How paid Wikipedia editors squeeze you dry
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
A weird kind of solace but I hope it helps a little.
At least we got to see something new.
I'm sure there are weirdos in the web3 spaces, but I feel like they're very outnumbered. Projects like ENS or IPFS are probably much more interesting to weirdos than most "crypto stuff". I2P too, though I don't think this twenty-year-old project should be lumped in with "web3".
I think the Fediverse is a better place to go. Lots of little communities, almost all of run by regular nerds, each one with their own quirks and petty personal drama and constant UI tweaking? It's like forums all over again, except it's now safe to use one password for everything.
Fixed that for you.
If you want the old internet vibe the dark Web is the place to be. Tor, freenet, i2p.
I'm quite partial to freenet because it's completely segregated from the regular internet and refreshes as the speed of dial up. No interactive web2.0 here.
There's also a separate factor in some problems, which is that the power and reach of bad actors are increased by tech. To use a familiar and relatively innocuous example, before the popular Internet, virtually no scammers from some developing nation halfway around the globe would be able to reach the US, which would effectively mean a lot fewer jerks in the world, as far as people in the US knew.
I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before (at the same time that some positive memes are also propagated). I don't know what would be a good baseline for evaluating, nor whether there are good historical analogs for some of the recent sociopathy -- including that practiced by the tech industry, and that merely enabled by the tech.
I think this is the case and appears in many shapes.
* libertarians lift their individual freedom above societal needs but they fail to see their own dependence on them, like any public services funded by taxes.
* Crypto bros advertise new "currencies" but use them as volatile investments or foster such expectations. With this volatility it will never become a fully stable currency. There is a common wisdom in traditional trading that you dont do arbitrage / speculate on real currencies because of their _intended_ stability. Another failed realization (because of personal gain attached to it).
* Right leaning people argue against criminal migrants but discriminate not by commited crimes but simply foreignness. Their percieved superior cultural identity is their solution to internal cultural problems but they fail to realize how criminal sociotopes emerge and that its independent of ethnicity.
I could go on if i had time.
I doubt it, bad behaviour is more likely to be called out and borderline cases probably pushed towards cooperation. Sociopathy is, I think, the condition where one can't be pushed towards cooperation by social pressure.
I think that the acts of calling people out (in addition to your point about tech empowering bad actors), just makes it seem like they are being normalised.
Slap a swastika on it and you'll never have people trying to take over your project. Same way goatse kept the old forums from being overran by normies: https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse...
My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”.
In a git repo.
We can see your crimes now.
Wikipedia is this in microcosm - we can see the edits, we can use software to watch for us, everything is in the open and the feudalism and rent seeking exist best in the hidden darkness
What we do with that is up to us.
There's zero chance that the CTO at a company as big as VW is going to be personally committing to code repos.
We know that VW did not write the code. It was the supplier Bosch that did it. VW simply activated a feature through configuration.
"33. Supervisors B, C, and F, and others, however, realized that VW could not design a diesel engine that would both meet the stricter US NOx emissions standards that would become effective in 2007 and attract sufficient customer demand in the US market. Instead of bringing to market a diesel vehicle that could legitimately meet the new , more restrictive US NOx emissions standards, VW AG employees acting at the direct of Supervisors B, C, and F and others, including Company A employees, designed, created, and implemented a software function to detect, evade, and defeat US emissions standards.
tl;dr : Bosch (company A) along with VW employees created the evasion function at the behest of supervisors.
[0]: https://www.mass.gov/doc/vw-statement-of-factspdf/download
I do think, however, that the two movements share a common ancestor in the certain and nearly evangelical belief that technology holds the answers to messy people problems- early internet culture was largely about assuming the best in people, and crypto by it's design is about assuming the absolute worst and harnessing that to make tech.
Of the two, I think crypto is probably more sustainable!
The internet changed everything, it has given these people the power to effortlessly destroy things created by anyone, anywhere on earth, no matter where they are or how many resources they have. Making the internet so easily accessible was a massive mistake.
* The current government/politicians, which are worse then the ones we had
* The youth, who have it easy and are not as good as the old generation
We have actual texts from ancient civilizations saying this, so _maybe_ it's just a seesaw, or _maybe_ it's just getting old.
For instance, you can find no end of people who utterly despise Margaret Thatcher and think that she’s the worst thing to ever happen to the UK. But as far as I am aware, even the people who hate her tend to think that she genuinely believed in what she was doing. The idea that she was wrecking the country for her own personal gain isn’t a mainstream belief is it?
Now contrast that with somebody like Boris Johnson. A politician who is hated in similar volume to Thatcher. But you can’t say that the accusations levelled at Johnson are anything at all alike to those Thatcher received, can you?
The same goes for American politics. Take a look at the criticisms directed at Trump compared with those directed at either Bush. There is a qualitative difference.
Newspapers and TV were much more limited and gated. I remember having no access to cable, and thus only 3 TV channels, and two "national" newspapers available easily.
So news was textual, and the TV news was only on at 7am, 6pm, 11pm.
Then came the rise of cable news, and 24 hours news. And they needed to have more news to fill the gaps.
So people turning molehills into mountains is a thing, misconstrued interpretation of actions, unproven allegations, and more is now far more common. And before a thing would vanish quickly from the news, but with 24 hour networks they would come back to it for months.
This took time to develop, so the 90s 24 hr news networks weren't like this instantly. They evolved into this.
Then came the internet. Twitter, facebook, etc. Now more news was needed.
From what I can see, this is a large part of the change.
And as an aside, quite literally "enemies of democracy" work to amplify this. And it's so easy to do.
Pick the nuttiest nut, the least tolerant of boneheads, and donate to their foundation or cause.
The nut doesn't need to even know, they are the ultimate "useful idiot", feed them and they grow into an influential nut.
Nation-states don't need to use bots, they can just donate to causes which cause the most internal friction. Then these characters run around, pointing out every flaw.
Admittedly, Boris J. is more of a populist politician that keeps dialing up the populism and down the politics until it's pure populism, while Donald T. is more of a narcissist that took the "normal" path to that point.
The Bush administration was deeply criticized for the Iraq war which was considered just a big money grab for friends and family.
Or consider JFK, which is now rated as one of the best US presidents and his actual legacy.
I am Italian, and people are now saying "you know Berlusconi was bad, but at least he had some business knowledge and charisma, compared to the idiots today".
Just give it ten years and people will say that Boris Johnson was pretty honest compared to these guys..
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/201...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/06/jfk-accomplished-lit...
Is this still currently a thing? I would think, with Covid lockdowns, social networks designed to manipulate them from early age and a future prognosed of climate change and war, not many people could think the new generation has it easy.
From what I've seen the youth's complaints are usually "heard", but not recognized. There is definitely an arrogance to many positions from older generations and a tendency towards dismissiveness for too many reasons that do not address the concerns from the youth at all.
I don't wish ill on anyone, but it does seem that many of these issues that the youth are aware of and even want to change will not go away until the ideas die along with the older generations that continue to do everything to maintain a status quo that the youth have openly said "nah we're not going to do that anymore" -- often just because the older generation's have it so ingrained that there is no other option besides the former status quo for whatever reason.
``Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.''
Then released in several versions as a spoken word song by the Australian director Baz Luhrmann.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen
It reached peak parody when further mangled and released by John Safran as Not The Sunscreen Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YwqFz14xY4
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/21/d...
The fact that enough people vote for these characters has me more than a little bit worried. Democracy is super fragile and to wave away the observable fact that in the past things were quite different by quoting some random text seems to be a bit too glib and easy.
But _were_ they? (That's rhetorical, they were not.)
When Wikipedia started and even like 10-15 years ago that wasn't a common belief. Especially in Germany. "There are some assholes on earth, how could you dare to believe something voluntary and open to everyone will succeed?!?" (others already posted that it's not unfounded given real world experience)
Wikipedia though is my preferred counter example for that.
- a site editable by anyone on the internet? That is never going to fly
Few months later I followed a link to Wikipedia and that clicked, we can definitely build an encyclopedia online and the hope (I was in my early 20's) or bet was that more people were wiling to write article than people willing to deface it. I guess we won that bet by a large margin :-]
Even if I was younger, I was not clueless. I was well aware some people would deface it and it did happen. I have also been involved in two very long and tedious fights with editors having a political agenda, which diverting me from actually writing articles. I think that is the real danger: shifting the focus of people from writing articles toward pointless long discussions.
And they seem to be adamant about titling the article about Kalashnikov rifle "AK-47", which is simply wrong (there were only handful of actual units of model AK-47 produced, and the mass armament of Soviet army with AKs has started with AKM), and their justification for that is "but that's how AK called in the media" - I thought Wikipedia is there to debunk media myths, not amplify them.
Other than that, yes, Wikipedia is a miracle.
links to the English page about the Kalashnikov rifle family.
It's titled Kalashnikov Rifle.
The first image is of an AK-74.
There's a comparative table of about 20+ different members of the family. Each of the types has a seperate page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-108
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47
etc.
Perhaps you went directly to the AK-47 page and assumed that was all that was there?
>Most licensed and unlicensed productions of the Kalashnikov assault rifle abroad were of the AKM variant, partially due to the much easier production of the stamped receiver. This model is the most commonly encountered, having been produced in much greater quantities. All rifles based on the Kalashnikov design are often colloquially referred to as "AK-47s" in the West and some parts of Asia, although this is only correct when applied to rifles based on the original three receiver types
And sometimes by "AK-47" the article means the whole AK family - there's a list "manufacturing countries of AK-47", and then the list of countries follow that produce all kinds of AK-type rifles _but_ AK-47. So it's clearly a total mess.
In fact, I'm not the only one that complained about it in the past, there's plenty of complaints on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:AK-47/Archive_6 And the response always was like "we use the most common name, we're not interested in being correct here, get out".
- Mahatma Gandhi (not: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi)
- Bill Clinton (not: William Jefferson Clinton)
- Aspirin (not: acetylsalicylic acid)
- Sailor Moon (character) (not: Usagi Tsukino)
All of these are technically incorrect, yet they are much more useful than the "correct" names.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_titles#Use_c...
Great example when doing according to the letter just makes more stupid. Sure, in English (which one, btw? US English? UK English? Global Universal English?) it's commonly named such, but you are reading that article on the site what poses itself as encyclopedia, more so as encyclopedia which strictly relies on other documentation for the article texts and data. Anyone sane would just add a remark at the start of the article about usage of that name in English, because that's quite important thing all and all.
But not only there are no such remark, but those people actively refuse to add one.
And finally, in the article:
>> The Kalashnikov Museum (also called the AK-47 museum) opened on 4 November 2004 in Izhevsk, Udmurt Republic
.. but it's not called 'AK-47 museum'! It's 'The Kalashnikov Museum and Exhibition Complex of Small Arms'!
So they just blatantly 'renamed' the museum to fit their shenanigans, completely ignoring their own principles of encyclopedia.
I have some problem with calling someone/thing with a name that was pushed from the outside, and was not endorsed by that someone or the creators of that some thing. Say, Wikipedia does not call photocopiers "xeroxes", it mentions "xerox" once in the lead of the "Photocopier" article, and afterwards, photocopiers are only called photocopiers. (And so when you google "xerox", it'll tell you about Xerox the company, not the type of machines.)
And I'm strictly against of calling a thing with a name of a similar thing, which was not even endorsed. That's not useful at all. That's confusing. Perhaps I wouldn't be too wrong if I called that "relabeling" of AK with "AK-47" in the Wikipedia article, a lie. Because that's the thing with lies, they are often hard to keep straight. So throughout the article, its editors can't even figure out - what exactly do they call "AK-47"? The real thing, what Kalashnikov called AK-47, and all its different issues? Or that, and AKM? Or the whole AK family? The answer to that can change in different points in the article.
And I totally understand that people want to call it AK-47. I wouldn't even bring that up if they explained that in the article's lead. Like, "this is an article about AK-47, but what you probably wanted to read about, is actually AKM, here's why". But they don't even do that - not in the lead, at least. Why?
Perhaps because Wikipedia article's leads are used for Google search. Google is actually a major contributor to the Wikimedia Foundation. These leads are shown in SERPs, and they are probably used for Google's machine learning shenanigans elsewhere. Wikipedia is the biggest array of structured, easily-readable information in the world, and Google uses it.
Perhaps, that also was one of motivations behind the "use the common name" rule in Wikipedia, and the adamancy of the Wikipedia editors to use it in this particular case, even when it doesn't make much sense. Because when the average user googles about "ak-47", he doesn't want to be lectured about the differences between AK-47 and AKM and whatnot. He only wants to know about that thing that, as the myth in the media goes, was made by Kalashnikov in 1947, was all sold throughout the world, and has not changed ever since. And it's also on Mozambique's flag.
Because lecturing users is bad for Google's business. So maybe, this is an example how Google's interests made Wikipedia lie.
In the early days it used to be a very selected bunch.
The only reason these guidelines exist is because all articles need to have references. No references, no article. The vast majority of deleted articles don't have any references. If you have just a couple references, that article is likely to float around in some gray area for a long time. There are articles on the site only a couple sentences long, but they have notable references, so they can't easily be deleted.
People mistakenly think that paying off an administrator is a golden ticket to getting on the site. They misunderstand that the majority of governance on the site is done in public, and often doesn't involve administrators at all. For example, I've been involved in a couple requests for article deletion (sometimes as the person requesting the deletion, sometimes not). In all my experiences, no administrator was involved in the debate. If there are good reasons to delete an article, a bribed administrator will simply be outvoted by the public.
^1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
^2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
Now public trust in corporate news is at a record low [0], for good reasons. Wikipedia simply hitched their "truth and reliability wagon" to a dying horse, and the chicken are coming home to roost.
[0] https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-...
Wikipedia shouldn't be so difficult to edit or highly politicized. There was a time when IP editors made the majority of contributions. Today correcting a typo might trigger a full-time editor to defend his turf. Even asking questions about an uncited assertion on a talk page can be labeled as disruptive.
I feel bad for the victims of the scam. It can be hard to edit or correct basic facts. Most business owners don't have time to specialize in Wikipedia lawfare. I have no sympathy for the WMF or the hard-core believers who wrote this expose'. Their policies created opportunities for these scammers to exploit.
The fact that they wrote this without an ounce of self-reflection or awareness of the problems is more troubling than the scam itself. Scams will come and go, but we've been stuck with Wikipedia as Google's and therefore the Internet's arbiter of "truthiness" for too long.
This doesn't align with my experience. From what I've seen, the consensus is that the majority of edits from an IP user are constructive, and they're not reverted simply because they're from an IP user. I've seen data about this[1], but for fun I looked at a page I've edited recently. Out of the last 50 edits, 13 were from IP users (26%), and only 4 of them were vandalism (30% of IP edits).
You are right that some people entrench into a "turf" and revert things for no reason. This is an old problem on Wikipedia. But this is pretty rare across the site from my experience. And I have seen people get warnings for this behavior. If someone was reverting simple typo fixes or discussions on a Talk page I would expect something to happen to that user, regardless if it was against an IP user or not.
That's not to say there are no advantages to having an account. Creating new pages, uploading files, and editing semi-protected pages require an account. Some articles require pretty strict criteria to edit, your account has to be at least 30 days old with 500 edits (which is more than I have). This list is around 7000 articles[2] which is more than I expected.
^1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_editors_are_human...
^2: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Protected...
500 edits and a 30-day history are not "pretty strict" - it's the minimum evidence that you have a basic knowledge of the rules. Protected articles are articles that tend to attract wingnuts and agenda-pushers.
I keep on coming across editors with a history of (say) 50 minor edits, 100% of which have been quickly reverted for being nonsense or worse. It's a blessing that such editors can't alter high-profile sesitive articles.
If players enjoy their game, that's fine. However it should be understandable when others don't want to invest in a Wikipedia lifetime achievement award. Malign incentives for paid editing scams occur where the online game overlaps with people's lives and businesses.
But I've been editing WP since about 2004. I have no merit badges, and no admin privileges. I have no allies. I just want to improve the encyclopaedia.
From their perspective it's spam. And it seems to work, as in: they have a wikipedia and you can complain but elsewhere.
> the Internet's arbiter of "truthiness" for too long.
That's funny how you use a word made popular by Stephen Colbert.
Wikipedia is fine. We are not "stuck" with wikipedia, there are alternatives. Wikipedia is a free source of information, with certain rules. It is good enough.
> highly politicized
You cannot reach perfect objectivity or neutrality. Wikipedia depends on sources. People who attack wikipedia often sound like they have an agenda.
I used to spend a lot of time working on the Wikipedia conflict of interest notice board, [WP:COIN]. Hate mail. One lawsuit.
Here's my essay on that.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hints_on_dealing_wit...
That kind of sounds like bragging that they detect 100% of the paid editing they detect.
I spent a while digging into this company and a couple of related companies. They had edited themselves into Wikipedia articles in small ways over the years, and gotten themselves included in click bait lists of military contractors. They made a half-assed effort to cover this up by changing their Wikipedia user name, but that just creates a different record that was still searchable. There was a Wikipedia article mentioning a rumor they worked for Mossad, but I suspected they were also the source for that rumor. They claimed they worked for the CIA, and they had a real contracting number with the DoD. But I didn't find any evidence these contracts were real, and when I sent a FOIA to the CIA they said the information either didn't exist or was classified.
The weirdest thing I noticed was that it had bled into the culture to some extent. People who wanted to give themselves an edgy camo aesthetic would find these click bait articles and vandalized Wikipedia pages and not realize it was a sham - or realized and were doing it ironically, how is one to tell. I saw an admin of some forum who took it as a handle. I saw someone present a military-themed outfit in GTA named after it.
Eventually I got to the point where I was gathering more and more evidence and none of it was making any sense, and I realized I was never going to make real headway without finding a way to interview these people. I could see pieces of what they were doing, but as far as why they were doing it, that information just didn't seem to be written down on the Internet. The prospect of flying across the country to try and track down someone who was doing things I couldn't understand wasn't appealing, so I just let it go.
As a disclaimer, I'm working off of memory here, some of the details may be wrong.
---
Looking back at their deleted Wikipedia page on the Wayback machine, it's all so outlandish that I have to imagine it was an elaborate prank. It's a lot more paperwork than most pranks involve, but I just can't imagine that whoever put this together intended anyone to believe it. Maybe they wanted to see if they could do enough legend building that the Wikipedia mods would have some doubt and keep up the page for a ridiculous hoax? If I was practicing a skill, maybe they were too? Impossible to say.
I think it's much more common for me to see articles that do the opposite. They take some article, find some negative news article and write about them in the Wikipedia article. Especially for small communities where there are no notable publications except for major drama, it pretty much means that the Wikipedia article is going to highlight the negative side of the community even if that isn't actually representative of what the community is actually about.
I have not previously noticed/recogmized articles like this, and am asking out of curiosity.
I don't think it's necessarily the person writing the wikipedia page malicious, but it creates a reinforcing cycle where journalists don't know what XYZ is so the Google it, get the wikipedia page Since wikipedia ranks highly, then see a bunch of controversial stuff, and then propagate that more. Similar with average people wondering what it is.
Personally, I don't like controversy sections in wikipedia article as the way wikipedia works does not make them work well. Good luck trying to correct misinformation while simultaneously following wikipedia's rules as you can't correct misinformation yourself.
Huh? Do you mean "you can't correct misinformation about yourself? Who do you think is allowed to correct misinformation?
I don't know but you can't simply delete it yourself as technically that information did come from a reliable source. I figure you have to counter it by finding another published work that is a reliable source. Even then people have agendas they want to push, so in the end your correction may just be reverted.
It still sounds as if you're thinking of an article about yourself. You aren't supposed to edit an article about yourself, that's true. The proper course is to post to the article's talk page, specifying the change you want made, and asking for some other editor to make the change.
If the "misinformation" was from a RS, then you're right: to reverse it, you need your own RS that contradicts the misinformation, and is better than the original. But if the information/misinformation is in an article about a living person, and the sourcing is contested, then it should be removed. Everything in a BLP article is supposed to be reliably sourced.
FWIW, I think this rule has unfortunate consequences; articles about living people tend to be insipid, and fail to mention well-known controversies about their subject. That is, I think Wikipedia is a poor resource for information about living people.
We do this not because it's easy, but because we can.
—A 20-Year Wikipedian
If you spend time editing Wikipedia a decent amount, you will see the same groups of moderators and actors which rapidly alter certain types of articles to fit particular metanarratvies. Anyone who points this out will get revdel'd, which means that non-admins can't even see what happened. revdelling is supposed to be reserved for doxing and serious matters, but when you see it abused with your own eyes by the same users working in tandem with mods (I am talking within 3-4 minutes of a controversial post going live), then I guarantee you will never look at Wikipedia the same way again. There are obvious nation-state actors acting out in the open, running automated software (dozens of edits across pages within minutes) without an authorized bot, and they are allied with particular circles of mods who are on the same payroll. If any other user attempts even a mere fraction of a percentage of the biased and violative TOS activity in which they engage, you will get revdel'd and/or have your account banhammered.
Wikipedia is not perfect, but their process is quite mature and robust.
I even read people saying wikipedia is politicized.
Wikipedia's processes are anything but. It almost feels like it's less mature now than it was 10 years ago. I've seen this with other communities where people move on and the only people left are disproportionately made up of mediocre Peter principle-proving folks who see it as a comfortable and insular hobby where seniority/tenure trumps everything else.
That's just plain funny right there.