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A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

wikipedia.fivefilters.org

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Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#171

Post by barrkel »

tptacek wrote: post #144
pvg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Making things harder to change simply increases the costs of change. People with the most time to spend end up winning the war. If that's well correlated with the truth, that's ok. In politics, though, it's rather less likely.

So yes, I think your perspective is naive.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#172

Post by Retric »

tptacek wrote: post #123
Retric wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can't edit, even simple spelling mistakes get reverted regularly. It's designed to be an overly byzantine bureaucracy to discourage edits so a relatively small group can maintain control. Remember if 100 million people made meaningful contributions daily there would be no way to maintain that control. Arguably that works well, but it's almost meaningless to call it a wiki.

One of the indisputably nice things about WP is that there's a record of everything that happens. Can you cite an example where a simple spelling mistake was reverted, so that the page right now is running the incorrect spelling of something?

That's not what I am saying. I am saying that if you look at Wikipedia history you can find plenty of places where an anonymous user/occasional editor fixes a spelling mistake that was then reverted. That history sticks around far longer than anyone one version. And for that user all they see is that their effort is pointless.

"if you make an edit which is good-faith reverted, do not simply reinstate your edit – leave the status quo up" ... "propose your reverted change on the article's talk page or pursue other dispute resolution alternatives." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reverting

I am not saying the policy is unreasonable, but it combined with the interface does discourage people.

As to an improvement, if Wikipedia sees the same edit applied twice it could detect this and walk someone through the policy.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#173

Post by PrimHelios »

whack wrote: post #10

This is extremely concerning. Phillip Cross was easily caught because he was running his mouth on twitter, and was blatantly making one-sided edits from his single account. Imagine if a country like Russia makes an orchestrated effort to achieve similar goals, using an army of fake-wikipedia-profiles. They could easily turn Wikipedia into a platform for disseminating propaganda. In fact, I'd be surprised if they have…

>Imagine if a country like Russia makes an orchestrated effort to achieve similar goals

That's pretty much already happened. Remember that time Scientology tried to attack Wikipedia for telling the truth about Sea Org? They got close to getting away with it, and if a larger nation-state tried editing less-controversial articles, I'm sure they would get away with it. It wouldn't surprise me if Russia has already done things like that.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#174

Post by barrkel »

zug_zug wrote: post #128
4bpp wrote: post #73

> ‘Philip Cross’ has edited @georgegalloway ‘s wikipedia page over 1800 times. This, and many other political arguments I have seen on it before, really makes me think that Wikipedia would benefit from a policy where a sufficient number of individual complaints against a user who has passed some threshold of number of edits to a single article (say 100) would be automatic grounds to block the user from further edits…

We can't just jump to conclusions like this. We can't take a single story about a single bad editor and make blanket rules. You have to take a look at the whole dataset of people who make crusader efforts and then see if there's a pattern. Even if there is, you then have to ask yourself if it's something that people will just learn and work-around. I'm not disagreeing Cross was likely a net negative for wikipedia, bu…

Single bad events are usually how we, as democracies, create new blanket rules. The events have to be bad enough to move people to action, and that normally means something out of the ordinary, which by definition is likely to be singular.

The blanket rules should be made with care, for sure, but your premise is wrong.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#175

Post by k1m »

crazydoggers wrote: post #170

Please hacker news... use your skeptical nature and research inclination to understand where this junk is coming from. This is a propaganda outfit. I have a suspicion HN is getting played here... upvotes and downvotes seem suspicious on these comments. Some info on who Media Lens and FiveFilters are... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/02/fuller

There's no mention of us in that article and we didn't exist in 2006.

As for Media Lens, I googled the author's name and Media Lens and this article came up. Might be interesting too: http://medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2006/449...

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#176

Post by PrimHelios »

crazydoggers wrote: post #170

Please hacker news... use your skeptical nature and research inclination to understand where this junk is coming from. This is a propaganda outfit. I have a suspicion HN is getting played here... upvotes and downvotes seem suspicious on these comments. Some info on who Media Lens and FiveFilters are... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/02/fuller

I mean, you can actually see the edits the guy makes.

Why would FiveFilters falsely defend Media Lens - a conservative organization - while attacking a wiki editor who is extremely pro-war? Your argument really only makes sense if the editor is liberal and attacking Media Lens and FiveFilters.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#177

Post by wafflebear »

komali2 wrote: post #132
bhouston wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia does tend to protect long time contributors and not have to outside sources that do not like an article. There is a meta game in Wikipedia that if you do small changes and write justifications in wikilawyer speak and you discredit your opponents in the right fashion you can win even if you are technically wrong. It is a beuruaucracy and some can play the game well.

I've noticed the same behavior on Reddit, hackernews, Tumblr, and lesswrong. As long as you say it in the right cadence for the given forum, you can be completely off base and be getting upvotes. I try to be aware of it but I see myself mindlessly agreeing with someone just because they took the superior tone for the given format.

HN cleverly flips this around to its advantage. Even comments that are categorically wrong often contribute to the conversation. Some of the best comments on HN happen when a comment is so wrong that it baits a sleeping expert into responding.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#178

Post by GuB-42 »

throwaway_98554 wrote: post #9

Judging by the time card, I would bet multiple individuals are using this account. And they're probably getting paid to do it.

I think it is the opposite. It looks more like an obsessed individual than a group.

What makes me say that is that it is extremely regular from 8am to 10pm, 7 days a week. It looks a lot like a single person waking hours. If people did that as a day job, it would be more like 9am to 5pm, monday to friday. During their free time, it would be the opposite. For an international team, we would see activity around the clock. Hard to match such a schedule with a team.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#179

Post by barrkel »

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…

The strongest people Russia can leverage are those with genuine positions independent of Russia, because reflexive apologists are easy to dismiss.

You haven't supported your position that these guys are not pacifists.

I rather see them as pointing out hypocrisy, necessary to avoid the groupthink that forms around national interests - the set of positions that all sides of mainstream politics in a nation hold for reasons of self-interest, rather than truth or ethics.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#180

Post by megous »

Udik wrote: post #143
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 t…

It's not nonsense. Russia is waging a propaganda war in the west. Results are clearly visible in the last 5 years or so.

Even in my country that was occupied by USSR at one time, there are now very vocal pro-russian agenda voices, especially on social media, news comment sections and or alt-news websites. It's ridiculous.

And what's this website anyway? Someone created an anonymous website to spread some onesided info about a feud with some wikipedia editor he doesn't like.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Galloway. He isn't really serious about what he writes about UK/US/Syria. Just filter his twitter for syria keyword. It's all just some one-sided polemic, often based on leading questions. It's not even reporting. He comes of as some kind of misinformed activist with non-obvious agenda.

Anti-war? That surely must be a joke. He has 151k tweets and barely mentions destruction of Raqqa by US air campaign that was going on for 5 months. He mentions Kobani, another city US bombed and shelled to the ground, precisely once - to send people to RT/Sputnik for info about that. All these things and others were significantly more influential actions by the US war machine in the region, and incomparably more deadly and injurious to innocents. He's not even anti-US/UK war machine, consistently.

Yet US does some token attack on Assad's infrastructure, and he spreads alarmist nonsense for days, even insinuating that he might be killed by UK government. I don't get him. Perhaps he's just trying to look certain way to UK citizens, and it's all just posturing/signalling.

He didn't even mention any of the Assads war crimes, or what he did to fuel instability and war in the region. No mention out of 151k tweets. That's anti war?

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