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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

#591

Post by tapoxi »

andybak wrote: post #550
PeterStuer wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keri Smith, a former hardcore SJW activist, has documented how she and others daily targeted people through Wikipedia edits for preparing a cancel. It's quite fascinating the extend of organization and process they used. For instance, they would not directly edit the target's page, but start working 2 links removed from it, compromise the "friend of a friend of a friend", and then work towards the actual target and f…

Skimming this: https://www.kerismith.net/ and seeing some of the people she proudly mentions - it seems like she's just switched cults.

Nah she's just going where the money is. Look at how that page is all about telling her core market what they want to hear, and that she's happy to accept their money for a speaking engagement.

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

#592

Post by potato3732842 »

20after4 wrote: post #561
flask_manager wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now; Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected. There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia abo…

I think the "deletionist" tendency is one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia. At least it's the main thing that prevents me from making significant contributions. I say tendency, but maybe it really is more of a crusade. Deletion and rejection definitely seem to be the default "predisposition." I've seen a lot of examples of apparently well meaning contributors being pushed away by the need to establish "notabili…

Exactly. It makes it basically impossible to get niche industry/trade information and history onto wikipedia unless it was so newsworthy it's covered everywhere.

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

#593

Post by bjourne »

simonw wrote: post #435
card_zero wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a source, so "reliable" here has to mean "reliably presenting a full range of notable sources". No editor should be saying you can rely on claims found in Wikipedia, except in the sense of relying that the claims are in the sources. (Except the claim as stated isn't always in the source anyway. Best to check.)

I found Molly White's video here really useful for helping me understand the Reliable Sources policy: https://blog.mollywhite.net/become-a-wikipedian-transcript/ > The way we determine reliability is typically based on the reputation for editorial oversight, and for factchecking and corrections. For example, if you have a reference book that is published by a reputable publisher that has an editorial board and that h…

Love the use of the "we" word here. :) What is counted as a reliable source is voted on on one of Wikipedia's meta pages. So "reliability" is not based on any factual circumstances, but on whether the vote is won or lost. And you can trivially game that using sock/meat puppetry. Notwithstanding, White's claimed policy heavily favors Western media giants such as The New York Times and The Washington Post which many editors know about. However, the actual information they publish are often much less accurate than what is published in specialized trade magazines or even activist blogs.

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

#594

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

keybored wrote: post #559
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but skin in the game is argument is not irrelevant. It is called a franchise for a reason after all. You want a slice of the pie, you should be able to prove that you know what you are doing. Owning land was a good enough proxy then. We can argue what would be a good proxy now.

You’re saying that people who owned land (and humans) as property had skin in the game while everyone else did not. Just stop.

There is no reason to conflate the two. To be frank, I explicitly stated land ( and not property as a more generic term ), which makes me question how much of a good faith of a conversation this is. My point stands on its own merits, but you seem to want to rely on cheap rhetorical theatrics a good chunk of the audience here can see through.

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

#595

Post by immibis »

lxgr wrote: post #590
TomK32 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a contrast to the early days: 22 years ago I was simply appointed admin on the German language Wikipedia when there was simply a lack of hands doing deletions and stuff. No voting, just a show of hand a lots of trust put into people only know by what they write and discuss on this new website. A few years of work (10k edits) and a few years of dwindling participation on my side someone noticed that quite a few o…

In my experience (of also roughly 20 years ago), the German Wikipedia is as dysfunctional as it gets. The primary goal of the admins seemed to be to gatekeep, in particular to keep “unencyclopedic” content out at all cost, e.g. by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one. “Just because it’s relev…

[flagged]

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

#596

Post by immibis »

user3939382 wrote: post #584
BrtByte wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neutrality? I’ve never seen an English language wikipedia article on a politically controversial topic that wasn’t the DC establishment/State Dept official take. They listed Greyzone as an unreputable new source because it’s pro-Palestinian. When you Google the usernames of those who voted to ban them pro Israeli think tanks from DC come up. Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics. If you’re lucky you can find…

They spent basically two years rejecting the renaming of "Israel-Hamas war" into "Gaza war" (it has now been renamed) even though the full scope of the war was apparent after just a few months. It was very important to maintain the narrative that the only victims were Hamas. They protected the page so you couldn't request a rename without being a verified user.

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

#597

Post by jowea »

hodgesrm wrote: post #54

In my humble opinion Wikipedia is the single best thing thing to emerge from the Internet boom. Its name is a wordplay on one of the most important intellectual projects of the Enlightment.[0] The DC prosecutor letter reads like something straight out of the totalitarian playbook.[1] Please donate now to show your support. It's time to fight back against this crap. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A9die…

As much as a I agree with the first paragraph I don't think that is a reason to donate money.

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

#598

Post by scarab92 »

20after4 wrote: post #537
LightHugger wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Perhaps it is your perspective which is biased and that leads you to project that accusation towards the wiki (and the gp commenter here)

I think their comment is fair.

Wikipedias policies to promote neutrality are often counter productive.

Because neutrality is hard to define, what these policies actually do is progressively raise the effort required to keep or remove a particular point of view. Unfortunately, requiring more effort also means substituting the point of view of knowledgeable but time poor and inexperienced contributors, with the point of view of time rich chronic contributors and admins. The result is that instead of neutrality, you actually select for the strongest held points of view of a small ingroup of chronic users. The viewpoint diversity of such users is extremely low, which is why you’ll notice all controversial topics tend to lean a certain way.

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

#599

Post by [deleted] »

andybak wrote: post #550
PeterStuer wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keri Smith, a former hardcore SJW activist, has documented how she and others daily targeted people through Wikipedia edits for preparing a cancel. It's quite fascinating the extend of organization and process they used. For instance, they would not directly edit the target's page, but start working 2 links removed from it, compromise the "friend of a friend of a friend", and then work towards the actual target and f…

Skimming this: https://www.kerismith.net/ and seeing some of the people she proudly mentions - it seems like she's just switched cults.

[deleted]

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

#600

Post by firesteelrain »

hnlmorg wrote: post #567
albumen wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social Justice Warrior. The acronym has been around for a long time.

That doesn’t mean what everyone is familiar with it. For example I’ve been around since internet slang first developed a life of its own. And yet I wasn’t immediately familiar with SJW either.

By the time you commented you could have at least searched for the acronym or asked AI.
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