Wikipediocracy

If you want to see for yourself the seedy underbelly of Wikipedia, check out http://wikipediocracy.com/

"No one doxxing others in that particular clique is going to do it from anything other than a burner account." This is incorrect. many do it with accounts linked to their real onwiki profiles. jps is an example and I provided a link to unambiguous doxxing: https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=14172 They've been doing it since 2016 when they started an" alt-right identification thread": https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=8031 Others use accounts linked to their onwiki personas to ask for doxx. e.g. AndyTheGrump is a well-known user who posts in the "alt-right identification thread" about someone they dislike and getting a quick response. Here's AndyTheGrump asking for doxx on a user named "BlueGraf". https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=8031&p=3… Quickly followed up with that individuals full name and employment. And many editors/admins participate in those doxxing threads to gawk or have fun under their real usernames.

Exactly. Even if they didn't pay writers (which might create its own problems), they could do far more to create and publicise a user-friendly scheme to provide volunteers with access to paywalled sources, digitised books etc. They could spend some of those tens of millions on that. But there too they rely on begging and volunteer labour: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library It speaks volumes that even this rudimentary project, the Wikipedia Library, was originally initiated by a volunteer - for ten years, nobody at WMF seems to have had the brains to think of it. Supporting the broad mass of volunteers (rather than a few snouts in the trough) has never been near the top of the WMF list of priorities. I suspect the volunteers are largely regarded as amazingly convenient and useful idiots. The lion's share of WMF money has always been spent on software engineering, much of it done by former volunteers who sucked up enough to first land a WMF job and then prove their engineering incompetence (as in the VisualEditor debacle): http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-free-just-pa… https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/25/wikipedia_peasants_revolt/

Additional context: https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14555 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Meta-… https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1rllcdg/megathread_wikimed… Apparent JS worm payload: https://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D0%A3%D1%87%D0%B0%D1%81%D1…

also here, I see now: https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14242

This seems to corroborate on the veracity: https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5417

> Among other details, he falsely suggested MacMasters had helped develop lighting systems for the London Underground. > "These [claims] would get picked up in different types of media, I would cite them, and they would become fact," Alex says. This is very funny, I can understand why the hoaxer kept on adding to the article. https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11454&p=3…

In 2014, the Google Knowledge Graph was a good way for Google to redirect Wikipedia page views to its own ecosystem. Good job Google! https://wikipediocracy.com/2014/01/06/googles-knowledge-graph-killing-…

Kind of disappointing to see so much fanboyism of the Wikimedia Foundation. Try reading up on hr.wikipedia.org (the Croatian Wikipedia), which is run by illiterate Nazis (and it shows). Or maybe something more directly related to the WMF, like the research by Gregory Kohs: https://wikipediocracy.com/2014/07/06/look-whos-visiting-the-wmf/

Related http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-free-just-pa… and https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/ Also, look at how much they spend for nothing https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries

I somewhat agree with your examples, except Wikipedia. It has no business being much more than a server farm and software tweaker. That's not something that needs large ongoing investment by many people. http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-free-just-pa…

> Many complaints are of the form 'there is an cabal of admins who engage in a conspiracy against me!' Well, it turned out to be true that wikipedia admins had a place to discuss contributors and coordinate actions against them. It made quite a ruckus at the time. A compendium of wikipedia criticism has been posted here: http://wikipediocracy.com/2015/08/16/a-compendium-of-wikipedia-critici…

Here's a review of Wikipedia's math articles by a mathematician: http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/10/20/elementary-mathematics-on-wikiped… If you don't already know what you are reading, you can't distinguish knowledge from nonsense.

Others have written similar things, like http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/09/21/wikipedia-keeping-it-free-just-pa… .

> do you know what I got the one-way IBAN for? Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=980273295#Proposal:_One-way… Your fellow Wikipedians had had enough of your and BHG's squabbling, and they decided it was primarily you needling her. And yes, even in the brief exchange in the thread there, BHG comes off like an absolute prick. In no way does BHG's awful behaviour allow you to excuse your own. See also your own words "Upon reflection, that was indeed a needlessly inflammatory comment I made. I apologise for that." Perhaps you can accept you've made more than one needlessly inflammatory comment towards BHG? * Here you made a snide little comment exclusively about BHG where she'd see it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27… * Here you accused her of gaslighting: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_… * BHG then made a thuggish and threatening post on your user page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Chris.sherlock&am… BHG later characterised this like "oh but he was trolling me and I merely asked him one time on his talk page to stop (which is allowed)", which is bollocks because the "one time" is a long, angry screed written in a menacing tone. But if you want to go no-contact with someone who's clearly bad for you to be…

That twitter thread is garbage start to finish. It starts with 'wikipedia started out in a basement on a shoestring, so clearly all the millions spent two decades later is being pissed into the wind', which is absurd. ...then attacks SERCH claiming they've done nothing but release 'youtube videos with 50 views', attacks them for not having produced any within the last year (maybe their grant ended?) when if one google "SERCH foundation" they'd quickly see "Our signature program is Vanguard: Conversations with Women of Color in STEM, an online platform and monthly web series focused on women of color in STEM." and further: > WHAT WE DO > Produce a live web-series with timely and relevant content > Celebrate women of color with weekly #WCWinSTEM features > Publish original content written by and for women of color in STEM > Foster support and networking via our online platform > Convene as a community virtually and at in-person events > Advocate for ourselves + our STEM interests ....and then the big bad boogeymonster really blows its dog whistle when the author associates a foundation distributing grants to journalists who are people of color with "bankrolling the inescapable American culture war." You hear that sound? That's the sound of my eyes rolling, hard. Grants to people of color who work in journalism is furthering a "American culture war." Gosh, those pesky people of color, spreading their "culture war." The author of the thread then mentions Guy Macon,…

> I'm interested in hearing what parts of wikipedia (and which wikipedia) you think have been turned into a propaganda channel. As to "which Wikipedia" the answer is that of the versions I frequent - English, Dutch, German, Swedish and French - the English-language one seems to be the most affected. Native German and French speakers (who are more likely to have those versions at #1) may want to comment on whether my assessment is correct. As to "what parts" the answer is less clear since this is a moving target. Anything related to politics is a clear target for ideologically-motivated editors so those parts are a good example but it does not stop there. Articles related to current affairs, media and culture have attracted activist editors as well. There are plenty of studies which show Wikipedia is politically biased to the "left" [1,2,3,4,5,6], this is not simply an issue of a few parts of the site having been taken over. [1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Do-Experts-or-Collective-Intelli… ("Harvard study: Wikipedia articles are more left-wing than Encyclopedia Britannica") [2] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/17-028_e7788722-408f-4… ("Harvard researchers: left-wing editors are more active and partisan on Wikipedia") [3] http://wikipediocracy.com/2018/08/26/wikipedia-sources-methods/ ("top-cited news outlets on Wikipedia are mainly left-wing") [4]…

> That's not to say that Wikipedia doesn't have it's issues, it has them, but jumping from there to something that could very well be described as a conspiracy theory, is reaching a bit much. You jumped to conspiracy theory. You said all. I did not. The editors simply have a bias that affects how they accept and offer contributions. These biases show especially in politically charged topics and you have to identify and check them, often they are factually wrong or misleading. I did not say all articles have this bias, but it is prevalent and makes Wikipedia unusable for any political research, unless you scrutinize all sources and do additional source finding that Wikipedia omitted on purpose because it didn't align with it's viewpoints. There are niche wikis, but Conservapedia exists to counter Wikipedia's bias on certain topics. They have a page I linked to which lists a lot of these biases, but it's barely an exhaustive list. You can find instances like these on nearly every political page. This is not some unfounded conspiracy theory as you suggest, Harvard has done a study on this as well as other…

> That some sociopath gains access to the perl6 repo and replaces all the code with a shellscript that "sudo rm -rf /"'s? No, that some sociopath gains access to the perl6 repo and introduces subtle, plausibly deniable backdoors. I have looked at Wikipedia. I saw that obvious vandalism, like inserting "HAHA PENIS" in the middle of an article about — I don't know — US presidential candidates, is detected quickly; sometimes it is even caught by filters before it can be saved. Fabricating citations about a fictitious Bhutanese author[1] or Aboriginal deity[2], on the other hand, can go unnoticed for months. This is exacerbated by the fact that your typical "counter-vandalism patrol" usually looks only for the former; even though most hoaxes aren't even especially sophisticated and fall apart after 15 minutes of research. But who can blame those people? It's the easiest way to score virtue points. I don't know why some people are so okay with the most popular reference work of today being developed by a process basically equivalent to Twitch Plays Pokémon. It doesn't even work for the latter... and yet here we are. [1] http://wikipediocracy.com/2015/04/05/bhutanese-passport-what-does-the-… [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar%27Edo_Wens_hoax (embrace the irony!)

This is yet another article written by an author who has not done much editing on Wikipedia, or any serious research on the issues surrounding the project. The author buys into Wiki-utopianism -- the idea that Wikipedia could somehow become "the sum of all human knowledge". This false goal poisons the well, leading those who run the site, including the stewards mentioned, to believe that the site is perfect, and that it is the site's users that are a problem. Wikipedia is actually in terminal decline. The number of administrators is dropping and soon there won't be enough administrators to maintain the pages. [1] There is no plan from the Wikimedia Foundation to deal with further loss of administrators. As more editors leave the site expect more vandalism, even less reliability, more bias, and more scandals. More worrying is the author's glossing over of Wikipedia's gender gap. The article claims that "Everyone can participate and every voice is heard" but that's clearly not true. Wikipedia is written by 90% young white men, and the content reflects their interests and biases. Excluding women and minorities is hardly, as the article says, " a radically participatory model for this technologic age" It's no secret that Wikipedia's content creation process is one of the most toxic out there. Apart from the arcane and outdated interface, new users, women and minorities are routinely bullied and harassed. Even if they do survive the initial stages editors have to put up with…

Disclosure: I am a Wikipedian. I agree with several other participants here on HN that the general atmosphere on HN is much more friendly to informed, thoughful discussion on most topics than the Wikipedia editing culture is to discussion of how to edit Wikipedia. One thing that Wikipedia helps some people learn about is reliable sources. With that in mind, I'll mention that the source kindly submitted here, the Wikipediocracy site, is a haven for critics of Wikipedia of all kinds, including people who were site-banned from Wikipedia for tendentious pro-Nazi edits[1] and a variety of other people that no professional editor would ever allow to edit an important reference resource. The mobocracy of Wikipedia's initial editing culture indeed drew in too many idle young men with little life experience and too few people who had ever had actual responsibilities as editors or researchers. I agree with the comments posted before this comment was posted that most women, as a general rule, know better than to engage in time-wasting activities like cleaning up the mess on Wikipedia. I have to carefully ration my Wikipedia research and editing time among responsibilities for doing actual paid work and caring for my children. Anyone with adult life experience and mature judgment is likely to find Wikipedia more off-putting than rewarding, but some people persist in trying to clean up one or another corner of Wikipedia out of compassion for readers of the world's most visited free…