311–320 of 387 posts
Next time Jimmy pesters me for a donation I'll be contacting him and citing this as a reason why I won't.
Why don't we start a big "don't contribute to Wikipedia campaign". Can we start one of those "fund me" campaigns and use the proceeds to battle this?
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There is no He. It is them. "He" has made edits every single day in more than 1700 days. It is clearly a group.
There are far more productive Wikipedians (Cross is 308th) who are easily attributable to individuals. 30 edits a day is literally nothing - Cross probably has WP open in a tab at work and checks it like email. Someone makes a negative change to a page he's watching, and he reverts. Easy way to rack up hundreds of edits in a week. (Source: I used to do exactly this for about a year).
Of course, there theoretically could be a team being paid by number of edits to films and jazz musicians to distract from their real agenda to discredit people already enjoying roughly the same reputation as Lyndon LaRouche within the British political sphere. Some people are paid to post to social media.
Equally, if anyone can be bothered looking at the diffs of the allegedly offensive edits it could be that he's a guy whose Wikipedia obsession goes further than most and has a watchlist set up on pages he's edited and a set of brand new accounts edit warring the same unsourced claim about a Guardian journalist's beef with a Russia Today journalist into an article are the organised, if not necessarily paid, group...
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Why not mouth off on social media? Yes, it draws attention. But it also adds legitimacy to the operation if he is not an individual. If a PR firm is making edits to Wikipedia, they get heavily frowned on. If it appears that an individual is doing it, especially one with a long history of good edits, they will be defended. I don't have a particularly conspiratorial mind and I prefer coincidence until conspiracy become…
Sure, nobody is disputing that PR sources can and do manipulate influential publicly editable media full time. But if you were trying to not draw attention to yourself and maximise the percentage of your time spent on edits that were strategically useful, it'd be hard to come up with a less practical approach than User:PhilipCross (This is not something I lack knowledge of as a formerly prolific editor of UK politics…
Because they are openly taking money. If User:PhilipCross is then it is most certainly not transparent.
Almost everybody you see on TV is being paid by somebody. There is a particularly grating employee of the Institute for Economic Affairs regularly appearing on the UK state and corporate media to talk liberating the taxpayer of the NHS. She's presumably not being paid by the BBC or Sky News, but she is being paid for appearing there by interests that would benefit from what she is advocating.
In this way, we see that the majority people providing their time on TV have an agenda. We don't naturally expect the same of Wikipedia editors, but maybe we should.
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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…
> (Some articles also just have possessive editors; there is dysfunction everywhere, and WP is no exception). That's exactly what made me not waste a second thought on Wikipedia after my first attempt to contribute. A small change, clearly correct, well-sourced with first-rate sources, but unfortunately the guy who made most of tzhe changes to the article over its history cannot stand if someone fixes something in "h…
I've interacted with Philip Cross many times (UK politics Wikipedia is a very small place) and found him perfectly reasonable and his edits usually well justified. Needless to say, an anonymous critic launching a campaign complete with website and Twitter account against him for allegedly being unfair to conspiracy-mongering figures like Craig Murray and George Galloway and genocide denial specialist Neil Clark and t…
Why don't you engage with the substance of the criticism rather than who's made it. He's made over a hundred thousand edits on Wikipedia in almost 15 years. I'm sure some of them are well justified. We're highlighting the ones that aren't and in which he has a serious conflict of interest.
However there are also editors such as Volunteer_Marek that I see in almost every political or current event topic inducing a heavy left leaning bias. These bias in these edits are much more extreme and unrestrained.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Voluntee...
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> Wikipedia is useful for looking up technical info that there is no conflict over. Even this isn't true. As a former contributor to the Linux desktop community, false information about projects and codebases I had runs rampant on Wikipedia. One Wikipedia editor with more time on his hands than any of us [0] devotes his time to maintaining those articles, despite self-admittedly having little topical knowledge [1]. T…
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…
For example, Bir Tawil is called "a Terra Nullius" on several Wikipedia pages although no scholarly sources support that claim. There are only a few scholarly sources and they come to the conclusion that Bir Tawil can't possibly be Terra Nullius. For example, it is inhabited by nomads while Wikipedia claims it is uninhabited.
However, several news paper sources erroneously claims that Bir Tawil is Terra Nullius, possibly because the journalists read it of Wikipedia. The large number of bad news paper sources trumps the few scholarly sources. Therefore Bir Tawil is, in the minds of most Wikipedians, Terra Nullius. They can't really comprehend that the opinion of one professor in international law completely outweighs the opinion of 100 uninformed journalists. :) Examples like these are everywhere on Wikipedia.
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By the nature of Wikipedia it really depends on how many people / editors are looking at the page. But, feel free to dig through the reverts they are really common and not just for regional variations in spellings. PS: I realize listing even 50 in all of Wikipedia is not nessisarily meaningful so no I am not going to waste my time tilting at windmills.
You have made an assertion that a certain thing is a common occurence on Wikipedia, and have multiple times been asked for sources. The fact that you are still refusing to provide any sources (all the while claiming it is “really common”) is clear grounds for dismissing your point out of hand.
Note all the editors messing up the correct Pittsburg(h) with and without the h in various settings. Lot's of +/- 1 edit lengths.
Now, did some how instantly validate my point? No.
PS: But it does illustrate the situation something is popular enough that many people see it, complex enough that it takes a little thought for someone to notice an issue fix it in good faith and then get reverted.
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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 – leav…
> 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. You're essentially refuting yourself by making the same claim again, and yet still without offering a single example of something you are claiming is rampant. If there are "plenty" of examples, it should be easy to link a few . I'm skeptical, beca…
Why is is harder to get Twinkle and Rollback now than it used to be, and why is their usage more closely monitored?
It's because people were rapidly reverting a lot of edits, and many of those edits were correct and should not have been reverted.
There's a bunch of discussion on ANI and village pump about this.
I've interacted with Philip Cross many times (UK politics Wikipedia is a very small place) and found him perfectly reasonable and his edits usually well justified. Needless to say, an anonymous critic launching a campaign complete with website and Twitter account against him for allegedly being unfair to conspiracy-mongering figures like Craig Murray and George Galloway and genocide denial specialist Neil Clark and t…
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Wikipedia is useful for looking up technical info that there is no conflict over. It is not a good source for diving into a top-level controversial topic as those articles are long and have many places for people to stump and push for their ideas. The more specific a topic (think, a specific author associated with an ideology vs. the page for the ideology) the better. I think I've just adopted these mental heuristics…
The best part of a Wikipedia article is where it links to external resources and gives you links/DOIs.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Single_UNIX_Speci...