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

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

#481

Post by card_zero »

Terr_ wrote: post #333
sedev wrote: post #213

I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention…

I tried on a completely uncontroversial page that documented a certain idiom and examples of where it was used. My edit was reverted, twice, because apparently there is no such thing as a notable source for lines from a 1980s British TV episode, not even a fan website that has a transcript for all of them. Gave up after that.

That's an error, because episodes can be cited directly, and the template "cite episode" exists for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_episode

It can be seen in use for instance on the Beavis and Butt-head article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beavis_and_Butt-Head where the citation looks like this:

"Werewolves of Highland". Beavis and Butt-Head. Season 8. Episode 1. October 27, 2011. MTV.

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

#482

Post by card_zero »

thallium205 wrote: post #217
sedev wrote: post #213

I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention…

Why is their editor so awful to use?

Designers happened.

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

#483

Post by santoshalper »

kurtreed2 wrote: post #199
jjmarr wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A month after that article was published (and shortly after the article was posted on Wikipedia), the Arbitration Committee opened a sua sponte case to review the topic area despite the substance of that article being "Icewhiz was right".[1] It resulted in bans of Icewhiz' enemies for distorting the Holocaust topic area. I think moderators on pretty much any other website would laugh and ignore an article like that a…

> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia. There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia c…

But there is a survivorship bias because doing what Wikipedia does is almost impossible.

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

#484

Post by krisoft »

kurtreed2 wrote: post #199
jjmarr wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A month after that article was published (and shortly after the article was posted on Wikipedia), the Arbitration Committee opened a sua sponte case to review the topic area despite the substance of that article being "Icewhiz was right".[1] It resulted in bans of Icewhiz' enemies for distorting the Holocaust topic area. I think moderators on pretty much any other website would laugh and ignore an article like that a…

> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia. There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia c…

> There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to.

It is not survivorship bias to point out that the survivor survived.

> Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years.

Not “faltering after a few years” is part of “succesfully navigating that minefield”. If you fall out of the “race” no matter how good your policies would be otherwise you won’t be a reliable source of information. Because your can’t be if you no longer exists.

This is not a statement about what could have worked, this is a statement about what did work. And there survival is a necessary ingredient of success.

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

#485

Post by santoshalper »

LightHugger wrote: post #476
freen wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote != evidence. Also, your anecdote is specifically about a social media article about an attempt to use social media spaces to harass people. Seems extra “special case” to me.

[flagged]

I think your view of gamergate is absolutely fucking delusional. I watched it all go down in real time like many of us did. Saying Gamergate was about ethics in games journalism is roughly as accurate as saying the US Civil War was about "states rights". In that it is kinda sorta technically true if you ignore 99% of what was actually happening.

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

#486

Post by atombender »

ArinaS wrote: post #455
jjmarr wrote: post #87

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…

On Wikipedia people like Icewhiz are called "long-term abusers", and there's a public list with more than a hundred of them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LTA .

That list is fascinating. Like the obscure Canadian illustrator [1] who for a decade has been repeatedly trying to put herself into Wikipedia despite being told she's a "non-notable" artist.

I'm frankly amazed that enough people have the time to track this nonsense and stamp it out that it ends up being self-correcting. It's not just about time, either; chasing bad edits and prosecuting bad users must be a huge chore in terms of the sheer amount of work needed. I always find it amazing how horrible the tools are (like how almost anything, including having discussions, is done by editing pages; how can anyone have a discussion in such a disorganized way?), which surely must be a hindrance to productivity or to the ability to detect and deal with constant abuse. But seemingly it works. Maybe there are better tools that pro-level admins know about?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Anan...

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

#488

Post by int_19h »

sneak wrote: post #44
jtrip wrote: post #10

The scale of deep body trauma that has been done to the US will not seem clear today, but it will have dire consequences for the future trajectory of US. I am sad for this, for the current status quo I was born under, but I suppose History must happen.

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…

Regardless of all the nasty things US has done, if it goes down, it will get much worse for everyone else as well. Quite possibly worse than it will for Americans themselves. For one thing, it's such a big actor economically that its downfall will hurt everyone a great deal just from that alone. But secondly, when empires go down, they usually do so flailing at any real or perceived enemies around them - and given the sheer military strength of this country, it's not going to be pretty.

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

#490

Post by efilife »

hagbard_c wrote: post #32
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolute nonsense. Wikipedia is infinitely better than every source of “facts” out there.

No, Wikipedia is no better than any other site which allows user edits and in many ways reliably biased towards certain narratives - which narrative depends on the subject of the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia articles should always be read in conjunction with the Talk and Edit history pages and even then it is necessary to find original sources for any claims made in Wikipedia articles.

why is this downvoted? You call for verification of the claims wikipedia articles serve to us. Don't people agree we should verify info before accepting it?
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