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A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

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Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#141

Post by lemagedurage »

wybiral wrote: post #56

"ditch Wikipedia" seems a bit melodramatic. Nobody should rely on Wikipedia as the sole source of any information, but it can be a useful starting point and usually has enough references to back it up. People need to be more careful about examining the source of claims in general. Including what is shared with them on social media, YouTube videos, news articles, etc. But that doesn't mean those mediums are no longer…

"ditch Wikipedia" seems a bit melodramatic.

Definitely, if they call for ditching Wikipedia over a single contributor in the title of the article, how much are they exaggerating about other things?

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#142

Post by Tehnix »

tptacek wrote: post #95
MattHeard wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_API.svg

That's a resource, not a WP page. It has no talk page. I'm trying to get a sense of what the actual argument was. It's not a good diagram, and its author is clearly trying to attach it in as many prominent places as they can, which is not great. But I still don't know what the actual controversy is.

Here, I'll help (from just googling "Linux API wiki"),

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_interfaces

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Linux_Programming_Interfac...

Probably a lot more, but can't really reverse image search SVGs.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#143

Post by Udik »

roywiggins wrote: post #14

"Anti-war" doesn't sound like a particularly descriptive adjective for the apparent targets here. They are not anti-war campaigners per se, they seem to be sitting in the Russia-sympathetic zone of discourse. I'm not saying that to discredit them (I might, but I won't), but calling them anti-war rather obscures the problems people might have with them. That doesn't mean that a "one-man" effort to shepherd their Wikip…

> "Anti-war" doesn't sound like a particularly descriptive adjective for the apparent targets here. They are not anti-war campaigners per se, they seem to be sitting in the Russia-sympathetic zone of discourse.

No. Please, everybody stop with this Russia nonsense. Russia has become the bogeyman to which every evil and its opposite can be attributed, included the election of a US president that the US citizens voted themselves, and of which on average are pretty satisfied, I'm afraid.

Some of the people mentioned in this story as targets of Philip Cross have been questioning the West's alliances and wars- and the narrative that enabled them- for decades. Since a couple of years, Russia seems to be openly, and somehow aggressively (from an information point of view) doing the same. So in case it's Russia that aligned with them.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#144

Post by tptacek »

pvg wrote: post #139
tptacek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's "rampant" on Wikipedia, you should have no trouble pointing out examples. So, respectfully, I'd ask that to support your argument with evidence, you do that. I had trouble editing technical topics I was familiar with, too, and found it incredibly aggravating. I'd write demonstrably true, helpful, factual content about something only to have it struck for lack of sourcing. It took awhile to get through my head…

you should have no trouble pointing out examples. There are really entire broad topics that are bad. Lots of maths pages are horrible and un-encyclopedic.

As a stumbling late-in-life math learner and thus reluctant frequent consumer of Wikipedia maths articles, I couldn't agree more. But I'm looking for patterns of editors working to keep topics bad, not just examples of where WP isn't good yet.

WP's coverage of computer security topics is generally quite bad. Also: the WP process prevents them from getting better as fast as they could; that's the conclusion I came to after spending several months trying to work on them. I was unhappy about this at first, but I gradually came around to the conclusion that what was making topics hard to improve for me was also what was making the whole project work at all, and it's just fine if WP doesn't have great security coverage yet.

I'm interested if you think that's a crazy perspective.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#145

Post by ThoAppelsin »

tptacek wrote: post #95
MattHeard wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_API.svg

That's a resource, not a WP page. It has no talk page. I'm trying to get a sense of what the actual argument was. It's not a good diagram, and its author is clearly trying to attach it in as many prominent places as they can, which is not great. But I still don't know what the actual controversy is.

You can see the "File usage on other wikis" section to see Wikipedia pages in which any commons file is being used. I see a list of couple pages for the particular resource linked there, and verified that the resource exists in those pages.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#147

Post by klez »

kizer wrote: post #27
nwah1 wrote: post #3

I'm confused as to why this is newsworthy? Are we operating on the assumption that the 303 more prolific wikipedians are somehow all without a personal ideology? If the rules he's using are being followed correctly, and if the information he is posting is well-sourced, then your only other course of action would be to petition to change wikipedia's rules.

If the rules he's using are being followed correctly, and if the information he is posting is well-sourced, then your only other course of action would be to petition to change wikipedia's rules. "Well-sourced" is not the only criterion. I could edit a page, citing credible sources, and still distort it by including implicit, one-sided interpretations of those sources results/contents. Also, if the rules do not have,…

> I could edit a page, citing credible sources, and still distort it by including implicit, one-sided interpretations of those sources results/contents.

As an example of this, at a certain point John Perry Barlow was indicated as being against net neutrality. The source for the claim was his declaration of independence of the cyberspace because it claimed he didn't want government intervention in the net. As far as I know, this isn't "being against net neutrality" and I never read anything by JPB advocating against it.

So yes, someone can always cite something and twist its meaning to fit a particular agenda.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#148

Post by belorn »

always_good wrote: post #29

My friends and I had a shameful game in uni where we competed to see who could make the most egregious edits to wikipedia without getting reverted. What was surprising was just how easy it was. We started with minor edits in small articles, just adding our own name to some list of notable achievers. Then, due to competition, we would add an entire paragraph that fabricated an event. Like adding ourself as a conquista…

There is a bunch of networks that operate on the idea the the majority involved are good actors and the detection rate of the bad actors is statistical good enough.

Take the tor project. It is very easy for a exit node operator to be bad. If you wanted to you could go and compete on who make the most egregious changes to traffic before the tor project bans the node. If the wast majority of operates did this then the project would die. Similar, torrent sites and BitTorrent is easily poked at by bad actors that either insert malware or do other bad things to the network. It too only operates on the basis that the wast majority do not have the intention to bring it down.

Of course the same could be said by HN. If a wast majority of users ganged together to push a specific agenda then it would likely take a while before the moderators could intervene. The upvote/downvote and flag system operates on the concept that the majority of users operate as independent agents and do not intend to try bring HN down.

In the end however for all the weakness and dependency on the statistical good nature of people, sites like those tend to be resilient in the long run.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#149

Post by [deleted] »

tux3 wrote: post #116
tptacek wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I understand that lots of people on HN hate that, but, yes. Wikipedia is an incredibly complicated and intricate project with its own objectives and norms. It has been manifestly successful; it is one of the great achievements of the Internet to date. People arguing to override those norms have a heavy burden to meet. One of the reasons for those norms is that on controversial issues, everybody can marshal a pla…

Alright I'm going to have to disagree specifically on that point. I otherwise agree with your argument that there's no homogenous "they" banding together (And there's an article for that, even! [0] And an article nuancing that view too. [1]) But I emphatically take issue with the idea that it's reasonable to shut down what sounds like, in your words, "very legitimate concerns" instead of guiding the concerned users t…

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