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

A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

wikipedia.fivefilters.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 387 posts

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#321

Post by mmiyer »

4bpp wrote: 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…

No..if there really is a problem with his edits, there'll be a discussion and he'd be banned from that topic, which does happen (e.g, the top editor to the Donald Trump article also has 1800 edits to it but is indefinitely banned from that topic). That is far better than having this easily abusable system.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#322

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

philwelch wrote: post #252
4bpp wrote: 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…

> 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 to the article, regardless of fault So, let's suppose that some particular expert who has a particular level of knowledge or expertise in a given field, and is an establis…

> That policy would basically allow large groups of trolls to basically lock that guy,

That. It's not theoretical, it's an existing usage pattern. See "brigading"

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/36xhxc/what_i...

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#323

Post by posterboy »

smsm42 wrote: post #253
ThoAppelsin wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It would only be natural for us to take this resource as not-so-reliable But that is not what the author of the comment did. They regularly messed it up, and then complained that other people didn't clean it up fast enough. It's like throwing out trash every day out of the window, and then feel offended that there's lots of trash on the street. Of course it is, you made it! Stop doing it, and there would be less tr…

You are complaining about basically some graffiti and likening that to environmental polution and the cause for bigger polution happening and not being cleaned up. Is that right?

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#324

Post by scrumption »

throwaway59928 wrote: post #250
unreal37 wrote: post #109

As someone who's regularly donated to Wikipedia every year, this is concerting. I can't trust Wikipedia. I'm shocked actually.

Actually you can’t trust this article. It’s an anonymous attack piece by an apparently pro-Russian person or group.

Thank you for your deep insight, detailed analysis and surfeit of evidence, Mr. Throwaway Account, sir!

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#325

Post by crazydoggers »

PrimHelios wrote: post #176
crazydoggers wrote: post #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

I mean, you can actually see the edits the guy makes. Why would FiveFilters falsely defend Media Lens - a conservative organization - while attacking a wiki editor who is extremely pro-war? Your argument really only makes sense if the editor is liberal and attacking Media Lens and FiveFilters.

Their issue with the editor is that he cares about sources... so whenever these anti media outfits want to post unsubstantial claims in Wikipedia, he has a problem with that (as he should).

This is propaganda war at its finest. Make it look like conservatives and liberals agree with your points... then gloss over actual facts with hand waving. Most people won’t dig deep enough to find out the truth. These guys just want to control the narrative and generate public opinion that we should doubt our journalistic institutions.

And if we stop caring about journalism and hard facts and the importance of sources, then our democracy is going to have real issues.

Their ties with Russian propaganda outfits should also be troubling. Do a little googling and you’ll see a host of pro Russian conspiracy stuff from these “agencies”.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#326

Post by notahacker »

strainer wrote: post #287
philwelch wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how "having a soft spot" for one of the most notorious mass-murdering warmongers of the 20th century makes someone "anti-war".

Like I said, there may or not be a reasoned historical debate behind it I dont know. He is known as an anti war campaigner, because he has been a prominent campaigner against military aggression in our time.

Even his staunchest defenders would be forced to admit his campaigns against military aggression are selective and more influenced by a continuation of Cold War "anti-imperialist" realpolitik than actual pacifism. He's been outspokenly supportive of Russian involvement in Syria, and he was the member of the anti-war campaign over Iraq that achieved notoriety by calling for Arab armies to join the Iraqi "martyrs" in fighting Western forces rather than the more mainstream position of advocating a cessation of hostilities altogether...

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#327

Post by rurban »

unreal37 wrote: post #105
4bpp wrote: 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.

Less like a obsession, more like a paid agenda.

He is discrediting reliable anti-war (i.e. anti-government) news sources.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#328

Post by pessimizer »

ThoAppelsin wrote: post #310
c22 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that anyone who takes wikipedia at face value and trusts everything they read there without further verification, research, or compatible pre-existing knowledge is not a very discerning individual. Wikipedia is not being coy about their identity, I'm pretty sure everyone knows it's edited by strangers on the internet. If you want an encyclopedic source you know you can trust then buy an encyclopedia.

> I'm pretty sure everyone knows it's edited by strangers on the internet I can assure you that there are at least some who are unaware that even they can edit a Wikipedia article. My housemate (a computer engineering student) didn't. My girlfriend seeking her doctorate degree didn't. My 2 roommates who managed to get to the first 100 at our national examination, also didn't.

Who did they think wrote Wikipedia? I'm not sure that much concern should be taken for people who don't care at all about the sources of the things that they reference; not that it's not bad that they'll be confused by bad information, just that if people aren't concerned at all about sources, they're going to be confused by a lot of things, not just Wikipedia vandals.

Printing something in a book doesn't make it true, and putting it on a website also doesn't make it true, no matter how professional and authoritative-looking the css is. You trust something because you trust the motivations and expertise of its sources.

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#329

Post by pvg »

tptacek wrote: post #144
pvg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you should have no trouble pointing out examples. There are really entire broad topics that are bad. Lots of maths pages are horrible and un-encyclopedic.

As a stumbling late-in-life math learner and thus reluctant frequent consumer of Wikipedia maths articles, I couldn't agree more. But I'm looking for patterns of editors working to keep topics bad, not just examples of where WP isn't good yet. WP's coverage of computer security topics is generally quite bad. Also: the WP process prevents them from getting better as fast as they could; that's the conclusion I came to…

That sounds completely sane to me. Information security is a young, rapidly evoloving, technically deep, highly interdisciplinary field. It regularly reaches into people's everyday lives, into popular culture, politics, law, commerce, you name it. It makes sense that an open process for collaboratively making an encyclopedia would be lousy at capturing all that well and I agree with you that, while suboptimal, that's fine and that it will likely eventually get better.

Maths, on the other hand, is the OG field of abstract human knowledge. The study of how to communicate it, its history, its philosophy, a number of its key applications are all serious fields in their own right. WP's terribleness at it makes no sense to me at all. It's totally not-fine that it's produced jiggabytes of material that's worse-than-useless to interested non-specialists and adult learners - the supposed primary audience of an encyclopedia. It feels like some sort of massive sytemic failure but I have no idea or hypothesis why it's turned out that way, maybe you do?

Re: A Wikipedia editor's long-running campaign

#330

Post by pessimizer »

pjc50 wrote: post #276
barrkel wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strongest people Russia can leverage are those with genuine positions independent of Russia, because reflexive apologists are easy to dismiss. You haven't supported your position that these guys are not pacifists. I rather see them as pointing out hypocrisy, necessary to avoid the groupthink that forms around national interests - the set of positions that all sides of mainstream politics in a nation hold for reas…

George Galloway is primarily a contrarian, and actively supported Saddam Hussein. I'm not sure he'd recognise a genuine position if he fell over it in the street. Neil Clark is a genocide denier: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/feb/12/warcrimes.comm... There's a real problem with people who (correctly) spot that Western governments are lying about certain things, and then infer that (a) they're lying about eve…

> actively supported Saddam Hussein

I find Galloway unbelievably annoying, but is this just (Tory/New Labour) for being anti-Iraq War? Because it certainly was in the US.

Post reply on HN