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
Wikipedia source of truth?
That’s pretty bold.
I still want to have a copy of it when the world ends and I somehow survive. So I would say it is a decent source of truth.
Blanket statement is the argument of the uneducated.
I agree, but that… kind of seems like a blanket statement.
Wikipedia source of truth?
That’s pretty
boldpeer reviewedFYFY.
tiny penises in your pants?
that’s pretty cold.
This seems like an attempt at vote manipulation or brigading. Reddit doesn’t allow it, is it allowed here or something?
Wikipedia is only a source for truth for people that either don’t know what it’s protecting or are in the genocidal cult it is protecting.
What cult? And what is Wikipedia protecting?
I’m in like 5 genocidal cults at this particular moment. You’ll need to be more specific.
are in the genocidal cult it is protecting
I’m fascinated. Explain?
The person you’re responding to has their own crazy agenda against Linux, so don’t expect a rational discussion.
I mean Linux is fucking annoying or rather the users are annoying. Everytime the word windows gets mentioned there are dozens of people talking about Linux even if that has nothing to do with the topic
They also found time to say, “Both sides of US politics are full of shit and balance each other out to distract us from our real problems.”
What a perfectly natural thing to say, in conjunction with suddenly hating on Wikipedia right at this particular moment.
“Both sides of US politics are full of shit and balance each other out to distract us from our real problems.”
If by this a person means something akin to, “No warfare except class warfare,” then I might agree. There are important differences between the Republicans and Democrats, but ultimately both take most of their funding from billionaires, and that’s at odds with what the working class needs.
If instead it’s an excuse to be disengaged from what’s happening or to excuse voting for awful people, then no, I can’t agree.
Oh yeah Op was really trying to get people to go and downvote a user without even telling us who they are…
I’m not even going to touch the insane nonsense you spouted in the second half.
It just so happens that they picked things to accuse me of, for no reason at all, which overlap with things I could get banned for.
Must be a coincidence.
A single issue spam account (Linux sucks is all they post) acting dodgy?
I can’t believe that they would ever try something so underhanded.
Why don’t you post some of your weird Linux trolling outside your sad little echo chamber?
Lol you will get roasted even worse than here, is the answer. Some people have the saddest lives.
You know what an echo chamber is and ask that question. lol
Honestly hilarious that this is the only reply you responded to. Hit a nerve?
Aw poor little baby mad about Linux made a he-man Linux haters club. Sad no one will join it 😭
I guess you’re the person OP is talking about.
You just described the average Tankie around here lmao
I am pretty convinced that .ml is legitimately used as a Russian troll training ground before they get promoted to Facebook and reddit.
Meanwhile, at .ml:
Since Pi is infinite and non-repeating, would that mean any finite sequence of non-repeating numbers should appear somewhere in Pi?
In the comments they go into why it’s not even true that an infinite non-repeating sequence must contain all other finite sequences (10100100010000[…] example not containing any other digits). So it would follow that they wouldn’t contain all infinite sequences either. I think.
Even the most extreme extremist of echo chambers will have benign random conversations. Singling out a random blurb of conversation, without even any source link, is just cherry picking.
It’s even worse when you link to the actual comments.
https://lemmy.ml/post/24032724
They are having an extended conversation about a question which has an actual real mathematical answer. The correlation between what mathematics knows about it, and the things the lemmy.ml people are trying to say about it with a tone of voice that implies they have some knowledge and you need to listen to them, is almost nonexistent.
There are, to be fair, a bunch of highly-upvoted explanations of the real answer, which is that we don’t know. But there are also plenty of top-level comments getting lots of upvotes, which say things like:
Yes, this is implied. It’s also why many people use digits of pi as passwords and make the password hint “easy as pi”.
Yeah. This is a plot point used in a few stories, eg Carl Sagan’s “Contact”
Yes
Yes.
And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.
Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi
It’s actually extremely popular, it looks like, to just come up with some kind of random nonsense and then for one of the lemmy.ml people to be telling other lemmy.ml people that your random nonsense is the answer they’re looking for. When it comes out of the realm of politics and into the realm of mathematics, it suddenly looks really jarring and weird that they’re all so committed to sitting around handing out wrong answers to each other all day.
Are we saying it’s an echo chamber, or a literal propaganda training ground commissioned by the Russian government?
I’m not sitting here saying that one random thread I spotted when I jumped over there totally disproves either of those. It’s more of an amusing counterexample. I would LOVE if people would stop doing this thing where they expect you to defend an argument you didn’t make, I feel like I’ve pointed out it on this site 3 times in as many days.
That’s actually a really good way to illustrate what is wrong with lemmy.ml.
On math stack exchange:
Let me summarize the things that have been said which are true and add one more thing.
- 𝜋 is not known to have this property, but it is expected to be true.
- This property does not follow from the fact that the decimal expansion of 𝜋 is infinite and does not repeat.
On lemmy.ml:
0.101001000100001000001 . . .
I’m infinite and non-repeating. Can you find a 2 in me?
You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere
Why couldn’t you?
Because you’d need to search through an infinite number of digits (unless you have access to the original formula)
And:
Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi
And:
Yes.
And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.
All heavily upvoted.
IDK if you’re allowed to link to lemmy.ml here or what, but the post ID is 24032724. The response to “You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere” - “You can, it’s literally the way the number is defined.” - is +8/-1. Plus the original guy pointing out the 10100[…] sequence is +21/-1. What are you saying is the issue? If it’s “they’ll just upvote anything that sounds right”, I think you’re gonna find that’s true on reddit, and true here, as well.
I’m saying the issue is that on math stack exchange, the people who actually understand the issues involved are generally the ones talking and being listened to. On lemmy.ml, the guy saying you can’t prove that a sequence of 0s and 1s doesn’t contain a 2 has +5 upvotes. You can look over the comments, and even more so than for politics, it’s just really apparent that there are quite a lot of people who have no idea what they’re talking about exchanging confident proclamations to each other about what it is that’s going on.
I’m not trying to hate on anyone for not knowing something. I’m hating on them for thinking they know something, and need to teach it to everyone else, when they are mistaken and haven’t made even the basic effort beyond “I just thought for 2 seconds and decided this is how it works” to figure out what’s going on.
On
lemmy.mlpretty much all reddit-like boards.You can’t really compare a stack exchange board about a specific topic with general purpose boards.
There are plenty of Reddit-like boards which feature people who generally know what they’re talking about. Reddit used to be one, years ago, remember jokes about how the comments were a better way to learn the truth of the story than reading the article?
There are places on Lemmy that are like that, too. Weirdly enough, this comments section is a good example. The people voting are extremely capable to identify the bullshit and downvote it, it’s actually very accurate. Just have a look around. It’s not always like that. Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, and some of the tech-focused communities are notable places where the idiots outnumber the rest of the people, but it’s not at all a universal feature of Reddit-like general purpose forums. It just takes a little while to build the culture that way, and a lot of Lemmy is actively hostile to building it because the wrong people are so aggressive about pushing the wrongness, and it kind of chases people away unless they’re cool with that.
I was thinking earlier about how fucked we are in the U.S., that the MAGA contingent, and to a degree the Dem contingent as well, have accepted mentalities that are incorrect and actively reject correction. That people (the population in general) are being trained to reject the fundamentals of logic, and associate all opposing viewpoints with an evil “other”.
Meanwhile actually at .ml: let’s deify a murderer because he killed somebody we don’t like and he’s fucking gorgeous. Nevermind that he’s a rich antiwoke Musk-lover, murder is cool.
Bro, why are you attacking people unrelated to the post’s topic?
Weird, seems like it’s completely related to me.
Yeah, there’s kind of a Poe’s Law situation.
A lot of the sincere tankies, though, at least want to talk about what they’re into, and have elaborate reasons why it’s all true. The low-effort “I can’t even be bothered to try to mount a defense, I just wanted to say Wikipedia is doxing its users and kowtowing to fascist governments, and now that I’ve said it my task is done” behavior is a little more indicative of a disingenuous propaganda account in my experience.
elaborate reasons why it’s all true
Usually it’s “just read these 10 hundred-year-old books” that they absolutely have not read.
And if you ask them to make a point from those books, they can’t. Apparently they’re only comprehensible as a whole.
This is an excellent suggestion for how to deal with this. I can’t thank you enough.
That’s now poe’s law, it would be Occam’s razor.
The most likely scenario here is not many puppet accounts spreading sarcasm or parody but rather that there are many actors that all true believers in what they are all saying. They sound the same because they are feeding off the same talking point.
You’re right, I was misremembering Poe’s law. We need a law for “there is no point of view so idiotic that someone won’t be out there passionately proclaiming it, not because they are a propaganda troll, but because they really believe it.”
Maybe we could call it Bucket’s Law
That sounds like the Dunning Kruger Effect.
deleted by creator
Examples? Links?
Lurking makes me think it’s
Thanks! Blocked em
Wow. Thanks for sharing that profile… that is dedication to the niche issue of smearing Wikipedia.
Money makes the world go round
I’m looking for a job
The last thread OP participated in features a comment from OP countering something said about Wikipedia by wikipediasuckscoop. Looks like that’s who.
Doesn’t LW have a rule against desinformation and asking for reliable sources since the cat vegan food affair?
What!
It only applies to misinformation that might cause significant harm to some organism, which doesn’t apply to this.
Personally, I don’t think that LW should make the attempt to police misinformation completely, since it’s sort of a judgement call a lot of the time. I think it’s better that people be able to argue out whether something is true or false, or intended disingenuously or not, all on their own without the mods needing to decide for them, because misinformation has such a big grey area that you can’t make an objective determination and be right about it 100% of the time.
Yes, but for evidence to the contrary, we elected Trump.
I proactively remove disinfo accounts from piefed.social. Banned.
strongly recommend you look into Phillip’s own activity: habitually stalking users, accusing them of spreading misinformation, and hiding their true intentions. his presence is toxic as fuck, and I don’t trust their “analysis” one iota.
So are you the same person as the linuxsucks and Wikipedia accounts?
Because that’s the vibe I’m getting from your posting.
Tbh I think that the Linux sucks guy is a different person
no. but your research is about as good as philips
I think directly accusing people of spreading misinformation, explaining why, and letting them defend themselves if they want to, is a pretty good activity to do. Mostly, I only do it when something really annoys me, like for example someone claiming a free encyclopedia project for the internet is supporting genocide, kowtowing to fascist regimes, and many of their editors are quitting because it isn’t even safe to contribute to the project because they will dox you whenever asked.
this is not the first time you have made spurious accusations of spreading misinformation. it’s toxic as fuck. I wish you’d just get out of the fediverse instead of launching new instances when people start to ban your account.
I don’t think that LW should make the attempt to police misinformation completely, since it’s sort of a judgement call a lot of the time.
I agree, but ironically you see this reason used quite a lot of !news@lemmy.world
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com has quite a few examples
Musk is getting desperate.
This really could be any one of thousands of people on lemmy.
Honestly. Could be any user on any platform, Lemmy not excluded.
Misinformation… you mean lies?
I heard the guy who wrote Lemmy ate a GMO tomato, and enjoyed it.
“PSA I reported an account because they have bad arguments in my opinion” seems like a terrible precedent of a post for this sub. Why are people upvoting this junk.
Where’s a better place to put it, do you think?
I think a related community would be https://lemmy.ca/c/fediverselore
I specifically didn’t pick that one because it’s discouraged to post about a situation you are directly involved with there.
I couldn’t really find a good place to post about it, to be honest. This community seemed arguably okay for this kind of random stuff, and I do think it’s worth talking about this kind of thing, if we’re going to have a social network which isn’t overflowing with propaganda garbage. Also, a bunch of the people upvoting this post seem to agree with me.
Sure. I didn’t know you already put some thought into this. And I’m not in charge here. We can leave this up to the mods of YSK. If they decide to keep this post around, it’s probably alright.
In a DM to the mods.
in the garbage
Stay scratched
You should just report, block, and move on. If someone is a regular offender, their instance admin can just ban them. If they operate their own instance, they can be defederated.
It’s good to identify bad actors, but there’s no shortage of people with dumb opinions (even on Lemmy), and pointing them out like this only gives them more attention—exactly the kind of thing they want.
OP doesn’t identify bad actors. They say bad actors exist which is next to useless
Fuck that approach. It just shields trolls and other bad actors from consequence
Notice how I said “report” as the first action. If you want to keep seeing their bullshit, that’s your business, but the Fediverse works by not giving those people an audience.
If you want to be their own personal poltergeist, haunting their every comment, that’s your choice, but I would never recommend anyone waste their sanity and emotions on a bad actor here on Lemmy any more than they have to.
If literally everyone did what you recommend, that would be a feasible approach. But for various reasons that’s obviously not gonna happen. What does happen when people try that is the troll continues to shit up the community for everyone else and a few people reporting them once sometimes does next to nothing. Hence you get someone like linkerbaan or universalmonk shitting in the pool for months without consequence. If you don’t block them, you can continue to report them and/or call them out, which leads to shit actually happening.
Like I said, “reporting” is the thing people should be doing first. But OP is so bothered by whatever person’s bullshit that they felt the need to make a PSA about it, and that to me says they need to just block and move on with their life. I would give the same recommendation to other people who are getting fixated on individual bad actors.
Trolls don’t deserve to live in your head rent-free.
The first step to solving any problem that takes cooperation to solve is raising awareness. A single report from a person here and there is not that.
I think you’re more hung up up on analyzing the psychology of those trying to raise that awareness. You may not be reading them accurately, but even if you are I don’t see that mattering very much. It’s not your call what is mentally healthy for everyone else.
Blocking shields you from seeing their comments. But others will still see them. You’ll be unable to call them out the second time they lie if you do it like that. Which is fair enough if that’s what you wanna do, but it’s not a solution to the current issue that op is describing.
And that’s why reporting is such an important step that we should all be doing. That’s why I mentioned it first. Blocking is for your benefit, but it’s not strictly necessary, and the spirit of my comment is to let the admins handle it without giving them engagement or more exposure.
So you can be a vigilante if you want, but with the number of people out there who have dumb opinions, it seems like a waste of time to try to play admin without actual admin powers.
It’s good to identify bad actors
Couldn’t agree more.
Then why are you trying to be cute and not call out the username (or usernames if they are using alts)? This doesn’t identify jack, just says that someone exists doing something nonspecifically bad towards wikipedia.
As important as Wikipedia is, there are a ton of legitimate problems with the site and community moderators. Some of the drama that comes out of there is downright otherworldly. Without examples it’s hard to take what you’re saying seriously.
Edit: Either there’s enough direct screenshotted evidence that this needs to be a specific call for admins to ban this person, or this just comes across as absurd escalation of some stupid internet debate.
Second edit: it’s wikipediasuckscoop
Do we really need a warning for someone so obviously biased? Next you’ll be warning us that madthumbs might have some reservations about the usefulness of linux.
I think it’s useful to talk about. I’m not sure why so many people are coming out lecturing me that this should be a forbidden topic for discussion.
a forbidden topic for discussion.
I’m not getting that from the responses. What I’ve seen is
- being vague is not effective
- bad opinions aren’t the same as objective misinformation
- the username checks out
- it’s pointless to platform these people
These all seem to reiterate the idea that “this is not a good post” and not “this subject is taboo”.
But, if you’re messing this up, does that jeopardize your own efforts?
I’ve literally seen no one say that it’s forbidden. Maybe one of the comment chains from someone I already have blocked does, but there’s only
fourtwo of those.I see plenty of people saying this is a stupid post. A post that is uselessly vague. A post that is almost entirely purposeless.
I understand wanting to avoid brigading, but as it stands this post amounts to “You all should know that I reported someone (I won’t say who, tee hee) for posting something that I think is misinformation about Wikipedia (I won’t say what, tee hee). It’s really bad, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. This person I won’t name is just the worst. You need to know they’re the worst. But you don’t need to know who they are or what they said, that’s not important! Also I have vague consipiratorial feelings about anyone who would speak ill of Wikipedia after Musk said bad things about it, because no one could possibly have grievances or concerns with Wikipedia that are still valid despite Musk’s derangement.”
If you wanted to spread awareness, you should have named the problem user. If you wanted to force the admins into action you should have named the problem user.
If you are willing to give the admins time to handle things properly, especially during the fucking holidays where they likely have other things to do, instead of needlessly raising an alarm on something pitifully small… then you should have waited a few days for them to do something before running off to play vigilante with this post.
If you want to make people waste time trying to evaluate if you’re a nutter, thin skinned, or otherwise blowing smoke… you make a post like this one.
Either you had enough evidence to make this warning/call out post legitimately, and then you make it with names, screenshots, and fucking receipts… or you give admins time to respond and sit until they show they won’t do something.
This weak, vague post just says that you’re too impatient to let the admins work, you don’t trust them to do what you think is the right thing, but you’re also chickenshit that they might ban you for talking about it. Rather than post this from a throwaway made on another instance you make this useless thing.
TL;DR- People are telling you that this attempt to “warn” people is worthless without actionable info.
6 different people have reported my post, so presumably they think it should be forbidden, at least.
Hundreds of people have upvoted this post, so presumably they think it’s a worthwhile post. You are welcome to your opinion that it isn’t, of course.
I’ve run across Wikipedia hate as well on Lemmy.
I have never. You are spreading misinformation now. MAAAAADDDSSSSS!
That’s a one issue account just report him and leave comments calling out the behavior.
The issue will fix it self.
I don’t think it will, though. I’ve reported the misinformation, and it’s still up as of right now.
I honestly am not even sure that mods should be in the habit of deciding that things are “probably” misinformation and removing them. In practice, they are not in that habit, so it’s not a solution. And even if they were, I certainly don’t think that the whole topic should be banned for discussion among the rest of us.
Dude. It’s Christmas, and even if it wasn’t, mods aren’t a 24/7 presence.
If something gets seen and handled in a day or two, it’s fine for anything that isn’t illegal or dangerous to the instance.
Not that the mods/admins have to agree with your interpretation of whatever it is being misinformation to the kind of standard that needs intervention, but there’s other reasons it could still be up that are entirely unrelated
If something gets seen and handled in a day or two, it’s fine for anything that isn’t illegal or dangerous to the instance.
Not that the mods/admins have to agree with your interpretation of whatever it is being misinformation
Completely agree on all fronts. Personally, the idea “just report it, don’t say anything, mods will deal with it with their powers, it’s not for you to make these decisions or talk to one another about these things” seems kind of paternalistic on both fronts. There’s no guarantee that they’ll get it right 100% of the time, and even if they did, it would be good for us to talk about what’s going on when there is an issue that does (or doesn’t, if I am off base about this) impact the nature of the discussion on the network.
I agree, and I think you approached this well.
Thanks! I mean, it has hundreds of upvotes, clearly there are some people who are interested in talking about the topic and hearing what I have to say. I think the number of people who want to dogpile various lengths of essays at me about how entirely unreasonable all of this is, on my part, is maybe not correlated with the community’s overall reaction to it. Which in itself is pretty interesting.
My guy it’s fucking Christmas day.
The post itself is 2 hours old right now.Your response to that post is a whole whopping 4 hours old right now. Allow the admins to have at least a small grace period where they aren’t sitting right at the controls. Lemmy is nowhere near as big as Reddit, with large admin and mod teams able to take shifts.I don’t think moderator action is the right way to handle this. I reported it so they can be aware, but I think community discussion is the right way to handle this.
you just want to spread mistrust among the users.
These are random, anonymous accounts. Not trusting you is the default mode. The fuck are you talking about?
Interesting all this WP news I’m hearing today. Last week I downloaded the entirety of Wikipedia. Anyone can do it, the base archive (no pictures) is only about 25G, although the torrent is slow AF, took me… almost 2 weeks to download it.
I did this because I feel like this might be the last chance to get a version of it that has any vestige of the old order in it, the old order being “trying to stick to ideals and express truth rather than rewriting history to the fascists’ specifications.”
I’d love to be wrong, but if I’m not, I feel like it will potentially be a good reference in the future if needed.
This is in the news because Wikipedia is refusing to rewrite history to the fascists’ specifications.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrdydkypv7o
It’s possible that India will succeed at eroding by a little bit Wikipedia’s resistance to having things rewritten because of various powerful people demanding it. But, if you’re looking for an organization that’s resistant against those demands, I don’t think you will be able to find one that is anywhere near the equal of Wikipedia in terms of the scale at which it operates combined with the resistance it puts up when people do this.
Shit. I better donate.
I donate every year and they made it easier than ever this year if you use Apple Pay or anything equivalent. Like 15 seconds and that includes chhosing amount.
edit: for us with the lazys
Thanks for posting this. I just gave my entire Apple Cash balance. I had no idea what I was gonna use it for and this seemed likea worthy cause. Wikipedia just got $140 because of you.
That’s interesting and terrifying all at once. If the Indian government is successful, it will basically set the precedent for other powerful entities such as autocrats, oligarchs, and corporations to also force Wikipedia to edit their content to suit their desires. I donate frequently and will keep making sure they can win.
Wow, they really sued the Wikimedia Foundation instead of trying to find a reliable source to refute the article’s claims. I looked up the edits they made. They removed content, citing various Wikipedia policies that govern how the article should be phrased.
In general, so long as the information is presented in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner and cites a reliable source, it can go in the article. Wikipedia’s job is to summarize what reliable sources say about a subject.
So all ANI would’ve needed to do was find a reliable source (preferably more than one) refuting the claims they want to refute. The most they’d likely be able to do is put both points of view in the article rather than removing one point of view entirely from the article, which is what they were trying to do.
Instead, they went to court about it.
Kiwix is a self hostable option for this, and you can get other content databases as well, like wikiHow, iFixit, and Khan Academy.
The downloads are much faster than two weeks too.
Just some context, Hetzner gave the shaft to the Kiwix project and took down their content servers without any apparent notice (Kiwix’s side of the story at least), and they had to rebuild it with another provider.
Interesting, that’s too bad. Seems like it’s not an uncommon occurrence for Hetzner.
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.
On the contrary, seems like a lot of disinformation accounts are trying to elevate Wikipedia as a credible source. Seems to be coming from the same people pushing pro-western narratives. Which isn’t surprising, as western governments have been caught funding mass editing to promote western narratives.
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-state-sponsored-disinformation/
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the effort to elevate Wikipedia as “credible” has been ramped up during this genocide. The Zionists teach classes to their people on how to manipulate the site for their narrative.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups
I don’t know exactly what is going on with WikiPedia right this moment, mostly because I am neither glued to the news nor to WikiPedia, and I have no idea who this user you talk about is or what they are saying. However, WikiPedia isnt exactly a 100% trustworthy source, and it never really was.
Calling WikiPedia a “force for truth” is kind of silly, in my opinion. It can be helpful with basic information or finding potential sources, but it is definitely not something you should just immediately take everything on the site at face value. Within the last maybe 10 years or so, the credibility of its sources have started to come into question, at least on some of their recently authored/edited articles. It certainly doesnt help that literally anyone can edit most pages, and that WikiPedia is not a verifiably neutral information source on most things. What I mean by this is that, WikiPedia might list both positive and negative reception about a certain film or video game, for example, but they usually wont mention whether the negative points are outliers or whether there is overwhelmingly more positive reception except if there is a controversy section. This gives a surface appearance of being neutral, but actually skews toward whichever side is the dissenting opinion. For video games and film, they at least list reviews which can kind of mitigate this, but on articles regarding history or art, you cant exactly put reviews on historian/artist opinions. This can lead (and has lead) to some instances of sources quoting themselves (which I think is against WikiPedia rules?) and other hilarity.
I remember some guys in high school altered the wikipedia page for the high school or principal or something and it was up in its altered hilarious state for a few days before it got reverted. I always think about that when reading Wikipedia pages. I might be reading a Wikipedia page during a window where the information is maybe disingenuous. Always good to be on your toes.
I’ve heard from a few people that there are people that edit a lot of articles with a lot of bias and have been getting away with it. It’d be interesting for a journalist to really go into it.
I’ve heard from a few people that there are people that edit a lot of articles with a lot of bias and have been getting away with it. It’d be interesting for a journalist to really go into it.
This is definitely the case for certain niche topics. A few power editors can push agendas as long as they have a handful of reliable sources, no end of time, and a good knowledge of Wiki’s bureaucratic processes.
Love wiki, but don’t take it for more than a very useful encyclopedia - as the name suggests.
No
It can be helpful with basic information or finding potential sources, but it is definitely not something you should just immediately take everything on the site at face value.
This I definitely agree with. Some of the rest of your message is, in my opinion, not exactly how it works, but all of this is besides the point. What I am saying is misinformation is that WP doxxed its editors to an Indian court, kowtows to any fascist government that asks them to, or is protecting a genocidal cult. All of those were claimed and then when we tried to talk about the claims with the person posting them, that person either evaporated or dissembled about it.
If someone posted an article saying that anyone can edit Wikipedia so take it with a grain of salt, I would never have cared and probably would have upvoted them.
There will always be issues with Wikipedia, but overwhelmingly it is a useful and reliable resource. Also, “its sources” are any reputable journalism from around the world.
Well as I said it, isn’t completely useless. I mean, sources aren’t always reputable. People make mistakes, people act in bad faith, things happen.
I was just saying that WikiPedia is not a “bastion of truth,” because it is very susceptible to wrong information. Sure, the information may be correct most of the time on popular high traffic pages, but on low traffic pages, or pages that used to be low traffic and suddenly became high traffic because of some topical issue, can you really be sure that you aren’t reading wrong or biased information? That is all I am bringing up. I think any person with a brain can realize this, but I wanted to be sure to mention it regardless, as many people seem to not meet that low specification.
It brings tons of information to the masses, all over the world, in every language, for free, without ads. Shut the fuck up.
Yes it does. But not all of that information is always true. Wikipedia pages are vandalized all the time, people quote sources that are later revealed as made up or not credible, these are all things that happen everywhere, WikiPedia is not immune to this. That is why I said WikiPedia is not a “force for truth.” It can be correct, but can you guarantee that every time you go to WikiPedia, the information on any given page will always be 100% correct? This is all I meant.
i would call being resistant to misinformation, being a force against misinformation, is that enough to warrant calling it a force for truth?
They do it for free, too, what more you can ask for? Well you can unreasonably ask them, these people, humans, fallible biological machines, to “be” correct 100% of the time, even when moderators may not be available, even when people didn’t yet report misinfo, something you’d never ask anyone else to do or be.
Oh wait you did ask that, so I think there’s a very good reason to believe you don’t really care for what you preach.
Do you ever go back to a WikiPedia article after you read it to check if it has been updated? Yeah, didn’t think so. Most people don’t. Thats why there is danger in just believing everything on WikiPedia because its on there and its free. Its not a bad resource, but it isn’t always a good source either.
But obviously you and others have some weird fetish regarding WikiPedia, so I guess this is where the conversation stops. People here be making it out like I am saying WikiPedia is evil and that is definitely not what I am saying, but I suppose on Lemmy it doesn’t really matter. People believe whatever they want to regardless.
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And some people really don’t like that it does that.
All those words… not one article of falsehood to back it up with.
You are allowed to freely link wikipedia here, and post screenshots.
Go ahead. Hit us with some examples. You likely have plenty of pages in mind already, so this shouldn’t take long.
I hear a lotta hearsay…
I have a different perspective. I do think they are a force for truth, because it is a forum for openly sharing information. Not all of the information that is shared will neccesarily be truthful or correct, but as long as it remains open and collaborative, the truth will prevail.
Another point is that the sources for the information are cited (or at least requested and notated when missing), and it must always be the responsibility of the reader to check and understand the sources.
but it is definitely not something you should just immediately take everything on the site at face value.
I don’t think this should ever be the expectation for any source of information, really.
