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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

#691

Post by sgc »

jzb wrote: post #648
sgc wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That an enormous sample size. Statistically a complete participation should be very close, so the burden of proof lies with those who claim it would be different. Regardless of whether Trump would have won or not, that is a clear indication of evenly split public sentiment. So we still get to justly reap the fruits of our collective choices. There is no exoneration by whimsically dreaming of improbable alternatives.…

"I don't think it is that hard to vote" Says a person commenting on HN that almost certainly isn't in a demographic that it has been made intentionally difficult to register, stay registered, and get time off an hourly job to stand in line for hours to vote.

I did not say 'is', I said 'was'. I have not seen studies or even many anecdotal stories indicating people think it was too hard for they themselves to vote. I have seen a lot of people saying that about other people, but as of 2024, attempts to disenfranchise voters had not been very well done. I also don't think having ID is a high bar, which is what a large amount of the noise has been about. Many, many democratic countries have this requirement [1]. Coupled with other things it can become a problem, but when anybody says voter id itself is a problem, I can't take them very seriously.

I however repeat, that was last year. Things could very well take a dramatic turn for the worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws

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

#692

Post by brookst »

bowsamic wrote: post #547
maigret wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is SJW? Please avoid using unclear acronyms.

Social Justice Warrior but it’s worth noting that actually the acronym has cultural connotations that the words alone do not

The great thing about SJW is it tells you even more about the person using the term that the target. It’s your grandparents’ equivalent of “woke mind virus”.

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

#693

Post by thayne »

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…

> There have been several major pro-Palestinian ones recently, which is probably why this letter has been sent.

I suspect the real reason is more likely due to Trump not liking pages related to himself, including the page on the Jan 6 attack.

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

#694

Post by myself248 »

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 done a fair bit of editing over almost 20 years. Some of my photos are featured in small articles, and I've only had a few of my edits reverted, always for sensible reasons. It's easy to get started, and the pitfalls (chiefly, adding commentary without a source) are well documented.

So on that basis, I agree. Please edit. It's easy. Start small.

That said, I've watched entire articles vanish under the banner of non-notability, which were clearly notable if one bothered to find some citations. The deletionists have a process and a timeline, while the contributions come slowly and sporadically. This asymmetry is a cancer. If there's a treadmill belt pushing articles off the site which fail to run fast enough, then it's impossible for small articles, which are just learning to crawl, to survive long enough to survive. It's not a test of notability, it's a test of Wiki-savvy among an article's supporters.

The best way to make a new article actually stick around, is to basically build the whole thing elsewhere, which takes weeks or months of effort for a single person since it's not collaborative, then plonk it into Wikipedia fully formed, and maybe, just maybe, it might have enough citations to pass the test of notability. But this means that, from the outset, it represents a single author's viewpoint.

Deletionists eviscerate what makes Wikipedia interesting, and they're the main reason I haven't edited more.

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

#696

Post by ashoeafoot »

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…

Is the eV still in that renovated building near the Chinese embasy, playing cards every Wednesday near the river?

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

#697

Post by mindslight »

sgnelson wrote: post #197

Serious question, after the past few months, how can anyone deny that America is heading in a totalitarian direction? Those of you who believe that all of the many actions that have happened in the past few weeks are "okay", please explain your perspective without resorting to "whataboutism" or cherry picking only one or two of the things that have occurred lately. Because from what I'm sitting, this is not behavior…

The straightforward answer is that those supporting the autocratic authoritarianism want autocratic authoritarianism. They've been primed with decades of anti-American grievance politics condemning our distributed societal institutions as being foreign attackers, and they crave the simplicity of some big man with a big stick to make the complex world go away. They've also been primed to believe that they are supporting "freedom" (even though it never plays out that way in practice), so the more these actions reek of autocratic authoritarianism the more aggressive they get in their rationalizations.

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

#698

Post by computerthings »

sidibe wrote: post #637
Spivak wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really a hard list to compile. * Paul Graham * Mark Zuckerberg * The Ghost of Elon Musk before he fell down the alt right pipeline and now is no longer liberal-tarian. * Sundar Pichai * Jeff Bezos * Sam Altman * Jensen Huang * Tim Cook A who's who of people who felt their businesses were being threatened by the Biden administration with a starry-eyed view of how this next round might benefit them and being…

Many of those probably wanted Biden to win but don't want to antagonize Trump after he won. If I had to guess there at least Sundar and Bezos didn't want Trump to win Elon and his loud hangers-on in the VC community have made SV look a lot more MAGA than it is

[dead]

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

#700

Post by dlubarov »

whatshisface wrote: post #658
skywalqer wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Palestinians are indeed Semites, however, the word antisemitism (for historic reasons) is used to refer specifically to hatred of Jews. It makes historical sense that Germans are afraid to criticize the Jews. I probably disagree with your opinions, but the debate would likely be useless.

One of the obstacles to getting that point of view across is that very few of the people in countries with a majority religion (which is most countries) see criticism of their government's history as criticism of their religion. I've never really heard a Christian complain about the treatment of the thirty years war in history books, and that's presented in an extremely negative light. The equation you're making does…

It's not documenting historical facts about Israel that's problematic, it's using that history to justify calls for the destruction of Israel. Does anyone cite the Thirty Years' War to advocate for the destruction of Germany?
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