kurtreed2

There is a sudden fracas involving me and the forum which got me abruptly ejected from the latter.

First of all, regarding a multi-years long doxxing situation I was able to pinpoint the perp to a globally banned user in NY, who got some interesting pro-CCP comments on X, after analyzing various indicators including writing styles.

The perp is globally banned by the Wikimedia Foundation, presumably for doxxing, years ago from what I can tell, although many alleged that her ban was unjust. But when I post some of the findings on a private area on Wikpediocracy forum, I found myself getting heckled by some who accused me of “promoting baseless conspiracy theories” despite not being the case (anymore) given what’s compiled so far. To be frankly honest I did withhold some of the findings because the last time I was “fully transparent” there, a naughty admin took it as “beans stuffed up on the noses” and mucked up the situation. Not to mention legal reasons since the SanFranBanned user was allegedly engaging in identity impersonation and network intrusion to evade her SanFranBan and now the NYPD is reportedly investigating it.

I calmly asked one of the hecklers at WPO to put me on his forum account ignore list if he doesn’t like my postings much since I got forewarned by an admin of the forum, that I shall not provoke him too much since he got cancer. All I got instead from him was a vile curse for me to “die horribly” until another admin locked the thread discussing the findings, and I thought this is the end of it.

A day after the account was placed “under mod discussion” which entailed initially a 7-day ban, then switched to a permanent one under the reason “The quality and tone of your postings is not what we desire on this forum” despite me having emailed support@wikipediocracy.com asking for appeal while nothing was received from the email address all along. The ban reason looks as specious as Wikipedia’s “NOTHERE” block.

If the appeal attempts are unsuccessful it’s safe to say that Wikipediocracy has indeed enshittified by mob rule, particularly by pro-Wikipedia hecklers, and thus the biggest safe zones on the Internet to discuss Wikipedia’s issues would be X, Reddit’s /r/watchwikipediadie sub (which is getting revived by some including WillyNilly) and the WS forum.

I think I've agree with you on this one. Even on Wikipedia there's a ton of pages like SPI pages which can be indistinguishable from actual malicious doxxings.

Not to mention that there a whole load of #MeToo scandals which would doom Wikipedia if exposed to the media.

https://www.reddit.com/r/JustWikipediaThings/wiki/scandals

My bad. But my point still stands because I was using their initial criteria when talking about survivorship bias.

I think the goalpost is being moved. Your initial criteria was all about the resilency against state-sponsored disinformation attempts and the gaming of systems. For that criteria we don't have a comparable sample to look into when evaluating Wikipedia's.

By comparable, I'm meaning an alternative or competitor that had gained equal prominence as Wikipedia, in terms of Google search results, and the eyes of the whole world, again like what Pepsi is to Coca-Cola and vice versa. We would have something to compare to in terms of the criteria if Google has given their favoritism to one or more other platforms, instead of just Wikipedia.

You're welcome.

If you scroll down to the bottom of that page you'll see a different story.

There are actually some proposals to mass-delete the LTA pages but they all came to a naught.

They'll need to delete those LTA pages first before they can move to Europe due to GDPR.

Justapedia has forked English Wikipedia almost three years ago and is doing good so far, even if they're still ignored by major search engines.

This needs to be talked by a lot! However per my experiences and those of others if you go to either the "front page of the internet" or Lemmy the competitor you'll get side-eyed and harassed by people who thinks that you're a "far-right obscurantist" for simply criticizing Wikipedia.

That's right. They only survived because competitions were crushed out with both network effects, and the help of Google which reportedly prioritizes Wikipedia in search results while downranking any others which could challenge Wikipedia.

Yet when I (or others) are trying to raise the issue on certain Reddit communities in addition to Lemmy people there still prefer to bury their heads in the sand. Often they'll simply resort to personal attacks and so on just to avoid facing the fact that Wikipedia is not as infalliable as they think at all.

Example:

https://lemmy.world/comment/14158030

That's right. Often due process is skipped even if the blocks turn out to be errors or collateral damages later. It's not going to be 100% perfect at all because stylometries can be obfuscated (see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7345380/) and there are tools like VNC and residential proxy applications to evade IP-based tracing and detection.

It's going to be a Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, mark my words. Those LTA pages often contains a lot of personal information which would violate GDPR in Europe, at least based on what I've heard from NOYB so far. Some editors have expressed their concerns about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Long-term_abuse...?

It is indeed a survivorship bias since we have no good other sample in the form of competitor to compare to, like how Pepsi is to Coca-Cola. Which part of my statement you find difficult to understand?

You should make an account on Wikipediocracy (which is frequented by many Wikipedia editors and insiders) and express all your paeans about Wikipedia's supposed infallibility, and see how fast you'd get dressed-down.

You can download backups of Wikipedia articles at dumps.wikimedia.org. For the IA they had a plan to move to Canada back in 2017.

> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.

There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.

As a start you can look at the following page.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchWikipediaDie/wiki/scandals

> Damn Wikipedia character assassinating critics now

FTFY. If you go dig deeper at foundation.wikimedia.org you'll inevitably come across an Israeli court document describing systemic smear defamation and libel campaign mounted by toxic editors against an academic, which lasted around a decade.

One can look into Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski's report about how the Polish ultranationalists have distorted the Holocaust topic area on Wikipedia (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) if they want to find a counterexample. To the best of my understandings so far, I think Icewhiz is a good guy, just that he doesn't have strong grasp about Wikipedia's guidelines, particularly regarding multiple accounts, and was the victim of sustained smear campaigns by Polish ultranationalists who were able to psychologically manipulate the admins into banning him in order to let their distortionist edits stick. Now he's an Emmanuel Goldstein figure for both the ultranationalists and the pro-Hamas editors who seek to deflect external scrutiny to their edits.

The 4000 character limit has severely inhibited the ability to communicate it effectively.

You'd be utterly shocked if you googled what the "Anvil email" is.

Wow. Sorry to hear that. If your good friend is a she then she should get in touch with "Jennsaurus" at Wikipediasucks.co ASAP because Jennsaurus is a journalist who has discovered and compiled two dozen cases of sexual harassment against women editors.

Wikimedia did this to aspiring candidates who want to be the "stewards".

Good for you. They're going to get proverbially burned down eventually because of two dozen sexual harassment scandals.

Botipedia is already a thing although in beta.

They back it up by doxxing alleged repeat offenders on "Long term Abuse" pages.

There are two dozen sexual harassment scandals committed by admins and editors which was uncovered by a journalist starting from a year ago. She has finished written the feature story which might get published on the Daily Beast next year.

Wikipedia's structures must be viewed in the same light as Theranos at this point. Moral injuries are so strong in both.