The original sin was merging the StatusNet article into the one on GNU social.

Yes, GNU social began as a fork of SN, and became the dominant fork after Evan moved on to working on pump.io (the precursor to ActivityPub). But these were 2 distinct projects, run by completely different groups of people, working within 2 completely different organisations; VC-funded StatusNet, and the GNU Project. They're significant to fediverse history in their own ways, and deserve their own articles.

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The existing GNU social article completely paves over that history. Except for a couple of mentions of StatusNet as a former name, and a credit to "Evan Prodromou et al" as the original author.

Aside from that, some of the information is just factually wrong. For example, the infobox gives the date for the first "Preview release" of GNU social as 2021, which is just factually wrong. That wasn't even the first release of GNU social, let alone StatusNet, let alone Laconica.

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Now every time I gripe about this, some WP reply-guy pops up to tell me that deletionism is WP working as designed. That I need to bring up issues in talk pages, edit articles myself, find more references, etc.

Yeah, I know. Been there, done that.

Then I come back a few months later, and all that work has been pruned again. In the case of deleted articles, I don't think they even preserve a history, where I could extract the work I already did, and reinsert it when I find more sources.

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Like Sisyphus, I'm thoroughly sick of pushing that particular boulder up the hill, with Wikipedia deletionists pecking out my eyes at every opportunity.

I understand that their editorial policies and practices exist for a reason. But they need to understand that every one of those norms came into existence to solve a problem. One that WP reply-guys probably denied the existence of with equal vigour, until a new policy/ practice was formalised to mitigate it.

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Wikipedia needs a new policy to fix this problem. Riffing on the popular kids game, with an older name that was a bit racist against the Chinese, I'm going to call it Phone Game Editing.

A dynamic where a WP article gets pruned, by one well-meaning but uninformed editor after another. Slowly making it less informative, and eventually inaccurate and misleading. Ending with this now-degraded article being proposed for deletion, and its history with it.

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#Wikipedia #PhoneGameEditing

Note that I'm presuming good faith editing here. But keep in mind that this is also a technique that Bad Actors could use to degrade obscure-but-important Wikipedia articles. Perhaps because they're somehow inconvenient to a hidden agenda, or just for the lulz.

A policy addressing well-intentioned Phone Game Editing would help to surface examples of malicious PGE. Allowing the PGE policy to be modified to catch that too, or a new policy formulated specifically to address it.

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Speaking of fediverse-related Wikipedia articles suffering from Phone Game Editing, I just checked the fediverse article itself. It's suffered some serious continental drift too since I last looked.

For a start, this sentence alone contains at least 2 basic factual errors;

> In December 2012, the flagship GNU social instance at the time, identi.ca, began to transition away from OStatus to a new protocol named Pump.io

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1) identi.ca was an instance of Laconica, then StatusNet, and now pump.io. It was *never* an instance of GNU social

2) One day identi.ca ran StatusNet and federated over OStatus. Then the domain was redirected to a new instance of pump.io, and started federating over its new pre-AP server-to-server protocol only. There was no "began to transition" from one to the other, it just happened abruptly with the change of software.

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Another factual error in Wikipedia's fediverse article;

"By 2019, almost all software that was previously using OStatus had removed the protocol"

What the reference says is they'd almost all implemented AP by 2019 (GNU social hadn't, nor postActiv, but that was a zombie by then). Mastodon was the first project to remove OStatus, in it's 3.0 release. I'm not sure any of the others ever did.

I'm sure there's more. Unless someone beats me to it, I'll have a bash at correcting it all soon.

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Oh and whomever is once again editing Wikipedia's fediverse article to shoehorn in protocols used in other federated social networks ...

"...the AT Protocol and Nostr have formed their own networks separate from ActivityPub."

... please, don't do that : /

ATProto and Nostr networks only connect to the fediverse via a couple of third-party bridges (BridgyFed, Mostr). So they're not part of the fediverse, at least not yet.

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