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How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

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Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#31

Post by b112 »

JimDabell wrote: post #23
riffraff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I share the same feeling (and we likely are not thinking of the same politicians) it's worth noting every age has had people complaining about * The current government/politicians, which are worse then the ones we had * The youth, who have it easy and are not as good as the old generation We have actual texts from ancient civilizations saying this, so _maybe_ it's just a seesaw, or _maybe_ it's just getting old…

I’m not sure that’s true? There are certainly people complaining about politicians from every era, but specifically shameless grifters ? In similar volume to today? For instance, you can find no end of people who utterly despise Margaret Thatcher and think that she’s the worst thing to ever happen to the UK. But as far as I am aware, even the people who hate her tend to think that she genuinely believed in what she w…

One thing though, one difference. The media.

Newspapers and TV were much more limited and gated. I remember having no access to cable, and thus only 3 TV channels, and two "national" newspapers available easily.

So news was textual, and the TV news was only on at 7am, 6pm, 11pm.

Then came the rise of cable news, and 24 hours news. And they needed to have more news to fill the gaps.

So people turning molehills into mountains is a thing, misconstrued interpretation of actions, unproven allegations, and more is now far more common. And before a thing would vanish quickly from the news, but with 24 hour networks they would come back to it for months.

This took time to develop, so the 90s 24 hr news networks weren't like this instantly. They evolved into this.

Then came the internet. Twitter, facebook, etc. Now more news was needed.

From what I can see, this is a large part of the change.

And as an aside, quite literally "enemies of democracy" work to amplify this. And it's so easy to do.

Pick the nuttiest nut, the least tolerant of boneheads, and donate to their foundation or cause.

The nut doesn't need to even know, they are the ultimate "useful idiot", feed them and they grow into an influential nut.

Nation-states don't need to use bots, they can just donate to causes which cause the most internal friction. Then these characters run around, pointing out every flaw.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#33

Post by [deleted] »

thesuitonym wrote: post #24
JimDabell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s definitely gotten worse in politics over the last decade. It used to be the case I could look at politicians and hate their policies and values, but know that they were genuinely trying to shape their country into what they thought was best. Now it seems to be overtaken by shameless grifters who will happily tear everything down if it profits them in some way.

This is commonly attributed to Vonnegut, but apparently wasn't written by him: ``Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.''

[deleted]

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#34

Post by knowaveragejoe »

quartesixte wrote: post #14
idiotsecant wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now th…

Is there anywhere new for us to go? Or must we wait for some new leap forward still?

For some reason it's unpopular here, but that "place to go" is the altweb of crypto and other networks like I2P, often dubbed "web3". Yes, all of the scams and beige this-or-that are there. But it's so vast and so granular right now that you can definitely find your dreamers and weirdos doing interesting things.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#35

Post by baxtr »

Smoosh wrote: post #4

Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.

You’re seeing the entire society now.

In the early days it used to be a very selected bunch.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#36

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

neilv wrote: post #17
idiotsecant wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now th…

Yeah, I think that's the biggest part of a lot of disappointing things that have happened and are happening. There's also a separate factor in some problems, which is that the power and reach of bad actors are increased by tech. To use a familiar and relatively innocuous example, before the popular Internet, virtually no scammers from some developing nation halfway around the globe would be able to reach the US, whic…

> increasing normalization of sociopathy

I think this is the case and appears in many shapes.

* libertarians lift their individual freedom above societal needs but they fail to see their own dependence on them, like any public services funded by taxes.

* Crypto bros advertise new "currencies" but use them as volatile investments or foster such expectations. With this volatility it will never become a fully stable currency. There is a common wisdom in traditional trading that you dont do arbitrage / speculate on real currencies because of their _intended_ stability. Another failed realization (because of personal gain attached to it).

* Right leaning people argue against criminal migrants but discriminate not by commited crimes but simply foreignness. Their percieved superior cultural identity is their solution to internal cultural problems but they fail to realize how criminal sociotopes emerge and that its independent of ethnicity.

I could go on if i had time.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#38

Post by sokoloff »

eimrine wrote: post #29
1905 wrote: post #12

Wikimedia is about as unbiased as a legacy media news outlet. Every major issue on wiki has some kind of narrative slant

The George Bush wiki page has the biggest number of edits, isn't it an example of how the appropriate narrative happens?

Biggest number of edits could mean “exhaustively converged on the truth” or could mean “best funded and/or most doggedly persistent wins”.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#39

Post by gurchik »

palmfacehn wrote: post #20

Wikipedia as an institution, their insider-only ways, byzantine guidelines and more all incentivize this kind of abuse. There's a pessimistic comment on this page observing, "The world is just chock full of assholes..". Wikipedia editors are not exempt here. Wikipedia shouldn't be so difficult to edit or highly politicized. There was a time when IP editors made the majority of contributions. Today correcting a typo m…

> Today correcting a typo might trigger a full-time editor to defend his turf. Even asking questions about an uncited assertion on a talk page can be labeled as disruptive.

This doesn't align with my experience. From what I've seen, the consensus is that the majority of edits from an IP user are constructive, and they're not reverted simply because they're from an IP user. I've seen data about this[1], but for fun I looked at a page I've edited recently. Out of the last 50 edits, 13 were from IP users (26%), and only 4 of them were vandalism (30% of IP edits).

You are right that some people entrench into a "turf" and revert things for no reason. This is an old problem on Wikipedia. But this is pretty rare across the site from my experience. And I have seen people get warnings for this behavior. If someone was reverting simple typo fixes or discussions on a Talk page I would expect something to happen to that user, regardless if it was against an IP user or not.

That's not to say there are no advantages to having an account. Creating new pages, uploading files, and editing semi-protected pages require an account. Some articles require pretty strict criteria to edit, your account has to be at least 30 days old with 500 edits (which is more than I have). This list is around 7000 articles[2] which is more than I expected.

^1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_editors_are_human...

^2: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Protected...

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#40

Post by hashar »

treffer wrote: post #28
Smoosh wrote: post #4

Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.

Well, the good news is that there aren't enough of these a*** to destroy it. When Wikipedia started and even like 10-15 years ago that wasn't a common belief. Especially in Germany. "There are some assholes on earth, how could you dare to believe something voluntary and open to everyone will succeed?!?" (others already posted that it's not unfounded given real world experience) Wikipedia though is my preferred counte…

I work for Wikimedia and I have been one of the few weirdos assisting in its creation back in the early 2000's. The first time I got exposed to wikis predates Wikipedia and my stance was:

- a site editable by anyone on the internet? That is never going to fly

Few months later I followed a link to Wikipedia and that clicked, we can definitely build an encyclopedia online and the hope (I was in my early 20's) or bet was that more people were wiling to write article than people willing to deface it. I guess we won that bet by a large margin :-]

Even if I was younger, I was not clueless. I was well aware some people would deface it and it did happen. I have also been involved in two very long and tedious fights with editors having a political agenda, which diverting me from actually writing articles. I think that is the real danger: shifting the focus of people from writing articles toward pointless long discussions.

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