181–190 of 387 posts
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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
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That's a resource, not a WP page. It has no talk page. I'm trying to get a sense of what the actual argument was. It's not a good diagram, and its author is clearly trying to attach it in as many prominent places as they can, which is not great. But I still don't know what the actual controversy is.
Here, I'll help (from just googling "Linux API wiki"), - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_interfaces - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Linux_Programming_Interfac... Probably a lot more, but can't really reverse image search SVGs.
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…
A few of my colleagues at work had a running gag of building a persona around one of our coworkers as a joke. The goal was to get a Wikipedia bio crediting him with inventing a particular variant of mullet in the 70s. We were unsuccessful in getting him inventor status, but we did a bio page created, and prominently featured a picture of him with a mullet. You just need a few months and some savvy dealing with the bu…
When no one is above the rules, everyone is equal. But given strict adherence to the rules by everyone, enough time, and a collection of ignored misunderstandings that build on each other... change that is not actively opposed is guaranteed.
The Wikipedia editing process is broken. Wiki-lawyering is used to shut down the collaborative editing process, even when not on political topics often by people who don't know much about the topic that they are editing. I don't trust Wikipedia content and tend to examine the Talk pages (sometimes even the Talk page histories) on controversial articles.
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…
If you subscribe to criticisms of establishment ideology, and some of those have merit, there is a pervasive bias against numerous valid, credible, or meritorious viewpoints, contributions, contributors, and voices.
(There is also a great deal of quite valid rejection of flat-out bullshit.)
One can easily find numerous instances of this. An example from my present reading, H.A. Guerber's 1906 anthology The Myths of Ancient Greece and Rome, specifically notes in the preface, "great care being taken, however, to avoid the more repulsive features of heathen mythology".
Earlier enyclopedias either explicitly followed institutional gospel, or faced censure and criticism for failing to do so.
Another instance of which I'm aware, having run aacross it myself, comes from the 1874 Chamber's Encyclopedia, a British work with an authorised American edition ... to which some changes were made. The British publishers took umbrage:
In the interests of literature, and in defence of their rights as authors, Messrs Chambers have to make the following Satement regarding an American edition of their Encyclopaedia:
By an arrangement with Messrs Lippencott of Philadelphia, they were furnished with duplicate stereotype plates of the work, in order that it might be simultaneously printed and issued in the United States. After a time, the American publishers began to make extensive alterations to the articles, a thing which had not been contemplated in the agreement. Had the alterations been confined to bringing the information up to a more recent date, or correcting errors of fact, nothing need have been said about it. But it is a serious matter when, in a re-issue of a work, statements and opinions are introduced which are repudiated and hateful to the original proprietors, their name all the while appearing on the title-page. That Messrs Chambers have reason to complain of being placed in this unpleasant and false position by the American edition of their Encyclopaedia, will admittedly by any one who will look at the following alterations, selected from a number that could be noted....
Among the contested entries, free trade:
Free Trade (Original Edition). 'This term, when used so late as twenty years ago, expressed a diputed proposition, and was the badge of a political party; it now expresses the most important and fundamental truth in political economy. From its simplicity, it affords, to those who expect to make political economy an exact science, the hope that they have obtained an axiom. But it has in reality been established as the result of a double experience --- the one being the failure of all deviations from it, the other being the practical success of the principle during the short period in which it has been permitted to regulated the commerce of the country.'
And how might one possibly offend? Oh...
Free Trade (American Edition), 'a dogma of modern growth, industriously taught by British manufacturers and their commercial agents. For many years certain political economists have laboured to establish this theory upon a reliable basis, and have asserted that the doctrine represents an important truth; but no nation has attained substantial prosperity except by protection to native industry, whether avowed or disavowed. The doctrine had no foothold in the policy of any nation, and had no legislative birth until put forth by Sir R. Peel in 1846....
Also Protection, Slavery, and:
[A] slanderous imputation concerning His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, which we should be ashamed to copy.
https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n1...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...
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It is easy to mess up public places. You can spit on the floor in a bus, throw trash on a street, vandalize Wikipedia. Or you can clean the trash and help Wikipedia. The choice is yours. There's no mystical powers coming in and cleaning up after you - just you and people exactly like you. So before complaining "nobody cared" ask yourself - how did I help? What did I do to expect others to clean up after me and feel e…
The important difference here is that this platform claims to be an encyclopedia, and any random vandal may not simply make an edit on an article of the conventional encyclopedia. It would only be natural for us to take this resource as not-so-reliable, for that it is as easy a man to spit on the floor to infiltrate Wikipedia with false information. Yet, we usually don't. We usually just go ahead and trust what we se…
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
It's weird to see articles like this without a publish date or author attributed to them.
regarding general participation in English Wikipedia -- the last three or four edits I made to Wikipedia articles I found interesting, were summarily reverted. Why try ?
What reasons were you given for the reversion?
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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We can't just jump to conclusions like this. We can't take a single story about a single bad editor and make blanket rules. You have to take a look at the whole dataset of people who make crusader efforts and then see if there's a pattern. Even if there is, you then have to ask yourself if it's something that people will just learn and work-around. I'm not disagreeing Cross was likely a net negative for wikipedia, bu…
Single bad events are usually how we, as democracies, create new blanket rules. The events have to be bad enough to move people to action, and that normally means something out of the ordinary, which by definition is likely to be singular. The blanket rules should be made with care, for sure, but your premise is wrong.