> These customers include many small businesses... a private detective agency...
That's just plain funny right there.
How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
11–20 of 106 posts
Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
#12Wikimedia is about as unbiased as a legacy media news outlet. Every major issue on wiki has some kind of narrative slant
Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
#13Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.
It’s definitely gotten worse in politics over the last decade. It used to be the case I could look at politicians and hate their policies and values, but know that they were genuinely trying to shape their country into what they thought was best. Now it seems to be overtaken by shameless grifters who will happily tear everything down if it profits them in some way.
While I share the same feeling (and we likely are not thinking of the same politicians) it's worth noting every age has had people complaining about
* The current government/politicians, which are worse then the ones we had
* The youth, who have it easy and are not as good as the old generation
We have actual texts from ancient civilizations saying this, so _maybe_ it's just a seesaw, or _maybe_ it's just getting old.
Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
#14Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.
No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now th…
Is there anywhere new for us to go? Or must we wait for some new leap forward still?
Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
#15I don't doubt this kind of scam is happening. But I think it stretches credibility to say that there aren't many more people successfully paying to make Wikipedia articles more to their liking.
Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
#16Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.
Fight back if you can. I keep an eye pages for subjects I know well, especially if contentious in some areas.
Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
#17Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.
No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now th…
Yeah, I think that's the biggest part of a lot of disappointing things that have happened and are happening.
There's also a separate factor in some problems, which is that the power and reach of bad actors are increased by tech. To use a familiar and relatively innocuous example, before the popular Internet, virtually no scammers from some developing nation halfway around the globe would be able to reach the US, which would effectively mean a lot fewer jerks in the world, as far as people in the US knew.
I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before (at the same time that some positive memes are also propagated). I don't know what would be a good baseline for evaluating, nor whether there are good historical analogs for some of the recent sociopathy -- including that practiced by the tech industry, and that merely enabled by the tech.
Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
#18>The volunteer community is extremely diligent about finding and deleting any promotional material that marketing companies try to post on Wikipedia.
I think it's much more common for me to see articles that do the opposite. They take some article, find some negative news article and write about them in the Wikipedia article. Especially for small communities where there are no notable publications except for major drama, it pretty much means that the Wikipedia article is going to highlight the negative side of the community even if that isn't actually representative of what the community is actually about.
Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now th…
Is there anywhere new for us to go? Or must we wait for some new leap forward still?
[deleted]
Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
#20Wikipedia as an institution, their insider-only ways, byzantine guidelines and more all incentivize this kind of abuse. There's a pessimistic comment on this page observing, "The world is just chock full of assholes..". Wikipedia editors are not exempt here.
Wikipedia shouldn't be so difficult to edit or highly politicized. There was a time when IP editors made the majority of contributions. Today correcting a typo might trigger a full-time editor to defend his turf. Even asking questions about an uncited assertion on a talk page can be labeled as disruptive.
I feel bad for the victims of the scam. It can be hard to edit or correct basic facts. Most business owners don't have time to specialize in Wikipedia lawfare. I have no sympathy for the WMF or the hard-core believers who wrote this expose'. Their policies created opportunities for these scammers to exploit.
The fact that they wrote this without an ounce of self-reflection or awareness of the problems is more troubling than the scam itself. Scams will come and go, but we've been stuck with Wikipedia as Google's and therefore the Internet's arbiter of "truthiness" for too long.