Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

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Re: Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

Post by CrowsNest » Thu Mar 21, 2019 12:47 pm

Lolwut?
Jake wrote:As for Mr. Marek, as irritable as he can sometimes be, I'm afraid he has a point - on Wikipedia, any show of acquiescence or concession to a hostile user, or especially group of users, just makes your own situation worse. Over the years, people on WP have just gotten too good at extending dispute cycles until they get what they want, and they'll always use past precedent against you if they can.
Is this the same Wikipedia of the famed WP:BOOMERANG, which must share equal billing as the most successful gang-deployed policy free weapon as WP:NOTHERE, for removing users who are engaging in WP:BATTLE?

It isn't hard to understand Marek's longevity, and it has crap all to to do with his obstinancy.

In his case, he suffered the inevitable consequence of doing the same hostile battleground crap again and again, namely Sandstein properly fucked him, using his discretionary powers. It was a perfectly valid block, totally in line with policy and the general principles of how to handle disruptive users.

He got away with it because a gang came to his rescue, for rather obvious reasons. A prominent member of that gang, NewYorkBrad, couldn't even be bothered to say why he was opposing Sandstein's sanction, he just said it should be lifted, and lifted it was. Brad faced no consequences for this obvious act of unaccountable weight throwing. Not because he is stubborn or obstinate, nor because he was hostile. Only because he was acting for the right gang. The House Gang.

A big facilitator in Brad being allowed to do what he does, white knighting for toxic little rats like Marek, is of course, none other than Jake. Brad is a member of Wikipediocracy, but as a far as Jake is concerned, if you want to use that supposedly independent platform to hold scum like Brad to account, you can fucking swivel.

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Re: Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

Post by CrowsNest » Thu Mar 21, 2019 6:12 pm

Poetlister wrote:I can't see what the problem is with financing the project long term. The WMF has substantial and growing assets.
Fucking muppet.

Wikipedia has been hoarding gold precisely because they fear their funding model is unsustainable. Fearing they might not even hoard enough gold before the golden goose gets constipation, they've been scrambling to switch from a strategy of griefing small donors to shaking down large corporations.

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Re: Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

Post by Graaf Statler » Thu Mar 21, 2019 6:47 pm

CrowsNest wrote:Wikipedia has been hoarding gold precisely because they fear their funding model is unsustainable. Fearing they might not even hoard enough gold before the golden goose gets constipation, they've been scrambling to switch from a strategy of griefing small donors to shaking down large corporations.

And they reach that by all kind of abstruse expectations and promises to that donors they can never achieve. And because of that they put the chapters under pressure to deliver what they can't. what no-one can in this world. And that leads to absurd situations as solving a not-existing gender problem in Holland (expect that public toilets). Supporting a free beer party of a few Pirate Bay kids. Trolling me out with brute force and sending ME, yes me a letter that they will sue me and I have to shut up. Putting Edo on there banner after he has send me that email, hoping I sue him, what I of course not do. etc, etc, etc.

Only to please that donors. Giggling Katherine promise them de hemel op aarde, heaven on earth, doesn't matter how unrealistic because only a complete fool can believe Romains Brussels Advocating group will reach anything. It is a pyramid scheme of lies, or is there anyone who still believe how we Dutch can make our lady's happy and need therefore some shitty American foundation with a bunch of total flipped aggressive gender lady's? Who's slogan is een beetje vent transgender? Give me a break, the bloody fools. Or do you really believe Jullia Reda is the political talent of 2019 without even have a single knowledge about European copyright? I am still waiting for the proposal creators have to pay if people use there work in the future. Is a great edea, isn't it? Not the user pays, but the creator. Mdd will be trilled!

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Re: Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

Post by CrowsNest » Sat Mar 30, 2019 9:29 am

Carrite wrote:
Poetlister wrote:The point is that Wikipedia will not accept expert opinion. There is no absolute way for a non-expert editor to know for certain what is true and what is false. The next best thing is to say that a source is "reliable" hence it is presumed to be generally accurate, or "unreliable" and so presumed to be generally inaccurate. Of course, this classification is likely to be unreliable without input from experts.
Your fundamental premise is mostly wrong. WP makes use of subject experts all the time, who make decisions about what to include or not include silently.
:lol:

There's two scenarios here...

1. Carrite has a good working knowledge of Wikipedia
2. Carrite considers himself a subject expert, and has simply extrapolated his editing to everyone

You know it's two. It's Carrite, FFS.

Postmaster talking his usual nonsense too - for a start it takes no expertise at all to assess the reliability of a source according to Wikipedia's criteria. Experts can help, but if the system couldn't operate without their input, the whole thing would collapse. Wikipedia's issues with identifying reliable sources goes far behind their inability to assess them.

Second, there are a non-trivial number of Wikipedia editors who have bona-fide subject expertise but who quite happily operate within the constraints of a system that says this expertise is subordinate to what reasonably intelligent editors can divine from reliable sources. Again, if it wasn't the case, the whole thing would colllapse. Wikipedia's issues with experts is simply there isn't enough of that sort of editting. Like many internal issues, there is just simply one goto person, which is extremely unsustainable.

Another of Wikipedia's big problems with experts is not them trying to overrule non-experts based on nothing but their own minds, it is subject editors not staying in their lane (Doc James believing he is an expert in all medicine being a classic example) and using the pretext of their supposed better understanding of reliable sources to justify their unilateralism. That is now you properly manipulate Wikipedia as an expert, if manipulation is your goal.

A classic example of how screwed Wikipedia is regarding these themes, is that Carrite both considers himself a subject expert editor, and believes he is competent enough to comment on the reliability of sources. The fact he thought the Daily Mail is equivalent to the National Enquirer, rather proved that to be spectacularly wrong.

This is not a theoretical issue either, he put that opinion on record several times. There seems to be only one or two Wikipedia editors properly familiar with issues like how the news media works, and they did their best to give their view of the Mail with reference to reliable sources. Wikipedia's problem is they were easily ignored against the tidal wave of ignorance and pseudo-expertise from the likes of Carrite, and presumably Poetlister's socks as well.

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Re: Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

Post by Abd » Wed Apr 17, 2019 5:19 pm

Dysklyver wrote:On my SPI page one of the CU's has literally put a bunch of IP address there "for the record" in what must be a pretty damning breach of policy and maybe an excuse for something a little more European... ;)
Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/A_Den_Jentyl_Ettien_Avel_Dysklyver/Archive#31_May_2018
Once upon a time, in a land far away, checkusers were trusted servants of the community. They would not initiate investigations by themselves, and they would not investigate without evidence of disruptive behavior. That list of IPs, Tony Baloney claims:
All of the 109 IPs have commented here on the block/have admitted it in their signature, and have blanked the lock appeal on meta.

He is using the SPI archive as an LTA case page, where such IPs are often listed. However, to justify this, legitimately, would require serious disruption.
It is not at all obvious that these IPs were disruptive. Everything I've looked at was normal editing, constructive.
Status offenses. Very familiar, I went down this road for a week in 2011, with constructive edits, signed as "self-reverted under ban." They pulled out every enforcement gun they could find, not just prompt blocks, but range blocks, getting deeper and then the edit filter to prevent signature, causing more and more collateral damage, then revision deletion (to prevent others from seeing the edits and bringing them in back in, as some were doing. and remember, all good edits). (The admin got trout-slapped for abuse of revision deletion, so, of course, when I created a single actual sock to see what would happen, and it was detected and blocked, that admin was very eager for me to be community banned. Many voted for no ban, the offense was not considered serious enough. But tar and pitchforks prevailed as they usually were doing by that time.

(I later realized that the vulnerability, while less pronounced on Wikiversity, still existed there and was getting worse. So long before I was blocked there, I had abandoned working on educational resources, it was too risky, to invest many hours of work, which could all evaporate in a flash.)

If my goal had been to edit articles for my purposes, the experiment proved: registering a sock will be much more effective. Because this was part of the experiment, I took no checkuser-evasion measures (I certainly would with serious socking). But there was no disruption, no public complaint. I was finished with the account and went on "wikibreak." I doubt I would have used it again. But three days later, an arbitrator blocked the account as block evasion.

An arbitrator, acting as what? complainant, investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner? This all nailed it for me, Wikipedia had become, when the chips were down, a lost cause. The community stopped watching the watchers, and when that happens, the watchers take over, there is nothing to restrain them, and, of course, "le wiki c'est moi." It's all for the common welfare.

The motto of fascists.

I've never seen your ideas about this, Dysklyver. I'm interested, you have paid your dues. Anytime you want another podium....

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Re: Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

Post by CrowsNest » Thu May 09, 2019 8:43 am

http://archive.is/rWygU
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtop ... =8&t=10341

Fae and Oliver Keys have changed their gender identity. The good folks of Wikipedia seem to think this is an exercise in trolling. Both are deeply embedded in the cult, regularly meeting other Wikipedians in real life, so they are either mistaken, or this is the best troll ever.

The only Wikipedian I know who has "changed their gender" on Wikipedia just to make a point, just to be able to claim to be offended for being misgendered, while clearly not having altered their appearance or sense of self away from what they so clearly are, namely an ugly ass pig/oaf of a man, is Drmies.

Is there a reason the good folks of Wikipediocracy choose to target people who are, absent any realistic alternative explanation, are probably experiencing genuine trauma over their identity, while ignoring those who are clearly just identity trolling?

We know it isn't because they are conservatives, and while it is tempting to believe it is because they genuinely don't know this is what Drmies does and are otherwise mistaken about Fae and Keyes' level of involvement with Wikipedia, neither seems realistic. As much as it doesn't appear to be the case given their output, they do spend a lot of time watching Wikipedia, and watching this place for tips from serious critics.

The inescapable conclusion is they are doing it because they are just really horrible people, hard-wired to attack those they see as aligned with the WMF for any reason they can grasp at, no matter how nasty or ridiculous, while ignoring people like Drmies, presumably because they recognise the same level of nastiness and fondness for trollery in him as they see in themselves, and consider it some kind of virtue.

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Re: Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

Post by CrowsNest » Thu May 09, 2019 9:17 am

Alex_Shih wrote:
Jake wrote:I assume the Big Fear here is that someone, or some organization, will get their hands on a dormant admin account, and then study the prior activity and language-usage of the person running it in order to impersonate that original account-holder without being detected. How much "damage" could be done in that scenario..? Seems like it could be a fair amount, if the person knew what he/she was doing.
Plausible, but unlikely to ever happen when you scrutinise the thought closely. Since accounts with no activity over a year are routinely desysopped, we are looking at "dormant" admin accounts mostly within one year. These "dormant" admin accounts intended to be seized has to be abandoned, otherwise it will likely be reported right away. How much effort does it cost to "impersonate" these account(s) without being detected? Even if that could be achieved, what could the eventual goal possibly be that involves admin tools? And if misuse of admin tools is involved with this unlikely-hypothetical-compromised-admin account, it is far too unlikely that it can stay under the water.
The key phrase here, was someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who knows......

1. Dormant Admin accounts being left active for a year before being desysopped is a huge vulnerability, not a security feature. There is a reason the WMF is screaming for Administrators to adopt strong password security and 2FA. This is it. Someone who has left for six months, in all likelihood isn't coming back at all, or will be gone long enough to have lost any means of persuading people the person now running their account is the imposter, not them.

2. The cost of impersonation would be easily covered by sub-contracting it out to one of the many paid editor outfits that exist. Let them use the compromised Admin powers, in a limited and non obvious way for their own ends, and they will probably happily do it for free. The perceived prestige of simply having an Administrator comment on any debate with a view to influencing an outcome, is probably worth it all in its own, to a group aiming to subvert Wikipedia's rules and norms. Ealdgyth certainly didn't become an Administrator to do any actual fucking work, did she?

3. The inability of the Wikipedia community to spot Admin corruption if it is infrequent and low level. Blocking people without a reason for example. It is routine that stuff like that is only exposed when an Administrator reaches ArbCom, for doing something far more obvious than that. There is also the fact Wikipedia happily looks the other way even when obvious examples of corruption are pointed out, unless I missed something and the rules now say it was OK for Drmies to accept a paid editor's rewrite of the Intel CEO's biography by claiming it was neutral, and then protect it to stop people who could see it was clearly not neutral from rejecting the rewrite.

I mean, for FUCK'S SAKE. To someone who knows what they are doing, if handed the gift of a compromised dormant Administrator account, if they want to get any benefit from it at all, the very first thing on their mind would be to make it appear to the rest of the idiots that its former owner had simply returned and was getting back to the grindstone in an unremarkable way.

Anyone who thinks the first thing a hacker does when they have compromised a dormant Administrator account is do something with it that reveals it has been compromised, is an idiot.

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Re: Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

Post by Graaf Statler » Thu May 09, 2019 11:53 am

If you are a good faith user is the best thing to do to fix a permanent block. And yes, giving a powerfull sysop account to a other to manage is common practice. And I understand very, very well MoiraMoira (NL) flew away and hide herself for everything and everyone including the press.
Yes, exacte. The inlog mistake of Ymnes boy who continued to edit about the Caribbean project on the Moira account. The smoking gun what proofs this practices.

A extreem risky game. Because, for sure in the European legal system you keep 100% the responsibility for your own account. And because of this it is a huge mistake in the WMF software you can't lock or let lock your account global lock on request.
Wikipedia is a blunder project. Everybody can edit without even have a clou about the very misty legal background. There is not any, not any legal legal protection and there are only risks. Risk where YOU are full responsible for.

Wikipedia is a nice gift of the devil. it's wiki-faust in optima forma. Just take, take one of the many wiki-tempations, it is free and can give you financial benefits and even personal fame! But with a bit bad luck you end up broke in prison at the end. And don't count on the skilled legal team of WMF, because that's just a bunch of idiots and lunatics as the rest.
Bart, legal wikipedia 2005-2016. A complete autistic guy without any legal education. Gerlach, a complete legal lunatic. And the rest is the same. A bunch of legal nitwits.

Still waiting for the legal qualifications and the roll of Vigliant in the blunder SanFanBans, but I fear his qualifications are about Bart his level...... Because he still haven't answered that only question, because the only thing we see are smoke curtains till now. But no answer.

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Re: Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

Post by CrowsNest » Mon May 13, 2019 5:45 pm

Poetlister wrote:Wikimedia Commons has been described as a highly hostile place for multimedia students contributions. Who made this allegation? The WMF!
ORLY?

He refers to this.....

https://outreach.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/E ... tributions

As anyone can see, that is a piece written by one Galder Gonzalez, a.k.a User:Theklan, whose home wiki is the Basque Wikipedia. I am seeing nothing anywhere that indicates that he works for the WMF, and indeed I see no evidence he even has a semi-official role, such a Wikimedian In Residence.

The so called hostility was merely a case of Administrators not showing enough intelligence or good faith, unable to escape their conditioned responses to situations they have come to react to in quite autonomic ways. The same flaw exists on Wikipedia, if not more so.

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Re: Wikipediocrats not understanding how Wikipedia works

Post by CrowsNest » Wed May 15, 2019 8:26 am

:lol:

http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtop ... 33#p237733

Jake wrote:I feel like I'm stating the obvious again here, but if the WMF were a real, properly-run organization, then an action by a low-level manager (i.e., volunteer admin) in support of high-level management's highly-focused PR campaign (to encourage more articles about women) would mean that the screw-up has actually been made by the Arbcom for even accepting the case.
Clueless.

If the premise here is that Wikipedia is run by professionals, then none of this would have ever happened. None of it.

The biography would never have been created, therefore it never would have been deleted, therefore there would have been no controversy over Wikipedia deleting it, therefore no rogue middle manager would have recreated it out of process, therefore no internal disciplinary process to examine their actions would have occurred.

If Wikipedia were a professional organisation, a biography for Clarice Phelps would only be created if, and only if, the claims of the author Kit Chapman about her being the first black women to help discover a superheavy element were committed to print (the book he claims says this not yet having been published), and this claim was picked up by other reliable sources sufficient to show they consider it to be a notable first.

There is no other route for Phelps to be considered Wikipedia notable, even after factoring in their strategic goal of increasing the number of biographies of women. Why? Becuase, as a professional organistation, they were sensible enough to say that they could not achieve this goal by simply picking and choosing who was worthy of a biography based on the good feels or PR it might generate. Per their established mode of working, they do need any such decision to be based on evidence and a reasonable interpretation of their rules.

If a professionally run Wikipedia thought what Phelps did, regardless of her gender or ethnicity, was significant, it opens the door to hundreds of thousands of new biographies for white men who currently lack a Wikipedia biography, so that is obviously not an option.

Pending the publication of Chapman's book and any resulting coverage, if a professionally run Wikipedia chose to decide that what Phelps did is significant enough to include her because she is a woman and a minority, they are similarly stuck with a giant problem, because the only route to grant her a biography under those circumstances, if it is to be systemic and rules based, transforms Wikipedia from an encyclopedia into a fucked up version of LinkedIn, trawling primary and non-independent sources for names to include in their directory.

The risks of that approach are numerous and obvious, from seeing their pillar of neutrality destroyed, to having their stance against promotionalism completely discredited (since it would become the case that it is primarily the way employers write about their employees that governs whether they get a Wikipedia biography or not).

A professional organisation doesn't completely destroy its foundational principles of what it is and how it gets there just because of a Tweet. Because it was a Tweet from Chapman to Wade, that started this entire mess. Something that would not and could not have hapoened, if the premise of Wikipedia being a professional outfit, holds true. In that scenario, those two would merely be exterior commentards.

Neither has admitted culpability for their role in how the decidedly amateur elements of Wikipedia has handled this farce, because they too have absolutely no idea what Wikipedia is, and the controversy suits both their agendas very well. Chapman has books to sell. Wade needs to promote herself as an online activist (because she too, has books to sell).

-----------

When are these idiots going to learn? You cannot claim any authority to be saying what is obvious, if you don't know what actually fucking happened in the first place.

https://www.wikipediasucks.co/forum/vie ... 9365#p9365

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