Wikipedia:Lost functionalities

In fields like mathematics, computing, engineering, sciences, mechanical work etc., any practitioner in the field will have roughly the same body of knowledge and there will be some sort of consensus between experts, written or unwritten.

These people have a tendency to add unreferenced information to Wikipedia such as:

• Apples fall from trees
  • This is common knowledge for most of humanity. You'll find that no-one actually writes these things down, so finding a reference is very hard. Placed here for comparison with the examples from specialist fields. Note how "Apples fall from trees" was once a redlink, but now redirects to a well-referenced article which now explains exactly why apples fall from trees.
• DOS 'dir' and unix 'ls' are roughly equivalent
  • Books about unix often have this fact (see below)
• Adrenaline is a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands, which are located just above and behind the kidneys (adrenal~="next to kidneys")
  • This is a bad example. There are thousands of textbooks (Reliable secondary and tertiary sources) that can be used for citations.

Experts typically don't bother referencing things they believe are common knowledge because "everyone knows that!". It's probably a bad idea to actually delete common knowledge information, but finding refs might be tricky if you try to use article searches.

Remember, if your "common knowledge" doesn't occur in basic textbooks on the subject, there might be a reason.

Which just happened to me when creating this page. Vandalism patrol is so fast that it becomes impossible to correct certain classes of mistakes. :-P

And if you want, you can get the text you worked so hard on so that you can put it in the right namespace. However, in general newbies don't know they're allowed to make this request and their work is lost to perpetuity.

Admins used to be able to do read SQL queries on MediaWiki's underlying MySQL database. No longer possible.

Asking someone for permission to use an image on Wikipedia, back when we could still use such images, generally got a pleased and friendly response. Asking someone to release an image as public domain (which sounds awfully, well, public), or GFDL (which they've probably never heard of) gets a very different response.

YMMV. Ask the Volunteer response team how many such requests they successfully process every day. --Slashme (talk) 20:16, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

This wasn't technically permitted, even back in 2002: "Just like the articles, it is important that images follow the same guidelines about copyrights. Make sure you own the image, or that it is in the public domain, or that the copyright holder has agreed to license it under the GFDL.", later versions of the text added some bits about fair-use but it's always been the case that Wikipedia is a free content encyclopaedia and required that submissions be suitably licensed. Enforcement has varied in intensity over time, but don't mistake the big cleanup efforts that have happened at various points as changes in the policy. --Gmaxwell (talk) 21:48, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia currently ranks well on many search engines. It used to be that Wikipedia's high ranking would favourably influence the ranking of websites that were linked from Wikipedia; however, due to increasing problems with spam, all external links are now marked 'nofollow'.

Wikipedia can still influence SE ranking though the process has grown more subtle.

Once upon a time, someone would insert a partial paragraph of text that was missing key bits of information, and this would be gradually expanded by the editor and/or other editors.^{[citation needed]} This avoided the necessity of saving the whole thing up into one big edit, and meant lots of small changes could be made instead. This worked well, because it meant people who were not expert writers, but did know about the subject, could contribute to Wikipedia productively.

This cannot happen these days, because any paragraph of this nature will be reverted nearly immediately.

It used to be possible for any small-scale Wikipedia issue - article content disputes, user conduct issues, policy arguments, etc. - to be sorted out simply by some level-headed user going down to the area of dispute, and cooling it down. Blocks were considered a "last resort", and discussion was used before they were put into effect.

Now, there is some hideously-complex, formally-structured, "Request for <mediation|arbitration|undeletion|administrator intervention|personal ban set by Jimbo|nuclear warfare>" process that absolutely must be followed, on pain of death. Each of these have their own very specific instructions on how they must be used, which are invariably totally different from all the others, and usually fail at what they are meant to do anyway.

Either that, or some administrator just comes along, and bans whoever they like, regardless of what started the problem in the first place. The people involved then waste huge amounts of time fighting out an arbitration case over who blocked whom, and whether it was valid or not under WP:XYZ.

It's the difference between something you are just beginning and something that is in pretty good shape. When Wikipedia was a scrap notebook and merely a wannabe-encyclopedia then adding scraps for further use made sense. Now it is an encyclopedia and wannabe-articles need to be in a different space - such as user space or subpages or talk pages. The difficulty level of editing Wikipedia is constantly increasing, as is readership. At first a 10-year old could add helpful edits, then teenagers were fully capable and so on. Now, a college education is needed to "accidentally" edit Wikipedia the correct way from the beginning, although these editors still need to brush up on not doing original research. Teenagers can still edit productively but they have to spend a large number of hours learning the rules first. The ability for 10-year olds to contribute is almost totally lost.

Reading talk page messages used to be easier and efficient, thanks to the New messages notification which provided both single and multiple diff link. Now the diff links are non-existing or buried behind various Echo stuff and instead you're brought to the useless top of talk page (and sometimes specific section).

Admins used to be able to unblock themselves, which could come in handy if a rogue/compromised admin blocked them, but could also lead to wheel-warring. In November 2018 this was removed after an admin removed a block on his account, leading to an Arbitration case.