Phillip Cross: A Mystery Wikipedia Editor Targeting Anti-War Sites | Hacker News Reader

Phillip Cross: A Mystery Wikipedia Editor Targeting Anti-War Sites

mintpressnews.com

95 pointsrbanffy38 comments

Wow. If only similar suspicious edits and editors could be investigated as thoroughly.

Regarding this question posed by the BBC to "Orange Mike":

One of the people whose pages he [Cross] has been editing, and has edited over 1800 times, is George Galloway, and he says he knows that Philip Cross is being paid to do this. Do you think that’s likely?

People being paid to edit Wikipedia articles is not conjecture. It's an ugly truth about the platform. On rare occasions paid edits are investigated and exposed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...) but more often than not Wikipedians fail to acknowledge that paid edits are even a problem. And that is itself a huge problem. If the patient can't even admit he's riddled with disease, what hope is there for successful treatment?

Personally speaking: I find it extremely hard to trust any article about celebrities, movies, politicians, products currently available in the marketplace, and even some foundational science and technology articles. It's so easy for paid PR to insert spin into these articles, or, as Cross has done, smears against selected targets.

For the 10 most costly medical conditions, Wikipedia is wrong 90% of the time [0], compared to the latest research.

I would love to see the result of following the money on those edits; who is making those edits, etc.

And politics / anti-war stuff is, I'm sure, much much worse.

[0] https://www.healthitoutcomes.com/doc/wikipedia-is-wrong-of-t...

I couldn’t see a link in that article to the study. I would be interested to know if they graded how wrong Wikipedia was. The criteria for wrongness is described as “contained information that contradicted the latest medical research on the condition.”.

But Wikipedia articles are huge, containing many pieces of information. What if an article contains just one outdated piece of information amongst hundreds of others, and the material points are substantially correct?

It's difficult, they removed James Heilman from medical articles because he was adding verified prices to medicines. And he's a ER doc.

Edit: note a followup article to the one you posted is here:

https://www.healthitoutcomes.com/doc/was-study-of-wikipedia-...

Last I checked Doc James remains very active on WP. There was some flap in the Board of Trustees around 2015, but he was reelected there as well in 2017.

Thanks for pointing that out; seems legit.

Apparently, a more reasonable 'accuracy rating' of factual medical statements on Wikipedia is about 55-100% - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/01/is-wiki...

This may interest you:

http://intactwiki.org/wiki/Jake_H._Waskett

Searching his name on Google Scholar retrieves references to the published articles of Dr. Brian Morris, with Waskett listed as a co-author many times. Yet Waskett is said to have no particular training, experience or credentials as an academic or medical researcher.

One is left wondering what scholarly contributions Waskett made to that research.

That article shows no proof and links to a site that no longer exists.

[Ding] https://web.archive.org/web/20140531074444/http://www.ihealt...

[Dong] https://web.archive.org/web/20140521005122/http://www.jaoa.o...

> Wikimedia had arrived uninvited into a twitter thread discussing the “Philip Cross” operation and had immediately started attacking people questioning Cross’s legitimacy. Can anybody else see anything “insulting” in my tweet?

What the (nonexisting) hell?

From here: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-c...

(addition)

> I repeat, the coincidence of Philip Cross’s political views with those of Jimmy Wales, allied to Wales’ and Wikimedia’s immediate hostility to anybody questioning the Cross operation – without needing to look at any evidence – raises a large number of questions.

“Philip Cross” does not attempt to hide his motive or his hatred of those whose Wikipedia entries he attacks. He openly taunts them on twitter. The obvious unbalance of his edits is plain for anybody to see.

> Wikimedia had arrived uninvited into a twitter thread

I didn't know you were supposed to wait for an invitation. But what do I know, I've never used Twitter, and I don't know the protocols.

The protocol is that everyone tries to be louder than everyone else.

On Philip Cross:

https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/122772269668495360...

And Jimmy Wales on Philip Cross:

https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/994264792062885895

Wikipedia deprecating and censoring anti-war sources:

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...

Wikipedia doesn’t allow for The Grayzone to be used as citations because it’s pro-authoritarian propaganda that launders the worst takes from dictators around the world. You’ve got Syrian regime apologism, Uyghur genocode denialism, and rampant conspiracism. You can package that up as “anti-war” if you want, but I think pro-authoritarian is more accurate.

Mint Press News is similarly a deprecated source, for the same sort of reasons. The present article should be read in the light of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...

There's a whole list of "Daily Mail and worse" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deprecated_sources

This deprecated sources list is an excellent resource. I couldn’t find a similar one on the Portuguese language site. Are there such lists for non English sources?

Every language edition of Wikipedia has their own rules and processes. The Portuguese version appears to have a place to discuss the sources for specific articles, but no blanket list of deprecated sources: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Fontes_confi%C3...

It's incredible how scant the reasoning given for blacklisting MPN on your link is.

It's all "cesspool" this and "conspiracy non main-stream" that, with fuck-all actual evidence.

expand the "extended discussion" sections for lengthy detailed cites

I don't see an 'extended discussion' section for MPN... There's one for "LifeSiteNews" below it though; are you sure that's not what you're referring to?

Haha. I wonder, what is your preferred anti-war media source?

I reject the framing of The Gray Zone as anti-war. Anti-US imperialism sure, but not anti-war. They have no problem minimizing the suffering of millions at the hands of some of the most brutal regimes on the planet. Calling them anti-war is like calling Alex Jones a scientist.

Their articles are generally really well researched and they actually call for an end to all war in Syria. Thy're consistently anti-war.

It looks as if they’re consistently anti-US: not a single word against China, but each shady remark that casts some doubt on US policy gets the floor.

They are certainly left or hard-left and are very critical of US, NATO, and Israel. If they view themselves as activist-journalists, it seems a logical choice to focus their criticism on the US, where (in theory) they have some chance of moving policy through public opinion.

There is approximately zero chance of their reporting swaying Xi, Putin, or Assad. US adversaries get plenty of unfavorable reporting in more mainstream channels.

They're a political pressure group. That's not necessarily a criticism, they can publish whatever they like, but they aren't anti war, and they aren't against a lot of things they report on. They're only against them and only report on them when their political enemies, the US and the west generally do them regardless of context or provocation or any broader circumstances. Outside that, they don't give a crap what anyone does. Pretending otherwise is I'm afraid rather naive. To be fair, they say so quite clearly, check out the editor's profile page on the site itself.

What? Here's the editor-in-chief's page that I see:

> "Mnar Adley is founder, CEO and editor in chief of MintPress News, and is also a regular speaker on responsible journalism, sexism, neoconservativism within the media and journalism start-ups. She started her career as an independent multimedia journalist covering Midwest and national politics while focusing on civil liberties and social justice issues posting her reporting and exclusive interviews on her blog MintPress, which she later turned MintPress into the global news source it is today. In 2009, Adley also became the first American woman to wear the hijab to anchor/report the news in American media."

Nothing there so far as I can see about how "they're only against them and only report on them when their political enemies, the US and the west generally do them regardless of context or provocation or any broader circumstances"? ... Are you referring to some other page maybe?

My apologies, I was thinking of the founder:

"Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions."

I appreciate the correction.. Even so, does that description line up with what was claimed?

... Also, America is in perpetual war, which is having profound repercussions domestically, and globally also.

That other "journalism" outlets ignore the above fact so much is a very very large part of why we're in such a mess; economically, intellectually, environmentally, politically etc.

Why do you think other news outlets are not aware of this? I think they very much are. The question is, are there valid reasons for this.

TheGreyZone does not address that point at all, so they’re the ones dodging the real questions - what else should we be doing and why? What are the appropriate responses to the challenges we face? Mainstream media largely do challenge politicians on this and ask these questions.

They are against the west and the USA waging war. They are not against the Taliban, the Syrian government, Russia (in Eastern Ukraine and other places) waging war. Russia is heavily involved in Syria supplying and supporting the Syrian government, but gets zero criticism for it. They're silent on the conflict in Ethiopia because the west and the US aren't really involved. Go and check, there's a full on conflict with massacres and military intervention from Eritrea, and not a single article on The Grey Zone, they're just not intersted.

On the conflict in Yemen all of their articles are only about criticising or highlighting any US involvement. Iran is up to their eyeballs in it supplying and supporting the Houthis but they never get criticised, just the US. It's the only angle they cover. China is recklessly provoking Taiwan militarily, not a single comment against it. Only criticism of any and every US contact or relationship with Taiwan.

They have a very specific anti-West, anti-US agenda they pursue relentlessly and exclusively, completely regardless of the context.

I would prefer an "anti-war" site without a track record of making shit up. That's why Gray Zone is deprecated on Wikipedia, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...

It's funny how this level of scrutinization only applies to journalists who are critical of US/NATO foreign policy of neocolonialism and US empire expansionism & hegemony, but never to organizations like BBC, CNN, NYT who have been exposed to churn out some of the biggest lies, especially against US propaganda targets.

It's a remarkably consistent phenomenon, on WP and elsewhere. This page [0] goes some way to showing just how deeply biased Wikipedia has acted against Grayzone and others like it:

[0] https://mronline.org/2020/06/15/wikipedia-formally-censors-t...

[2018]

It's still relevant because Western masses still think manipulation of social media sites is exclusive to US adversaries like Russia and China despite the fact that US and other neocolonialists use way more sophisticated techniques of manipulation of the public by the usage of technology.

World War III is coming.

And yet again, Wikipedia fails. And Wales wants Facebook to adopt its volunteer admin/editor paradigm. The amount of bad faith bullies on that platform is ridiculous. One in particular is BrownHairedGirl, who single single-handedly managed to remove about half of the active Australian contributors from the site.

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