‘We Are Not Madhouse of Twitter’, Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Engages in Savage Conversation
Almost every article on Wikipedia has sources. Are you on drugs? was the savage reply of Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia when asked on twitter to go read Wikipedia (Sic), your articles have zero sources.
It all started with a tweet from a user Nikhi Minach quoting a deleted post whose title read 2020 Tablighi Jamaat coronavirus hotspot in Delhi.
Jimmi Wales the founder of Wikipedia then replied “Wikipedia doesn’t work that way. We don’t accept payment to include things, nor to delete them”.
The user then replied to Jimmy Wales, “Hi Jimmy, this article was important for people to know the current hotspots in India, kindly restore the article, since it wasn’t islamophobic to mention the current hotspots”.
Jimmy then replies: Wikipedia doesn’t work like that. We engage in serious rational discussion. It’s very different from the madhouse of twitter.
The user again wrote: “Agreed sir, but again the article was a rational and educative article. Thank you for replying, I’ll be posting the article again, since it’s imperative for the public to be aware. Thank you. :)”
Then came the most savage really of all from Jimmy: “I don’t recommend that you do that – it is important to join the discussion. In actual fact, the article was incredibly poorly written and has zero sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2020_Tablighi_Jamaat_coronavirus_hotspot_in_Delhi&oldid=950920063… This isn’t about religious sentiments, it’s about not putting junk into Wikipedia.”
What followed was a comment from another twitter handle R-ball
The tweet read “I’m sorry sir, I disagree. Most of the articles in Wikipedia have absolutely zero cited sources. This is nothing but leftist propoganda.”
He first replied politely: “Most of the articles in Wikipedia have absolutely zero cited sources.” This is transparently false and easy to check. It isn’t really helpful to your cause, whatever it is, to make things up out of thin air.”
Multiple users then kept prompting him further on sources of his article. He definitely seemed to be agitated when he tweeted “Almost every article on Wikipedia has sources. Are you on drugs?”
Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles, except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism.
However, there are enough moderation to ensure false, missing reference and otherwise inappropriate entries are deleted or modified.
Jimmy Wales is an American-British Internet entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia.
