[Taxacom] Wikipedia vs. science

[Stephen Thorpe]

Well, it had to happen sooner or later. Talking *Wikipedia* here, not *Wikispecies*. I have been blocked indefinitely from WP by an admin who wrote on my talk page [quote]This is a private website, and there are no "freedoms" nor "rights"[unquote] ... wow! A candid comment from another WP admin that I know: [quote]The community has become quite toxic and a lot of editors display self entitlement, which chased off a lot of new editors[unquote]
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All because of some sloppy (but under normal circumstances very minor) editing of a page on WoRMS, which an idiotic WP editor insists on neverthless using as a source for a WP article on the relevant taxon, even though he admits that it was adding nothing but misinformation to what he already had from other sources! The WoRMS page listed a couple of species epithets as genera, and cited a nonexistent publication as the source for these names (or, more precisely, the publication does exist, but in a completely different journal to the cited journal!) At first I tried to tag the errors on the WP article as unreliable (or even just possibly unreliable) information, but was told that to do this?was "Original Research", and therefore not allowed. This, I could just about accept, barely, but surely then the sensible thing to do is just to drop WoRMS as a source for this particular WP article? If you don't mention it, then it isn't a problem! But, no, for some
 unknown reason, that WP editor seems to "own" that article, demands to persist with WoRMS as the source, and admins are protecting him ...
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The WP editor has written that the *only* thing that he will accept as sufficient reason to rebuke the WoRMS page is an explicit published statement in a peer reviewed journal to the effect that the relevant names on the current WoRMS page are a mistake! Sounds a bit "hopeful", doesn't it???
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On another article by the same WP editor, on a species of Diptera found only in Australia, he has dragged out an archived version of?a N.Z. Diptera web checklist which has now been taken down because it was not considered to be reliable enough. It lists the fly from N.Z., based, it turns out, on a misidentification. The WP editor nonetheless insists on using this archived checklist as a source for the presence of the fly in N.Z. ... wtf???
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Stephen