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A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

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341–350 of 387 posts

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#341
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Galloway offered the reward Well, we're not George Galloway. If the real interest was in the edits as opposed to promoting conspiracy theories about Wikipedia colluding with conflicted editors to damage the good name of Messrs Murray and Galloway, presumably people would be devoting their time to reasoned explanations of why X is important or Y is irrelevant in talk page discussions on article wording I'll jus…

If there's an editorial dispute, please solve it in an editorial manner. Editors opposing Cross on Wikipedia have shown prior bad-faith activity. For example, User:Leftworks1 created over a dozen sockpuppets ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga... ) to push their viewpoint, only to get smacked by several editors including Cross repeatedly. If there's a real editorial dispute - if anyone want…

> If you have a dispute in the real world, you would go to the courts and use the legal system

Or you go to the media...

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#342
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2. Sockets are files. No, they don't have filenames usually, but they do have file descriptors and even inode numbers. I challenge you to create a symbolic link to one. :)

ln -s /proc/`pidof Xorg`/fd/1 here-you-go Really though, it's the file descriptor that matters. This is the abstraction that lets you do things like pass a socket between different processes in the same way that you'd pass an opened directory between different processes. The few places where this abstraction is missing are painful. A good example is ptrace. You can't pass a ptrace between processes. Handling it nicel…

Ah, my memory fails me of the limitation I was running into. IIRC it was passing socket FDs from a process in an ip namespace to a parent process outside of the namespace via a unix domain socket.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#343
This is hardly the only problem with Wikipedia, the assumed infallibility of sources is one I've run into several times before.

I've seen some pretty bad faith editors justify their edits by dumping piles of sources that were flat out wrong or using suspect sources to push some sort of political bias.

Not to mention editors adding crappy sources in good faith, or the classic xkcd citogenesis phenomenon.

https://xkcd.com/978/

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I prefer to judge him by what he actually does and says (and he's an unusually eloquent speaker and persistent campaigner rather than some gaffe-prone blunderer) and not than some Platonic ideal of what he actually might represent.

We're talking about someone that agitates against any form of air strikes by the West for months, then when Russia announces plans to launch air strikes against exactly the same target, gushes that it's going to be a Stalingrad-like triumph over fascism all over again. We're talking about somebody who highlighted Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses right up to the point where the West decided he was actually more of a threat to regional stability than Iran and forcibly ejected him from the neighbouring country he invaded, at which point George started meeting people who were naming their sons Saddam and felt obliged to fly to Iraq after the war to salute Saddam's indefatigability and wish him future victories in person and deliver deputy the writings of Sun Tzu to advise them on "patriotic resistance" against any future threats. And we're talking about somebody who goes off the fairly coherent and very widely-supported anti-war campaign script in 2001 to call upon Arab armies to join the Iraqi "martyrs" in rising up against the West in Iraq. If all this is in the name of "long lasting international peace and security for everyone" as opposed to because he really, really wants to see non-Western forces prevail on the battlefield, it's difficult to see exactly how....

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#345
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many options. Off the top of my head, here are a few: Major non-partisan news organizations. Generally, their news is relatively unbiased; editorials are meant to be biased, of course. Search their news archives. Major non-partisan think tanks can be fantastic sources, but be a bit careful about their funding. Encyclopedia Britannica is excellent, with articles generally written by domain experts. Coverage…

> non-partisan news organizations. Generally, their news is relatively unbiased; One has to be very careful about who their readership are and whom the journalist cater to in their writing. For example we had this study done for reporting on the 2016 election and its only a small selection in green that indicate nonpartisan target audience: http://wilkins.law.harvard.edu/projects/2017-08_mediacloud/G... It should be…

There are no perfect solutions, but dismissing all of them because they are imperfect (or mocking them as 'fun' and outdated) is a failure of thinking. Everyone's code is imperfect and has bugs, but that doesn't mean we should dismiss all code as unreliable. The reality is that some things are much more reliable than others, and critical thought is required to distinguish between them.

> doing the work oneself and make original meta research

It's extremely inefficient, and often impossible to do without domain expertise. Also, there's no reason to think that you are less biased than others.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#346
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Galloway offered the reward Well, we're not George Galloway. If the real interest was in the edits as opposed to promoting conspiracy theories about Wikipedia colluding with conflicted editors to damage the good name of Messrs Murray and Galloway, presumably people would be devoting their time to reasoned explanations of why X is important or Y is irrelevant in talk page discussions on article wording I'll jus…

I'm far from the biggest fan of Wikipedia's jargon or bureaucracy, but if there is a specific false or objectionable claim on a page it's generally a lot less time-consuming and more productive to remove it, explain why it was removed and then watch the page for future updates than spend hours searching through the responsible editor's social media accounts and then launch a campaign to ban him through multiple socia…

In my experience contentious articles are often locked for edits from the general public, require approval, or in case they are not, your edits are reverted 10 minutes later.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Not adjusting your overall rules to the actions of single bad actors can be fatal.

Rash and systemic overreactions to bad actors can be fatal.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I prefer to judge him by what he actually does and says (and he's an unusually eloquent speaker and persistent campaigner rather than some gaffe-prone blunderer) and not than some Platonic ideal of what he actually might represent. We're talking about someone that agitates against any form of air strikes by the West for months, then when Russia announces plans to launch air strikes against exactly the same target, gu…

I try to look deeper than just Western and non-Western forces.

I believe Galloway and all the people concerned here do sue for peace given any fair prospect of it and recall Galloway was active against Apartheid in South Africa. Craig Murray was too even while he was a british civil servant under Thatchers government at the time (who considered the ANC simply a terrorist organisation).

Regardless of the summary of George Galloway, Craig Murray, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, David Edwards etc. that you would put up for debate, and of these suspicions of extra-national interest suggested here as "realpolitik" and "zone of sympathy" -- the persons own wikipedia bios should be technically even handed if not charitable, so that the Wikipedia reader (and supporter) doesn't have to fill in a case for the defence or the prosecution themselves to achieve balance.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, here's the Wikipedia page in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Galloway The revision history is interesting to look through as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Galloway&o... Many of Cross's revisions seem to revolve around removing unreliable sources (such as RT and Sputnik), integrating edits such that the verbiage flows better, and so forth. I can't find any edits that he's p…

That’s a very generous interpretation. Usually, when you find something that is not sufficiently well sourced, you add “citation needed” or mention it on the talk page or something. You don’t just delete entire sections that aren’t obvious vandalism.

In my opinion, it's only fair to respond to hit pieces with generous interpretations. The internet outrage machine needs more coolant, not less.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how "having a soft spot" for one of the most notorious mass-murdering warmongers of the 20th century makes someone "anti-war".

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.

There's a long, dark history of Anglo-American "anti-war" campaigners being nothing more than sympathizers to the enemies of those countries. Orwell had these people's number in 1945 (https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...):

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The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransferred.

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60 years later, and "pacifists" like Galloway evidently have no problem pinning that emotion onto butchers like Stalin, Putin, and Assad.

I'm not British and I don't have a horse in this race; I don't really know who Galloway is and from what I've heard, I don't care to. But the evidence presented in this thread certainly presents as symptoms of Orwell's diagnosis.

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