the Arb Com itself is chosen, e.g. by random selection of users with a certain activity level, independent of the ordinary admin track.

- Grant all users the right to be forgotten (courtesy vanishing), not just users in good standing, so that users bullied off the platform can remove their proverbial stockade.

- Create a mechanism that forces rules to be refactored or reduced in scope. Just spitballing, one possible way might be to limit the growth of any given WP: page per unit time, require negative growth for some of them, or in some way reward editors who reduce their extent.

There may be fundamental unsolvable problems, but that doesn't mean the current system can't be improved.

Every discussion about wikipedia, everywhere, now attracts comments from accounts with a poor history claiming it's biased. I assume bad faith.

Links to examples would go a long way.

> mentally ill

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Wikipedia has been co-opted by mentally ill people is an extraordinary claim. You should provide more than feelings.

I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there. As I see it, it's like that quote about democracy - it's the worst way to attempt to catalogue human knowledge, except for all those other forms that have been tried.

> It also has an incredibly strong western bias.

What's the issue with that? Why shouldn't English Wikipedia have a strong Western bias? I've explored and participated in several other Wikipedias and other collaborative projects, and each is biased towards the worldviews common to the culture that its main editors come from. I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all (if such a platonic ideal could even be properly defined), and seeing how Western values include a significant focus on pluralism, freedom of expression and scientific inquiry, I think this situation is much better than the alternatives.

maybe my viewpoint is weird but i think this distorted human interactions on multiple domains.

of course we all wanted to communicate faithful information, but now any discussion turns into a religious difference, and the escape is of course "who has the truest source". people don't necessarily understand the content, they just defer the validity to an official third party, so basically we're back to zero.. but we're all debating everything now.

and it makes me think that locally, we chatting, was never meant to exchange rigorous information, but mostly to share opinions lightly, more emotional than rigorous and scientific

And now it's given by the mainstream media, which is mostly owned by a few very rich people and pushes the same type of propaganda as before (but now globally).

> Colleges are political, and donations are made to assure they keep on being political.

Ok, to clarify:

> > And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.

Which American colleges, by what people, and what does "being political" mean? Maybe I'm very ignorant of the USA, are these just known things to Americans?

Dr Raoult was very vocal in France about hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid 19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Raoult

It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.

> As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.

They probably mean people like Robert Malone [1], who - despite being well accomplished in a related field - spread verifiably wrong information about vaccines on social media during the pandemic. There are many people like him who showed past accomplishments in a related field, but were totally out of their depth when interviewed about covid on the Joe Rogan podcast or similar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Malone

You can simply do a Wikipedia search for "misinformation doctor" and get plenty of results, even with its search system, let alone if you use a search engine to power the search.

I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited. Do you have some better reason to want a particular name?