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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

#811

Post by jzb »

sgc wrote: post #691
jzb wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't think it is that hard to vote" Says a person commenting on HN that almost certainly isn't in a demographic that it has been made intentionally difficult to register, stay registered, and get time off an hourly job to stand in line for hours to vote.

I did not say 'is', I said 'was'. I have not seen studies or even many anecdotal stories indicating people think it was too hard for they themselves to vote. I have seen a lot of people saying that about other people, but as of 2024, attempts to disenfranchise voters had not been very well done. I also don't think having ID is a high bar, which is what a large amount of the noise has been about. Many, many democratic…

Having an ID is a high bar when it can take a day or more at the DMV to get one. Right now in NC you either have to book an appointment - none are available for months - or show up like you’re queuing for concert tickets in the 80s at 6am before the office opens, get a number, come back at one, and hope they get to your number. (Source: daughter just did this procedure last week for a learner’s permit.)

The GOP has also closed polling places in predominantly D areas, fought drop off boxes, etc. It is intentionally hard to vote for minorities and people in D areas.

Yes, it’s going to get worse. But it isn’t good now.

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

#812

Post by soundwave106 »

YZF wrote: post #373
sgnelson wrote: post #197

Serious question, after the past few months, how can anyone deny that America is heading in a totalitarian direction? Those of you who believe that all of the many actions that have happened in the past few weeks are "okay", please explain your perspective without resorting to "whataboutism" or cherry picking only one or two of the things that have occurred lately. Because from what I'm sitting, this is not behavior…

I'm not an American so I'm kind of looking at this from the side but I'll try to engage here... What does "heading in a totalitarian direction" mean in this context exactly? I'm not trying to use this as a "cherry pick" but this was news from today: "Trump administration reverses abrupt terminations of foreign students’ US visa registrations DOJ announced the reversal in federal court after weeks of intense scrutiny…

If you think of authoritarianism as more of a "spread" and not as a black-or-white thing, you can see where the problems with "Trumpism" are.

Using the terms of The Economist's "democracy index", I see the United States under Trump 2.0 as a denigrated "flawed democracy". There is even some danger of the United States backsliding towards a "hybrid regime". Hybrid regimes combine some aspects of electoral democracy with some aspects of authoritarianism. Prominent examples of hybrid regimes include Turkey and El Salvador.

Maybe we won't get that far -- strong federalism will help here. But while The Economist has ranked the United States as a borderline "flawed democracy" for the last several years, I suspect 2025's rankings will be considerably lower. My "gut feel" is that the United States could end up ranked close to present-day Hungary, or Poland under PiS. In both cases from what I remember, democracy still was present, but considerable damage was done via institutional attacks on the press and the universities. A US attorney general arresting judges for what seems like a minor dispute (but one involving migrants) seems like a pretty big flag that some degree of authoritarianism has taken hold. As is the erosion of due process involving immigrants.

Long run, I think this institutional damage being done by Trump is the most concerning aspect of Trump 2.0. Trump is actively damaging future engines of American growth (research science and universities). My guess, too, is that the anti-immigrant hostility might damage the previous paradigm where many of the brightest in the world came to America for both research and careers. There is a significant core of American voters that supports this stuff; the most vocal of this core in fact cheer on the arrest of judges and actively attack technologies where the conspiracies overwhelm the facts. (Witness the recent push of a few states to actually restrict mRNA vaccines for... reasons? Nothing solid that I can think of.) I do not think that this element will go away after Trump moves on.

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

#813

Post by [deleted] »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #291
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…

Did you read this post? "Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record" https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

[deleted]

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

#814

Post by teddyh »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #788
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…

Interesting how so many people are answering that they've had trouble! How about I look at some of those cases? Especially if it's relatively recent, I can take a look. Leave me a message here, or at my email address (see my HN info) , or on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kim_Bruning I'm not very active anymore, but I'll check in the next couple of days and see what I can do. Really to be able to help I gene…

> How about I look at some of those cases?

Please note that, although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them. It’s always like this with Wikipedia detractors; I don’t know why, but it is. Complaints and horror stories galore, but nobody will link to any of it, preventing anybody from investigating what actually happened.

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

#815

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #805
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has degraded a little since I joined some years ago. It is still better than most of the online fora out there, but you can feel the change in the posts.

Let me help degrade it further by asking what the purpose of this comment is and then asking if outside changes, like Trump, would be a more likely explanation for the change in tone

The purpose is the help understand current state of play. It used to be more purposeful, useful and meaningful for me to be here. If things will continue with its current trajectory, I will simply stop. I am not saying everyone will. We all have different lines after all. I am not sure what Trump has to do with this particular conversation though.

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

#816

Post by kristopolous »

asveikau wrote: post #434
kristopolous wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's two: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x61wly8 or https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvxx8j Chris Hedges had a show as well.

Thanks for the first two. So she was a guest on panelist/talking head shows about her antiwar positions. I know about Chris Hedges. I wasn't asking about him.

Mostly I'm sensitive to the classic technique of scapegoating an external enemy as the source of failure for a poorly done internal policy.

Whether it's Jews, Russians, Communists, leftists, the Chinese, immigrants, it's always some infiltrating evildoer and not the failure of policy.

It's purely ideologically driven because these accusers think their thing being sabotaged, whether it's an economic policy, a candidate, whatever, is so obviously superior that only some secretive cackling outsider could be to blame for the disparity of the results

Whether it's Clinton in 2016 or Trump in 2020 there's an elaborate conspiracy to explain it. Any excuse to avoid introspection.

If I am anything in life I am anti-bullshit. Nothing can move productively forward when based on nonsense.

So that's really the larger context here.

Being part of Jan 6 is a signal, being a repeated guest on an ideological show like Nick Fuentes, Russ Roberts, or Richard Wolff, these are signals.

Appearing on Rt? Not so much

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

#817

Post by cyberax »

sgc wrote: post #799
cyberax wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that all the additional requirements _always_ result in targeting Democratic voters. Always. For example, voting by mail is bad. Unless you are a senior (and thus more likely to vote Republican). And it doesn't take much to change the outcome of many elections. Just a 0.1% shift is often enough to flip the result.

So the fight needs to be to make things universal and fair, not to do away with everything. I agree there are many attempts to throw elections in the US, but I also think unreasonable resistance to measures that make a lot of sense on many levels would have far better results if it was spent making sure things were implemented correctly. I think a lot of people see all-out resistance as extremist and somewhat irratio…

> So the fight needs to be to make things universal and fair, not to do away with everything.

Like, automatic voter registration on license renewal? Nope. Denied if you're in a Republican state.

> I think a lot of people see all-out resistance as extremist and somewhat irrational

That's more restrictions _will_ be used to entrench Republicans even more. That's the simple reason for resistance.

And yes, the media does a poor job explaining this.

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

#818

Post by firesteelrain »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #809
firesteelrain wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are people supposed to understand these hard to follow and shifting rules?

The base rules are actually not very complicated. But any time you try to write them down, people will come along and interpret them to their own advantage, sometimes outright in the opposite direction. That's a people problem, to some extent, not purely a Wikipedia problem. (BRD is my favorite pet-peeve)

I am going to use this at work!

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

#819

Post by tsimionescu »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #800
tsimionescu wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they have the same amount of skin in the game. Given that the state can decide to kill you, or to force you to work, land is irrelevant in the grand scheme of the law's impact.

The response seems a little too emotional to be considered rational. Still, lets consider another perspective. Would you agree that people with more money are treated differently from people with less money? Money is not exactly property or power, but would you agree that they stand more to lose than a person without either? If they stand to lose more, they automatically have more skin in the game. In fact, if we cou…

No, this is an absurd idea. People with more money have more options - including easily leaving the country if they don't like its laws. In contrast, people with less money have less options and are more dependent on the state, and more at the state's whims if it decides to turn against them. For example, a wealthy person may be able to appeal a wrongful conviction, even taking things all the way up to international courts. A poor person will likely have to accept the initial decision of any judge. An increase of 50% in taxes will cost a wealthy person much more in pure monetary terms, but will have a much, much higher impact in quality of life for a poor person.

So, since laws and governance have a disproportionate impact on those with less money, I would say that, if anything, those with less money have more skin in the game. But I wouldn't put it like that myself - my position is that every person who lives in a country and is subject to its laws for a long enough time has, on balance, the same amount of "skin in the game". The only distinction related to the right to vote should beade based on the ability to take rational decisions (that is, while they still have just as much skin in the game, some people shouldn't be allowed to vote because they lack the ability to rationally understand the vote - but this only applies to children and to those with severe mental disabilities).

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

#820

Post by onli »

teddyh wrote: post #814
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how so many people are answering that they've had trouble! How about I look at some of those cases? Especially if it's relatively recent, I can take a look. Leave me a message here, or at my email address (see my HN info) , or on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kim_Bruning I'm not very active anymore, but I'll check in the next couple of days and see what I can do. Really to be able to help I gene…

> How about I look at some of those cases? Please note that, although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them. It’s always like this with Wikipedia detractors; I don’t know why, but it is. Complaints and horror stories galore, but nobody will link to any of it, preventing anybody from investigating what actually happened.

Because we/they have detached from the issue. It was a bad experience and thus it gets pushed aside. I also have my wikipedia deletionist story - the German wikipedia is among the worst there, way worse than the us-american - but it's not like I will keep an account active on a project with those awful people. So linking it isn't even all that easy.
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