Wikipedia Sucks!

....in Racket News' "Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know" (link) article. Quoting in full (there are hyperlinks in the original that are deserving of being looked at):

40. Wikipedia. In June of 2021, Wikipedia’s then Executive Director Katherine Maher appeared at a conference hosted by the Atlantic Council, where she was interviewed by NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny about “how big tech can be as trusted as Wikipedia.” The thrust of the report was that Wikipedia had refused a request by the Turkish government to take down “two pages that they did not appreciate references to President Erdogan and his family and their involvement in the Syrian civil war as a state sponsor of terrorism,” which led to a ban of the site that was overturned to great fanfare in 2020. Wikipedia, like many tech behemoths, plays the role of a defender of free speech in certain circumstances, but lately it has become perhaps the most furious grindstone of digital conformity in Western media outside Twitter, Google, and Facebook, institutionalizing a system of blockages that increasingly only let through information reported on in an approving way by large corporate or academic institutions (it has been a great struggle to get Twitter Files material on the site, for instance). Wikipedia was once seen as one of the great experiments in open-source media, and identified with legal challenges to things like the NSA’s illegal domestic surveillance program, but has become just another member of the cartel-like “industry call” that includes the FBI, Twitter, and Facebook (the Twitter Files show the exact moment in which Wikipedia asks for a “disinformation” contact at the FBI), and has taken rigid stands on ridiculous issues like the definition of “recession.”

#TwitterFiles also show Wikipedia staff invited to election tabletops with the Pentagon, and joining weekly “industry meetings” with their Big Tech brethren.

Former Executive Director Katherine Maher is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum young global leader, a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and a fellow at DFRLabs at the Atlantic Council, the military-industrial complex’s favorite Think Tank. It’s amazing how far selling encyclopedias can take you.

Above: Alleged messages between Ryan Merkley and Yoel Roth in 2020 on disinformation campaigns where Roth admits his FBI contact is a special agent in San Francisco named Elvis Chan. These were found through Matt Taibbi's #TwitterFiles investigation. The rabbit holes run deep.

You’ll often see it implied that “information operations” are only practiced by America’s enemies, because only America’s enemies are low enough, and deprived enough of real firepower, to require the use of such tactics, needing as they do to “overcome military limitations.” We rarely hear about America’s own lengthy history with “active measures” and “information operations,” but popular media gives us space to read about the desperate tactics of the Asiatic enemy, perennially described as something like an incurable trans-continental golf cheat.

Indeed, part of the new mania surrounding “hybrid warfare” is the idea that while the American human being is accustomed to living in clear states of “war” or “peace,” the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian citizen is born into a state of constant conflict, where war is always ongoing, whether declared or not. In the face of such adversaries, America’s “open” information landscape is little more than military weakness.

Americans are used to thinking of a binary state of either war or peace. That is the way our organizations, doctrine, and approaches are geared. Other countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, use a wider array of centrally controlled, or at least centrally directed, instruments of national power and influence to achieve their objectives…

Whether it is contributing to foreign political parties, targeted assassinations of opponents, infiltrating non-uniformed personnel such as the little green men, traditional media and social media, influence operations, or cyber-connected activity, all of these tactics and more are used to advance their national interests and most often to damage American national interests…

The historical records suggest that hybrid warfare in one form or another may well be the norm for human conflict, rather than the exception.

The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.

Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a “shared vocabulary” of information disorder, or “credibility,” or “media literacy.”

Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building “resilience” to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the “marketplace of ideas” (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense. In the Twitter Files we repeatedly find documents like this unsigned “Sphere of Influence” review circulated by the Carnegie Endowment that wonders aloud if tech companies really need to be competing to “get it right”:

Communities, minorities, safety, protection, believing, empowering, spaces, individuals, vision, diversity, inclusion, positive. These are the terms I know feel free to add more.

Forgot to add that Yoel Roth was the Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter at the time when the messages were exchanged. His Twitter account (now moribund) is @yoyoel.

Which reminds me....this was posted on r/WhitePeopleTwitter today and it made the front page of Reddit: Remember: his "minions" do all the work. And the removal of the Turkish WP ban was mostly thanks to the effort of Turkish lawyers and activists, with "some" support from the WMF. Read the "official version" of it here.

Jimbo does nothing. He's almost persona non grata with insiders by now. Only average internet fools think he's a "leader" of something. Far as I can tell, his "activism" these days consists of tweets aimed at his cult members. That's the SAME GUY who demanded in the admin IRC channel, back in 2006, that history must be rewritten: Larry Sanger had nothing to do with the founding of Wikipedia and should be removed from the "official history".

Best part is all the fuckheaded Redditors in the thread, mumbling about how "cool" Jimbo is and how they're gonna donate to the WMF, in between the usual "Elon is a nazi" muttering. DISGUSTING.

Strelnikov wrote: ↑

Sun May 14, 2023 6:25 am

Forgot to add that Yoel Roth was the Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter at the time when the messages were exchanged.

As I said before: the WMF and Twitter have been exchanging employees for years. Criticism of WP on Twitter often resulted in Twitter accounts being banned--until Musk bought it, and fired most of the former WMFers.

And a reminder: the Twitter exchange above was due to Musk cheerfully offering to censor Twitter--to make Erdogan happy.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/ ... b3d7ce6353

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Sun May 14, 2023 8:05 am

Strelnikov wrote: ↑

Sun May 14, 2023 6:25 am

Forgot to add that Yoel Roth was the Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter at the time when the messages were exchanged.

As I said before: the WMF and Twitter have been exchanging employees for years. Criticism of WP on Twitter often resulted in Twitter accounts being banned--until Musk bought it, and fired most of the former WMFers.

And a reminder: the Twitter exchange above was due to Musk cheerfully offering to censor Twitter--to make Erdogan happy.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/ ... b3d7ce6353

Different people, same actions.

Posted the same day, I think. Twitter is loads crazier and more stupid (and more biased) than Wikipedia. Worse still, it continues to have thousands of obsessed fan users who "can't function without it".
Is this some kind of hoax account? I can't tell.
https://twitter.com/annlesbyphd

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Sun May 14, 2023 11:36 pm

Posted the same day, I think. Twitter is loads crazier and more stupid (and more biased) than Wikipedia. Worse still, it continues to have thousands of obsessed fan users who "can't function without it".

glass-houses-dude.jpgI-love-you.jpg

Is this some kind of hoax account? I can't tell.
https://twitter.com/annlesbyphd

yes

badmachine wrote: ↑

Mon May 15, 2023 4:25 am

yes

Whew.....thought i was having a stroke or something. Twitter is ideal for hoaxes and bullshitting the hapless. The mere act of posting nonsense there can attract "followers", if you play the political cards the right way.

Strelnikov has more dirt on the "Twitter Files" censorship, and on the WMF's past friendly relations with the FBI and other organizations that an "organization" like the WMF really should not be bosom-buds with. Calling all Strels.

A slight cul-de-sac:

Number 39 on the list is the "Institute for Strategic Dialogue" of which the authors say this:

Also funded by the U.S. State Department, the Britain-based ISD offers another smorgasbord of content-suffocation tools, including a “hate-mapper” service and a product called Beam, which “is a multi-lingual, multi-platform capability developed to expose, track and confront information threats online.” ISD identifies “bad actors” or “extremist actors” and its “shared endeavour” program seeks to build “psychosocial resilience to radicalization.” The ISD is responsible for the report saying anti-Semitic remarks soared on Twitter after Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, a report listing “independent journalists” amplifying “Russian propaganda” that inspired an NBC report including the now-on-trial Gonzalo Lira. ISD was also a source for a USA Today report that was influential in getting not-yet-convicted people accused of participation in the January 6th protests removed from a variety of Internet services. The ISD is one of many groups that were roaring about the dangers of Discord before the “Pentagon Leaker” story, saying, “Evidence suggested that users of extreme right channels on Discord are very young,” raising questions about the role that “online games” play in “radicalization of minors.”

I pointed out in an email to Eric Barbour the following:

YouTuber "LazerPig" (who is some sort of low-level military analyst in the UK in real life) claimed in his aftermath video to the anti-debate he had with Gonzalo Lira in January that "officials" he "knew in Ukraine" had told him that Lira had been deported.....then he was arrested in Kharkiv/Kharkov at the beginning of this month, so either the Scotsman was lying or the Ukrainians were lying to the Scotsman. Lira may be a deep annoyance to certain online people, but he also has dual American-Chilean citizenship and passports, so it would not been hard for the Ukrainian SBU (their FSB) to dump Lira and his lady friend onto an airliner bound for Santiago. The whole thing is pointlessly punitive and a "proof" to anti-Ukraine people that Ukraine is a Nazi state because it does not tolerate any dissent, even by foreigners. I mean, it is a country shot through with Nazis, and corrupt as hell......

He rejoined that Lira is only worth mentioning because of the insanity revolving around his Wikipedia BLP, which has been deleted twice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... nzalo_Lira

The entire revison history of the article:

14:35, 31 October 2022 Bbb23 talk contribs deleted page Gonzalo Lira (G7: One author who has requested deletion or blanked the page – to retrieve it, see WP:REFUND)
14:16, 31 October 2022 Onel5969 talk contribs moved page Gonzalo Lira to Draft:Gonzalo Lira 2 without leaving a redirect (Draftify as per AfD (via script)) Tag: Disambiguation links added
02:32, 11 August 2022 Vanamonde93 talk contribs moved page Gonzalo Lira to Draft:Gonzalo Lira without leaving a redirect (Not ready for mainspace, incubate in draftspace: see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gonzalo Lira (3rd nomination) (via script))
00:27, 28 October 2014 Mojo Hand talk contribs deleted page Gonzalo Lira (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gonzalo Lira)
11:33, 27 September 2014 Ymblanter talk contribs protected Gonzalo Lira ‎‎[edit=autoconfirmed] (expires 11:33, 30 September 2014 (UTC))‎[move=autoconfirmed] (expires 11:33, 30 September 2014 (UTC)) (Persistent disruptive editing: RFPP request)

From the look of it , this was a very small article. It went through the AfD process three times and was finally vaporized on Halloween of 2022.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... nzalo_Lira

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... omination)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... omination)

The most interesting thing about this process was that GizzyCatBella got involved, before they were found to be a sockpuppet of Jacurek this April. I wonder if GizzyCatBella was kicked off the Wikipediocracy board, because they were involved there as well.

This is the problem of Wikipedia's nutball "notability" rules; you are only worthy of being included as a living person as long as you said or did things the editors like. Run against that, and you are somehow a non-person unworthy of even a stub article, and this is over a guy who had a large-enough YouTube presence before the war came to him in Ukraine, a guy on trial in a Ukrainian court over doubting that Ukraine would win the war. They have an article for Aiden Aslin, whose biggest claim to fame was that he was a foreign volunteer for the Ukrainian military as far back as 2018 and that he was involved in a prisoner exchange after being captured in 2022.