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Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

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Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#561

Post by 20after4 »

flask_manager wrote: post #233
sedev wrote: post #213

I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention…

I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now; Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected. There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia abo…

I think the "deletionist" tendency is one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia. At least it's the main thing that prevents me from making significant contributions. I say tendency, but maybe it really is more of a crusade. Deletion and rejection definitely seem to be the default "predisposition." I've seen a lot of examples of apparently well meaning contributors being pushed away by the need to establish "notability" for a subject and the expectation that all information must be referenced to a fairly limited number of approved reliable sources. These are norms which have been built over a long period of time so it would be incredibly difficult to change them now.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#562

Post by eastbound »

terribleperson wrote: post #419
moritonal wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I created a page, it got declined because the guy who two films have been made about didn't count as important enough. I kind of get it, but still, did kill the energy slightly.

The notability requirement is a real bane, but it also kind of makes sense when there's really insufficient manpower for the articles they already have. But then, maybe they'd have more manpower if they loosened the notability requirement.

[flagged]

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#563

Post by eGP9jDq_nw »

LightHugger wrote: post #99
jjmarr wrote: post #87

The English Wikipedia is a massive target for influence campaigns. I don't think there are any other communities as resilient as it. Just an example: There's certain individual or group that edited under the name "Icewhiz", was banned, and now operates endless sockpuppet accounts in the topic area to influence Wikipedia's coverage on the Middle East. One of them was an account named "Eostrix", that spent years making…

There are counterexamples where this has failed/continues to fail, the gamergate article is famously non-neutral, only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy. This is rather than true secondary sources with less extreme and biased views, like is supposed to be the rules there. You can switch from the english one to other languages and get completely different content with very…

[flagged]

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#564

Post by eastbound »

dxroshan wrote: post #260
mjrpes wrote: post #56

Here's the letter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ocNyx34Et19sKtlta0bTPPzSPcp... No claims, no evidence. No sources, except "it has come to my attention" and "information received by my office".

What is happening is very scary. Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say. I think this has been the case at anytime in history. However, now, with the internet, it is easy to spread such lies to mass and easy for such leaders to make blind followers.

> Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say.

I’m one of those people you complain about. When I did deep research about DEI, I presented evidence and sources to people like you, including judges that I knew in my private life.

It seems you didn’t care, to a point that I had in my hand a document printed from a department of justice’s own website (about mothers’ own violence on their children, which is as high as men’s given the scope you decide to choose) and the person who in his public life is a judge, didn’t even bother discussing the thesis and just told me: “This document is false. You changed the figures before printing the document”.

You may say that Trump is bad for dismantling your administration, but you guys don’t care an inch about truth, evidence, sources, honesty, bad faith, or even for the number of children who are beaten to death by their mothers.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#565

Post by phrotoma »

3036e4 wrote: post #500
sedev wrote: post #213

I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention…

I edited mostly a single page many years ago. It wasn't a controversial subject really, just one where there is a lot of garbage popular history and some light revisionism that made it a bit of an effort to remove unreliable sources and add some better sources. Never any issues or fights over it, but I got bored eventually and just let it be. Recently I edited a page or two, then tried to edit more, but everything is…

I spent like 30 minutes trying to fix a busted citation link a while ago before giving up. I write code and markdown for a living. :shrug:

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#566

Post by chii »

exceptione wrote: post #536
chii wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a lot of the views are very agreeable That's why you don't "ignore" propaganda, but consume all, from all sides. Just consuming agreeable propaganda simply means it is working.

Nope, you shouldn't. Because propaganda is effective. Humans are by default not influenced by logic, but rather respond on beliefs and emotions. This is one of the hardest thing to swallow for us people, we do see ourself as independent rational thinkers. We are sometimes able to, with effort. To understand it better, you should know that Russian propaganda is not designed to instill a certain belief, but rather to m…

> We are sometimes able to, with effort.

and i'm saying everyone should expend this effort, because otherwise, people and democracy gets taken over. It's one's civic duty to ensure that you are not making choices based on lies or manipulations.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#567

Post by hnlmorg »

albumen wrote: post #546
maigret wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is SJW? Please avoid using unclear acronyms.

Social Justice Warrior. The acronym has been around for a long time.

That doesn’t mean what everyone is familiar with it. For example I’ve been around since internet slang first developed a life of its own. And yet I wasn’t immediately familiar with SJW either.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#568

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

Nearly everyone has a viewpoint and taking the time to contribute is a strong clue the viewpoint is deeply-felt. Some people primarily adopt the Wikipedia rules as their viewpoint, but in hotly debated social issues like (oh, pick one out of a hat) the Covid-19 crisis and origin investigation-- Wikipedia is drowned in other viewpoints, and, because administrators mosly are alike, substantive groupthink.

I'm impressed by Wikipedia's efforts to root out "abuse" but in the end it's all a contest over truth, and Wikipedia fails in precisely the dynamic, high-interest, high-consequence topics that users seek out on the site.

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#569

Post by roenxi »

foldr wrote: post #554
roenxi wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The BBC isn’t propaganda. It has its biases for sure, but it doesn’t exist for the purpose of spreading a particular viewpoint. If it isn't pushing a British viewpoint, wouldn't it be incumbent on the British government to shut it down? Why would they be funding something that was pushing viewpoints that undermined Britain? This is simple incentive analysis stuff, this organisation isn't being funded for billions o…

Every news organisation reports its own point of view and could potentially be shut down by whoever controls the purse strings. Your logic will lead you to the conclusion that all news is propaganda. That might be technically true in some very broad sense, but it tends to lead to absurd comparisons like your comparison between the BBC and RT. Incidentally, various British governments have tried quite hard to shut dow…

> This logic will lead you to the conclusion that all news is propaganda.

A lot of media groups are pretty transparently in existence for propaganda purposes, but the logic doesn't imply that. It could be a media organisation exists to make their owners money while meeting an under-served need in the community. That is why most businesses exist. It obviously isn't why the BBC exists because there are a whole bunch of laws and public funding propping it up and it isn't independently profitable.

> ...absurd comparisons like your comparison between the BBC and RT.

The BBC had a policy for 60 years [0] of vetting applicants through MI5 based on their politics. And realistically it took 60 years to find that out we'll probably find out what the current vetting arrangements are in the 2040s. Any media organisation with that sort of historic tie to intelligence can be safely compared to RT.

> Incidentally, various British governments have tried quite hard to shut down (or at least neuter) the BBC and failed. You're failing to take into account the fact that the BBC is a popular institution and that there would be domestic political consequences for a government that attacked it too strongly.

That seems to be largely irrelevant. I'm sure there are factions in the Russian government that see RT as a waste of money on any given day and I'm happy to accept that British propaganda is popular in Britain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#MI5_vetting_policy

Re: Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

#570

Post by jijijijij »

albumen wrote: post #546
maigret wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is SJW? Please avoid using unclear acronyms.

Social Justice Warrior. The acronym has been around for a long time.

While this is true, I don't think I have heard/read it once in more than a year, maybe five, actually. It's not used anymore. Pretty much anyone not MAGA has become "leftist", these days.
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