Okay what about editors with a left-wing agenda/bias and who abuse their powers. I'm sure there are some within the top 300.
You should find them, and write articles about them, rather than just assuming they exist.
A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
331–340 of 387 posts
Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
George Galloway is primarily a contrarian, and actively supported Saddam Hussein. I'm not sure he'd recognise a genuine position if he fell over it in the street. Neil Clark is a genocide denier: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/feb/12/warcrimes.comm... There's a real problem with people who (correctly) spot that Western governments are lying about certain things, and then infer that (a) they're lying about eve…
> actively supported Saddam Hussein I find Galloway unbelievably annoying, but is this just (Tory/New Labour) for being anti-Iraq War? Because it certainly was in the US.
I was trying to use "actively" to express that his support went beyond merely opposing the war; the details are complicated, lengthy and the subject of numerous court actions, but here's a sample: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4016803.stm
Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
#333here is the editor's wikipedia page: https://everipedia.org/wiki/philip-cross-wikipedian/
Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
“Telecom regulations give a lot of leverage to organizations whether governmental or corporate to close down the right to know. My long experience says as soon as you give government the authority to impose regulations on the Internet you are doing something to frustrate the right to know. People tend to presume on theoretical grounds a little right minded regulation will help people build beneficial architectures and organizations. I do not think there is anything to support that theory. Every time I have seen any sort of regulation of the Internet the results have been mayhem. Declaring the Internet and the telephone network to be the same thing is like declaring a Buick and a symphony to be the same thing because they both make noise.”
- John Perry Barlow
http://calinnovates.org/category/issues/platform-access/net-...
Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
The General Disclaimer saying that very thing is hyperlinked at the bottom of every single page on the WWW site. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
... which pretty much catches nobody's attention unfortunately. If Wikipedia does have the goodwill, then something has to be made to bring the average user's perception of trustworthiness down to the level of how much trustworthy they really are, and maybe even less. In the context of trust, false positives are worse than false negatives, since an individual may simply build up trust by referring to other resources…
You are manufacturing an absurd allegation. Wikipedia put the wikiness of their model right in the name. If an "average user" doesn't bother to research their resources [0] or understand modern language then the problem lies somewhere in our educational system, not in the number of disclaimers on internet websites. It takes a special kind of curious person to want to find information on a subject but not wonder where it came from.
Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
“Telecom regulations give a lot of leverage to organizations whether governmental or corporate to close down the right to know. My long experience says as soon as you give government the authority to impose regulations on the Internet you are doing something to frustrate the right to know. People tend to presume on theoretical grounds a little right minded regulation will help people build beneficial architectures an…
It's interesting that the passage you quoted is not itself sourced in the link you gave. I tried looking for that same passage on Google and came out empty handed (except for the site you linked to).
Do you have a first-party source for that? I would like to see it in its original context.
Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
#337Behavior like this is very prevalent in gamergate-adjacent wikipedia pages. For example the OAPI page [1] claims that OAPI is a non-profit organization and any attempts at amending it to clarify that it's not incorporated, only exists as a wordpress blog and hasn't done anything in 3 years (including updating said blog), gets reverted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Abuse_Prevention_Initia...
Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
#338> ‘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…
Not adjusting your overall rules to the actions of single bad actors can be fatal.
Single bad actors can sometimes wreak utter havoc.
Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
#339The Wikipedia editing process is broken. Wiki-lawyering is used to shut down the collaborative editing process, even when not on political topics often by people who don't know much about the topic that they are editing. I don't trust Wikipedia content and tend to examine the Talk pages (sometimes even the Talk page histories) on controversial articles.
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…
Seems like a good case for a Wikipedia reader/plugin that indicates the level of controversy/abuse going on in an article. As a bystander, I get the impression the management/senior editors are not at all interested in such a feature.
Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like I said, there may or not be a reasoned historical debate behind it I dont know. He is known as an anti war campaigner, because he has been a prominent campaigner against military aggression in our time.
Even his staunchest defenders would be forced to admit his campaigns against military aggression are selective and more influenced by a continuation of Cold War "anti-imperialist" realpolitik than actual pacifism. He's been outspokenly supportive of Russian involvement in Syria, and he was the member of the anti-war campaign over Iraq that achieved notoriety by calling for Arab armies to join the Iraqi "martyrs" in f…
I think he is most "influenced" by the thought of lasting international peace and security for everyone, and perhaps justice too, though I fear that is most difficult of conditions to resolve.
Would that Russia critics could admit their involvement in Syria has been hugely stabilizing to a situation which almost fell into the hell which Libya was thrown into by air strikes...