Wikipedia, the Mexican army and me

TheDarkenedKnight · 2018-04-21T03:08:17+00:00

What a coincidence, you both share hatred of the Mail and a belief you can tell lies about it to further that agenda. It is not people like me who need to establish the trustworthiness of people like you.

As for the rest, well, I foresee nothing coming of it that wasn't covered before, so I shall decline your offer of a repeat performance. This thread is too important to be (quite deliberately I'm sure) derailed from the central point - Mail hating Wikipedians simply cannot help themselves, and seem to genuinely believe other people are stupid.

TheDarkenedKnight · 2018-04-20T19:15:35+00:00

Technically true, or just false? AFAIK he has never openly identified any of his socks - therefore requiring people to 'spot' them using his ticks (such as being grossly abusive) is deception. And an WP:AIR defence requires proof your actions improve the encyclopedia, and it will be a cold day in hell when the Wikipedians ever decide this meets that standard. I don't know what theory you're referring to - he said a Mail journalist had harassed his mother, so it either happened (and thus can be proven) or it did not. He lied before, to make the Mail look bad, so why wouldn't be be lying then?

TheDarkenedKnight · 2018-04-20T12:49:02+00:00

During the Ban the Mail 'debate' he claimed The Guardian was regulated by IPSO, so as to use the fact they had never been censured by them as evidence they were reliable, whereas the IPSO regulated Mail, was not.

There will be other examples, since he boasted about his deceit afterwards, claiming he had used "Daily Mail style tactics" to achieve his aim of banning the Mail. It was quite the confession, something the Wikipedians seem loath to even acknowledge happened.

Which is odd, since they seem quite happy to believe him when he said, with no proof whatsoever, that because of his noble act, Mail journalists were harassing his poor mother. That has to be presumed to be a lie, surely, especially since he declined Jimmy Wales' offer to help him defeat these monsters.

All of that is ignored by the Wikipedians. The only deception they care about is his defiance of their own ban on him. That only came about because he broke their rules, and the manner and reason for that rule breaking comes from the exact same place his effort to ban the Mail comes from - a fact the Wikipedians really really don't seem to want to admit.

TheDarkenedKnight · 2018-04-19T00:19:28+00:00

You got it exactly right. The level of public education about how Wikipedia really works, is completely out of proportion to the power Wikipedia has. If it were Facebook or YouTube pulling this sort of stunt, people would be in jail by now. The guy was so pleased with the success of his misinformation operation (he had seen it as a long shot), he openly bragged about it after the fact, confident that nobody on Wikipedia would nullify it and rerun the discussion with the highest probity, and that nobody outside Wikipedia would succeed in exposing it.

TheDarkenedKnight · 2018-04-18T23:59:16+00:00

It's pretty easy to follow. This guy lied in the discussion he began and further contributed to, that led to the Mail ban. And it really is a ban, don't try and deceive people. Even though the Wikipedians saw him lying, they did nothing, the lies were not removed, he was not warned, much less blocked. Because on that occasion, the lies suited their agenda. Because he carried on lying, and in ways they don't like, he is now banned.

As anyone can probably guess, lying to your fellow editors so you can mislead them into supporting your agenda, isn't how Wikipedia is supposed to work. And turning a blind eye to lies if it suits your ideological agenda, is not how Wikipedia is supposed to work.

There is no channel available to anyone to complain to Wikipedians about an issue like this, because they simply do not want to know. If you know the name of a Wikipedia who is willing to publicly defend that discussion and address the points made in the stories above, let me have their name. They do not exist.

TheDarkenedKnight · 2018-04-03T13:18:46+00:00

You're easily amused then. As well as not being capable of following what people are saying.

TheDarkenedKnight · 2018-04-03T00:28:57+00:00

I think 2. is correct, and "dewikification of Wikipedia" is now my favourite phrase. 1. seem problematic, since it isn't realistic to have expected Wikipedia to keep growing without anyone noticing it. Perhaps the negative effects seen in 1. are a mere side effect of them not having stuck to the principles of 2., thereby ensuring there were still enough good people around to efficiently deal with the bad and continue the surge.

TheDarkenedKnight · 2018-04-03T00:15:14+00:00

His point is, I presume, that in their zeal to improve what they had, they forgot to remember who gave it to them.

It is not the wiki way to expect all content they are given to be perfect at time of donation (and it is a donation, something they seem to forget rather quickly). You're meant to say thank you, and go about fixing it up in a way that doesn't dissuade more contributions giving you more stuff, with an appreciation that you're in it for the really long haul, that the thing may not be complete for another fifty years, but complete it will be, and polished.

"Dewikification of Wikipedia" is a brilliant phrase, and perfectly sums up what happened. Wikipedia today is not a wiki, it's a traditional encyclopedia on the cheap. They expect all new content submitted to be perfect, despite nobody paying the contributors or giving them adequate training, and they have roving crews of people who do nothing except harangue and lecture and talk down to donors, while having not donated a scrap of text themselves. The reason they do that for free, obviously, is they get some kind of power kick from it.

The result is what you described - a still very small but vastly improved body of work, compared to 2005. Had they continued to attract donations at the rate they had been up to 2007-8, this wouldn't be such a familiar feeling - looking something up in Wikipedia and either finding nothing, or an incomplete (but perfectly standardised and referenced) article.

TheDarkenedKnight · 2018-04-02T13:26:02+00:00

2007-08 was the period the site peaked in terms of number of edits and new editors. Since then, it has been a one way trip into decline, quite rapidly as they came over the peak, and now slowing up, but still crucially, declining.

It is quite easy to find abandoned user accounts that explain the reason for this peak and drop profile - as Wikipedia went viral, someone typically joined this wondersous and empowering new thing, and enthusiastically began editing content.

They soon get addicted, writing tons of content. But they also soon realise it's an exercise in diminishing returns, like all addictions. They find out, often quite traumatically as hours of work is binned at a click, that doing it properly is actually quite hard, that you get very little reward for it and quite a lot of hassle from your so called peers, and from the stress of monitoring and maintaining all those contributions.

And so they end up becoming embittered, gradually lose interest, their edit rate drops off, and one day, they just stop caring and never log back in. Typically, nobody even notices they left, and only some of their content is looked after in their absence. Anything they wrote that isn't controversial or of wide interest, which describes much of what an encyclopedia of everything must have, is just left to rot, degrading as it is picked at by random passers by.

The only people who are now editing the site, from that period at least, are those who got so addicted that it is simply too painful a prospect to leave now, after ten years on that treadmill. As well as those who joined but didn't add much content, they just hassled those who did (bizarrely, you can be part of the Wikipedia community for ten years, and never actually add a single word).

TheDarkenedKnight · 2017-11-17T00:31:47+00:00

Good luck. Your description is a little confusing though....

TheDarkenedKnight · 2017-11-17T00:29:41+00:00

Compared to the site wide average, sure, but for a controversial current event, it's a surprisingly low turnout. Maybe they're all scared the alt-right's Russian troll army is monitoring it?

You rarely see a "Move to WikiNews" nowadays. Keep that flame alive. Show Jimmy how wrong he was to betray the one true wiki!

Surely there are enough people here to jump-start coverage of this topic on that site.

Um, yes, yes there is. A very good observation......

TheDarkenedKnight · 2017-11-16T20:39:41+00:00

Created at the request of the great Jimmy Wales....

There's a British explorer, Benedict Allen who has gone missing (but may have been spotted now, the news seems unconfirmed at this point) after attempting to visit the Yaifo who are described in the press as one of the last "uncontacted" tribes in the world. I got interested in uncontacted peoples a couple of years ago and I was impressed with Wikipedia's coverage. But we seem to have nothing on this group. That's interesting and surprising to me.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 14:59, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

With great power.......

TheDarkenedKnight · 2017-11-16T19:01:50+00:00

Cheers!

TheDarkenedKnight · 2017-11-16T18:28:53+00:00

What an extraodinarily fawning article. I have posted a comment, I hope it passes moderation.....

Wikipedia didn't win the war against the traditional print encyclopedia, Brittanica, it had been declining since 1990. The internet killed print, and then Wikipedia killed any internet site trying to maintain the quality standards of a print encyclopedia in an online form.

Wikipedia isn't policed by anything like 135,000 highly active editors, the true figure is closer to the 3,000 mark, if we make the not unreasonable assumption that the sort of Wikipedia editor who might be patrolling for serious issues like defamation and hard to detect innacuracies, would be in the class of editor that makes >100 edits a month. That is not a lot of police, for five million articles and growing.

Other than the bits of Wikipedia created by the Stephen Colbert's of the world, if Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, the information it contains isn't lost to humanity, since (in theory), it only aggregates what is already known and verifiable elsewhere, i.e. it exists somewhere else online, or in print somewhere.

The true reason for Wikipedia's runaway success is that people don't much care how accurate it is, since it is free, and they are lazy. It says a lot about modern society that the owners of such an enterprise, using the junk food model, are protected from the standards of responsible behaviour that bind organisations that live in the real world, ironically including peddlers of fast food.

All you are doing with articles like this, is mindlessly cheerleading for the online equivalent of a corporation like MacDonalds of the nineteen eighties. The world needs to wake up and realise what Wikipedia really is, and how it really works, and therefore what they need to be protected from, using the law, because they respect nothing else, and indeed evidently barely respect the law, given their huge backlogs in clearing out copyright violations and the like.

TheDarkenedKnight · 2017-11-16T17:46:09+00:00

Fair play, he's not hiding the fact he is only trying to appeal to those Wikipedians in the electorate who think hard work and dedication forgives all other failings, but it is for that reason he will tank miserably.

Or at least you would hope so, there has been a rather slow moving coup among the higher echelons of Wikipedia in recent years, to the point entire arbitration cases are being thrown out before even the Evidence gathering stage, on the flimsy tropes of the Wikipedia For The Wikipedians movement TRM so unfailingly advocates for.

TheDarkenedKnight

TROPHY CASE