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How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

en.wikipedia.org

71–80 of 106 posts

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#71

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.''

Vonnegut had nothing to do with it, and it doesn't preclude that there really are changes that slide one way or another, in fact when I was a kid compared to the wages of the day many prices were more reasonable than they are today, many politicians were in fact much more 'noble' (though that word doesn't really fit) than they are today. As to whether children respected their elders or not I have no opinion on but the other two definitely have shifted where I live, the kind of rabble that sits in parliament here today would never have gotten a pass in the 70's. FFS we have a guy here that believes that lizards rule us.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/21/d...

The fact that enough people vote for these characters has me more than a little bit worried. Democracy is super fragile and to wave away the observable fact that in the past things were quite different by quoting some random text seems to be a bit too glib and easy.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#72

Wikipedia as an institution, their insider-only ways, byzantine guidelines and more all incentivize this kind of abuse. There's a pessimistic comment on this page observing, "The world is just chock full of assholes..". Wikipedia editors are not exempt here. Wikipedia shouldn't be so difficult to edit or highly politicized. There was a time when IP editors made the majority of contributions. Today correcting a typo m…

That's some mid level whataboutism.

> the Internet's arbiter of "truthiness" for too long.

That's funny how you use a word made popular by Stephen Colbert.

Wikipedia is fine. We are not "stuck" with wikipedia, there are alternatives. Wikipedia is a free source of information, with certain rules. It is good enough.

> highly politicized

You cannot reach perfect objectivity or neutrality. Wikipedia depends on sources. People who attack wikipedia often sound like they have an agenda.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#74
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the full story. If you read into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47 , it's clearly written as an article about _both_ AK-47 and AKM. So, all sentences like "100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK-47s" and "Việt Cộng soldier armed with an AK-47" - they are simply wrong. The funniest thing is, they openly admit it in the article (deep down the article! not in the lead):…

I was undecided on this topic, but the comment you linked convinced me of Wikipedias stance. The linked guidelines about using commonly recognizable names[0] have great examples for why this naming scheme makes a lot of sense: - Mahatma Gandhi (not: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) - Bill Clinton (not: William Jefferson Clinton) - Aspirin (not: acetylsalicylic acid) - Sailor Moon (character) (not: Usagi Tsukino) All of th…

> great examples for why this naming scheme makes a lot of sense

Great example when doing according to the letter just makes more stupid. Sure, in English (which one, btw? US English? UK English? Global Universal English?) it's commonly named such, but you are reading that article on the site what poses itself as encyclopedia, more so as encyclopedia which strictly relies on other documentation for the article texts and data. Anyone sane would just add a remark at the start of the article about usage of that name in English, because that's quite important thing all and all.

But not only there are no such remark, but those people actively refuse to add one.

And finally, in the article:

>> The Kalashnikov Museum (also called the AK-47 museum) opened on 4 November 2004 in Izhevsk, Udmurt Republic

.. but it's not called 'AK-47 museum'! It's 'The Kalashnikov Museum and Exhibition Complex of Small Arms'!

So they just blatantly 'renamed' the museum to fit their shenanigans, completely ignoring their own principles of encyclopedia.

https://en.museum-mtk.ru/

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#75
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the full story. If you read into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47 , it's clearly written as an article about _both_ AK-47 and AKM. So, all sentences like "100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK-47s" and "Việt Cộng soldier armed with an AK-47" - they are simply wrong. The funniest thing is, they openly admit it in the article (deep down the article! not in the lead):…

I was undecided on this topic, but the comment you linked convinced me of Wikipedias stance. The linked guidelines about using commonly recognizable names[0] have great examples for why this naming scheme makes a lot of sense: - Mahatma Gandhi (not: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) - Bill Clinton (not: William Jefferson Clinton) - Aspirin (not: acetylsalicylic acid) - Sailor Moon (character) (not: Usagi Tsukino) All of th…

I’m still peeved that they don’t follow that guideline for the Sears Tower, and instead call it the “Willis Tower”. Just because the signage was changed doesn’t mean anybody actually calls it that.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#76

Wikipedia as an institution, their insider-only ways, byzantine guidelines and more all incentivize this kind of abuse. There's a pessimistic comment on this page observing, "The world is just chock full of assholes..". Wikipedia editors are not exempt here. Wikipedia shouldn't be so difficult to edit or highly politicized. There was a time when IP editors made the majority of contributions. Today correcting a typo m…

Man, you can't even post a comment in the article without knowing how to edit a wiki yourself.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#77
post #73

I don't understand why some people like to criticize the reputation of wikipedia. Wikipedia is not perfect, but their process is quite mature and robust. I even read people saying wikipedia is politicized.

> Wikipedia is not perfect, but their process is quite mature and robust.

Wikipedia's processes are anything but. It almost feels like it's less mature now than it was 10 years ago. I've seen this with other communities where people move on and the only people left are disproportionately made up of mediocre Peter principle-proving folks who see it as a comfortable and insular hobby where seniority/tenure trumps everything else.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Indeed - to me it seems there are politicians, politicians using populism, populists becoming politicians, and the new class: populists milking politics. That is, populists without political goals entering politics and finding fertile soil.

Admittedly, Boris J. is more of a populist politician that keeps dialing up the populism and down the politics until it's pure populism, while Donald T. is more of a narcissist that took the "normal" path to that point.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#79
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason it's unpopular here, but that "place to go" is the altweb of crypto and other networks like I2P, often dubbed "web3". Yes, all of the scams and beige this-or-that are there. But it's so vast and so granular right now that you can definitely find your dreamers and weirdos doing interesting things.

When I lived in a small European town a few years ago, upon hearing that I was a software developer, regular-ass business dudes would regularly want to talk about NFTs, inbetween a conversation about football and one about cars. I'm sure there are weirdos in the web3 spaces, but I feel like they're very outnumbered. Projects like ENS or IPFS are probably much more interesting to weirdos than most "crypto stuff". I2P…

> It's like webrings all over again

Fixed that for you.

Re: How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry

#80
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the full story. If you read into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47 , it's clearly written as an article about _both_ AK-47 and AKM. So, all sentences like "100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK-47s" and "Việt Cộng soldier armed with an AK-47" - they are simply wrong. The funniest thing is, they openly admit it in the article (deep down the article! not in the lead):…

I was undecided on this topic, but the comment you linked convinced me of Wikipedias stance. The linked guidelines about using commonly recognizable names[0] have great examples for why this naming scheme makes a lot of sense: - Mahatma Gandhi (not: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) - Bill Clinton (not: William Jefferson Clinton) - Aspirin (not: acetylsalicylic acid) - Sailor Moon (character) (not: Usagi Tsukino) All of th…

I have no problem with calling Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton. He called that himself.

I have some problem with calling someone/thing with a name that was pushed from the outside, and was not endorsed by that someone or the creators of that some thing. Say, Wikipedia does not call photocopiers "xeroxes", it mentions "xerox" once in the lead of the "Photocopier" article, and afterwards, photocopiers are only called photocopiers. (And so when you google "xerox", it'll tell you about Xerox the company, not the type of machines.)

And I'm strictly against of calling a thing with a name of a similar thing, which was not even endorsed. That's not useful at all. That's confusing. Perhaps I wouldn't be too wrong if I called that "relabeling" of AK with "AK-47" in the Wikipedia article, a lie. Because that's the thing with lies, they are often hard to keep straight. So throughout the article, its editors can't even figure out - what exactly do they call "AK-47"? The real thing, what Kalashnikov called AK-47, and all its different issues? Or that, and AKM? Or the whole AK family? The answer to that can change in different points in the article.

And I totally understand that people want to call it AK-47. I wouldn't even bring that up if they explained that in the article's lead. Like, "this is an article about AK-47, but what you probably wanted to read about, is actually AKM, here's why". But they don't even do that - not in the lead, at least. Why?

Perhaps because Wikipedia article's leads are used for Google search. Google is actually a major contributor to the Wikimedia Foundation. These leads are shown in SERPs, and they are probably used for Google's machine learning shenanigans elsewhere. Wikipedia is the biggest array of structured, easily-readable information in the world, and Google uses it.

Perhaps, that also was one of motivations behind the "use the common name" rule in Wikipedia, and the adamancy of the Wikipedia editors to use it in this particular case, even when it doesn't make much sense. Because when the average user googles about "ak-47", he doesn't want to be lectured about the differences between AK-47 and AKM and whatnot. He only wants to know about that thing that, as the myth in the media goes, was made by Kalashnikov in 1947, was all sold throughout the world, and has not changed ever since. And it's also on Mozambique's flag.

Because lecturing users is bad for Google's business. So maybe, this is an example how Google's interests made Wikipedia lie.

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