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Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#81

Post by sneak »

consumer451 wrote: post #58
sneak wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has not been a force for good in the world in some time, if ever. Unfortunately for Americans, it has to get worse before it can get better. Much worse. The institutions are deeply corrupt, and have been for decades. They must be destroyed and possibly replaced. It sucks, and it will hurt. It may even possibly require an entire revolution, as many of the deeply evil US institutions such as the CIA and FBI are…

> What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society. Can you walk me through how you see this playing out, step-by-step? I want to believe!

Over the last thousand years, humans have become more educated and more connected. Violent deaths have been steadily falling.

Over the last hundred years, American military and paramilitary forces, and their vendors, have subverted transparency and democracy to turn America into a military dictatorship.

There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.

The culture of the 3.6% of people who live in the current territory of the USA will be irreparably damaged, however. This may not be entirely a bad thing, given how significant an outlier the US lifestyle is compared to the rest of the world.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#82

Post by mikeyouse »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #55
mikeyouse wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure you’d find the exact same thing if some grifty billionaire funded a fake investigation into those people who were contributing money to WinRed and yet, only one of the two is facing investigation.. it is so far past the time when this DOJ should be given the benefit of the doubt and steel manning their obvious corruption doesn’t make anyone seem scholarly, just credulous.

It's not true that only one of the two is facing investigation. Multiple state AGs are investigating WinRed, and rightly so - there's substantial evidence that they're using dark patterns to trick people into recurring donations when they intended to donate only once. The controversy is that a political official is ordering an investigation of ActBlue, not that political fundraising platforms ought to be above scruti…

Federally it certainly is true. And I agree, they shouldn’t be above scrutiny which is why it’s so important for the DOJ to maintain their independence and to avoid partisanship.. but Elon was loudly claiming they were funding the Tesla protests a few weeks ago and the rest of the administration got in line to encourage this pretextual nonsense.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#83

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

habinero wrote: post #68
hagbard_c wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that depends on your viewpoint. Those who come from a "democrat" background will certainly consider Trump to be more controversial than Obama while those from a Republican background will see Obama - especially second-term Obama - as far more controversial than Trump. Independents will vary on their interpretation but Obama is not likely to end up in the history books as the 'Change agent' he promised to be and w…

> partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA This is just a euphemism for "he was black in public and lesser white people didn't like it".

No, that's not accurate. When people talk about the "deterioration of race relations", they're referring to a well-documented phenomenon (https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx) where poll respondents say race relations are bad (and trending downwards) since 2015 while they were good from 2001 to 2013. I'm skeptical that Obama bears any responsibility for this, given that the trend didn't start until his second term, but it's a real trend and not a euphemism.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#84

Post by hayst4ck »

Reason and truth are the enemy of authoritarian regimes. They want you to believe that truth is subjective. Truth and reason provide alternative legitimacy to authority. If nothing is true, there is no basis on which to judge those in power.

There is a long legacy of authoritarian regimes attacking curious places, universities, historians, museums, books or any institution that grounds itself in reality which provides you a way to reasonably criticize authoritarian actions. Many authortarian regimes will "purge" as many of the country's intellectuals as they are able.

Wikipedia is absolutely the enemy of this administration and authoritarians everywhere in the world would love to see it's demise or collapse into chaos.

Whether the Wikipedia page for Israel says Gaza is a genocide or not, or that it's an ongoing debate matters. It matters because it influences what people think and therefore what they consent to or what they deem worth fighting for or applying resources to and that goes for just about any issue out there. If you can't read about the suffering that racism has caused, then how bad is racism really? If there are no examples of successful labor movements, then why would you hopelessly start one?

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#85

Post by Supermancho »

hagbard_c wrote: post #61
Loughla wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His argument is that Trump is being criticized more for being controversial than Obama. Honestly. Is Trump not more controversial than Obama?

No, that depends on your viewpoint. Those who come from a "democrat" background will certainly consider Trump to be more controversial than Obama while those from a Republican background will see Obama - especially second-term Obama - as far more controversial than Trump. Independents will vary on their interpretation but Obama is not likely to end up in the history books as the 'Change agent' he promised to be and w…

> Obama is not likely to end up in the history books as the 'Change agent' he promised to be and will mostly likely be seen as partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA

That's a fantasy. His mere existence in the position, contradicts the premise. Hillary hoped to be in a similar position...history would have also been kind to her, despite her vicious nature by the obvious virtuous implications (a woman can become POTUS).

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#86

Post by aingling »

Alupis wrote: post #7
jmclnx wrote: post #2

Well seems the war on truth has started. There is a 1984 quote about history that escapes me now.

[flagged]

Exactly, he sees the problem clearly. And this article was five years ago. It's become even more entrenched now. There's basically no way of fixing this.

We can see similar problems with other sites that rely on volunteer labor, like Reddit.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#87

Post by jjmarr »

The English Wikipedia is a massive target for influence campaigns. I don't think there are any other communities as resilient as it. Just an example:

There's certain individual or group that edited under the name "Icewhiz", was banned, and now operates endless sockpuppet accounts in the topic area to influence Wikipedia's coverage on the Middle East. One of them was an account named "Eostrix", that spent years making clean uncontroversial edits until one day going for adminship.

Eostrix got 99% approval in their request for adminship. But it didn't matter, because an anonymous individual also spent years pursuing Eostrix, assembling evidence, and this resulted in Eostrix's block just days before they became a Wikipedia administrator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...

It's a useful contrast to a place like Reddit, where volunteer moderators openly admit to spreading terrorist propaganda or operating fake accounts when their original one gets banned. You don't get to do that on Wikipedia. If you try, someone with far too much time on their hands will catch you because Wikipedia doesn't need to care about Daily Active Users and the community cares about protecting a neutral point of view.

Not denying the existence of influence campaigns. There have been several major pro-Palestinian ones recently, which is probably why this letter has been sent. But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up. Most social media websites don't care and would rather you don't bring it to their attention. That is why Reddit banned /r/bannedforbeingjewish.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#89

Post by mikeyouse »

almosthere wrote: post #22

It's 2 paragraphs... What's the substance of the allegation?

It’s a similar nonsense letter to the same ones he sent to several prominent medical journals. Speech chilling, 1st amendment violating unsubstantiated threats on DOJ letterhead. Of all the unfit people in this administration, he’s likely the most unfit. His entire career has been deeply unethical and partisan and often borderline illegal.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#90

Post by duskwuff »

clipsy wrote: post #65
nailer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the missing topics mentioned in the article (updated to quote them for convenience): The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing “Obamagate” story in which Obama was personally involved in survei…

Have you bothered to do any sort of comparison as to how similar attacks are reported? At a quick glance, I see nothing on George W Bush's wiki page[0] about the 2002 consulate attack in Kolkata[1], for example. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_attack_on_American_cultur...

Not that it's necessarily wrong for it to not be listed there, though. The article on GWB is about him and what he did as president - it isn't meant to be a complete history of the United States between 2001 and 2009.
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