Censorship?

I just tried editing a Wikipedia page about text editors to include StrongEd and Zap as RISC OS text editors and my entries were removed. As far as I am aware my entries were perfectly valid.

Anyone else want to try adding them?

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

Not so much censorship as somebody’s precious page they don’t like touched. I’ve run into this a while back which is why I just don’t bother with editing much on wiki…

Although you can run into fiefdoms on Wikipedia, the reason the links were removed was apparently that you linked to pages that didn’t exist. The commit that reverted your change says “revert – see WP:WTAF”, where WTAF is explained here.

Hmm… I did link the Zap entry to the Zap (disambiguation) page and modified that page accordingly. It seems my modification on that page was rejected as well. I have since modified the Zap page again and had my changes rejected again.

Also there are plenty of entries in that table with dead links.

Does look a bit like censorship then. If they have just rejected the stuff you’ve added without an e-mail to explain why, then it seems they are rather arrogant and insensitive.

Hmm… I did link the Zap entry to the Zap (disambiguation) page and modified that page accordingly.

Linking to a disambiguation page isn’t very useful, and is generally frowned upon by wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Links_to_disambiguation_pages

It seems my modification on that page was rejected as well.

If you check the history you’ll see that there were two reverts for two different reasons:

1. The first was an anti-vandalism bot thinking you’d vandalised the page
2. The second was a user because you failed to cite your sources

Also counting against you are likely to be (a) you haven’t registered an account with wikipedia (so there’s no way for them to email you even if they wanted to, and there’s no way to prove that you’re a good editor because you can’t prove that all your previous edits have been from the same IP), and (b) you failed to link to the RISC OS page when you mentioned RISC OS.

Does look a bit like censorship then.

When you have a free resource which can be edited or contributed to by anyone, there need to be at least some rules in place otherwise it will turn into an utter cesspool. And if that resource is expected to contain factual information the rules need to be even tighter.

I’ve run into problems with wikipedia in the past (fun and games with the images from the icon bar article being deleted because they lacked copyright information, and I fell into the same pitfall of making the edits before I registered with the site so probably missed out on any notifications that would have happened). Thankfully Trevor Johnson & friends have now restored it to its former glory (and then some).

Ah! If they don’t know your e-mail, then I suppose they can’t really explain!