Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 1001 posts

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

#491

Post by BrtByte »

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…

Wikipedia isn't immune to influence campaigns - honestly, no open platform is - but the key difference is how seriously the community takes it. The amount of volunteer effort that goes into investigating sockpuppets, enforcing sourcing standards, and maintaining some kind of neutrality is incredible when you step back and think about it.

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

#494

Post by BrtByte »

yannis wrote: post #449
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…

Wikipedia is the best source of humanities "common knowledge". Yes there are users that abuse the system to push their own point of view. Many articles in Wikipedia have improved tremendously over the years; many times it is not unusual for an article to have over a hundred references. It gives you all the info you want to understand the subject before you delve further through books. Now for politics I can see the p…

Wikipedia's value isn't that it's perfect, it's that it shows its work

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

#495

Post by foldr »

roenxi wrote: post #375
NelsonMinar wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RT is not legit. It is Russian propaganda. When those people participated they were collaborators.

Ex-CIA head Brennan famously remarked in an MSNBC interview [0] that when he says something is a Russian information operation that includes dumping accurate information. So really it isn't enough to identify something as Russian propaganda - it is necessary to analyse whether it is propaganda of the accurate and informative variety, or the inaccurate variety. Propaganda really just means someone is arguing a viewpoi…

The BBC isn’t propaganda. It has its biases for sure, but it doesn’t exist for the purpose of spreading a particular viewpoint. It’s good to be aware of media bias, but it’s reductive and cynical to view all media as propaganda.

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

#496

Post by cma »

emacsen wrote: post #190
TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't demand "moral perfection", but I draw the line at overt fascism. The ADL are fascist sympathisers.

Did you read the statement they put out later that day about Musk, or the day after? I agree this was a terrible move on the ADL's part, and there have been others, but you're essentially labeling the oldest anti-hate group "fascist" because you disagree with one statement they made. This dismisses any concerns they raise, or if someone else says the same as them, then they too must be pro-facist.

He also tweeted in approval of this tweet putting forward the "Jewish people planned it" antisemitic form of great replacement theory with "you have said the actual truth":

> Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.

> I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much.

> You want truth said to your face, there it is.

Then a bit later Musk gives the heil Hitler salute twice in a row, once facing the crowd, then turned around and gave it facing Trump.

The stuff the ADL put out after the salutes was only after he added on jokes involving Nazi party members, right? Or was the one later that day before that?

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

#497

Post by buyucu »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #422
simonw wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes that letter is alarming. > In view of public criticisms, including those expressed by Wikipedia Co-Founder Dr. Lawrence M. Sanger, regarding the opacity of editorial processes and the anonymity of contributors, what justification does the Foundation offer for shielding editors from public scrutiny? Larry Sanger has been criticizing Wikipedia for more than 20 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Cri…

The Heritage Foundation has been open about their desire to strip Wikipedians of anonymity, this is just the government putting that plan into practice: https://slate.com/technology/2025/02/wikipedia-project-2025-...

The easiest solution is for the Wikimedia Foundation to move out of Us jurisdiction to a more democratic country.

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

#499

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

mulmen wrote: post #247
rchaud wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority that did vote, voted for this. The participation rate has always been low in rich western countries. Given the standards of media literacy and civics education, there's no evidence that a higher participation rate would have changed the outcome.

There’s also no evidence that increased turnout would have had the same result. What seems to be overlooked in these conversations is the skill with which American voters have been disenfranchised by partisan forces. It’s easy to blame people for not voting if you ignore the real difficulties in actually casting a vote for many Americans.

I hesitated while reading this part, because I wholly agreed with the first 2 sentences. Do you mean physically difficult in terms of barriers to voting or making a less direct comment about the usefulness of that vote? If the former, I think I disagree compared to other countries ( and the levels of paperwork needed ). If the latter, I would be interested to hear some specifics.

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

#500

Post by 3036e4 »

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 edited mostly a single page many years ago. It wasn't a controversial subject really, just one where there is a lot of garbage popular history and some light revisionism that made it a bit of an effort to remove unreliable sources and add some better sources. Never any issues or fights over it, but I got bored eventually and just let it be.

Recently I edited a page or two, then tried to edit more, but everything is so complex now. All the special markup and stuff to consider is really off-putting. Took me forever to figure out how to properly fix the year of death of a person and some other data I just ignored because it was too much red tape. Wish it was more simple plain text. Makes quick drive-by edits too much work.

Post reply on HN