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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

#671

Post by donnachangstein »

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 has been captured by special interests.

I recently watched The Silence of the Lambs, an Academy Award winning movie from the early 90s. Afterward, I skimmed the Wikipedia article to see if I missed any plot details.

There is a whole section on how the movie is considered transphobic by some nobodies, how the director defends that it isn't, blah blah blah. Having just watched the film, the thought didn't even enter my mind. I realized that the entire section is irrelevant to someone seeking information about the movie and at its worst, an opinion piece or cleverly disguised political shit-stirring.

Wikipedia is full of stuff like this. As a comparison I checked a 'real' encyclopedia (with editors) and of course not a mention of this, just the facts. Any attempt to delete irrelevant stuff from Wikipedia is closely guarded by self-appointed article gatekeepers because it has 'sources'.

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

#672

Post by foldr »

paganel wrote: post #654
foldr wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BBC’s editorial line isn’t determined by the government of the day. I’m not familiar with the output of examples you mention, but there’s no comparison with RT, which is simply a propaganda arm of the Russian state.

Then how come it lines up pretty closely with the British government’s views? See Covid, Ukraine and especially the genocide in Gaza.

It doesn’t. You can find people of all political stripes complaining about BBC journalism, including government ministers.

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

#673

Post by joenot443 »

qingcharles wrote: post #406
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've been an editor since 2004. It's getting really, really hard now. Like, it is really off-putting and no longer enjoyable.

21 years of editing, that's awesome! I'm curious though, what's changed? If I were to maybe guess, I'd imagine it coincides with the rising temperature of the online culture war?

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

#674

Post by rendaw »

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SJW redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior

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

#675

Post by makeitdouble »

rayiner wrote: post #656
makeitdouble wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voter suppression is suppressing voters one way or the other. Your idea of restricting by birth rights is of course another form of it. It's fascinating to look at that proposition for a country that mostly got rid of its indigenous population.

Words have meaning. Setting qualifications is different than “suppression.” The former determines who are legitimate voters. The latter is an effort to keep legitimate voters from voting. Conflating legitimate qualification rules with “suppression” is fuzzy thinking in service of propaganda. Restricting by birth right is simply an extension of the universal practice of restricting voting by citizenship. Every democra…

> Words have meaning

Well, yes. At this point we could as well get back to Wikipedia for at least a common interpretation of the concept:

> The disenfranchisement of voters due to age, residence, citizenship, or criminal record are among the more recent examples of ways that elections can be subverted by changing who is allowed to vote.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression

> universal practice of restricting voting by citizenship

Citizenship restriction is not universal BTW, and going from a civil status (can be acquired) to a physical one is an incredibly huge leap that is nothing simple.

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

#677

Post by darknavi »

focusgroup0 wrote: post #676

[flagged]

I don't understand, the revenue and expenses seem relatively close most years and they seem to have a cash reserve for a little more than a year. What's not non-profit about that?

I'd buy an argument if you looked at executive payout or something along those lines.

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

#678

Post by jimmaswell »

ashoeafoot wrote: post #661
albumen wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Usually hijacked and paid by quatar, russia or china. Its always fascinating how fast that im against injustice at home chute leads to "i support a monstrous regime abroad".

The cognitive dissonance can be disturbing. A frightening number of people never grew past a child's logic of "X has problems -> X is the worst thing ever -> if I hate X then that must mean I love the opposite of X" and suddenly they're a trans activist (which is a good thing, to be clear) frothing at the mouth in absolutist terms to defend people who want them dead..

Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can appraise the situation, Israel sucks and has a somewhat higher incidence of committing war crimes than other western countries, but Palestine would suck even worse if you switched their places around, the only thing holding them back from committing much worse atrocities being lack of resources, going by their human rights record and direct statements from their leadership. Israel isn't executing anyone for being gay for example. But out of many factors, one being some left leaning people taking the mental shortcut that the anti-American option is always more intellectual and "owns the conservatives", we've ended up in this nonsense scenario.

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

#679

Post by GuestFAUniverse »

Yeah... this Ed Martin? -- rhetorical question! " Martin was a CNN contributor in 2017.[38] From 2016 to 2024, Martin appeared more than 150 times on RT America and Sputnik, both of which are Russian state-controlled news agencies.[39] None of these appearances was disclosed to the Senate on a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire asking for a list of all media interviews.[39] Nine days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine he said there was no evidence of military buildup on Ukraine’s boarders and critized U.S. officials as warmongering and ignoring Russia security concerns.[40] "

Time to archive a lot of snapshots.

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

#680

Post by crazygringo »

donnachangstein wrote: post #671
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 has been captured by special interests. I recently watched The Silence of the Lambs, an Academy Award winning movie from the early 90s. Afterward, I skimmed the Wikipedia article to see if I missed any plot details. There is a whole section on how the movie is considered transphobic by some nobodies, how the director defends that it isn't, blah blah blah. Having just watched the film, the thought didn't eve…

That doesn't have anything to do with special interests.

Literally nearly every Wikipedia page for a fictional work or creator will have a section on "controversies" or similar, if there have been any. Regardless of which political direction they go in. If it's been covered in the media or a book or whatever, it tends to be included.

This is a good thing. It helps situate everything in a broader cultural context. When I look something up on Wikipedia, I want to know these things. It's not irrelevant and it's not an opinion piece.

It's not like the articles takes sides. They just objectively describe the controversies which are real objective things which exist.

I find it curious that you seem to want to be shielded from the existence of these controversies. Nobody is forcing you to read them. But many people do genuinely find them useful and informative.

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