Wikipedia Signpost: Crypto and bitcoins and blockchains, oh no! | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia Signpost: Crypto and bitcoins and blockchains, oh no!

en.wikipedia.org

38 pointsdavidgerard17 comments

I am not convinced that having a vocal blockchain skeptic (Mr Gerard has written the book "Attack of the 50ft blockchain" and has written many articles critical of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies) as an arbiter of Wikipedia pages on cryptocurrencies and blockchain is necessarily a good idea. For example, Mr Gerard will refuse to allow the addition of well-sourced articles on popular projects even though they are reliably sourced in major crypto news publications. As you can imagine, much crypto news doesn't reach the mainstream press, so this blocks a lot of useful information appearing on Wikipedia.

Also, major projects, such as IOTA, don't even have a Wikipedia page or stub, despite the project having a multitude of academic papers and reliably sourced news. Mr Gerard will say this is because of the huge amount of spam on the pages, but other crypto pages, and non-crypto pages, have plenty of spam and they still manage to appear on the site.

As an analogy, imagine if climate deniers were in control of Wikipedia's climate change pages.

Mr Gerard simply has too much influence on Wikipedia's crypto pages. There is certainly a crypto spam problem on Wikipedia, but it seems like he is actually censoring information, which for those interested in crypto, is somewhat ironic.

This isn't only happening there, a lot of Wikipedia pages basically have someone revert a lot of changes they don't agree with, while you could bring this up on the talk page this takes a lot of time and knowledge about how Wikipedia works, for more controversial pages this often works out that those whom have most time to spend get to decide on the direction and point of view of the article. This might even be just small rewordings and copy edits to put something in a more or less favourable light.

One of the downsides of Wikipedia's methods of conflict resolution is controversial articles select for editors with strong feelings.

I'm largely disinterested about cryptocurrency, so maybe I'd be an ideal neutral arbiter in arguments about such articles. But for the same reason, I'm not motivated to do the tiring political work that would involve.

If you write a negative book about a collection of topics and make it diverse enough not to have to go in detail you can tailor it such that wikipedia becomes the perfect promotion vehicle. It has to be negative since removing positive material is much easier than either writing it or removing negative material. (There is often some sub-human narcissist volunteer willing to preserve negativity.)

Sober neutral voices get nothing done. You have to be extreamly biased

It's literally never not amazing to have crypto fans claim not being a crypto fan is a conflict of interest, BUT owning the crypto they're promoting isn't a COI.

Imagine having someone that makes money disparaging a particular technology in charge of the "truth" about the technology. I've challenged him to a debate on livestream, which he accepted, and then was never heard from again.

I've been busy, I'll get back to you eventually.

seriously it's been flat out here, holy shit inbox 600, and my freebie budget is running sparse

(you can tell by the fact it took me 2 days to respond to this thread)

debates are tedious, let's just talk shit, that's way more fun - i tend to agree 99% with any coiner after all ... it's like, an atheist is an atheist for all religions, a theist is an atheist for all but one religion

also, it's never not hilarious having coiners shocked shocked that someone is ... making money!! from something

David and I have setup the "debate" which really will just be a fun conversation between a cryptocurrency founder, and someone who greatly dislikes them. Saturday, 2/1/2020, UK time 1PM (2PM EST). https://youtu.be/7oZhTM3LKBM

Yeah, the cryptocurrency spam everywhere is a problem and I'm glad the community is fighting it. But for me, the more annoying remnant of this bubble is the fact that the meaning of the word "crypto", used for decades for "cryptography" (like in "strong crypto"), has now been altered and by default means "cryptocurrency." Which, because of many crooks involved, is often associated with its shady aspects.

The "You can treat [crypto] as short for "cryptosporidium[1]"." is a good find.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptosporidium

> Cryptosporidium is a genus of apicomplexan parasitic alveolates that can cause a respiratory and gastrointestinal illness (cryptosporidiosis) that primarily involves watery diarrhea (intestinal cryptosporidiosis) with or without a persistent cough

it's an awful disease that gives you the chronic shits, it's clearly the true meaning

words, language and interpretation change over time, just deal with it. Those of us into both cryptography and cryptocurrency are able to determine the difference through context most of the time.

Of course it's not impossible, I can guess what you mean by "the crypto used in this crypto is dubious." It just irritates me, also because many if not most people don't know the original meaning and always assume we're talking about cryptocurrencies.

BTCPay could really use a WP article at this point.

I'm confused.

Can somebody explain who's more corrupt ... cryptocurrency touts or Wikipedia editors?

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Without Wikipedia editors and high rep Stack Overflow users, who could we rely on to destroy knowledge that we shouldn't be interested in?

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