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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

#821

Post by hagbard_c »

habinero wrote: post #68
hagbard_c wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that depends on your viewpoint. Those who come from a "democrat" background will certainly consider Trump to be more controversial than Obama while those from a Republican background will see Obama - especially second-term Obama - as far more controversial than Trump. Independents will vary on their interpretation but Obama is not likely to end up in the history books as the 'Change agent' he promised to be and w…

> partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA This is just a euphemism for "he was black in public and lesser white people didn't like it".

Yes, everything I don't agree with is racist. It is time to drop that tired old trope, if you don't want to accept it from me accept it from Thomas Sowell:

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support – kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11151740-racism-is-not-dead...

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

#822

Post by sneak »

matwood wrote: post #589
sneak wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the last thousand years, humans have become more educated and more connected. Violent deaths have been steadily falling. Over the last hundred years, American military and paramilitary forces, and their vendors, have subverted transparency and democracy to turn America into a military dictatorship. There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come)…

> There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence. The US recently put the world on notice that everyone needs a larger military and should develop their own nukes if they can. I fail to see how that will continue to decrease violence.

There have been no large scale wars since the development of nuclear weapons. The data available thus far suggests that mutually assured destruction prevents total war.

I live in a county in which most people are armed. There are very few attempts at carjacking.

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

#823

Post by lobotomizer »

dlubarov wrote: post #711
user3939382 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a long-term editor, this is pretty off base. The discussion [1] that led to Grayzone being deprecated had almost nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. Meanwhile most Israel/Palestine articles are driven by Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and similar sources, while many Jewish sources (ADL, Jewish Chronicle, NGO Monitor, etc) are banned or restricted. One example of a heavily debated neutrality issue was the opening pa…

[flagged]

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

#824

Post by TimorousBestie »

zbobet2012 wrote: post #778
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've had basic facts about mathematics which are wrong deleted in revisions by editors with no knowledge of the subject beyond having asked ChatGPT (which repeats the wrong shit on Wikipedia). It's hard to be worth it. Wikipedia's biggest problem is the editors.

Wikipedia is really, really bad at mathematics. The tone is all over the place, from “plagiarized from an undergrad textbook” to “crackpot with an axe to grind against Cantor.”

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

#825

Post by oarsinsync »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #809
firesteelrain wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are people supposed to understand these hard to follow and shifting rules?

The base rules are actually not very complicated. But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction. That's a people problem, to some extent, not purely a Wikipedia problem. (BRD is my favorite pet-peeve)

> The base rules are actually not very complicated.

> But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction.

I think this a feature/bug of a (litigious) society that works on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.

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

#826

Post by Kim_Bruning »

teddyh wrote: post #814
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how so many people are answering that they've had trouble! How about I look at some of those cases? Especially if it's relatively recent, I can take a look. Leave me a message here, or at my email address (see my HN info) , or on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kim_Bruning I'm not very active anymore, but I'll check in the next couple of days and see what I can do. Really to be able to help I gene…

> How about I look at some of those cases? Please note that, although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them. It’s always like this with Wikipedia detractors; I don’t know why, but it is. Complaints and horror stories galore, but nobody will link to any of it, preventing anybody from investigating what actually happened.

You're not wrong, per-se.

I'm still going to ask though! We might get lucky. Want to help out?

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

#827

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

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…

wikipedia means different things depending where you are. Content in English looks a lot better than browsing content in other languages like Spanish, French, Italian, ... Especially when it is about non Tech subjects in these languages, there seems to be a strong difference in quality, and the utility you get from Wikipedia varies with how many languages you speak.

My biggest beef is that any contributions volunteers make will be stolen by sama and similar scam artists & SV dweebs so they can improve their AI (and while Wikipedia is free AI which requires login/authentication and maybe even paid subscription in future).

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

#829

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

In the past, I have done so, and won't, again.

First, my (quite correct) edits in existing pages have been reversed within minutes. No explanation as to why (I assume because I was not "known" enough). I have heard this complaint numerous times.

Second, when I tried to create a page about a system that I had originally authored, has become a well-known, worldwide tool, managed by a large team that does not include me, the page was rejected. I think it was because I had been involved in the creation of the tool.

I decided that it wasn't worth it. I didn't get upset, but it was clear that my input wasn't wanted.

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

#830

Post by jjmarr »

kranke155 wrote: post #669
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…

The Portuguese Wikipedia does not allow the existence of details on corruption allegations against Portuguese or Brazilian politicians. There are moderators who take care of cleaning those up, then starting harassment against users who have posted these things. I've seen one particular page, when a corruption allegation was blown up against a politically connected individual, be set up for permanent deletion (the onl…

Post some specific references. This happened to the Croatian Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation stepped in.
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