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A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

wikipedia.fivefilters.org

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Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#161
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is useful for looking up technical info that there is no conflict over. It is not a good source for diving into a top-level controversial topic as those articles are long and have many places for people to stump and push for their ideas. The more specific a topic (think, a specific author associated with an ideology vs. the page for the ideology) the better. I think I've just adopted these mental heuristics…

Where would one go to dive into a top-level controversial topic? Outside of doing the research oneself or having a organization which is explicit nonpartisan with the goal of unbiased reporting (ie fact checking sites), what options are left beside Wikipedia?

If it's a philosophical topic, try starting with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

If it's a scholarly topic that lends itself to testable predictions, use Google Scholar to search for highly cited and/or recent review articles, and read on sci-hub if the article isn't already open access.

If it's highly controversial and not particularly testable, then I recommend A) prepare yourself to consume a lot of primary sources and make difficult judgments on your own and B) prepare yourself to live with the problem not feeling satisfactorily resolved even if you do A for a long time.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#162
post #99
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a choice. You can engage in conversation with peers as if you might want to understand the reasons for their actions. Or you can preach at them and blame them as individuals for system problems.

Those individuals, and a few thousand more like them, _are_ the system problem.

And the way I see it the only way around it is cultural indoctrination.

It doesn't have to be a negative concept. It can be as simple as picking up a can as you walk by it on the street, and otherwise having a completely normal life. People with you can then see "huh, I can contribute just a little bit, feel good about it, without going full hippie high-viz jacket and tongs with a trash bag every weekend."

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#163
post #143

"Anti-war" doesn't sound like a particularly descriptive adjective for the apparent targets here. They are not anti-war campaigners per se, they seem to be sitting in the Russia-sympathetic zone of discourse. I'm not saying that to discredit them (I might, but I won't), but calling them anti-war rather obscures the problems people might have with them. That doesn't mean that a "one-man" effort to shepherd their Wikip…

> "Anti-war" doesn't sound like a particularly descriptive adjective for the apparent targets here. They are not anti-war campaigners per se, they seem to be sitting in the Russia-sympathetic zone of discourse. No. Please, everybody stop with this Russia nonsense. Russia has become the bogeyman to which every evil and its opposite can be attributed, included the election of a US president that the US citizens voted t…

[deleted]

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#165
post #73

> ‘Philip Cross’ has edited @georgegalloway ‘s wikipedia page over 1800 times. This, and many other political arguments I have seen on it before, really makes me think that Wikipedia would benefit from a policy where a sufficient number of individual complaints against a user who has passed some threshold of number of edits to a single article (say 100) would be automatic grounds to block the user from further edits…

1800 edits on a single page in only a few years is essentially a sickness. I'm not a doctor, but that should be classified as obsession.

If indeed it is one individual. With the intensity of edits it would not be at all surprising if this editor was in fact more than one individual masquerading behind a single account.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#166
post #93
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly the sort of thing that can happen, but as far as I can tell the COIN report was within Wikipedia norms, and closing the report two minutes later with "Zero evidence of COI. Galloway has picked a fight with Cross, not the other way around." was not. (Unless "don't criticise a top-1000 user" counts as a Wikipedia norm, I suppose.) I disbelieve that that the admin in question is both a neutral arbiter a…

A biased point of view isn't a conflict of interest. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest... ? We all have biases. But we have conflicts when we have direct relationships with topics. Similarly: edits are supposed to have NPOV. But editors almost always have a POV.

Is truth defined by perseverance?

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#167
post #10

This is extremely concerning. Phillip Cross was easily caught because he was running his mouth on twitter, and was blatantly making one-sided edits from his single account. Imagine if a country like Russia makes an orchestrated effort to achieve similar goals, using an army of fake-wikipedia-profiles. They could easily turn Wikipedia into a platform for disseminating propaganda. In fact, I'd be surprised if they have…

> Imagine if a country like Russia Honestly, Israel, KSA etc. are as much, if not more likely to do this, as indeed shown by the Phillip Cross guy, who was making edits to benefit them. Of course it is far easier to constantly mention Russia, (and it should be mentioned), but I'd love if people were more willing to call out our 'partners' who engage in this behavior, as calling out Russia requires no amount of 'coura…

The point of the post was not the courageousness of the op, or Russia. The point was propaganda.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#168
post #157

Why is FiveFilters taking such interest in this particular anonymous Wikipedia editor? This doesn't look like simply an honest piece of investigative journalism, given how far FiveFilters seems to be going to promote this story ( https://twitter.com/fivefilters/ ). Why doesn't the article disclose the relationship between FiveFilters and Media Lens? The FiveFilters blog ( http://blog.fivefilters.org/ ) mentions Media…

We're a huge fan of Media Lens. They do great work. But we're not Wikipedia. We don't need to live up to the standards they set themselves. We don't run an encyclopedia that pretends to be neutral.

By huge fan you mean “are”. (Look at parents posts)

How did this garbage get on Wikipedia? Fivefilters and MediaLens are part of the whole anti media propaganda outfits.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/02/fuller

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#170
Please hacker news... use your skeptical nature and research inclination to understand where this junk is coming from. This is a propaganda outfit.

I have a suspicion HN is getting played here... upvotes and downvotes seem suspicious on these comments.

Some info on who Media Lens and FiveFilters are...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/02/fuller

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