"Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia"

Because no one else is doing it--not even the media.
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ericbarbour
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"Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia"

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Jun 16, 2018 8:44 pm

A perfect example of the happy-smiley-speshul treatment Wikipedia receives from the tech press:

WIRED magazine allows Maher to pathetically beg for more money from Google and Facebook.
As if Google hasn't given them millions already.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedi ... ok-support

More recently, YouTube and Facebook have turned to Wikipedia for a new reason: to address their issues around fake news and conspiracy theories. YouTube said that they would begin linking to Wikipedia articles from conspiracy videos, in order to give users additional – often corrective – information about the topic of the video. And Facebook rolled out a feature using Wikipedia’s content to give users more information about the publication source of articles appearing in their feeds.

Not stated: that some Wikipedia content is politically biased and has been since the 2003-2005 era. I've posted examples of the ongoing pro-Israel bias, some of which has been repaired and some not. Even if you skip over the pro-science and intolerance of 9/11 conspiracy materials and the obsessive hatred of L. Ron Hubbard and Lyndon LaRouche and Anyone Chip Berlet Hates This Week and several other things, there are still thousands of little messes left from editwars no one noticed.

Go ahead. Ask the Bitch Maher why there's no article about Cyrus Farivar or Denise Milani. Or why a Wikipedia arbitrator spent years convicting and hanging Amanda Knox on Wikipedia. Or why Rachel Marsden must be humiliated. Or many other things.

Ask me about the Knox editwar. I dare ya.

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Re: "Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia"

Post by CrowsNest » Sat Jun 16, 2018 10:50 pm

She's ever so subtly updating this mesaage. A while back she was just bitching that private corporations were exploiting Wikipedia. Now it's exploitation of the foundational institions of the internet, which includes Wikipedia.

She's clearly good at her job, which is still basically Communications Director - if the message doesn't work, keep changing it until you hit on something that does. It's her job to get stories into the press. In her transition from CD to CEO, she just somehow forgot the message has to be defensible, certainly if the purpose of it is extracting millions of dollars from private corporations with CEOs a million times smarter than her.

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Re: "Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia"

Post by Graaf Statler » Sun Jun 17, 2018 8:55 am

I don't think it's about money, they have money enough, and get as many money they want by fundraising for their nobel carety project. No, it's about something else. Madam Maher is asking for suport because WMF knows god dammed well what the real problems are.

Europe is changing it's internet in a sort of Chinese style intranet. All that new European regulation is pointing in that direction, it's clear the EU want a safer, controlled European internet. Of course it will not be there tomorrow, but it is the direction of the Brussels technocrats and country's. I know how European regulation works, it seeps. It infiltrate, very, very slow. And that is what is worring WMF, because if you spend one million a year to lawyers you are aware of that. And for sure after you find out Romaine's European advocating group is just a joker, just like Romaine himself is.

In a few years it is impossible to run a project like Wikipedia in Europe anymore. I am sure they will check every site with super bot's to look if they don't break European regulation in that time. There is not even a single change to escape European regulation.
Why do you think the flipped complete when I wrote this page about the Dutch citaatrecht? I was immediately SanFanBanned after I wrote it!
And what was the result when I claimed the work of many users was conflicting with our citaatrecht, because they are using parts of existing text? A global lock! No, my work was copyvio! Natuur12 or who ever it was rushed immediately to his Meta frends to fix that Global Lock whit blessing of the whole wiki-cabal!

That is the help cheer leader Maher is asking for! To safe here beloved Wiki. Because, that SanFanBan is approved by the top of WMF, so she knows very well where it is all about!
Because, what other reason can be to use all your wiki-force to troll out a old Dutch man who wrote only a few innocent articles with that rare SanFanBan? Rarer than the Nobel Price? I got even a letter of a lawyer! What was of course very helpful in the toilet.

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Re: "Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia"

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Jun 17, 2018 12:16 pm

On it's always about lobbying, but if the cash rich WMF weren't still motivated by obtaining money through deception for non-critical functions, well, it would have shut down the Fundraising Department years ago.

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Re: "Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia"

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Jun 19, 2018 11:39 pm

Graaf Statler wrote:I don't think it's about money, they have money enough

They have NEVER had "enough money", ever. And they never will. The general success of their fund-begging on Wikipedia itself must be "encouraging" the WMF insider gang to ask for ever more and more cash, via every possible method. Remember that the WMF is still a piker compared to numerous foundations having billions in their endowments.

This is what they want to be. Notice that nearly all of these foundations were started by filthy-rich businesspeople, mostly Americans. The smallest one, Keck, has 10 times as much cash in the bank as the WMF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_w ... oundations

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Re: "Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia"

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Sep 19, 2018 8:18 pm

Dropping a new item showing that stupid people trust Google, and shouldn't.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/styl ... ywood.html
CNW is offering answers to questions that don’t have hard and fast answers. Rich people don’t know how much money they have, and “net worth” includes appraisals on all sorts of nonliquid assets, from cars and houses to fractions of companies. Jeff Bezos doesn’t have $150 billion in gold coins in a swimming-pool vault under the Space Needle. Most people know that, at least on some level. But that doesn’t stop us from Googling, and it doesn’t stop Google from sourcing snippet results from CNW.

Prime placement of that information is not about its accuracy either. A Google spokesman said the featured snippets are meant to point users to the most relevant piece of content given their query — and “relevant" is a very different criteria than “correct.”

But Google gives as briskly as it takes. Now Google’s top search spot for Ms. Lohan’s small fortune is dominated by an article from BankRate.com published in April 2017, which lists her net worth at $500,000. Their source? Just an outdated number from Celebrity Net Worth. Meanwhile, GoBankingRates.com owns the results for Chris Hemsworth’s net worth and TheCinemaholic.com owns the results for that of Chris Pine. While CNW owns results for many other people named Chris, good old Time.com owns the top spot for Chris Rock.

The American media has printed guesses and lies about celebrities for as long as the two have existed; that’s hardly Google or Amazon’s fault. But because “the internet” has become our default source for information, it is easier for tabloid facts to circulate under credible logos. The trivia that results can be hard to dispel.

And how often does English Wikipedia cite celebritynetworth.com? Why, that's easy: 231 cases as of today. Wiki-Twats routinely discourage people from citing it as a "reference". And seem to be failing, at least occasionally.

On the other hand: In their LESS than wise opinion, Celebrity Net Worth doesn't deserve to have an article. Two poorly-attended AFDs failed. During which totally insane things were said:
Keep It's coverage in Outline's "How Google Ate CelebrityNetWorth.com" plus the Quartz interview provide enough reliably reported info about its operation to indicate that it is professionally run, cited by reliable sources and regularly engages in fact-checking its content. While its content may not be considered an "encyclopedic" focus by some, it covers an area of wide public interest and appears to make efforts to provide information that, if not accurate to the dollar, gives relative rankings of celebrities' income that does not appear fabricated or arbitrary. FactStraight (talk) 15:42, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

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Re: "Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia"

Post by NadirAli » Sat Sep 22, 2018 3:38 am

Years ago, I read that Wikipedia was in talks with Facebook to allow users to edit using their FB accounts.

Although it may seem advantageous in the sense of catching trouble makers, we could see them creating sockpuppets on Facebook to protect their identity and post propaganda on Wiki, making it hard for CU to catch them as they'd have to extend their technical rights onto Facebook.

If they do it'll be a short lives project for the reasons I posted above. The project is still headed to a slow death. There's only one near impossible way they can save themselves and linking to other sites won't do the trick. It'll actually complicate things more.

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Re: "Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia"

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Sep 23, 2018 3:11 pm

Yeah, that was from a different time, when it was assumed having a Facebook account meant you were less likely to be up to no good than someone who took five seconds to register a Wikipedia account. World events have shown different.

It was given little serious thought at the time IIRC, because I think Wikipedians already understood that if they were seen to be doing that, it would just amplify the questions over why they let people edit anonymously at all (under the proper definition, where everyone who edits is anonymous, even those with real names until such time as they prove it is their real identity).

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