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Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

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Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#441
post #424
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have. Those same people who whine about "misinformation" are repeatedly caught lying to the public - for the public's benefit, of course, which they get to define. Which only makes sense - if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselves, and needs a gatekeeper class to define it for them, then it's only a little step from that to deciding th…

> Again, this happened many times just in the recent years. Again, when? Concrete examples if there are so many! > if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselve I mean, whatever one thinks of censorship this is objectively true. We have flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, people who drank bleach against Covid, people who believe Ukraine started the war ag…

> Concrete examples if there are so many!

We were told mass surveillance against US citizens doesn't happen. It did and still is. We were told healthcare reform will not force people to change their insurance coverage and healthcare providers. It turned out to be "a lie of the year". We were told US law enforcement supplying guns to drug cartels is crazy talk. It was true. We were told FBI, CIA and DOJ heads would never lie to the Congress. They did, and suffered no consequences. We were told the inflation is a temporary phenomenon that is going to go away very quickly, and is insignificant. It never did, and was very significant. We were told the hypothesis of COVID originating from Wuhan lab leaks is insane fantasy which no scientists have ever believed and it has no evidence at all behind it. It turned out to be not so. We were told migration restrictions as a way to reduce the impact of the pandemic is a racist bigotry. Then in a short time it became a mandatory policy. We were told masks are useless and nobody but medical workers should use them. Then there were mandated for everyone. We were told COVID is nothing to worry about and is less dangerous than the flu. Then 2020-21 happened. We were told lockdowns are vital and even sole person daring to go to an empty beach should be arrested because it is necessary to prevent millions of deaths. Then the same people endorsed mass protests where thousands of people gathered together. We were told 2020 protests were "mostly peaceful". They were anything but. We were told we need just a two week lockdown to flatten the curve. It turned to be many months. We were told closing the schools is absolutely necessary or our kids will die. It turned out not to be so. We were told COVID vaccines prevent the spread of the virus. They did not. We were told Hunter laptop is a Russian disinformation operation. It wasn't. We were told rumors of US government working with social media companies to censor dissenting opinions are total lies. Until the documents confirmed that's exactly what happened. We were told rumors of Joe Biden being unfit to rule are absolutely false and he's never going to be replaced as a candidate. He was.

These are just some random examples, only from recent years, I could have many more, especially if I dug deeper into the modern history. The press and the government are lying to us constantly, incessantly, brazenly. And the only way we even know they do and can challenge them on it is because they don't yet have the total control over the information. And that's why they want it.

> There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.

There are. But that doesn't mean some self-appointed guys that get paid for bloviating in public are now some magic geniuses that have the right to tell us all how it really is. They do not possess any such capacity and they are just as fallible as the rest of us. Except that they have been already caught, many times, lying to us.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#442
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts. I enjoy reading Wikipedia sometimes, but it's a broken system, a lot of truths missing in it's articles because of crap editors and political propa…

> Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts. This is what lecturers and teachers a tell us. Yet it’s far and away the most accurate and comprehensive resource I know of. When I search the fe…

Something can be technically correct, yet unreliable. How? Simply by reporting with a bias. The easiest example would be to look at a left (or right) leaning but accurate news organization like Vox or WSJ - they’re absolutely great at many topics, but read only one of the two and you’d have a slightly distorted view of everything. Being unbiased is incredibly hard even for newspapers, let alone a volunteer run org.

For a more specific example of wiki’s biases, think of the average Reddit bias - like their insistence of “if you can’t prove it it doesn’t exist”. A lot of people in the world would be very sad if they learnt that their god supposedly vanished.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#443
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You read the statements right. Indian judges tend to give such statements, sometimes even worse. For example, recently one judge in unrelated case gave a statement that “criminalising marital rape is bit harsh”. The main problem in this case is that Wikimedia hasn’t complied YET with high court orders of revealing people who did the edits. ANI just went ahead and filed contempt of court case before Wiki legal tea…

This. They're following the Orban-Erdogan-Harper (International Democratic Union) playbook - purge the judiciary of independent judges, control the news media, and open culture-war fronts to distract and sap the strength of opposition while riling up your base. The situation in the world's largest democracy is a very dire one.

> purge the judiciary of independent judges, control the news media, and open culture-war fronts to distract and sap the strength of opposition while riling up your base

I don’t like whataboutism as much as anyone else, but if we’re going to criticise one country I’d like to point out that with Murdoch et al, you’ve got the same stuff happening in a lot of countries (US/UK/Aus off the top of my head) too. And unlike some places like the US, in India the judges are relatively much more independent politically.

What you’re likely missing is that a significant chunk of the population itself (and likely some judges) hold such views. You don’t need to politically cajole a judge if they already share the same view, do you?

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They need a legal basis and they are required to cite that: What is the bar for a legal basis? In practice it seems equivalent to the way cops claim to smell weed as grounds for a search. > In my experience and by my reading of performance stats US Border force are far more intrusive and over bearing than Australian Border forces. Anecdotes will be anecdotes, but I flew in and out of the US for years before becomin…

> What is the bar for a legal basis? See link. > In practice it seems equivalent to the way cops claim ... How many times have you been asked to hand your phone over exactly? In any case, you're free to challenge, etc. See link. > Anecdotes will be anecdotes, but I flew in and out of the US for years before becoming a citizen and never had issues. Like most people then. Whether crossing US or Australian borders. > I…

> See link.

A blog article from a law firm isn't a great source here, especially when contrasted with the numerous accounts of people that have been forced to unlock their devices without legal basis.

> In any case, you're free to challenge, etc. See link.

Not if a 'legal basis' is claimed.

> Like most people then. Whether crossing US or Australian borders.

Yup.

> So Australia's not the worst "anglo country" then?

Is the term anglosphere such an unfamiliar term you had to put anglo country in quotes?

Australia is the worst country when it comes to searching devices without justification, objectively going by laws and user experiences.

The UK is the worst country for being treated with a lack of respect and being asked intrusive questions in my experience.

> Do you recall correctly? Did Australia stop?

You're being overly defensive, lad.

Maybe put your patriotism/tribalism aside while having this discussion?

I read a few articles recently that said Australia had stopped recorded, so yes, fairly certain I am recalling correctly but not about to go and look it up either.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for starters, they didn't put any German citizens / German descendants in a concentration camp False: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_America...

Define "concentration camp". If you mean "a place where many of a certain category of people are held", then yes, we did. If you mean "place where many of a certain category of people are held and killed ", then no, we didn't. Technically, the first definition is at least as correct as the second one. But colloquially, the second one is what many people understand. You cannot compare the camps that German citizens we…

I actually agree with you that the term “concentration camp” is inflammatory and misleading when applied to the internment camps used to hold Axis citizens and Japanese-Americans. But the comment I was replying to was attempting to draw a contrast between the Japanese internment and the treatment of German citizens, when in fact German and Italian citizens were interned during the war. In fact I’ve actually visited one of the internment camps, in Montana.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#446
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I am not in any eurozone, I am outside of Interpol's reach, and even if I am enemy #1 in Liechtenstein no one would care. Interpol is still bound by international law and budget constraints. An arrest warrant looks fine and scary when issued by another country but extradition costs money even when there are agreements in place. I might be some minor value as a trading token between my locale and Liechtenstein,…

Is this some strange fantasy roleplay? If you go murder someone in Liechtenstein, there are only a small handful of places in the world where you are not guaranteed to be arrested and extradited back to Liechtenstein to face trial, at their government's request, should it ask and should you be found. In that small handful of places, it's still a crapshoot. Extradition costs are generally paid by the interested state,…

You're missing the point. The parent comment isn't talking about murder but "defaming" someone on fucking Wikipedia. Even if Liechtenstein takes a big issue with this to the point of extradition, the government of wherever the parent commenter lives likely will not allow it.

And yeah, it is a fantasy because Liechtenstein isn't a backwards and stupid place like India is.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wikipedia doesn't currently have the technical ability to block a single article on a country basis. I can imagine. That's too much to ask to a company that's been on business for 20 years and have received 1.3B USD in total. I could come up w/ a solution to that in an afternoon on my $5/mo server but yeah "you don't understand the scale of wikipedia" or some bs. Not "donating" a single cent ever again.

Here's what their server stack looks like: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers Lot of replication and caching in there. For every cache there has to be a solution for how we're gonna make sure India doesn't receive the cached version, or receives a different cached version than the rest of the world. You also need to be sure that none of your changes are going to cause any significant reliability or per…

>"you don't understand the scale of wikipedia" or some bs

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#448
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly fact check and do notable research for obscure Wikipedia articles. This is usually a no drama environment sure I have helped delete articles that later became notable and removed true facts lacking sources. Many of these things have fixed themselves over time. My biggest fear with Wikipedia is citogenesis https://xkcd.com/978/ I have found one in a major news paper, this took three months to take down.

Out of curiosity: was it marked as possible citogenesis during that period? How did the situation resolve itself?

No. I usually edit directly in Wikipedia, my edits are sourced and uncontroversial I try not to deal with the bureaucracy. I took the time to contact the original news outlet and they did the correction pretty fast, Wikipedia had been referencing a secondary sources and those were not that helpful. About five emails, maybe four hours of my time.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#449

I understand that Wikipedia has done this to not lose the possibility to appeal the court's decision. However, if the appeal is not successful and ANI wins, I think Wikipedia should just block India completely. I believe that will blow up spectacularly in ANI's face if everyone comes to know the reason for the block. Right now only a few people in India know about the ongoing dispute between ANI and Wikipedia. A coun…

> popular and useful as Wikipedia is not going to go unnoticed by the Indian media.

without dwelling into the nuances of this case and who's on the right, it would be myopic to think that the block is not a realistic possibility.

it has been over 4 years since the TikTok ban (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679286), and while it might be apple and oranges, it does not remove from the fact that a major site was blocked, reported widely, and is still standing to this day.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#450
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to maintain some semblance of process, Wikipedia has to approximate what is true by relying on the consensus from reputable sources, not reality itself. This means that experts are often not who you want editing an article, because experts are often poorly positioned to know what the general public knows, and what consensus is from outside their area of expertise. E.g., I have published research that contrad…

That's the propaganda Wikipedia wants you to think, citing itself. In practice, it doesn't work. The bias and delusional behavior of the editors is infectious, widespread, and has even been criticized by Wikipedia's own co-founder Larry Sanger as being overrun by "left-wing propaganda essays." He even went as far as to call it the "most biased encyclopedia in history" in an interview with Glenn Greenwald. ( https://w…

I am not going to value the other sources, as I don't know some of them, but considering Fox News "unreliable" is even tame. You are better informed if you simply not watch news at all:

https://web.archive.org/web/20241001193736/https://www.busin...

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