Crap or questionable articles

[ericbarbour]

The "infobox" reaches the pinnacle of assholery. "Initial news reports may be unreliable" my balls. Because the subject of this article no longer exists in original form, DeSantis signed the law today to break up the RCID. (It is being replaced with a new governing body packed with Republican supporters of DeSantis, but hey hey, "don't say gay", okay?) The inevitable squabbling has begun on the talkpage. Excellent chance this will turn into an idiot editwar and end up on noticeboards.

https://apnews.com/article/ron-desantis ... osition_01

rcidtop.png (646.35 KiB) Viewed 1488 times

[oranges33]

The 2023 [[incel]] article on en.Wikipedia is a long bizarre rant which fellates the (relatively short-lasting) infamy-seeking, extremist incel forums by defining incel as everything them. But at the same time, Wikipedia doesn't name or establish a clear lineage of most of the forums it rants about.

The article almost exclusively focuses on incels after their arrival on Reddit, ie after 19 years of non-Reddit incel forums. I would not be surprised if Molly is a Redditor. The Wikipedia article has only a few short asides about incels before 2016, and renames extremist 2016 r/incels culture to 'incel'. For perspective, 19 years of mostly unmentioned forums is a lot longer than 8 years of forums. (2023 - 2016)

The article is first a rundown on r/incels culture. This instead of naming the article [[r/incels culture]], or writing anything concrete about incel, like a series of forums or a life circumstance. They could have made it a concrete article about the succession of extreme forums, if it had to be negatively framed, but they didn't even do that. They decided to call 'incel' a subculture, while not defining that subculture beyond 4chan or PUAhate culture. Next, the Wikipedia article calls any person incel if they were both violent and had adopted the culture of PUAhate/Sluthate (which never self-identified as incel and had non-celibates on it).

Not surprisingly, the page has broken many Wikipedia rules. The page title alone breaks WP:NEO.

This wasn't always the case. Wikipedia has had many, less re-appropriated definitions for incel over the years. Definitions which validate the feminist or non-ideological incel forums (which still exist, albeit as private forums and chats). Definitions including:

year 2010 definition: "Incel is a term for a person who has not established an intimate relationship or engaged in sexual intercourse for reasons other than voluntary celibacy or sexual abstinence."
https://web.archive.org/web/20100713165 ... wiki/Incel

year 2012 definition: "Involuntary celibacy (colloquially incel) is chronic near-total or total absence in a person's sexuality of intimate relationships or sexual intercourse that is occurring for reasons other than voluntary celibacy, asexuality, antisexualism, or sexual abstinence."
https://web.archive.org/web/20121205160 ... wiki/Incel

The prior articles cited non-sensational news outlets and dry academic articles.

Well... not until Molly White and 2-3 POV pushers decided to own the topic on Wikipedia. Right after the 2018 Toronto Van Attack, they proceeded to fill the article with dozens of quick-written, opinion-based, digital journalism articles about the attack. It would be somewhat understandable if the article was explicitly about the most extreme incel forums. Nowadays, there's pretty much only one, public, self-identified incel forum: incels.is, but they refuse to name it. They prefer to use it as a proxy to complain about 4chan culture. Ironically, Wikipedia now says the event which precipated the creation of the incel article for the fifth time had little or nothing to do with incel, that Minassian was just seeking infamy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_van_attack This is also what the judge who presided over Minassian's case said, that Minassian was lying about 'incel' influence.

Another thing that likely shaped the content of the current Frankenstein incel article is a (hard to find) debate Wikipedians had, with over a dozen arguing that all people who say they cannot have sex are.. lying!. Specifically, this one https://archive.fo/CT95w. Not all were arguing about the notability of involuntary celibacy, especially after User:Cunard showed it passed notability rules, but many started arguing it was impossible to be an unwanted or fearful celibate (which most of them of course are). Don't try to understand the psychology here, you wont.

The vote went down like this:

All say aye on who thinks it is possible to be celibate due to being undesirable or fearful of sex?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Andrew_Davidson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RoySmith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Valoem (who wrote a 2 page essay on why it should stay)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Raquel_Baranow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PORNBIO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hobit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Cunard (who wrote a 5 page essay showing how the 'involuntary celibate' concept passes WP:GNG)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk ... nd_windows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sammy1339
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vernanimalcula
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Min_al_Khadr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:HiDrNick
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:New_England_Cop
and a few others

All say nay?:
21 people said nay, beating the yay by a few votes

This caused the involuntary celibacy article to be deleted for the second to final time.

to be continued....

[oranges33]

The [[involuntary celibacy]] page was created for the fifth time after it was deleted salted however, but this time without consensus!

It was created (and written) anyway by Molly White, just because.

This caused quite a few Wikipedians veterans to balk at why she was unilaterally deciding to override salt without community consensus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... spite_salt?
from above, on April 25th, 2018

User:Alanscottwalker scolded Molly White, suggesting she should have made a draft first. He said Molly's action showed 'disrespect and distrust of others' and was an 'abuse of tools'

User:Flyer22_Reborn accused Molly of breaking consensus by creating the page, stating "I'm surprised to see that this article has been recreated despite the repeated community consensus on not creating it." But stopped at further questioning a Wikipedia big-shot, and didn't argue for it to be deleted.

User:Holdek called White's actions, "disrespectful", but not technically violating a rule

User:Rhododendrites also questioned Molly, but then stated they figured the page was created to comment on a news event a few days prior, breaking the not-the-news rule.

[oranges33]

As Molly was starting to write the [[incel]] article for the first time, a section was created to dispute the neutrality of GorillaWarfare (Molly White's) edits, on April 25th, 2018

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... neutrality

User:Aquinassixthway wrote
"It seems to me this article conflates a topic of psychology and medicine with sensationalism and is citing the NYT and SPLC to do it, associating anyone who can't get a girlfriend as a potential shooter. This [article Molly White wrote] is on the verge of bullying imo."

User:The_Anome agreed, as well as User:Willwill0415, both writing their own paragraphs.

Molly ignored the comments for the most part and pretended she had consensus, despite being outnumbered 3-1 in that discussion. She continued to edit it as if she hadn't read the talk page.

Later, User:Amin, User:Thylacoop5 also join to criticise the page. Amin, Thylacoop, and Willwill0415 proceed to create The Incel Wiki(s) a few months later as Limerencel, TheBreeze, and William respectively. According to Similarweb, each individual incel wiki got/gets way more views and engagement than the Wikipedia article.

[oranges33]

Wikipedians next had a vote on renaming [[involuntary celibacy]] to [[incel]] as it was clear they were breaking too many rules trying to make 'involuntary celibacy' about a subculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... April_2018

7 voted no, 8-9 voted yes, nothing close to consensus, but it was done anyway.

This brings us to back the current [[incel]] article, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1142425101

Most of it is wonky, confusing, misleading, and/or provably wrong. You can start at just the first few sentences

Here's the first sentence of [[incel]] after the lede, which isn't the worst sentence, but is just a taste of the confusion to come:

"The first website to use the term "incel" was founded during the 1990s, although media is conflicted on whether this occurred during 1993 or 1997."

Virtually all media says it was 1997, there's no reason to mention 1993. It took a (now banned editor) to even put 1997 in that Wikipedia article sentence. In fact, Alana, the founder of the first forum says that the 1993 date is wrong on her site, https://www.lovenotanger.org/ and in her own words says 1997 is the correct date https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6yi8P03igQ. Usenet posts and webarchive also confirm it was 1997. The only advertisements came during 1997-1998 https://groups.google.com/g/alt.support ... rfOi4wva8J

The second sentence after the lede is provably wrong.
"The website was founded by a university student living in Toronto known only by her first name, Alana."

Contrary to that sentence, Alana used her full name to prospective members every time she posted, eg here https://groups.google.com/g/alt.support ... sZKuUTf2dk

In fact, the reason Alana's last name isn't mentioned in news is because she requested the journalists not connect her name to the subject. She says that on her lovenotanger site. Her bios also all say that 1997 was way after she graduated college, so she created the site after she graduated college, contrary to the Wikipedia article.

The third sentence after the lede of the Wikipedia [[incel]] article is provably wrong, stating, "She created the website to discuss her sexual inactivity with others". Her site actually had no forum or mailing list for a long time

Alana actually created her site because she already became sexually successful and wanted to share how she became successful with readers of her site. She states this explicitly on her 1997 site linked below. She also stated that prior to creating the website she realized she was a lesbian, she had noticed similarities between the gay rights movement and a possible incel movement, prompting her to want to create an incel "movement" (her words).

https://web.archive.org/web/19970525065 ... -home.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19970525065 ... nvcel.html

This also makes the fifth and sixth sentences of the Wikipedia article misleading, which state, "During her college years and after, Alana realized she was bisexual and became more comfortable with her identity [prompting her to hand over the site]". This implies that LGBT identity prompted her to hand over the site, when in fact LGBT identity partially prompted her to create the site.

This is only the first 6 sentences of the article, and it just gets worse from there, but won't spam this place up to point out all the sentences.

[wexter]

Both the article page and the talk page have just under 15,000 words each!

15,000 words is 30 pages single-spaced or 60 pages double-spaced. Typical documents that are 15,000 words include include novels, novellas, and other published books.Sep 10, 2020

Well... not until Molly White and 2-3 POV pushers decided to own the topic on Wikipedia. They proceeded to fill the article with dozens of quick-written, opinion-based, digital journalism articles about the 2018 April Toronto Van Attack. It would be somewhat understandable if the article was explicitly about the most extreme incel forums. Nowadays, there's pretty much only one self-identified incel forum: incels.is, but they refuse to name it. They prefer to use it as a proxy to complain about 4chan culture. Ironically, Wikipedia now says the event which precipated the creation of the incel article for the fifth time had little or nothing to do with incel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_van_attack

How is this different from the "Eastern European Warfare" which speaks to Narrative Framing? Different topic same abuses?

In Wikipedia jargon its one big "NAFOW" - just so you know that is a "portmanteua' or frankenword for Narrative Framing on Wikipedia; Narrative Framers on Wikipedia are usually trans-white-men who are autistic-jackoffs.

An incel (/ˈɪnsɛl/ IN-sel, a portmanteau of "involuntary celibate"[1])

<-first sentence who writes like this?

[oranges33]

Both the article page and the talk page have just under 15,000 words each!

15,000 words is 30 pages single-spaced or 60 pages double-spaced. Typical documents that are 15,000 words include include novels, novellas, and other published books.Sep 10, 2020

Right, they can't really fit it into a single article anymore because [[incel]] conflates multiple, barely overlapping large topics including: forums which try to hijack the topic from longer lasting communities (each with their own culture), the original non-4chan communities, 4chan culture, r9k culture, all entitled misogynistic violence, a male-only PSL culture, with a gender-neutral psychological topic etc.

You can see they don't have a solid definition when you ask the article authors exactly what constitutes an 'incel', given over half of their examples of incels weren't self-identified, and they reject the "life circumstance" definition for now. They have no answer, and they've ignored any talk page topic with teeth.

It's been proposed to split the article or rename it since Molly re-created it against previous consensus.

User:Rhododendrites and User:Flyer22_Reborn proposed calling it either [[incel (subculture)]] or [[incels (subculture)]] during 2018.

A few editors just suggested deleting the page and merging half the article to [[misogyny]] or something similar.

User:Bashfan31 proposed splitting the article to [[incels.co]] and [[4chan culture]] in 2022.

User:Freedom4U and User:Trade encouraged editors to split content of incel to a separate article on the forum topic

User:KevinSan-c proposed splitting it to [[incels.is]] in 2023, including writing it himself, but it seems he's the actual owner of the most misogynistic incel forum, or a proxy, given it's a single purpose account trying to scrub a guy named Small out of wikipedia pages

It also appears the original authors and patrollers have no interest in the article topic anymore. They appear to have stopped including most media or academic sources after 2018-2019 for inclusion in the article. They didn't really include anything after 2018-2019, with only small, now banned accounts putting it in. Either established wikipedians don't like the more recent sources or are disinterested.

[oranges33]

In Wikipedia jargon [the incel article] is one big "NAFOW" - just so you know that is a "portmanteua' or frankenword for Narrative Framing on Wikipedia; Narrative Framers on Wikipedia are usually trans-white-men who are autistic-jackoffs.

There were some leaked internal Wikipedia discussions which mentioned the page on the academic [[Denise Donnelly]] was deleted solely to narrative frame the more sensationalist iterations of [[involuntary celibacy]]/[[incel]]. If you check the AFD for [[Denise Donnelly]], the delitionists even admitted it passed WP:GNG and there was little policy reason to delete the page. But the Donnelly article framed incel too much as a life circumstance, which they didn't like. The Donnelly articles and subsequent academia citing her were used as an anchor for the inclusion of a non-sensational [[involuntary celibacy]] article in previous years.

This background decisions of the aforementioned articles is just a bunch of politics really, not about building an encyclopedia

[oranges33]

Might as well talk about the [[Sanctioned Suicide]] article in public.

Knew it would devolve over time because almost no one at Wikipedia wants to read the sources associated with the subject (the main one is 30 pages long, so of course no one at Wikipedia read it).

So, naturally, the owner of incels.is/sanctionedsuicide (or a one degree separated proxy for him), set up shop as the main editor of the [[Sanctioned Suicide]] article. (User:Kevinsanc on Wikipedia) It's a single purpose account which kept trying to scrub stuff about the founders, for two months daily.

Among their activities on the article is pretending they don't know about the various minor deaths reported on the forum, eg reverting the story about Daniel, a 16yo who died on SS after being encouraged to ingest what was likely sold to him as meat preservative. They also deleted sentences from the NYTimes article which mentioned how staff coordinated to conceal the forums activities from law enforcement. They deleted a quote from Galante in the article, where he said on the SS forum

“If you’re preparing your departure, please contact a mod so we can help with preparations,” Serge wrote, directing members to moderators.
https://archive.is/PUGSo#selection-3041.2-3045.141

(for more from that article)

" The two took other precautions. Serge warned members they would crack down on anyone publicly sharing personal contact information. He also said they would begin closing the accounts of those who had posted goodbye threads, a step that kept loved ones and law enforcement from gaining access to them later. "

"Links to a suicide hotline and other mental health resources appeared on the site, as did a new public forum focusing on recovery from suicidal thoughts. But Marquis also noted that people who registered only to use the recovery forum “will be denied most likely.”

They switched "children died" to "minors died". They deleted the string "meat preservative" every time it appeared in the article (what sodium nitrite is, the meat preservative that the NYTimes reported as the most common method)

At least one mom of dead children from the site seem to have appeared on the talk page, asking for the URL to be censored. Wikipedia has no idea what to do with the article, probably just hoping some drama will give them excuse to provide shelter for a criminal site.

[ericbarbour]

So, naturally, the owner of incels.is/sanctionedsuicide (or a one degree separated proxy for him), set up shop as the main editor of the [[Sanctioned Suicide]] article. (User:Kevinsanc on Wikipedia) It's a single purpose account which kept trying to scrub stuff about the founders, for two months daily.

This I can believe. The article is being controlled by the operators of the forum--too obvious. Only three accounts completely dominate the history: Kevinsanc, Freedom4u, and an IP address editor. They're basically using Wikipedia to advertise their stupid incel-rageboy hangout. And Wikipedia is letting them. Plus, the talkpage is full of hilarious squabbling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctioned_Suicide