but:
> The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America ...
Everyone clicking on that archive link avoided having to pay someone to see information.
I'm personally a copyright abolitionist, so I'm pretty okay with that - but I want people who pearl clutch about AI systems not paying to realize that it's the same damn thing going on when they click on the archive link.
And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.
But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.
The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.
With AI content scraping, the people whose content was ingested aren't getting paid. That part does align to paywalls.
But there's more in the AI content situation. The scraped content is repackaged without any credit being given to the people who made the content. In most cases, the models trained on the content are intended to be monetized, and there is no intent to share revenue with the people who made the content.
When I bypass a paywall, there is no particular expectation that I'm going to take the content, modify it, and display / sell it as my own. In the vast majority of cases, someone reads some free content and moves on. The damage to the site or publication is limited to the unpaid viewing.
AI content scraping absolutely comes with an expectation that the content will be modified, presented, and sold. The damage goes beyond the unpaid viewing of the content.
Of all the demographics who should understand this, you'd think that people complaining about the failure of all the other institutions would be high on the list.
This probably highlights how human contribution or automated referencing both have a root in the sources, that should be recovered as a focus. Part of the future of the presentation of information should be hyperlinking "to the book pages".
Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings. When I try to search for it, I often trace it back to alternative medicine or pseudoscience influencers.
The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. Unless you're ready to spend months in a Wikipedia edit war with someone who obsesses over a page, there's no point in even trying. These people know the rules and processes and will use every one of them against you. When that fails, they'll try to pull rank. If that fails, they'll just quietly continue editing and rewriting (possibly from alt accounts) until you get too tired to fight the battle any more.
Contrast that with the rest of the internet, which mostly rewards radicalization and nudges people towards it.
Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
According to that Arbitrator, Wikimedia gave a legal opinion that he violated the law in doing so:
"Well, I got a result today: the ombuds commisssion found that I did indeed violate the access to nonpublic data policy, and has issued a final warning to me. Apparently mailing list comments are, "under a contemporary understanding of privacy law and the policies in question," nonpublic data on the same level as CU data or supressed libel."
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=350266#p350...
Wasn't the first time he did it either... Officially, community guidelines only apply on the site itself. Once you get into the Discords or forums, doxxing is common and tolerated. Admins and arbitrators are happy to participate on those forums under their Wikipedia usernames because they feel like they need doxx to take action against those trying to harm Wikipedia. And because it (usually) isn't them doing the doxxing, it's ok. There's even an "alt-right identification thread" where established editors can request doxxing from people who don't link their accounts onwiki.
Generally this targets newer editors who aren't in a clique yet. e.g. The person who made "Wikipedia and Antisemitism" got doxxed. Once you get to a certain level, you are expected to participate in these "offwiki" forums to get anything done.
Some people try to complain about it but it doesn't end well. Generally you don't want to fuck with them because by the time you find out about Wikipediocracy, you've already revealed too much and are doxxable. & unlike nation-state actors they have inside information and understand the site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
If you do choose to edit Wikipedia, use a burner email and only edit during the same one or two hours of the day so they can't track timezones. & don't post any photos or information on where you live nor attend meetups.
There are some good people but once you get deeply involved it is a toxic community. Sorry for the rant but it pisses me off whenever people talk about how great the Wikipedia community is as someone who's into the internal shit. it's the worst place to get involved in "free culture".
It’s a bit hard for me to imagine something better (in practice). It’s easy to want more or feel like reality doesn’t live up to one’s idealism.
But we live here and now in the messiness of the present.
Viva la Wikipedia!
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
The trick is to write about your proposed edit on the talk page and wait a few days. If nobody has complained, you make the edit and write "see talk" in the edit summary. The notion that you should push an edit first and wait for someone to revert you just doesn't work in practice except for trivial typo fixes. Discuss your edit in depth, then push it once you have a presumed near-consensus for it.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
Edit: at least ~4 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
I think that starting in the 1980s, people started to expect anything involving information technology created immediately-accountable monetary value on a massive scale after seeing the fortunes of people like Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, et al. This was further boosted by the Dotcom bubble.
The fact is, a significant fraction of IT is indeed profitable, but applying the model of perpetual growth is not appropriate for all of that significant fraction, and there's the other fraction of the IT world that isn't directly profitable. More people need to realize that their work falls in the latter two fractions instead of the first.
Scientists realized there is no "Truth", only a series of better and better models approximating it. But philosophers still talk about Truth, they didn't get the message. As long as we are using leaky abstractions - which means all the time - we can't capture Truth. There is no view from nowhere.
People are paid whole-ass salaries to edit Wikipedia (and to become mods on Reddit.) They masquerade as (a dozen different) obsessed weirdos, but they are just normal middle-class people who are being paid to lie.
If the number of editors were limited, it could easily develop bias (see your own Facebook page for examples).
If the subject matters were limited, it could develop bias (WikiSolarEnergy wouldn't tend to attract anti-solar-energy types).
Unsurprisingly, "Wikipedianon" is a hit-and-run profile created just for this post, AFAICT.
> it
What is "it", if not truth?
You're focusing on when the word "Marxist" was removed in 2024, but you might want to consider when it was added to the article (in August 2020, about two weeks after Harris was selected to be the vice presidential nominee): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
>Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.
to
>A controversial topic will become important enough to merit editorial discussion
Is an interesting point. I think I will vouch you just for the genius of flipping it.
i know that Beeblebrox did not doxx anyone and I said that in my comment. my point is leaking information to a doxxing forum sends the wrong message and is dangerous.
Maybe you should create an account and look at the "Wikimedian Folks Too Embarrassing for Public Viewing" forum and get back to me. Or do something about it before the Trump administration uses this as an excuse to censor enwiki. Either way here are some excerpts if you don't want to.
From the first page, here's an active editor (iii, known as jps or ජපස) doxxing someone about UFOs. I took out the names to be polite but it's all there:
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=14172
"Is [username 1] (T-C-L) an alt account of [username 2] (T-C-L)?
For those who are not aware, [username2] is the name of an account used by one [redacted] on various platforms up until about 2024 when he more or less abandoned them. That account also was involved in the ongoing game of accusing [redacted] (T-H-L) of being [redacted] (T-C-L) which is about as fairly ludicrous an attempt at matching a Wikipedia username as I've ever seen.
Anyway, I feel like maybe he thought "If [__] can do it, so can I." And maybe that's the origin of the VPP.
Oh, this is about UFOs. Yeah, I'm in the shit. Maybe someone can link to some other stuff for you to read, but I just want to drop this here because I have nowhere else I get to speculate on these matters and everyone loves a good conspiracy theory data dump from time to time "
Here's the thread "Who is Wikipedia editor i.am.qwerty"
https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=13821
"I.am.a.qwerty (T-C-L) gathered up a bunch of those articles and some earlier material to create Wikipedia and antisemitism..."
It goes on:
"But who is I.am.a.qwerty? Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I.a.am.a.qwerty is a PhD student named [real name]. Specifically, this [real name]:"
"[real name] is a PhD candidate [major] at [university name]. He received his BA (Hons) in [major] from [university]. Previously [real name] received his rabbinical ordination from the [other school] in [location] in [year]. [real name] is also the [job title] at [organization]."
The political model doesn't work at all. If you just count the votes of the people who show up to vote, the Party will hire buses and empty the retirement homes and homeless shelters. Maybe you can fight this irl if everyone knows there's an election, but nobody knows when there's a war on a talk page.
I dont want a world in which Trump regulates Wikipedia but pretending it's sunshine and rainbows is a joke at this point.
And the person you're replying to is strawmanning. I never said Beeblebrox doxxed anyone, just that they leaked secret information on a doxxing forum in violation of Wikipolicy and possibly privacy law.
I'll add I don't think it can be any closer to "perfect" than it is because the same fundamental traits which lead to its imperfections also enable its unique value - like speed, breadth, depth and broad perspectives. The only areas where it might very occasionally not be ideal tend to be contentious political and culture war topics or newer niche articles with low traffic. Basically topics where some people care too much and those where not enough people care at all.
But this isn't as big a downside as it might be because anyone can look at an article's talk page and edit history and immediately see if it's a contentiously divisive topic or, on the other end of the spectrum, see when there's been little to no discussion.
Not much of an indictment that additional information was added sometime shortly after the article was created.
It is not a transparent organization, and it does not even pay lip service to the effort of transparency. It is large enough of an organization that it is an absurd claim, on its face, that there are not cliques and factions who would do such things if it were at all possible.
You investigated yourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080604020024/http://www.hereco...
> So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.
> And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus
It's only when a subject becomes popular that the propaganda gets recognized and rectified.
https://x.com/therabbithole84/status/1957598712693452920?s=4...
Quite to the contrary, it's a very transparent organization because edit histories are public. It would be trivial to link to any instances of doxxing on the project, unless they don't exist, which they don't. Wikipediocracy doesn't count when talking about Wikipedia doxxing.
Correction on this: Wikipedia was GFDL until 2009. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update .
I don't quite agree with this, unless what you mean is that there's no procedure we can follow which generates knowledge without the possibility of error. This doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth, or that we can't generate knowledge. It just means that we can never guarantee that our knowledge doesn't contain errors. Another way to put this (for the philosophers among us) is that there is no way to justify a belief (such as a scientific theory) and as such there is no such thing as "justified true belief." But again, this doesn't mean that we cannot generate knowledge about the world.
So do you want reality or reality TV on Wikipedia? Should we consider Ancient Aliens as a source?
He's so unable to engage with ideas he doesn't agree with that he's conflated having a stance with "bias".
A lot of wiki pages about smaller companies only list the good things (fundraising, tech, etc.) and omit any controversies. The deliberate omissions due to bias are even more insidious than weasel words or other forms of poor journalism.
Fwiw I truly believe in Wikipedia and donate every year, but calling it "perfect" would be extremely dangerous (and false!)
COMPENDIUM Brief summary of a larger work or of a field of knowledge : abstract
The library is more extensive, but they don't have the same goals. I'd even argue that part of Wikipedia's quality is it's ability to remain small relative to the knowledge it summarises.
See also Canceling Disputes: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inqui...
There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere.
Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts.
Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable.
Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
Something happened, a war started, someone did X, someone else did Y... you open wikipedia, see all the "current situation" bias, open the history tab and look at the article from before <the thing> happened.
They have their NPOV[1] policy, and seem impressively unbiased to me, given the various divisive situations they have to try to cover.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_v...
Oh I agree we can generate knowledge, but it is never the Truth, it can't be. Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.
We are taking patterns from our experience, and coining them as abstractions, but ultimately we all have our own lived experience, a limited experience. We can only know approximatively. Some people know quantum physics, others know brain surgery, so the quality of our abstractions varies based on individual and topic. We are like the 5 blind men and the elephant.
The same applies on a larger scale with moderation. There are plenty of poorly-sourced database-like stub entries for STEM subjects, but try to make a page on a "softer" subject and there's a pretty good chance someone will try to nuke it with WP:PROOF, WP:NOTE, and/or WP:OBSCURE if it isn't perfectly fleshed out in the very first draft.
> There's a misconception in this thread and commonly elsewhere. Scientists aren't after truth. They're after facts. Truth depends on context. Facts are indisputable. Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be true. But the fact might be that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently.
This to me reads as semantic games; let me rephrase your example:
"Imagine you're looking at your computer screen and you see green. Someone else looking at their computer screen might be red/green color blind and might see a shade of brown. The color being green and red can simultaneously be factual. But the truth is that the displayed color is a mix of certain EM frequencies, and each person's brain interprets those frequencies differently."
There are only a very few people from the entire history of our species who have run particle collider experiments and verified first hand what's inside an atom. What they agree on is truth for everyone because almost nobody has the means to test it themselves. And then of course this truth is modified and updated as we find more data. Then old conclusions are rejected and the entire baseline of truth changes.
We can be sure of things to however many decimal places as you'd like, but reality itself is fundamentally built on probabilities and error bars. What we think we know is built on probabilities on probabilities.
Wow, she was ahead of her time, no? I admit to have never contributed to Wikipedia, that is about to change.
Your rephrase is incorrect.
"Red" and "green" depends on what your brain interprets. That doesn't change the underlying EM frequencies of the color you see.
Therefore, red and green are truth while EM frequencies are factual.
I never got around to writing it all out though. Bits of it can be found in old policy discussions on bold-reverse-discuss, consensus, and etc.
I guess the first thing to realize is that wikipedia is split into a lot of pages, and n_editors for most pages in the long tail is very very low, so most definitely below n_dunbar[]; and really can be edited almost the same way wikipeida used to be back in 2002. At the same time a small number of pages above n_dunbar get the most attention and are the most messy to deal with.
Aaron Swartz actually did a bunch of research into some of the base statistics too, and he DID publish stuff online... let me look that up...
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/
and especially * http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (note I'm using lossely in empirical sense, where an online page might have a much lower actual limit than 150)
Anyways, to get off-topic from my original comment, here's some evidence for you to ignore:
https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...
https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/is...
https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased
https://stophindudvesha.org/the-myth-of-wikipedias-neutralit...
My thought is that math (broadly speaking) possesses correctness because of axiomatic decisions. The consequences of those decisions lead us to practice math that can't express everything that we can imagine (e.g., see axiom of choice/ZFC).
The math humanity practices today is a result of tuning the axioms to be: self-consistent, and, useful for explaining phenomena that we can observe. I don't believe this math is correct in a universal or absolute sense, just locally.
Therefore, it's a fact that my brain interprets red instead of green, or vise versa. It's a fact for someone else's brain that they interpret it as green instead of red.
Philosophers aren't necessarily trying to do that.
You can't get to capital T truth via inductive reasoning like science uses. Just because the apple fell from the tree every single previous time, does not necessarily imply that it is going to fall down next time.
But if you are after other forms of reasoning its possible. 1+1 will always equal 2. Why? Because you (implicitly) specified the axioms before hand and they imply the result. Talking about capital T truth is possible in such a situation.
So its perfectly reasonable for philosophers to still be after capital T truth. They are doing different things and using different methods than scientists do.
* A sketchy online university that was clearly manipulating their Wikipedia page with lots of positive information about themselves to suppress info about their active lawsuits and controversies
* On medical topics: non scientific, baseless claims about the efficacy of various herbal treatments, vitamin supplements, or other snake oil treatments.
* On various fringe politicians. Someone clearly rewrites the article or adds additional things to the article with claims about what the politician has done or not done or wants to do, but these claims are arguably not fact based.
Now these things usually don't last for a long time. They do get rolled back or removed. But it doesn't have to be on there long for it to be utilized. For example, someone just needs to modify the Wikipedia page long enough to get through their active lawsuits, or the snake oil salesman just needs their info up on Wikipedia for long enough to use it to increase their perceived authenticity to trick some seniors. There is such a constant stream of bad actors trying to put this stuff out there that you'll see it eventually, and it doesn't even have to be up there for long for it to be harmful.
So I re-read the entire page, this time looking for signs it was written by marketing rather as a factual document. Of course it was exactly that. Only the engineers deep in the bowels of the organisations developing 5G knew how it would perform at that stage, and evidently they weren't contributing to Wikipedia. Until the man on the street had experience with 5G, the marketing people were going to use the Wikipedia page on it as an advertising platform.
So I'm in agreement with the OP. From what what I can see a Wikipedia page that only has a few contributors it is no better than any other page about the same subject on the internet. The breath and depth of a Wikipedia page on a subject arises because of the wisdom of the crowds contributing to it. If there is no crowd, it's possible there is no wisdom.
Fortunately Wikipedia does have one other advantage over a random Internet page - you can tell when the have been lots of contributions. There is an audit trail of changes, and you can get a feel for the contentious points by reading the Talk page. That contrasts to getting the same information from an LLM, where you have no idea if you are being bullshitted.
As you might predict from all that, the Wikipedia page on 5G is very good now.
The counter-arguments to all this all tend to boil down to some form of condescending tone or moralizing:
* left-leaning is just reality-leaning. LoLoLoL right-wingers are sooo stupid!
* Wikipedia should take the left-leaning stance because it is good, moral, noble, and righteous, while the right-leaning stance is vile, evil, unconscionable, and despicable.
If either of those thoughts cross your mind, then, congratulations, you are left-biased. You should try your hand at Wikipedia article editing. I'm sure they'll love you.
He first invents a link between a topic being "complex" with not being able to take a side. Then he conflates taking a side with "bias".
This is detached from reality. That is not nitpicking words. This is a word salad that starts with a need to dismiss a viewpoint and works backwards.
This "co-founder" was let go from Wikipedia in its first year over 20 years ago. He's had a crusade against them ever since.
Random people don’t have time for that.
Ergo “it is not a project for random editors anymore”.
I want do an edit or addition and be fairly evaluated without having to call higher instances or fight through bureaucracy.
> someone else's brain
Yes, like I said: it depends on context.
Red and green is interpretation, which depends on context. That's truth.
Sure, it's indisputable that one brain and a different brain can have different associations for names of colors. That's a fact. But the name of the color that each brain associates with corresponding input depends on context. That's truth.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/64d6548c19f38a...
In cases like those, what has gone wrong is a mix of apophenia and people protecting their own turf. Elaborate classification systems are created that are internally consistent but have no relationship to reality.
Much has been written on this topic, you should avail yourself.
https://conversational-leadership.net/tolerance-is-a-social-...
How about not calling Peter McCullough or Ryan Cole or Pierre Kory misinformation spreaders about covid when they were right the whole time
Larry Sanger was correct
Edit: (I know we're not supposed to comment on downvotes but I seriously don't care) Those of you who insta-downvote stuff like this should not enjoy the privileges of the karma system on HN that allows you to downvote
(Further - how many of you actually work for big tech? Do you think it's ok to censor doctors like has been going on the last few years? Do you have any qualities of personal reflection, whatsoever?)
Yes, it has its flaws, but I plan to keep on editing and donating.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi...
Unlike most user contributed sites it's happy to throw stuff away. It does grow but it doesn't care about growing fast. That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate.
What were they right about? I'm looking at Peter McCullough's Wikipedia article and some of the things he's claimed include young people don't need the vaccine, there is no evidence of asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, and COVID-19 pandemic was planned, etc.
Is this what you're saying they were right about the whole time? The pandemic was planned?
NSFW images on Wikimedia tends to be a very hot button issue when it comes to Wikimedia politics. There obviously some cases where such images are needed, and there is a lot of debate on where the line should be drawn (or if it should be drawn at all). Wikipedia is traditionally very anti-censorship in any form. Fun fact - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales lost a bunch of his user rights when he went on a deletion spree of classical art work containing nudity.
There is an automated filter for child sexual abuse images. Its not public what the procedures related to it is, but i assume if it goes off the fbi gets called.
One important piece of even trying to replicate that is its nature as a nonprofit. Any profit-seeking organization trying to grow a user-contribution based site will prefer content and moderation pipelines that drive engagement over quality.
No means or methods are necessary. I am familiar with the work of the NW3C and other groups who do important work in that area. My sympathies to the janitors. Truly difficult and important work.
As a non American this is very obvious to me.
Even Reuters that was supposedly meant to be a non-biased media outlet is clearly left-leaning at this point
In general, it is not uncommon to come across slantedness issues. Is it completely 100% clear that Doi has come on and maliciously added his papers? Not quite, but good propaganda wouldn't be either, and would actually be far less suspicious-looking.
In full fairness to jimmy, i think only a handful were risque art from the 1800s. Many of the other images would probably be classed as sex educational if you're being sympathetic, and exhibitionist if you are not. However the ultimate issue was not what the files contained but that he acted alone without agreement to delete outside of proper procedure.
Anything vaguely sociopolitical is functionally censored on it and wikipedia does nothing about it even if they don't support it.
For example:
I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. I spent countless hours writing articles in my early twenties. I stopped because the environment got more hostile as the site grew in popularity. I think that might have been necessary to address the influx of drive-by editing, but it still meant I stopped enjoying being a contributor. I don’t appreciate the constant asking for money — as far as I understand, they’re well off without donations.
There.
I think the misconception here is that criticism has to be mean and personal. As someone who celebrates the project’s ideals, giving criticism is an act of love.
In my view it is very much the journey towards an unatainable goal that makes Wikipedia so inspiring. The Wikipedian's themselves admit it is a work in progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_work_...
I think that's part of what makes Wikipedia beautiful.
In some ways it makes me think of the religious monolouge from the tv show babylon5 https://youtu.be/JjnpTcvGvts?si=6jdzDxVXOt--LNHC
That is a pretty concrete epistemological statement. Is it true?
That's not just a game, or a "gotcha". Any discussion about "truth" eventually ends up with the question of what it means to know something, a subject about which you seem to be fairly confident.
Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously *was* a slur then too. As evidence, it cites a study of 17th century literature that notes redskins were more likely to be villains than heros in a small sample of 80 books and a diary entry about a sign outside a small town that said "Indian / Redskin scalps - $1" or some such. I don't recall the details.
The point is there wasn't one cited source that showed redskin specifically was a slur, only general evidence that white settlers were racist against Native Americans. Clear WP:SYNTH violation.
Tried to make my own changes, got immediately reverted. Tried to start on the talk page, got totally filibustered by two editors who has the page and a hundred other racism adjacent pages on their watchlist and whose edit history was basically just those handful of pages. Started reading about internal wikipedia boards I could appeal to. Stopped and logged off.
Once you start noticing things like that and start double checking, you find such minor distortions in a lot of political adjacent Wikipedia pages.
Another good example is to grab five super murderous left wing dictators and five super murderous right wing dictators and read the summary section. Use a pen or a highlighter and classify each sentence as positive, negative, or neutral.
My most-shocking LLM interaction so-far ties with when http://www.perplexity.ai cited my recent wikipedia edit (from my two decade+ account) in answering a question about transistor density... less than one day after I had made the update it cited [1]. Like I am nobody why tf are you listening to me?!?
This ties with having sat with a published author of a non-fiction war chronicle as we discussed his books, himself, and his world (with a computer, me typing / brainstorming).
Among many other reconfigurations of muh'brain.
[0] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/efPrtcLdcdM
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
I am just the electrician.
- https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...
And my personal favourite is recently when the most ridiculous thing was added to Bukele's Gang Crackdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
If you still have the desire to have some of these fixed, post here and I'll put it in my queue and get to it at some point. If you don't want the resulting interaction from other commenters here, send it to my email (in profile).
Wikipedia is ultimately a consensus summarizer frequently mistaken for a truth-seeker. So you have to make the case for something being true somewhere where the experts live, and then Wikipedia can express the experts' opinion. But crucially, it is not truth-seeking on its own.
> However the ultimate issue was not what the files contained but that he acted alone without agreement to delete outside of proper procedure.
Were any changes to Wikipedia policies implemented as a result of this, and if so, do you know which ones?
I found the link to the discussion I referred to upthread since the discussion was from a bit ago:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:IdeaLab/A_Tor_On...
Did this ever go anywhere? I found a grant proposal, but I need to sign up for an account or reactivate my existing one, or whatever.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/A_Tor_Onion_S...
I held out for as long as I could but it was emotionally draining
When philosophers talk about 'Truth', they aren't searching for a perfect static artifact. They're investigating the concept itself, which is very necessary.
The entire project of model-building would be meaningless if there were no external reality to approximate. What is it that this "series of better and better models" is converging toward?
https://paste.sr.ht/~awal/2310cfca431e9f723df281d02558eaebd7...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kamala_Harris&old...
They are, by and large, a bunch of horrible bullies and losers - many Wikipedians don't actually care about articles creation or actual content, they fiddle about with URL fixes and categorisation. There was one horrible human being called BrownHairedGirl who did all these things and almost destroyed the place before they got indefinitely banned also.
I had a look at the most potentially controversial topics I could find right now, and I say they seem fair. For example: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/dozens-detained-us-immigrat... (on ICE arrests in NY) and https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-would-wider-r... (on recognition of a Palestinian state).
Indeed, Wikipedia lists it as a good source[1]. It's worth comparing that to outlets like CNN (reliable, but "... talk show content should be treated as opinion pieces. Some editors consider CNN biased, though not to the extent that it affects reliability.") or The Wall Street Journal ("Most editors consider The Wall Street Journal generally reliable for news. Use WP:NEWSBLOG to evaluate the newspaper's blogs, including Washington Wire. Use WP:RSOPINION for opinion pieces.")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per... ("Reuters is a news agency. There is consensus that Reuters is generally reliable.")
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...
Articles about some chemical process are fine, indeed often excellent.
Everything where facts get filtered and presented, is bad. Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
It doesn't seem to say this - there's quite a nuanced discussion about whether or not it was a slur during that time period[1]:
> The term redskin underwent pejoration through the 19th to early 20th centuries and in contemporary dictionaries of American English it is labeled as offensive, disparaging, or insulting..
> Documents from the colonial period indicate that the use of "red" as an identifier by Native Americans for themselves emerged in the context of Indian-European diplomacy in the southeastern region of North America, before later being adopted by Europeans and becoming a generic label for all Native Americans....
> In the debate over the meaning of the word "redskin", team supporters frequently cite a paper by Ives Goddard, a Smithsonian Institution senior linguist and curator emeritus, who asserts that the term was a direct translation of words used by Native Americans to refer to themselves and was benign in its original meaning ...
> Sociologist James V. Fenelon makes a more explicit statement that Goddard's article is poor scholarship, given that the conclusion of the origin and usage by Natives as "entirely benign" is divorced from the socio-historical realities of hostility and racism from which it emerged.
I think your summary saying the "status in the 17th and 18th century is a bit less clear" is fair, but I think the Wikipeida article outlines that lack of clarity too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_contr...
I'm increasingly concerned about the fact that any media outlet, conservative or otherwise, that doesn't engage in far right pandering to the propaganda of politicians is magically labeled "left wing." Anecdotal but someone was arguing to me at a pub last night that Piers Morgan is a liberal now because of his criticism of Israel.
OpenStreetMap's licence change was much more difficult. Agreement had to be sought from all editors and for the few that didn't respond their work was removed. We actually replaced the work of most non-responders before the licence change though.
I try to be open to the possibility that I'm wrong about things like this, but even as someone who tends to be very hesitant to make judgments about other people's motives, it's hard for me to imagine how much more convincing the evidence would need to be in order to conclude that one of the major political parties in the United States has long abandoned any semblance of good faith. Having a civil discourse requires both sides to sit at the table, and that can't happen when one side is busy flipping the table instead.
> Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.
> factually contrary to international law
Blew my mind.
At the end though, most of us are guilty of such behavior from time to time.
Russia is the major player in pushing disinformation in historical articles about eastern europe (and not only). It works on it systematically by using both hired editors and volunteers on scale as well as producing “backing” materials.
Framing editors who are trying to keep up with cleaning all this mess as bad actors is understandable if you support the goal why russia is doing that.
But, its by far the best human-averaged source of info on most topics. I'd say even politically charged topics, definitely much better than most news out there who always show some clear bias.
Its not exhaustive (another common complain form folks who seek visibility by complaining and denigrating stuff for the heck of it or some immature popularity), its not meant to be. You also don't do postgrad level physics studies from Encyclopædia Britannica, do you, but it may give you some shallow introduction to orientate in the field a bit.
Not like those hair-brained philosophers!
Sigh. One would have to possess an impressive level of ignorance in the history of philosophy and science in order to hold such a view. What would Raymond Smullyan, or Bertrand Russell, or Henri Poincaré, or who knows how many others, have to say about this remark, I wonder.
Is Bertrand Russel a scientist or a philosopher according to you?
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/classicreadings/chapter/bertr...
What about Albert Einstein?
https://todayinsci.com/E/Einstein_Albert/EinsteinAlbert-Trut...
Or Richard Feynman?
https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-fundamental-principles-o...
Finding resources for perspectives on truth by Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin is left as an exercise.
I'm seeing an ISO for Encarta on the Internet Archive, but I was hoping for a runnable version.
But archive.org has the subscription popup...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250905062805/https://www.theve...
You won't find a 1920's copy of a newspaper in Wikipedia, but you will find articles about events from then that link to said newspaper.
Both are super important though, Wikipedia can't exist as it does now without archives (digitized or at the very least referentiable).
I also have long been frustrated with certain areas of Wikipedia that I feel struggle so significantly with NPV that they're rendered beyond useless, likely net harmful. (These are not the topics I've attempted contributing to recently, I wouldn't dare).
I'm continuously annoyed by the contrast of their overbearing donation pushes with the overspends in their published reports.
BUT all that said I do sometimes need reminding in today's world how much of a miracle Wikipedia still is. Not something to be taken for granted. And on the overspends: this is hard to qualify given there's really no comparable projects in existence. Maybe this is just the price we need to pay.
There are organizations trying something else though; admittedly I got this through a promotion from a youtube channel, but Ground News [0] is a news aggregator that publishes news with many sources, including ownership, political affiliation, publishing type (facts or opinions, neutral or entertaining), and even notes on which channels do and don't report on it, identifying media blind spots like "low coverage from right sources" or "low original coverage" to help people escape their bubbles and provide multiple perspectives on an issue.
One of the requests in the letter (https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...) is to de-anonymise some of the Wikipedia editors.
Ta bu shi da yu created the citation needed template: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Citation... (I remember that account name from Kuro5hin. Much respect!)
He edited under several accounts, all of which are permabanned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aussie_Article_Writer
Why? Because he'd earned an interaction ban (IBAN) from engaging with BrownHairedGirl, and he breached the ban: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...
Whatever he said, it's been fully scrubbed, but it appears to have been commenting on BrownHairedGirl's not-yet-submitted Request for Adminship: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1039021442#Piotrus...
How'd he get the interaction ban? Because another account of his and BrownHairedGirl were squabbling, and the admins have working eyes and brains, they could see he was doing the instigating: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=980273295#Proposa...
You're not meant to wind up or troll your fellow Wikipedians, even if they are combative dickheads who need taking down a peg.
What was the beef? That he was creating small subcategories for each suburb of Brisbane, and BrownHairedGirl goes off her nut at small categories.
BrownHairedGirl was eventually taken out by being needlessly combative about - of all things - Wikipedia's "small categories" policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
> what stops you from creating a new account?
Wikipedians inevitably go back to their old stomping grounds, use their normal tone in discussions, repeat their same old habits and basically don't change. When they do that, they're very recognisable to the people they already spent 20 years interacting with. They out themselves as a sockpuppet of the original banned user, and they get banned again.
That said, I find Wikipedia's biases predictable, avoidable (topic specific) & also very interesting as a sociological study in itself.
Firstly, it reminds us of inherent bias in (mostly colonial-written) paper encyclopedia of the past. There has never been an unbiased encyclopedia written & seeing the biases fully sourced & rapidly evolving in realtime serves as an excellent crystallisation of slower processes in previous works: highlighting that many of the historical "facts" we all grew up with were ultimately fed to us by similarly biased groups.
I've also come to the slow realisation that this may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem & that simply categorising it as "biased beyond repair" & continuing to handle it in that manner may be the best thing we can do.
And of course famous people's PR people.
1. I suspect the NPV problem may be a fundamentally unsolvable problem (or at least one that would literally take a global paradigm shift in how all societies are structured to do so). This seems outside of Wikipedia's control. Attempting any draconian measures to tackle it might have negative knock-on effects on many of the other assets that give Wikipedia it's value.
2. The spending problem, as I said, is subjective & might simply be a case of efficiency being incompatible with an organisational culture that produces such a miraculous thing. I honestly suspect the opposite is true: I personally think the overspends are indicative of organisational disfunction that could seriously hurt the project in the longer term, but that's pure gut feeling on my part, based on nothing of substance. Who knows.
3. The increasing difficulty in contributing (80% of edits coming from 1% of editors) on the other hand is - imo - a potentially terminal problem & one that needs to be addressed urgently if we want to keep this resource alive.
In the past, Wikipedia vandalism was a rite-of-passage of school & college kids. This obviously needs counter-measures but it really feels like today's Wikipedia has gone so far in the opposite direction as to entirely dissuade new contributors. Old Wikipedia used to be filled with User: namespaced subpages with long form essays on the ever running debate between deletionism & inclusionism. In today's Wikipedia, the inclusionists have emigrated, tired of battle, & the remaining deletionists bravely prevent any budding new contributor from having a positive welcoming community experience by quickly auto-deleting their WIP stubs or moving them into esoteric red-taped namespaced processes nobody knows how to navigate. It's a deeply unwelcoming environment for new users, especially young people. I'd love to see an age profile of the population of frequent editors.
Is it a case of rot then? Or maybe I'm just biased, but I get the feel it wasn't always like this. It was never ideal, sure, but it used to be that I was wary of the site when checking, say, contemporary politics. Now it's a good chunk of recorded history instead.
Wikipedia is good for casual research, and in practice, I found the English Wikipedia very reliable, at least for scientific topics, but it is also pretty good on big controversial subjects. Reliability only starts to drop on minor subjects.
But educators want you to go beyond that. Here, Wikipedia is just a starting point, with its best feature being citations.
I did find some of the vandals, and became good friends with a few. Some of what they write is side splitting humor, but also the alt-right has an amazing amount of power they are using to rewrite history.
I would never give them a thin dime.
I know of at least of one case in which a person publicly admits he is using Wikipedia to promote their political stances and who is right now at the center of an arbitration case in which he intends to silence opposition.
This is not that.
Thankfully one of the primary vendors (Qualcomm?) had really good doco publicly available.
It even included a lovely diagram showing which frequencies were useful in different scenarios. And a list of likely allocations per country. Letting me create a nice side by side of possible 5g strengths in Australia vs the USA.
And being fair, if there's one weakness in a site which relies on several sources agreeing on something it surely is when those sources are colluding on something, but the end result is a page rife with misinformation.
This is prevalent in culture wars stuff, Keffals article "graciously" fails to mention how she frequently lied and instigated vast amounts of harassment towards herself or how she basically spent the GoFundMe money she campaigned for on heroin. If the media spins a narrative, Wikipedia doesn't really have a counter to that in any way.
When evaluating a news source for whether it’s unbiased, left or right, we necessarily look at the stories it presents and check whether they align with and present in a positive light a particular political option.
We call it „unbiased” if it doesn’t particularly favor any of these.
We’re already in the realm of US electoral politics - for a second we can assume that nothing else exists.
In 2016 the political landscape shifted drammatically and presenting the „right wing” option in a favorable light required certain concessions when it comes to previous journalistic standards.
So, just by sticking to its previous guidelines, the AP would automatically shift to the „left” - because the landscape changes.
It would be more accurate to say that the world shifted underneath AP’s lense and so it immediately started being perceived as left wing.
The consequence of what it means is that we can't have any justified claims or knowledge at all. If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility.
Alternatively, objective truth does exist and humans can comprehend it, and the issue of truth versus the development of how we come to understand it is a semantic one (I rather like the distinction between historie and geschichte in German).
To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.
Not that i'm aware but it was a long time ago so i might just not be aware. Note that the majority of the files he deleted were undeleted and are still present to this day. The list is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&... and most of the links are blue.
> I found the link to the discussion I referred to upthread since the discussion was from a bit ago:
Not as far as i am aware. People are really nervous that without accurate IP addresses it will be difficult to do anti-abuse stuff.
The new thing that is happening right now is we are killing public display of IP addresses of anonoymous users. Perhaps once that rolls out people will be less attached to ip address tracking and more open to something like tor.
That said, if the tor hidden service is read but not write as the grant proposals, that solves that concern. I don't think anyone would object to a read-only service. There just isn't that much interest from the people who could make it happen, and regular concerns about added complexity for limited gains.
As an aside, the grants process is really disconected from wikimedia tech stuff. Grants might give some money to someone to make an unofficial mirror, but it wont be helpful for making an actual official tor hidden service. There is a 0% chance that a grant will lead to an official hidden service. If this ever happens the discussion threads will be on phabricator and not grant pages.
The way in theory to make this happen is one of:
- convince wikimedia community this is super important. (Unlikely to happen as this is too niche). Wikipedians have some influence over WMF priorities but really only when they start a riot.
- convince wmf senior leadership it is super important (also pretty unlikely)
- lobby the idea with individual developers who work on SRE stuff. Maybe if you convince them, they convince their boss, and it eventually happens when the team is having a sliw sprint. (This is the part where its open source so external contributions are in theory possible to a certain extent, but to effectively do this you basically already need to be an insider and know all the right people to talk to)
I seldomly add much beyond such things though.
Compare this text from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration :
>> The most common labeling method uses the descriptors R or S and is based on the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules. R and S refer to rectus and sinister, Latin for right and left, respectively.[2]
This claim is actually repeated further down in the article. The fact that it is false was noted on the talk page seven years ago, but this seems to bother no one. After all, there's a citation.
I think we can reasonably expect more. Wikipedia reliably fails at very, very easy problems of "knowledge consensus".
Although CBPP shares a lot with general User-generated content (UGC) and the open source model, maybe mechanisms that make it work is a little different.
The article points out system-side elements like "Talk page" and human-side elements like policies and guidelines.
I wonder if there are any studies on this subject.
Not to mention that there a whole load of #MeToo scandals which would doom Wikipedia if exposed to the media.
Even more concerning is that the deletion "consensus" is often formed by just half a dozen people who almost always cast a deletion vote.
I pop into AFD discussions occasionally and try to put my thumb on the scale but always end up disappointed with the results.
Someone should make a "Deleted From Wikipedia" website composed of nothing but Wikipedia articles that were deleted due to supposedly insufficient coverage/notability.
You'll see "xy atrocity had caused the deaths of this many people*", where the additional note will say something like "The numbers reported in this study have been challenged by many scholars on the subject and has been accused of invalid methods".
It's super common with history around Communist countries, because for a lot of folks in the west, the black book of communism is taken as fact when it's far from it, and you have groups like the Victims of Communism memorial foundation that have huge coffers for pushing the black book line.
I'm not sure if there's anything else out there that's better at giving a fairly neutral summary of political controversies?
It reminds me of the Churchill quote "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
From the talk page:
"This is inaccurate, as the linked Wikitionary page defines rectus as straight, not right"
From the Wiktionary page referenced: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rectus
- led straight along, drawn in a straight line, straight, upright.
- (in general) right, correct, proper, appropriate, befitting.
- (in particular) morally right, correct, lawful, just, virtuous, noble, good, proper, honest.
So, the wiktionary page literally defines it as right, and we see that it's not about direction but about being correct or incorrect. And then the follow up has literally no source to back it up.
So... "I think we can reasonably expect more."
The first claim is debunked. The second claim has nothing to back it up.
Is your proposal then to accept lies and claims without evidence?
Wikipedia doesn’t treat all sources as being equal, so even in cases where there’s no reasonable doubt towards a claim’s veracity, if the correct source hasn’t already claimed it, editors are liable to revert your edit.
Obviously this is a phenomenon that occurs much more often in ongoing or politically sensitive stories. That said, it’s important for people to understand the flaws in Wikipedias method of epistemology.
I have an email, old enough to vote, that I received from an engineer. They wrote "Wikipedia is a good site for learning how our new RAID array works. People need to change their mind about Wikipedia. Just because anyone can make a page doesn't mean the information is wrong."
If they had sent me any other link, all this info would be behind a paywall, login, or would simply 404 today.
Just because we don't enumerate Wikipedia's faults doesn't mean we think it's perfect.
I get this feeling but in the opposite direction. The more I see it the more I come to realise I was blinder to it in the past.
Many people comment on the internet ushering in an age of misinformation, but I actually see it as ushering in an age of misinformation awareness. Factchecks in legacy media were rare to nonexistent & generally not accessible to most media consumers. Information was more siloed leading to much greater acceptance of what was fed as fact without a lot of interrogation. Now, we're bombarded by such a slew of contradictions we "feel" less able to discern fact from fiction, which is disconcerting, but it's really just a broad awakening to something that's always been the case.
Why don’t you just say what you mean? Not everything is about proving points or “winning”, it’s okay to just have honest discussion.
Individuals and groups, be they ad-hoc formations, corporate backed, or nation-state backed routinely astroturf all corners of the internet and Wikipedia is a very big, very common target.
What UN recognized definition of the place is "india administered kashmir" and "pakistan administered kashmir" that is split between the two till the time the issue is resolved before the UN. This is a internationally accepted definition that encompasses the situation being active.
what indian based troll factory does is, unilaterally call it "indian UT of jammu and kashmir" and "pakistan occupied kashmir".
I resisted for as much i could, i would revert the edits and they would be back, i would give evidence of the same in order to maintain status quo but sadly i could not keep up. i was overrun and it felt like being eaten by a mob of hungry zombies.
https://app.adfontesmedia.com/chart/interactive?utm_source=a...
(I expect a lot fewer people to reference that chart in the future unless they fix the new user interface)
These measurements do feel a bit arbitrary, since our definitions of left and right bias are subject to change. For example, one interesting thing about the AP is that their stylebook used to urge their reporters to avoid even using the word "Palestine," one of many ways they put their thumb on the scale in favor of Israel in that conflict. (not sure what it says today) They somewhat famously fired a reporter for having participated in some college activism related to the Arab-Israeli conflict that would seem very quaint and anodyne today, a firing that stirred up journalists and was pretty widely regarded outside the right wing media sphere as unfair. (ironically, a week or two later the IDF destroyed the AP's Gaza office in an airstrike)
I've been guilty of pointing out that the US doesn't really have a left wing, according to the textbook definitions of things, but that's not how people usually talk. People really are talking about the median when they say "politically neutral," even if they shouldn't.
And here's the point: the median can certainly shift as the number of media sources shifts, or if you prefer, as the culture shifts.
Either atoms exist or they dont. Our idea of atom has evolved over time, but the thing that we call "atom" has always been there (at least on the time scale of human civilization).
The probabilistic nature of quantum objects isn't really a problem either. Electrons may be particles, waves, both or neither, but the "thing" is a real phenomenon of this world regardless of how we talk about it.
Similarly, the truth value of alien existence is well defined: either they exist at this time or they do not. We don't know it for sure, but this doesn't change whether they are actually there or not.
EDIT That line did exist in the past. It was there one year ago. Can someone more skilled in Wikipedia find and link the revision where it was removed? Bonus points for finding when it was added. Thanks in advance.
Why? It's really not reliable. It doesn't have any decent standards for sources. Any controversial topic is a constant edit war. Wikipedia is only good when you're okay if info turn out to be false.
The Talk pages are just a first introduction to the sheer madness behind the scenes; one quickly starts to realize that relative few people are calling the shots in a lot of places and that their personal biases are causing serious problems. The "Reliable Sources" policy would be atrocious enough already (there are no objective processes for challenging a source's inclusion or exclusion from the informal list on a given topic, only political ones) without the "power user" editors who are clearly abusing it.
Just that we can’t claim all of our knowledge are equally close to the absolute truth we suppose to exist. The belief that the current attention exist is among the closest thing we can have to an absolute truth. That something like "I" exists is a step further away. That an external world exists is yet an other step further. That 1+1=2, it depends if we take the road of Principia Mathematica à la Whitehead&Russel or if we take more faith in intuition on sensory/memory inputs + reward/penalty from what teachers asked us to integrate at primary school.
>If you can't even count on the law of identity you've lost all intelligibility.
Change as sole stable permanent foundation is harder to play with, at least by the most spread education systems in western civilization (outside it I don’t have first hand experience), and the concept of identity can be derived from it as a transitional side effect. Not that identity must be dropped entirely, but then considered under different perspectives. Somehow like we can build our math under ZFC or category theory (or without anything so firmly and meticulously founded really), and at high level notions it doesn’t prevent us to reemploy familiar patterns.
Identity as a foundational block is not only an issue for humanity at epistemological level, but also at psychological and societal level. Used as inscrutable fundamental black box, it can actually prevent intelligibility and sound reasoning in all the contexts it’s broadly employed.
>To my mind, where we've gone wrong is that we began by assuming transcendentals, holding certain axiomatic, a priori metaphysical assumptions that make the scientific method possible, and then turned around and denied that transcendentals exist in the first place- undercutting the foundation rather than really questioning our tooling or our capacity to understand the data.
That’s probably smoothing "we" very broadly here. "We" also have a very firm tendency to easily build disagreement on every matters and the rest. Nonetheless I would be interested to know more about what leads to this perspective.
In my experience, the majority of accusations of various groups or individuals wanting to do these things, are simply not supported by the available evidence. Meanwhile, accusations of the desire to discriminate, impose religion etc. are often cited as justifications for censorship.
This is a good policy. It’s much easier for a couple small outlets to be wrong than for the small outlets and some major ones to be wrong, and the stakes are high - naming the wrong suspect could ruin an innocent person’s life. Wikipedia is for knowledge, not rumors. If you want rumors, there are lots of other sites out there.
Plenty of people disagree with you (and each other) about which groups of people have these characteristics.
> the obvious follow-up question is how exactly you can effectively debate someone who quite literally is opposed to the idea of rational debate
I'm unclear on how "ignoring inconvenient facts" is supposed to imply "opposition to the idea of rational debate". But my experience has been that both are common among the most active and respected Wikipedia editors and curators. Just try to get one to give any concrete standard for what it would take to start or stop considering a source valid for WP:RS purposes, and then try to hold them to that. The combination of RS inertia with WP:NOR is the primary thing enabling citogenesis (https://xkcd.com/978/).
> it's hard for me to imagine how much more convincing the evidence would need to be in order to conclude that one of the major political parties in the United States has long abandoned any semblance of good faith.
If you think this is only true of one of those parties, you're part of the problem.
I suspect that the bulk of readers don't give a second thought to Wikipedia's Magisterium.
Meta getting free books to train an LLM, piracy bad
Obviously popular articles are great -- they have so many eyeballs and editors that they're not just quite accurate, but often more comprehensive than other sources (in terms of describing competing schools of thought, for example).
But when you really drill down into more niche articles, there's a tremendous amount of information that is uncited or not found in the citation, has glaring omissions, and/or is just plain wrong. These are the kinds of articles that get 1 edit every six months.
It's those latter articles that are the reason Wikipedia is too unreliable to cite.
(Also, Wikipedia is a tertiary source, as it is meant to only cite secondary sources, not primary sources.)
In a world run by criminals, telling the truth becomes a crime.
Apologies for the preamble, but I wanted to provide some context. In the 2000s, I began updating the Men's Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement) Wikipedia page. Mostly statistics around things like suicide, homelessness, likelihood of being assaulted and murdered, disparities in the educational systems and courts, the high rates of workplace death and injury, etc. Always cited with peer reviewed or governmental data, and sometimes with "accepted" news articles. My goal was to inform people about the facts. Some time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, questionable edits began happening. For example, suicide statistics were removed periodically. The reasons were generally specious. Sometimes arguing about semantics. Sometimes the source. Sometimes procedural. One editor argued that the statistics should be contained as a subsection of the Feminism page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism), for example. They also tried to remove the page entirely. I began to notice that the people making the edits were frequent editors of related pages like Feminism.
It is at this point that I should point out that feminists and men's rights advocates don't always see eye to eye.
The questionable edits became malicious edits. Administrators began selectively enforcing rules. For example, applying a higher standard for sources on the Men's Rights page than they do on the Feminism page. They applied a banner at the very top of the page directing people to a feminist friendly page called the "men's liberation movement." They removed countless statistics and examples of inequalities in law and education. They changed the language in all sections to suggest or imply that the people involved in the movement are incorrect or mistaken. For example, the entire second paragraph (of only two) in the introduction is a refutation of the movement. Compare with the Feminism page. Criticisms are now located at the very bottom of the page in a sub-sub-section which doesn't even have its own anchor. It's a few small paragraphs now on a page with tens of thousands of words. In the "Suicide" section now they include, "studies have also found an over-representation of women in attempted or incomplete suicides and men in complete suicides." Just to make sure that no one could make the mistake of caring about men, *unless it's framed in relation to how women might be affected.*
I could go on but the stark differences between these pages should be extremely clear. They have not been edited for clarity or truth, but for ideological reasons. This is just one of millions of pages on which ideological wars are being waged. Unfortunately, the war is lost. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all some version of far to extremely far left wing Americans. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger now calls the site "propaganda." (https://www.foxnews.com/media/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-san...) It's clear that many like this bias, but for those of us who used to be involved, we can confidently tell you that you should never, ever take what Wikipedia has to say at face value. It is much closer to propaganda than it is factual.
So even if Wikipeda isn't permitted as a direct source for students, it's a great place to find other sources for claims and facts about almost any topic. That's how I taught my kids to use it in school. It's a ready-made bibliography on almost anything.
Even the titles are a place of political warfare. For example, note carefully which incidents are labelled as "riots" and which as "unrest", and try to find any objective, politically neutral principle that could explain those results.
Not seeing anything in this source that supports this language; they summarize no other sources that I could see, and their own conclusions are more complex than this (as covered further down the article.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...
Accordingly, the average media experienced a shift to the right, but not to the left. To be neutral, one thus has to look left of the average of what the media report.
Interestingly enough, Wikipedia once (I haven't checked if it's still in effect) blacklisted links to there, with compelling evidence (if you read any of the discussion behind the scenes) that it was actually about certain admins and power users trying to maintain control over the bias in main-space article content.
Individuals getting a pass, good.
See, it just depends on how you slice the Venn diagram. With a bit of imagination you'll be able to start connecting the dots by yourself in no time.
If I just want to know some dry facts about Podunk, BFE, it'll probably have them right. But maybe not, if the mayor of Podunk wrote the page and is trying to promote the town, or if it was last edited by someone who used to live there and hates the place. And very few people are going to check the talk or history pages to see whether there's been an edit war or other hints that the page might be sketchy.
Please don't pretend as if people having a discussion at this level are unaware of the facilities available for permanent deletion on Wikipedia (the so-called "oversight").
> Wikipediocracy doesn't count when talking about Wikipedia doxxing.
"Wikipedia doxxing" clearly means doxxing performed by and/or against Wikipedians, not necessarily on Wikipedia's actual domains. Especially if you're using the term to refer to GP, which states:
> The article criticizes doxxing but well-known Wikipedia editors doxx each other all the time...
So unless you can demonstrate that these Wikipedia editors don't post on Wikipediocracy, then yes it obviously does count. "Wikipedia editors doxxing each other" doesn't stop being "Wikipedia editors doxxing each other" just because of where it's posted.
> When I said anyone can verify it, I meant it; go make an account on wikipediocracy, go to the "Wikimedian Folks Too Embarrassing for Public Viewing" forums, and go through the posts by that user.
It looks to me like the top-level commenter already did exactly this, and found the exact opposite of what you imply we'd find.
> Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that [username] is a PhD student named [real name]. Specifically, this [real name]:"
> "[real name] is a PhD candidate [major] at [university name]. He received his BA (Hons) in [major] from [university]. Previously [real name] received his rabbinical ordination from the [other school] in [location] in [year]. [real name] is also the [job title] at [organization]."
is not "doxxing"?
Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that I find that patently absurd.
This is the right approach. If more information sources held this standard, sloppy reporting and outright lies would be very costly. Would you tell everyone very important news based on a the word of a friend who is known to stretch or invent the truth? Be a reliable source and you can participate.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikiped...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1]
Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc.
So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral.
Wikipedia absolutely cites primary sources (as well as secondary and tertiary sources), and this is in accordance with their policy. Breaking news stories and scientific papers are some commonly used primary sources. You may be thinking of their "no original research" policy or their warnings against editors adding their own interpretation to primary sources.
Perfect example, since they only exist as a concept to describe an observation. With higher precision of observation, it became “the new truth“ that most of the time even on the observation level do not actually exist in terms of matter; they “flicker“ fast enough to appear existing at all times. When you look often enough or at the wrong times, there is nothing to observe.
You are looking at a case of a person LITERALLY admitting they are using it for propaganda and your reaction is "I'm sure it's actually not, it's actually neutral and it's just that it differs from your view". I'm sorry but I can only explain it to you, I can't understand it for you.
Certainly that's not a great way to make money. Not if you're depending on people to spend a lot of time seeking new content (and be shown ads).
> A controversial etymological claim is that the term emerged from the practice of paying a bounty for Indians, and that "redskin" refers to the bloody scalp of Native Americans.[55] Although official documents do not use the word in this way, a historical association between the use of "redskin" and the paying of bounties can be made. In 1863, a Winona, Minnesota, newspaper, the Daily Republican, printed an announcement: "The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth."[56]
This is all WP:UNDUE. The claim is not just contoversial, it's downright nonsensical, unless you also believe "Indian" is a racial slur.
Its the lack of clarity or apology, he never said that it wasn't, he never apologised or said "oh yeah, i didnt mean that" or he even could have brushed it off as a joke or trolling to evoke a reaction. But he never did, he just said people were overreacting.
Combined with his public support for groups like AfD and Patriotic Alternative UK, it seems pretty obvious that he's a Nazi. If anything this subject shows a clear divide between US and European reaction, given how he's now overwhelmingly persona non grata in Europe since that. The US has this bizarre tribalism in its politics, where half its electorate deny the reality that an government official (as he started his doge role at the time) is glorifying the symbols of America's greatest adversary in the world's most destructive war.
That is some 1984-level “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" argument. If those “news” sources want people to stop calling them liars, they should stop lying.
I did hear about the hiding of anonymous users’ IPs in passing as I was looking into the .onion URL for Wikipedia concept. I was looking at stuff like TorBlock and thinking that they’re so close and yet so far from having a Tor accessible view or subsite. It could be a special view like the .m mobile views, or something. It could be made to work, but it would take some doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Torblock-blocked
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock
If one can implement that, a read-only mode for Tor users would seem fairly straightforward.
Once while randomly walking around in the Sunset district of SF, near the Internet Archive iirc, I bumped into someone who claimed to be a legal counsel of Wikipedia/Wikimedia with a business card to match. I don’t have many Wikipedia contacts besides, alas, but I am already a user, though I don’t post much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AspenMayer
Found my old account, as it were. Then I tried to edit my user page and discovered I have an IP block due to using iCloud private relay and/or a vpn. And that block prevents me from editing my own user page. That’s where this policy is going too far, imo. It’s my user page! I can see how even that feature could be abused, but come on. I know it’s not your personal policy, it’s just frustrating.
The issue seems one of institutional support and momentum more than a technically difficult problem to solve, especially if the Tor version were read only. I think it is just a shame that the issue has low awareness. Then again, I bet more folks associate Tor with bad actors than good or merely desperate ones, which is an earned reputation when it comes to bad actors on Tor. I don’t know how fair that is, but that’s the way it is currently. If only we could have a profile option to enable Tor access and then folks could get a unique .onion URL that proxies to a backend Tor read only connection to Wikipedia/Wikimedia? I think that could be done, but impetus is lacking, I suppose.
In a lot of ways, Tor can seem like a solution looking for a problem, at least for legitimate use cases that don’t involve law violating and/or antisocial behavior. It’s a shame that a bad reputation can hold Tor back from doing more good. I think Wikipedia is the single most important and impactful site that could benefit the world and all Wikipedia users simply by adding a .onion version, even if it has the same policy on blocking open proxy access and Tor access from edits. Read only is better than the status quo where Tor use is risky but necessary to access the site, as the alternative to that is no access at all.
I’m a working journalist, so I’ll have to make an effort to edit this Wiki user page while maintaining opsec, because I’m not turning off my vpn or private relay, or any other security features on my end of the connection. I respect Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but I have standards, and sources, to protect.
When they explain where primary sources are allowed, they emphasize they "should be used carefully":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
Also "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
The general idea is that primary sources have not been judged as notable by anyone. The fact that a secondary source considers it notable to include a primary source is a strong signal that the information has passed a first, minimal bar for inclusion in an encyclopedia.
And when primary sources are cited, Wikipedia is exceptionally clear that they must be cited only for verifiable statements of fact, not interpretations or synthesis. That's what secondary sources are for.
Although, handling it purely pragmatically, there is no other concise source of information as vast as Wikipedia's concerning so many facets of life as well as sciences that is far enough from feelings' reach that is pretty well-written as the only possible bias present is also factually incorrect (as opposed to ideological topics).
I understand that supporting and reading articles from a source which you know is blatantly lying or otherwise obstructive or manipulative on other topics is a difficult undertaking but we literally have no other option . There is no war but the war against illiteracy to be won. Education, information and intelligence is man's best friend and until a better alternative arises for the masses (e.g scientific articles do not count as an alternative, Britannica is only in English) the one we have should we stuck with, and its quite well managed too.
Bias in itself is eternal, and holding any entity to a standart so high is illogical at best in my view. If there was no Wiki, would you think the many blog pages filling its space would be absent of the very bias you're talking about, but worse, would they have had any factual backing?
Is this because atoms don't exist, or because we are looking in the wrong way due to partial (mis)understanding?
The "new truth" that you talk about is just a different understanding of the concept of atom, but the actual thing that we call atom and that exists in the real world (whether as matter or in some other form) has not changed.
I don't know that the attackers against Wikipedia are advocating for a modest point like that, which I would think even proponets accept as a truism. I think Wikipedia is just another variation on institutional knowledge, and, as the world descends into misinformation and authoritarianism, it was inevitable it too would be attacked for perceived "bias."
Everything from global warming to vaccines, to newer and newer frontiers we never would have guessed, like hurricane trajectories or drones or air traffic, have fallen one after another to a kind of reactionary skepticism, resentful of the fact that these domains are controlled by real facts, and not merely participatory collective storytelling. There are some things left, that we problaby think could never get politicized, that will be. Pickleball rules? Quantum mechanics? Baseball history? Soon longstanding uncontroversial claims belonging to those are going to fall into the category of essentially contested concepts.
So Wikipedia, with ordinary and lonstanding requirements for reliable sourcing, and decades of policy on what that means in reaction to countlessly many debates, is resilient against the kind of recreational, hedonic skepticism that the masses use to dismantle other knowledge claims.
So "well wikipedia's not perfect" kind of rubs me the wrong way because it seems like it implies we should be more welcoming of this attitude of hedonic skepticism, which has been so destructive. I think it should be celebrated. Authoritative factual validity, and the norms that make it possible, used to be uncontroversial. And thus far, social media misinformation has outcompeted fact checkers, but not (yet) Wikipedia. I feel like that's never been more important.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...
[2] https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi...
[3] https://archive.ph/CClQ6 (this is a Washington Post article. I'm using the Archived link as it's paywall-free)
Is it actually bad that Meta trained their AI on books? No, court already decided that it's substantially transformative and doesn't harm the publishers. Should Meta employees have stolen the books? No, obviously not. The middle men need their cut.
One thing that gets me excited is that there's a tantalizing possibility that the 21st century might have an Einstein-level breakthrough that treats holography and some principle of informational consistency as more fundamental than QM, which is amazing, and would change everything.
But even in that hypothetical future paradigm, an "atom" would still be something true and meaningful against that backdrop, and our measurements or knowledge claims about it would still be meaningful. And our progress toward knowledge of the atom was still real progress.
It's legitimate to treat our knowledge as limited, subject to revision, or approximating. But treating that grain of truth like it implies no knowledge or progress is in hand is an abuse of the concept.
- https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
- https://www.piratewires.com/p/wikipedia-editors-cant-decide-...
- https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...
It's similar to the problem on Reddit, I wouldn't trust it on any topic that is even mildly controversial. Wikipedia will have a strong progressive left slant it launders carefully through seemingly neutral language and selective sourcing.
Honestly it's gotten worse over the years too - makes me see more value in printed encyclopedia, they go out of date but at least they represent a slice of time. They're not endlessly revised to meet some false ideology that has edit power at present.
I'm sure they could, most teachers aren't idiots. And they were correct that "casual crowdsourcing" is not a fitting replacement for peer review.
And in fact, the current moderation policies for Wikipedia only work in so far as they use peer-review type processes, such as requiring "notability" and multiple sources, and preferring expertise in a field. Of course, if you're in a relevant field you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a primary source since you would presumably have access to whatever sources the wiki itself cites in the articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
> Wikipedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a social network, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, nor a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, an instruction manual, nor a collection of source documents or media files, although some of its fellow Wikimedia projects are.
Also I find a lot of people’s disagreements usually come down to “ok, I see that the information that I thought was censored is actually available but not in the format that I prefer”
And if you’re looking for objective information about the Israel Palestine conflict you’re hardly going to get it anywhere.
Almost every book you read about Israel Palestine will probably be biased in some way, certainly the news will be. It feels like perfect being the enemy of good. Like sure it’s a mess like all compendiums of human knowledge, but also seems massively better than the alternative.
Your point about the encyclopedia seems strange, sure it’s likely to be less accurate less complete and more biased, but it’s narratively interesting is like? What are you trying to accomplish than that that’s better?
Annoyance at Wikipedia feels nihilistic. Like “it’s not perfect so why try”. “I’d rather read things where I think I know what the bias is (but probably don’t”
The problem with wikipedia is it pretends to be above the fray and as a result it's deceptive. People think they're getting a neutral topic overview when they're actually getting something that's been designed to persuade based on the editors that control it and the editors are generally bad power hungry reddit mod types with extreme bias. It's particularly insidious because the people reading wikipedia are the least able to detect this deception. It launders their pet ideology through pseudo neutrality.
I think most alternative options are better.
The encyclopedia point is at least it is a static record from a point in time vs. a sort of "we were always at war with Eurasia" kind of fluid that bends to the times.
Ad driven sites broke the internet; they might have broken society to some degree as well.
Right but then this isn’t the purpose of an encyclopedia. Like great! But it feels like you’re saying “the more I cook fresh meals, the less I like microwave dinners”. I should Hope so!
https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-...
The bad part is people (including many in the comments here) don’t realize this.
A good encyclopedia doesn’t push an ideological agenda.
Its simply impossible to edit a public figures page at this point if you want an easy fail case to try.
No I will not waste my time researching proof for someone that is being intentionally obtuse. If you have interest you can easily find it by doing some research.
(Not that I necessarily agree with this practice. Don't decapitate the messenger)
(Even tinier is the Limburgian dialect that have their own Wikipedia. It seems to mostly be an exercise in how to write this spoken language than to make actually useful articles with unique content. Literally nobody can read that who can't also read Dutch, since it has no spelling or even a dictionary that'd work for more than a few square kilometres. But I digress)
The Germans on the other hand, I've been amazed that there exists, not infrequently, articles in German with more information than in English. It seems like such a shame to me to put all this effort into a niche language, yet it's there. There are well-maintained silos of information out there if you know where to find them!
I actually think that's probably a good thing for OSM. If OSM was the only game in town, there would be a lot more contention, fighting over how businesses are represented etc etc.
Which is not to say free and without challenges, definitely not at Wikipedia's scale, but compared to how much donation money they get it's peanuts, not even the same ballpark (the vast majority of the money they get via Wikipedian beg banners goes to projects other than Wikipedia)
Also, personal opinion but
> I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years.
sounded like someone proudly telling a group of supposedly cool friends how they don't read stuffy books anymore now that they've discovered one-page summaries online. This might fall on deaf ears but there's value in reading the actual thing including following references where relevant
But this is the no true Scotsman fallacy, encyclopedia’s are inherently biased. A good _______ doesn’t push an ideological agenda but they all do. I think I would argue Wikipedia less and more transparently than most. They just cover a lot more and are the main one so you see it a lot more.
This article suggests for instance that though Wikipedia’s does indeed have much more bias than británica, that bias may mostly be a factor if it’s length:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/01/20/...
“ What’s more, much of Wikipedia’s bias seems to be due to the longer article length of the online publication, where word count is less of an issue than the historically printed Britannica. When compared word to word, most (though not all) of Wikipedia‘s left-leaning proclivities come out in the wash. In other words, for articles of the same length, Wikipedia is as middle-of-the-road as Britannica.
“If you read 100 words of a Wikipedia article, and 100 words of a Britannica [article], you will find no significant difference in bias,” says Zhu. “Longer articles are much more likely to include these code words.”
So again my point would be, your criticism seems nihilistic, why try to have a thing that may, like all things, be inherently flawed, how can something fail in its mission if all of its failures are normal human fallibilities.
Question: in the phrase "right and left", what does right mean?
It could be that politicians right of center have a tendency to do things which merit negative sentiment slightly more often than politicians left of center. It begs the question to call this bias.
That’s not accurate. Science is orthogonal to belief in ultimate truth, and scientists have very diverse opinions on that point. Science is about finding more useful models to predict future observations, but whether and how that relates to truth is a question outside of the domain of science.
So, that that is system of notation which has consistency is itself a truth, isn’t it?
Why should a complete random be allowed to edit a public figure's page without some overview? What could they possibly edit that is relevant to this figure's page?
If a public figure dies, their page will be updated in less than one hour of the announcement, so the edit is not the issue.
It seems healthy to have people gatekeeping those pages, since they are not a public forum, but a common source of knowledge.
Today in Firefox : right click on a search field, add search engine. Pretty sure that this evolved from that separate search field that browsers used to have in addition to the URL field ?
Social “sciences”, humanities, and psychology maybe different
It’s beyond inherent bias, it’s explicitly weaponized for a particular point of view which it does a lot of work to try to hide.
Maybe you’re not skeptical enough.
Me a Wikipedia editor?! blushes no? These days I just let ChatGPT tell me what to think, it’s more objective and rational since it’s just the thoughts of a computer and not messy human emotions.
Rather, there’s a real political legitimacy behind their frustration as the election has demonstrated. The GP's experience ought to be documented carefully and posted in a blog for others to learn from.
I've seen the actual news that comes from them and while it's certainly biased rightward, particularly in what they choose to report on, it's not outrageously so.
The latest example of this behavior for me is recipe websites that do SEO to get the top spot on Google and then serve you a 30-page long webpage full of ads with the recipe at the bottom.
I think a huge part of the world’s current problems come from “news” sites that are funded by ads.
Yes, on-project doxxing gets OS'd but it also results in discussions and bans which can be reviewed. And from those you can easily determine that it's truly rare.
When I said to go to the forums, that was unfortunately unclear wording; I meant it's trivial to verify that Beeblebrox didn't doxx anyone in his postings.
I can assure you, I was not doing the instigating. Though I did comment on her RFA, not realising it was not yet submitted. There was never an appropriate review of my one-way IBAN, and nobody has been able to explain why this was done given her vile and ongoing obnoxious comments about myself. unless you consider her accusing me of "whining" to have been acceptable, something not a single person commented on. Also, I had been asking them not to comment on my talk page and had taken it to WP:AN/I. Not sure why you consider this to have been something that I was not allowed to ask for review about?
I had no part in the scrubbing of that page. That was the ArbCom, for reasons only known to themselves. Probably instigated by then-arbitrator Beeblebrox, who was later suspended from ArbCom for disclosing ArbCom matters on an external anti-Wikipedia site.
Also: I was not doing any editing of Brisbane categories. I don't know where you got that from.
Furthermore, I have not edited Wikipedia since I was banned. If you are implying otherwise, then you are wrong.
What did she do on Wikipedia?
She "fixed" barelinks and did categorization work. On the former, she wrote a script that utterly buggered up links to the extent they were being cleaned up long after she was banned. On the latter, she was so toxic that she was eventually blocked for her actions on categories.
She was a toxic editor who did virtually no editing of content on the site.
No one doxxing others in that particular clique is going to do it from anything other than a burner account.