He generally shows most of the signs of the misinformation accounts:
- Wants to repeatedly tell basically the same narrative and nothing else
- Narrative is fundamentally false
- Not interested in any kind of conversation or in learning that what he’s posting is backwards from the values he claims to profess
I also suspect that it’s not a coincidence that this is happening just as the Elon Musks of the world are ramping up attacks on Wikipedia, specially because it is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others, and tends to fight back legally if someone tries to interfere with the free speech or safety of its editors.
Anyway, YSK. I reported him as misinformation, but who knows if that will lead to any result.
Edit: Number of people real salty that I’m talking about this: Lots
I do the research and script writing for a documentary company. In 2023, I noticed that the pages of serial killers I’d been researching, started mentioning political affiliation in the top paragraph… but they all said Democrat (or socialst, communist sympathizer, anti-fascist, etc). Then, one of the murderers I was researching, who was literally a Republican politician who killed his wife , said Democrat and I had a team investigate. It got corrected, but we have no idea if it was one person or a group that changed the pages. Someone out there wants murderers to be associated with democrats.
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I don’t trust Wikipedia, but I do think they’re a good STARTING POINT for research, the problem comes when it’s used as the end-all be-all
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Can you be specific about this misinformation so I don’t just point fingers at anyone who doesn’t worship the ground Wikipedia walks on. Like what are they saying and why isn’t it true?
Quoting myself from elsewhere:
This is how modern social media propaganda works. One person says wikipedia is kowtowing to fascist governments and doxxing its members. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that $300 million “excess” went missing and no one knows where it went, implying that someone is skimming off money and we shouldn’t be donating because the whole thing is corrupt. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that wikipedia is slanting all its coverage to a pro-Western, pro-Israel slant and covering up the truth through a narrative enforcing task force. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion, someone else combs through their financials and finds out that the CEO is making some money, and uses phrases like “bleeding the foundation dry” or “all while content is created by volunteers.”
You can look through my profile to see the exchanges where people say all of those things and then I respond, if you want to see in depth where and how people are saying it, and my arguments for why it isn’t true.
I had heard a long time ago that Wikipedia donations are largely useless and haven’t actually gone to anything but profits in awhile. That second part however is demonstrably false with Wikipedia one of the few information outlets that CORRECTLY label Israel’s actions as genoicde.
Their financial statements are public: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
There’s no profit, since they are a nonprofit. They have a couple of years’ operating expenses saved up, which is nice. They’ve been giving away a lot of it to various research projects, and they pay everyone a comfortable salary, which is also nice. People in the comments have been assuring me that this is a sign that they’re incredibly corrupt, for example describing the research project thing as a bad thing (sponsoring “weird” research) or saying it’s a problem that they paid the CEO around $700k in one year.
Actually, they started out with the earlier claims like that they were friendly with fascists or that $300M went missing every year, and then only switched over to “their financials are good and they pay salaries, and that’s a problem, all they should need to pay is hosting” once all the earlier stuff failed to hit. It doesn’t sound like they’re hurting for money, but maybe being aggressive about soliciting donations is the reason they’re not hurting for money. They don’t get substantial income from anything other than donations, it looks like. But yes, if you wanted to support a project that really needs it, maybe the Internet Archive is a better place to start.
Who hates Wikipedia:
- Tech bros
- Russia
- Israel
- Other generic fascists
They don’t actually hate Wikipedia. They hold that it’s not a primary source for things that require citation, and that it’s not a great textbook.
Reading the Wikipedia page for optics is a bad way to learn optics.
It’s also difficult to cite as a source because you can’t actually specify who you’re citing, which is why Wikipedia, for research purposes, is a great way to get a quality overview and the terms you need, and then jump to its sources for more context and primary sources as you need them.
Encyclopedias in general are overviews or summaries of what they reference. Teachers would typically like you to reference something that isn’t a summary or overview when writing one, sincenthat what most of those reports are.
Who hates Wikipedia:
Russia
Is this even true? Has any Russian state official or organization indicated they give two shits about an English-centric US-hosted online encyclopedia? Ditto Israel.
Feels like every time I read a “bad actors on the internet” story, I get someone in the comments insisting a foreign intelligence officer is secretly pulling all the strings. As though American propagandists and industrial scale media magnets aren’t willing or capable of doing the job themselves.
Look no further than wikipedia to provide that information haha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_pages_banned_in_Russia
Hardly unique to Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Censorship_of_Wikipedia
And hardly exhaustive, either. The “people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia” includes two high profile cases of Saudi citizens, yet there’s no “Pages Banned by Saudi Arabia” when there obviously should be.
Hell, even the site’s own founding members have come at Wikipedia on its own terms, with Larry Sanger reporting the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI for distributing child pornography. For some reason, I never see “Larry Sanger” listed explicitly as an enemy of Wikipedia with the frequency I see Vladimir Putin indicted.
State actors often pose as normal editors on wikipedia, in order to try and cover for things they do. Corporations often do the same thing, via their PR firms.
Its pretty well documented on the WP logs.
I’m not super involved, but I believe it’s possible to engage with Wikipedia ethically and well as a PR firm or the like. But being honest is part one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PR_Professionals_%26_Editing
A bunch of these state actors are western politicians and their staff/campaigns, though.
The Evil Slavic Menace isn’t out there scrubbing pages for a bunch of state legislators, MPs, and judicial appointees. That’s just the goons of the local political parties.
Ditto Israel.
Lol. You should learn the differences between russians and zios.
- https://electronicintifada.net/content/ei-exclusive-pro-israel-groups-plan-rewrite-history-wikipedia/7472
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups
- https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240620-zionist-lobby-group-labelled-propaganda-and-misinformation-source-by-wikipedia/
No its true actually. Vladimir (the impaler) Putin and President Xi got together and had a secret meeting all about how Wikipedia is the greatest threat to their total dictatorship of Earth, because its the only thing keeping the American citizens so free and open minded and a place where people can go to learn about forbidden topics like Tank Girl and Winnie the Pooh. Putin got mad because he read the article about Grizzly bears and it said he’d probably die if he tried to wrestle one, so he spun up his special government botnet from his elite hacker force and activated his army of Tankie sleeper agents on Lemmy to make an attack on the Freedom of Information Act (thats a special law that Biden made to try to protect wikipedia and keep free speech safe).
this is a joke about foreign influence on Lemmy, not about Wikipedia itself. I like wikipedia
As long as people keep in mind what Wikipedia is, there should be no issue. There’s a reason teachers never allow it as a source, but it is great as an introduction to any topic, from which point you can further your own research.
I’m pretty sure it’s Elon.
