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Comment by chownie | Hacker News Reader

Do they pretend there's no censorship? I don't see that. They block spam and I'm certain no one objects to that, so the bare fact that they exclude some information clearly does not constitute the status "censored"

I'd imagine the reason kiwifarms gets different treatment is because the site is a lot worse than the descriptor "anti-trans doxxing forum" might make you believe — it's a website designed specifically to facilitate long term stalking and harassment campaigns. Trans people are their flavour of the month right now but a few years ago it was anyone disabled.

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> Do they pretend there's no censorship?

Yes, they do. Censorship of official links is against explicit Wikipedia policy[1], but it doesn't matter because every policy can be overridden by consensus. In practice this means that a handful of professional activists can (and do) censor it as they see fit, since they can determine for themselves whether such a "consensus" exists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links#Offic...

The Mediawiki environment became increasingly hostile to "the external world" though.

I am making a research project on grammatical gender in French, that I host on Wikiversity (there is a dedicated research space there). Lately I get an increasingly large number of rejection of saving my contributions, because some sites are considered "unreliable sources". But in my project, I am looking to document what people use in practice in their written exchanges. That they express lies or try to spread disinformation is irrelevant from the linguistic perspective I’m conducting this project. But due to this software enforced policy, I get prevented from documenting my sources from time to time.

If they're spreading disinformation, obviously they also aren't accurately representing their own speech patterns. That's just common sense.

> If they're spreading disinformation, obviously they also aren't accurately representing their own speech patterns.

But GP is not documenting the 'true' speech patterns of the people spreading the disinformation, but rather the speech patterns they use when they are spreading disinformation (which, as you pointed out, might be different from their normal speech pattern). So the sources are still good enough for that.

Is it really true that Wikipedia doesn’t have a formal, credible, method of determining whether a “consensus” exists?

It’s true that there is nothing which should work in theory, and yet mostly does in practice.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_...

https://foundation.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Controver...

If there is some official policy which links are allowed and which are not, I'll shut up.

Why are some links allowed and some not, what is the policy, if there is some.

I see

> Wikimedia projects are not censored. Some kinds of content, particularly that of a sexual, violent or religious nature, may be offensive to some viewers; and some viewers may feel such content is disrespectful or inappropriate for themselves, their families or their students, while others may find it acceptable.

which seems to me against link censorship.

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