Saturday, May 22, 2010

End of a War!

The year 2010 is mostly a war at Sinhala Wikipedia. A company has started putting article to the wiki (Paid Editing). It wasn't bad until they started showing disrespect towards the community.

Personally I'm not against anyone getting paid to improve the starving Sinhala wiki. As you all know we have a very few contributors at the moment. But I don't think I like it when they want to own the wiki articles and play funny games with Wikipedia policies.

However it is good that the company finally agreed to strongest of the demands by the community.

Few things I would like to note here.
  • First is, if you are interested in doing something good, you have to learn the basics about it.
  • If you are getting paid to do something and there are people who do the same thing for free, they deserve some respect.
  • When you are involved in a community driven work, try to be part of the community rather than fight against it.
There are a lot of request for me to protect articles just to make sure that non-logged in users won't destroy the article. I'm not 100% sure whether that's a good move. I know most of the people involved in the previous battle did their *bad* work without logging in. :-)

Let's see how things will turn out.

As on 2010-May-22, the current article count is 3309. That's not a bad value compared to what we used to have.

4 comments:

Shenya de Silva said...

Oh there had been a war?!! Too bad I was out of he community for a long time. Hope to translate those articles I've started with.

Unwanted edits in articles is not a new issue in Wikipedia.The issue has been there in the English Wikipedia from almost the start.

Anyway good to hear that war has come to an end.

Shane44

බිඟූ said...

Opps!!!
can we call that a war?

Lee said...

@Shenya: It wasn't that bad. No casualties... :-)

But yes, I also agree it's good that everything is back to normal now. It's not fun to see people fighting in OUR wiki...

Lee said...

@බිඟුවා: It is a kind of a war... Don't worry I didn't mean it in a bad way... :-)