We honestly need to end the myth that Wikipedia is some impenetrable white tower. It can and has been infiltrated by corporate and political groups, and even creative vandals.
It’s the most valuable digital property in the world. You think people break into the Louvre but can’t touch Wikipedia?
Organized groups hire people to edit wiki pages, you can even spot them coaching each other on the talk section. Monied interests especially, but also history is under fire.
Revisionists are rife, every monster from history is seemingly being rehabilitated, for at least 15 years. Feudalism has pr firms now too, it was great! No perversion of reality is too obvious that the sheep will not mindlessly take it as fact.
Technical subjects’ articles utility depends on who wrote it, a share of them are showing off their learnings using technical words 95 percent or more will not fully grasp, while other entries are in common terms andd fully understandable.
Wikipedia is a great resource, but not infallible, or a reliable source in itself, although it’s listed sources could well be reliable sources.
Yep like how North Face replaced photos of many pages with photos that had people wearing their products in it. And this is probably just the tip of the iceberg, there must be plenty of stuff that hasn’t been caught yet.
So that explains why some entries on companies don’t mention about their unscrupulous history.
Wikipedia’s TOS bans this kind of activity, and it’s pretty effective at detecting it. This has been going on elsewhere for over a decade, and I know of at least one reputation-laundering firm that has gone bust because of Wikipedia reverting everything they tried to plant.
Isn’t there a way to lock Wikipedia articles so they can’t be edited by just anyone?
Yes, there are mechanisms for that in Wikipedia
Edit: commented before I saw that other comment with a link, but that’s a good link to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy
They’re all publicly viewable edits aren’t they? Revert them and ban the IP ranges they come from? I thought that was the standard practice for abuse of Wikipedia?
Idk about banning ip ranges. I have never edited a wiki page as such amd my ip is blocked from even viewing the edits or talk.
It is unfair to others improperly blocked, my ip is also on a blacklist somehow do not know if that is related. Some kind of ratfuckery is afoot on the latter.
The problem lies in noticing them in the first place. If you make a thousand legit edits to various articles and then make some slight changes on some rich clients page chances are nobody will register this. Then again we’re on the internet so there’s always at least one guy who’d hyperfocus on monitoring something like this. The hero we need.
Exactly. I remember reading an article about a Nazi who was tried in the UK, apparently Winston Churchill himself vehemently defended this guy because he was a Nazi who fought the Soviets, and Churchill really hated the Soviets. He pushed hard for the charges to be dismissed, had his life sentence reduced to a few decades, and then eventually had his sentence commuted so he was released. I found this article around the time that the main guy behind the Nuremberg trials, Benjamin Ferencz, passed away, however when I went searching for the article a couple months later it was nowhere to be found.
I suspect the article was deleted under Wiki’s general rule where they don’t like having articles about individuals, and instead prefer articles about events. However this individual’s story was the event, and this could have been an excuse by those looking to colour Churchill’s history how they felt it should be presented.
Let’s not forget, it took years for Wikipedia to even notice Neelix, the Wikipedia admin who made over 80,000 pages/links about titties.
Let’s not forget, it took years for Wikipedia to even notice Neelix, the Wikipedia admin who made over 80,000 pages/links about titties.
He was just out there spreading the word of boobah but yeah this stuff can go under the radar for a while.
How so? Did no one go tat for his tit then?
Thing is the vast majority of people using wiki won’t think. They will just consume so the message gets through.
Can confirm. I use wiki and don’t know how to think.
I don’t understand. Someone read this to me.
Pages can be protected in various ways
This all started with Theresa May and the
right for rich people to curate themselves onlineright to be forgotten.Two Tier Kier.
FYI, Two Tier Kier is a conspiracy theorist term pushed by people who say Kier harms white people and doesn’t punish non-whites for crime.
