Inside Wikipedia's endless war over the coronavirus lab leak theory

Because no one else is doing it--not even the media.
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Jake Is A Sellout
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Inside Wikipedia's endless war over the coronavirus lab leak theory

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Sat Jun 26, 2021 1:38 pm

https://www.cnet.com/features/inside-wi ... ak-theory/

If you can get past the ridiculous optimism (are they being paid for that shit?) and wade through the general length, there are some nuggets of harsh truth for the Wikishits in this piece.

I hope for their sake, it didn't get read by certain people.

1. Only an idiot thinks a 20 year old is equipped to serve any kind of Supreme Court type role. Says a lot that these are the only internal governance roles on Wikipedia that are directly elected. Which probably doesn't matter, because as usual on Wikipedia, their Supreme Court didn't make a damn bit of difference as far as ending a long running, highly disruptive and yet certainly intractable dispute.

2. 70% of Wikipedia editors think that epidemiology is not a medical topic. And that's exactly what you would expect to see, if you opened up the task of building an encyclopedia to every unemployed dumb shit product of the American education system.

3. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a news aggregator. Even though the lab leak theory relates to events that happened over eighteen months ago, and there is lots of science on the matter already, they're still obsessed with the idea they need to splatter the whole encyclopedia with what the newspapers have to say about it. Why?

4. As a consequence, Wikipedia is still in the grip of the Guerrilla Skeptics, a force multiplying Democratic Left activist organisation dedicated to the Defence of Science (TM). It features the sort of fuckwit who thinks Science needs defending. It's science, you fuckwits. Which is why every dispute like this, turns into a hardcore battle of the devout, against even those with pretty sensible positions, such as acknowledge the news reports without giving them equal prominence to the science.

5. Wikipedia is a failure. Why are people still giving it credit for not promoting deadly cures? The only qualification required for a community of randoms to decide not to do that, is the ability to read. Eminently achievable, even in America. But hilarious that they might even have to outsource that to India. Wikipedia isn't meant to kill people. No gold stars to be had here.

6. The true mark of Wikipedia's failure here, as always, since they aspire to be a grown up encyclopedia with editorial processes etc, is just how insanely stupid they got, over a relatively simple editorial matter of how to deal with the fact that the news media are giving attention to a probably political effort to raise doubts about China, when there's no actual scientific evidence that it came from a lab.

7. It is indeed not a good thing that you can't actually determine what the settled Wikipedia view is on what to say about the lab leak theory. Or that they won't be honest and sign off on a statement that acknowledges it is in dispute, and probably always will be. This cannot be waved away by some bullshit about how Wikipedia is an amorphous blob of differing opinions. Because when it matters, when it comes to things like wanting to put every Daily Mail journalist out of a job based on a claim with even less evidence behind it that the lab leak theory, you bet they have a view. And they don't care who knows that it is a lie, that even a grad student can figure out it goes against all scientific and academic opinion on the matter.

Last but not least, Wikipedia editors are still insanely delusional about the quality of their own product ("gold standard"), which in reality, is as fucking bad as the process by which it is made would suggest. But what would you expect from a generation that doesn't even remember when real encyclopedias based on weighty academic tomes were an actual thing?

Hopefully they'll all die in a horrific nuclear war triggered by an edit war over something like this, that'll teach them. Do they even know how World War I started? I doubt it. It is in Wikipedia, albeit even the "summary" paragraph is excessively wordy to the point of being impenetrable Military History porn.

Crap is crap. It is not gold. Not even gold leafed. Have you ever tried to gold leaf faeces? Impossible. If you teach your kids using Wikipedia, they will turn out stupid. But there is at least a risk some of them get addicted to writing war porn, like they're learned scholars, not students. And to be honest, that's the only goal of Wikipedia. Like all sick cults, they only want to survive.

And like all cults, the risk of their insanity in the pursuit of the Holy Scripture and their Glorious Leader actually leading to death and even global nuclear war, while hopefully small, are never truly off the table. But what is for damn sure, is smart people will have their time wasted, and their children's future put at risk, if the cult isn't kept safely in its compound. Hopefully stocked up with lots of precariously placed oil lamps.

You don't get that shit with Encyclopedia Brittanica. And your kids don't grow up stupid.

Brittanica:
World War I began after the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand by South Slav nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914.
Wikipedia:
On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb Yugoslav nationalist and member of the Serbian Black Hand military society, assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, leading to the July Crisis.
Just like good journalism, it's an art form to be able to know how to write something in a way that doesn't look like you want the reader to know how smart you are, that you actually appreciate your job is to impart important information to them.

Wikipedia editors can't do that. Wikipedia editors are by and large, children, either actually, or emotionally. People of exceedingly low intelligence. Unemployable. They probably hate the Daily Mail because they know they couldn't even get a job there, let alone somewhere they consider a reliable source.

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Re: Inside Wikipedia's endless war over the coronavirus lab leak theory

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Jun 27, 2021 7:50 pm

Jake Is A Sellout wrote:
Sat Jun 26, 2021 1:38 pm
1. Only an idiot thinks a 20 year old is equipped to serve any kind of Supreme Court type role.
20??? Several high ranking administrators made it at age 12-14......
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a news aggregator.
More like a dork aggregator and comic-book reference. "News" is optional.

Also: CNET just HAD to stick a photo of Jimbo in there. Unnecessary. But no doubt it made His Royal Jimboness happy.

Oh btw: their Doctor Who coverage is now up to 4,434 items.
Making it "more important" than Covid-19, with "only" 3,898 items.

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Re: Inside Wikipedia's endless war over the coronavirus lab leak theory

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Mon Jun 28, 2021 2:04 pm

ericbarbour wrote:
Sun Jun 27, 2021 7:50 pm
Jake Is A Sellout wrote:
Sat Jun 26, 2021 1:38 pm
1. Only an idiot thinks a 20 year old is equipped to serve any kind of Supreme Court type role.
20??? Several high ranking administrators made it at age 12-14......
Exactly.

Most of what this person did on Wikipedia, which the voters hopefully used to judge his fitness to he one of their highest ranked and most esteemed dispute resolutors, would have been done when he was legally still a child. And a lot of it, probably as an actual child.

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Re: Inside Wikipedia's endless war over the coronavirus lab leak theory

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Jun 29, 2021 3:13 am

that reminds me....to change the subject slightly, I have the perfect example of Wikipedia leftists using article space to shit on someone they really hated, it's a classic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and ... t_Thatcher

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Re: Inside Wikipedia's endless war over the coronavirus lab leak theory

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Tue Jun 29, 2021 10:38 am

ericbarbour wrote:
Tue Jun 29, 2021 3:13 am
that reminds me....to change the subject slightly, I have the perfect example of Wikipedia leftists using article space to shit on someone they really hated, it's a classic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and ... t_Thatcher
Aye, it's articles like that which bear the hallmark of not having an overall guiding hand. At least not one with any professional training.

No doubt there were celebrations, but to devote that many words to what a defeated enemy thinks of the person who absoutely pwnd their asses, in the streets and the ballot box, is utterly ridiculous.

The "Battle of Orgreave" was a classic example. The genius leader of the miners decided to bar all journalists from their side of the lines. So naturally, public sympathy fell with the police side, which, from the perspective of the news cameras, was getting the shit kicked out of them by an angry vicious lawless mob. Which is exactly how Thatcher wanted them to be portrayed.

They hated her for a reason. She absolutely wiped the floor with them. And quite right too. Those greedy fuckers were taking the absolute piss under a leftist government. So the public elected a right wing government, which rewrote the striking laws, which the dumb bastards went ahead and broke.

They literally fought the law. And the law won.

Now their jobs are all gone, when an alternative future could have seen domestic deep coal mining survive, with larger more automated collieries. Thatcher wouldn't have had a problem with that. She was an industrialist, she wanted every fit and able man earning a good days pay for a good days work. The less people acting like the state owed them a living, the better.

The thick bastards don't even seem to realise there are health benefits to a working life spent above ground.

It's quite ridiculous really, what they've dunked in there, unchallenged.
Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams criticised "the great hurt done to the Irish and British people during her time as British prime minister", adding: "Here in Ireland, her espousal of old draconian militaristic policies prolonged the war and caused great suffering".
Unsurprisingly, militaristic policies were popular with voters in an era when the "Irish Republican Army" was the main cause of innocent civilians being randomly shot or blown up on the way to work or while out for drink.

Those daft fuckers didn't see the way the wind was blowing then either. For nobody bats an eyelid now when the state takes a shoot them in the head first, ask them questions later approach, to terrorist suspects.

Tony Blair's idea of making peace with these fuckers, has caused suffering to an entire generation that has grown up after that suppsoed peace treaty was signed. Gerry 'ain't got shit to say about that of course, because it matters more to him that the people living miserable lives in a small statelet where sectarianism is still baked into every aspect of people's lives, can at least now call themselves Irish, and hold an Irish passport. That aspect of this era of peace is trumpeted on Wikipedia, which has always been disproportionately edited by Irish nationalists. The cost, not so much.

It could have been so different. Thatcher brought De Lorean to Northern Ireland, which saw Catholics and Protestants working side by side, earning good money. People living good lives, don't tend to want to blow their neighbours up. Amazing, right? Now you can't even get a sausage unless it comes from the mother country, Southern Ireland. Some people think that's freedom. The same daft bastards who want to work underground for generations, no doubt.

The left has always had a really strange idea of what dignity looks like. How ironic that Dignity In Work is one of the many (already forgotten) attempts by the current left wing party here, to find something that resonates. People have long memories. Not much chance of dignity in work, if the government of the day can't provide stable employment. And on that score, people remember well, what side Thacther was on.

So if whining on Wikipedia is all they have left, you can only laugh!

Wikipedia is most definitely for left wing wankers like Ritchie333. He calls right wing politics, as reported by right wing media, right wing lies. And he's talking about Britain there, not Trumpland. He thinks nothing of making a batshit statement like that, on Wikipedia, like nobody is going to look at the fact he's an Administrator, and wonder if that doesn't affect the suppsoed neutrality of their alleged encyclopedia.

It does, and they can see it.

So Ritchie, I hope you are looking forward to dying, knowing you have lived your entire life under a right wing or centrist government. I hope by then, you realise it was all your fault.

You are the coal miner and the IRA Volunteer of this era. A born loser.

So good luck with that, dipshit.

Chin up! :lol:

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