Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 106 posts

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#21

Post by cuu508 »

charcircuit wrote: post #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 dr…

Can you point to a few specific examples? Are there signs this is targetted, and done maliciously?

I have not previously noticed/recogmized articles like this, and am asking out of curiosity.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#22

Post by tivert »

> Thanks to the community, paid editing firms rarely succeed in influencing the actual content on Wikipedia. There are paid editing firms that we are aware of with a 0% success rate.

That kind of sounds like bragging that they detect 100% of the paid editing they detect.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#23

Post by JimDabell »

riffraff wrote: post #13
JimDabell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not sure that’s true? There are certainly people complaining about politicians from every era, but specifically shameless grifters? In similar volume to today?

For instance, you can find no end of people who utterly despise Margaret Thatcher and think that she’s the worst thing to ever happen to the UK. But as far as I am aware, even the people who hate her tend to think that she genuinely believed in what she was doing. The idea that she was wrecking the country for her own personal gain isn’t a mainstream belief is it?

Now contrast that with somebody like Boris Johnson. A politician who is hated in similar volume to Thatcher. But you can’t say that the accusations levelled at Johnson are anything at all alike to those Thatcher received, can you?

The same goes for American politics. Take a look at the criticisms directed at Trump compared with those directed at either Bush. There is a qualitative difference.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#24

Post by thesuitonym »

JimDabell wrote: post #10
Smoosh wrote: post #4

Perhaps 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.

This is commonly attributed to Vonnegut, but apparently wasn't written by him:

``Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.''

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#25

Post by mike_hock »

quartesixte wrote: post #14
idiotsecant wrote: post #7

Earlier 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?

[flagged]

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#26

Post by lostfocus »

thesuitonym wrote: post #24
JimDabell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is commonly attributed to Vonnegut, but apparently wasn't written by him: ``Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.''

It was Mary Schmich and later Baz Luhrmann turned it into a song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#27

Post by defrost »

thesuitonym wrote: post #24
JimDabell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is commonly attributed to Vonnegut, but apparently wasn't written by him: ``Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.''

It's from an an essay written as a hypothetical commencement speech by columnist Mary Schmich, originally published in June 1997 in the Chicago Tribune.

Then released in several versions as a spoken word song by the Australian director Baz Luhrmann.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen

It reached peak parody when further mangled and released by John Safran as Not The Sunscreen Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YwqFz14xY4

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#28

Post by treffer »

Smoosh wrote: post #4

Perhaps 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.

Well, the good news is that there aren't enough of these a*** to destroy it.

When Wikipedia started and even like 10-15 years ago that wasn't a common belief. Especially in Germany. "There are some assholes on earth, how could you dare to believe something voluntary and open to everyone will succeed?!?" (others already posted that it's not unfounded given real world experience)

Wikipedia though is my preferred counter example for that.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#30

Post by gksierra »

For a brief period I considered becoming a private detective. A friend of mine knew I was looking to practice and sent me a photo on Wikipedia that was faked. It claimed to be of private military contractors in an outfit called GK Sierra in one country, but they were actually US soldiers in a different country.

I spent a while digging into this company and a couple of related companies. They had edited themselves into Wikipedia articles in small ways over the years, and gotten themselves included in click bait lists of military contractors. They made a half-assed effort to cover this up by changing their Wikipedia user name, but that just creates a different record that was still searchable. There was a Wikipedia article mentioning a rumor they worked for Mossad, but I suspected they were also the source for that rumor. They claimed they worked for the CIA, and they had a real contracting number with the DoD. But I didn't find any evidence these contracts were real, and when I sent a FOIA to the CIA they said the information either didn't exist or was classified.

The weirdest thing I noticed was that it had bled into the culture to some extent. People who wanted to give themselves an edgy camo aesthetic would find these click bait articles and vandalized Wikipedia pages and not realize it was a sham - or realized and were doing it ironically, how is one to tell. I saw an admin of some forum who took it as a handle. I saw someone present a military-themed outfit in GTA named after it.

Eventually I got to the point where I was gathering more and more evidence and none of it was making any sense, and I realized I was never going to make real headway without finding a way to interview these people. I could see pieces of what they were doing, but as far as why they were doing it, that information just didn't seem to be written down on the Internet. The prospect of flying across the country to try and track down someone who was doing things I couldn't understand wasn't appealing, so I just let it go.

As a disclaimer, I'm working off of memory here, some of the details may be wrong.

---

Looking back at their deleted Wikipedia page on the Wayback machine, it's all so outlandish that I have to imagine it was an elaborate prank. It's a lot more paperwork than most pranks involve, but I just can't imagine that whoever put this together intended anyone to believe it. Maybe they wanted to see if they could do enough legend building that the Wikipedia mods would have some doubt and keep up the page for a ridiculous hoax? If I was practicing a skill, maybe they were too? Impossible to say.

Post reply on HN