wikipediasuckscoop

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Their point still stands, but on the other hand you're no different than the supporters of the Maine oystenfuhrer who dismissed concerns about his character and attacked those who raised it, or maybe some paid bots of Theranos in 2015.

Fair warning: You'd want to get a lawyer soon if you're entangled with toxic nonsenses at Wikipedia in so many ways, because at the rate we see it, the chickens are about to come home to roost and it's not gonna end well for you. We'll leave the question open on what direction everything in this context are converging into.

wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 2mo ago

Volunteer editors make up a vast majority of the workhorse in the encyclopedia. Here's a post on how the strike will look like.

At WP:VPWMF § Petition: Editors willing to join in collective labor action, I've suggested the possibility of Wikipedia's editorbase going on strike in solidarity with Wiki Workers United. As I stress at VPWMF, the details of such a strike would only be finalized in the event that a strike happens; supporting the conditional commitment to strike does not mean supporting exactly what I've written in this document. However, it seems prudent to sketch out an idea of how a strike might work, which is what I aim to do here.

What would the strike prohibit? Editors on strike would agree to refrain from any on-wiki activity that does not in some way further the goals of the strike, except as necessary to preserve the dignity of our readers, editors, and living biographical subjects. In particular, they would not: Edit or take other actions on content pages[a] or their talk pages, except to remove content that is so egregiously inappropriate as to require revision deletion, suppression, or speedy deletion as an attack page Revert, warn, or block accounts for routine violations of the vandalism policy, the username policy, or any content policies Participate in content improvement or curation processes such as Wikipedia:Good article nominations or Wikipedia:Articles for deletion How would the strike be enforced? The strike would be strictly voluntary. No one would be blocked or otherwise administratively sanctioned merely for not participating. However, nothing prevents striking editors from lobbying other editors to join, even in strongly-worded terms, so long as they are civil and do not harass people. Furthermore, nothing prevents striking editors from imposing social consequences against those who cross the picket line, for instance by saying that upon the end of the strike they will not review good article nominations or featured article nominations by former strikebreakers.

Would this require community consensus? Individual participation in the strike would not require community consensus. Organizing the strike and encouraging others to join would only require an absence of consensus forbidding it. If there is sufficient support for the strike among community members, community-level decisions could be made such as: Revoking authorization for bots that edit content pages Disabling software features that make editing easier, perhaps such as those that are maintained by Community Tech Authorizing a bot to notify users of the strike the first time they edit a content page Placing banner messages notifying readers of the strike

When would the strike end? A minimum criterion for ending the strike would be Wiki Workers United saying that it is no longer needed. However, the participants in the strike could !vote to add further criteria, such as greater accountability and community influence in WMF governance.

What if those criteria were never met? The community at all times reserves its fundamental right to fork the wiki if necessary.

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wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 2mo ago

Unfortunately and theoretically, the WMF could just resort to strikebreakers, like recruiting people through channels like WikiEd and so on.

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wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 1y ago

Cory Doctorow has a word for the phenomenon: enshittification.

wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 1y ago

What I'm not seeing is any suggestion of a solution. Wikipedia has a slew of rigorous mechanisms to allow for community moderation, resolution/stoppage of edit wars, and well documented escalation paths. It has flaws, and it is a work of volunteers with inherent biases, hence the systems to address them. Instead of curating a list of deficiencies, it may be more effective to start building a list of potential solutions to the deficiencies at hand. If you were to take the existing model of Wikipedia, it's rules, it's moderation... What would you change to improve it? And more importantly, how?

Good question. One good approach would be to create as many Wikipedia alternatives as you can, which is actually doable through newly released ibis.wiki. There's also Encycla, Justapedia and Namu.wiki to pick from, although because of Google is putting it high up in their search results, almost all earlier alternatives failed to get off the ground and gather enough momentum.

Cory Doctorow's theory of enshittification can be applied to this one. According to him there are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor. Normally the first and the third one would be sufficient but as I see that Wikipedia has entered a terminal phase with those sexual scandals and so on, which would cause the Internet to turn against Wikipedia overnight, all the constraints would therefore have to be activated in this case. A likely result would entail Wikipedia liquidating and getting absorbed into more better, successor encyclopedic organizations, like how the League of Nations folded into the United Nations at the end of WWII.

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wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 1y ago

Please feel free to read this Reddit page which collects or summarizes a list of scandals and issues on Wikipedia.

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wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 1y ago

The systemic toxicity issues in Wikipedia, many of which aren't even remotely related to Israel-Palestinian conflict, are increasingly looking like their Achilles heels.

wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 2y ago

Update: They've already "sold out" the editors.

https://genderdesk.wordpress.com/2024/12/21/does-wikipedia-protect-your-privacy/

Anyone can take a look at what the Wikipedia editors themselves are saying about the matter.

The admins from India have only been accused of defamation. Now that the court has their identities, the actual statements will be examined to see if they do actually contain defamation. So anyone can go on a fishing expedition to get someone’s identity, and then say ‘oops, no laws were broken after all’, and now that we know who you are, it would be a shame if someone fell out of a window or something. And of course whatever is in the “sealed” document is now out, India is one of the biggest places for bribery there is. They are also saying the documents will be unsealed at the end of the court case, so it might be cheaper to just wait until they are published.

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wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 2y ago

Wikipedia unfortunately has a policy of blocking so-called open proxies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOOPENPROXIES

wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 2y ago

That edit was intended for people who downvoted the comment for unknown reasons.

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wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 2y ago

And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

https://www.reddit.com/r/justwikipediathings/wiki/index

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wikipediasuckscoop @lemmy.world 2y ago

It's likely that the editors and principles have been betrayed by this point and thus Encycla and ibis.wiki should be the places we can flock to.

Edit: What's going on with the downvotes? What is despicable or freakish about discussing Wikipedia through a critical lens?

X, for example, is discussed through a critical lens ad nauseum in many mainstream publications throughout the English-speaking world. Do you find that despicable, too?

Wikipedia has very big problems that profoundly effect public discourse. Yet almost nobody knows about them.

Out of curiosity, why is criticism of Wikipedia so infuriating to you? You can just take a look at what Tracing Woodgrains had written about Wikipedia or rather, the following by Aaron Swartz who've seen the problems far away.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroads

I'll be blunt here for die-hard defenders of Wikipedia; are you going to die on a wrong hill where the Andrew Tate fanboys are currently on just because of a website and institution which is far from perfect just like X, Meta, and United Nations?

wikipediasuckscoop

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Unethical conduct in Wikimedia Foundation

Unethical conduct in Wikimedia Foundation

Unethical conduct in Wikimedia Foundation

Unethical conduct in Wikimedia Foundation

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Wikipedia Editors Could Strike Following Layoffs

Wikipedia Editors Could Strike Following Layoffs

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Google and Adobe appear to be abusing copyright to silence a whistleblower's video

Exclusive: Trump’s D.C. Prosecutor Threatens Wikipedia’s Tax-Exempt Status

Exclusive: Trump’s D.C. Prosecutor Threatens Wikipedia’s Tax-Exempt Status

Exclusive: Trump’s D.C. Prosecutor Threatens Wikipedia’s Tax-Exempt Status

Exclusive: Trump’s D.C. Prosecutor Threatens Wikipedia’s Tax-Exempt Status

Exclusive: Trump’s D.C. Prosecutor Threatens Wikipedia’s Tax-Exempt Status

Is the Wikimedia Foundation about to sell out its editors—and its principles?

Is the Wikimedia Foundation about to sell out its editors—and its principles?

Is the Wikimedia Foundation about to sell out its editors—and its principles?

Is the Wikimedia Foundation about to sell out its editors—and its principles?

Is the Wikimedia Foundation about to sell out its editors—and its principles?

Is the Wikimedia Foundation about to sell out its editors—and its principles?