Crap or questionable articles

Good, bad, biased, paid or what-have-you. There's an endless supply.
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CrowsNest
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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Jun 24, 2018 2:29 am

The End wrote:Why do we need "List of celebrities who own wineries and vineyards?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... _vineyards
Judging by the sea of redlinks in column two, the main purpose of the list appears to be to ensure Wikipedians are properly motivated to write Wikipedia articles for vineyards and wineries owned by celebrities.

Perhaps a rename to "List of wineries and vineyards owned by celebrities" would help usher this wretched thing to its rightful doom?

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by The End » Mon Jun 25, 2018 5:18 am

CrowsNest wrote:
The End wrote:Why do we need "List of celebrities who own wineries and vineyards?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... _vineyards
Judging by the sea of redlinks in column two, the main purpose of the list appears to be to ensure Wikipedians are properly motivated to write Wikipedia articles for vineyards and wineries owned by celebrities.

Perhaps a rename to "List of wineries and vineyards owned by celebrities" would help usher this wretched thing to its rightful doom?


Or at least "demote" it to a category like "wineries and vineyards owned by celebrities" (and, believe me, we could have an entire thread dedicated to "crap or questionable categories").
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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Jun 29, 2018 6:10 pm

Jesus, this looks like a petty backstab on a government official who has been dead a long time:

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

Almost 80% of this article is blubber about "Mole allegations", something WHICH WAS NEVER PROVED, okay?? Just because Peter Wright whinged about something in his book doesn't make it true.
Wright retired in January 1976, upon reaching age 60, and, by his own account, was enraged at being denied a pension for his 30 years of service, on highly legalistic and technical grounds. He emigrated to Tasmania, Australia, where he wrote an account of his work at MI5. Despite attempts by Margaret Thatcher's government to suppress the publication and distribution of Spycatcher, it was finally published in 1987, and eventually sold over two million copies around the world.[11]

Try asking that looney UK government fan Dormskirk why he cares about this shit so much. Is he just a dedicated follower of the "espionage biz", or is he a UK government mole looking to control WP content about "people Whitehall don't like"? I could ask the same about several other major contributors to the Hollis article. One of them, Petrus Magnus, did very little outside of sniping at Roger Hollis.

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Jun 30, 2018 11:22 pm

Still a heavily-vandalized article, despite its obscurity:

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

The highest-paid person on earth, according to this. His article only dates from 2013 (apparently), the #1 editor thereof is infamous vandalism patroller Bbb23, and the first three edits in the history (which has been chopped up heavily) look like this:
(cur | prev) 06:04, 14 February 2013‎ Jim1138 (talk | contribs)‎ m . . (22 bytes) (-235)‎ . . (Reverted edits by 149.160.242.63 (talk) to last revision by Marcus Qwertyus (HG)) (undo)
(cur | prev) 06:03, 14 February 2013‎ 149.160.242.63 (talk)‎ . . (257 bytes) (+235)‎ . . (←Redirected page to Asshole) (undo)
(cur | prev) 14:29, 25 December 2012‎ Mark Schierbecker (talk | contribs)‎ . . (22 bytes) (+22)‎ . . (#REDIRECT Snapchat)

Clear signs of oversight being used to keep Spiegel from threatening the WMF in court.

Some people are hated loads more than Trump (or Hillary), okay?

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by AndrewForson » Sun Jul 01, 2018 3:30 pm

ericbarbour wrote:Clear signs of oversight being used to keep Spiegel from threatening the WMF in court.

Nothing so sinister: userid Marcus Qwertyus was renamed to Mark Schierbecker.

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Jul 03, 2018 9:54 pm

Pointed out by a friend:
http://www.njohnson.co.uk/
Ring modulators have been around for a long time, first developed for telephone systems, and now used extensively in radio telecomms, and since the 1950s also in electronic music. I've written up some of the history of the ring modulator since my efforts at correcting the wikipedia page seem to upset the electronic music crowd.

Not sure which editing account he was using, but there's some hilarious squabbling on the talkpage for "Ring modulation", with this part being extra-"autistic":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ring ... ng_sources
Binksternet again. Nothing but assholes here....

Ah, found it, on a different article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_mixer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nigelj
I *THINK* that's the same guy. Maybe.

Still a badly written and sourced article, and Nigelj fought with people back in 2004-2008 after writing the bulk of the mathematical section
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... id=7489312
Some old shitstorming on the talkpage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Freq ... om_article
He did Wikipedia a great favor, and was "rewarded" by being chased away. A story I've heard a thousand times before.

Mentioned partly because Johnson likes to argue with people on the Muff Wiggler forum:
https://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/viewt ... c&start=25
Warning: long barely-readable thread. Whether you have an engineering degree or not.

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Jul 28, 2018 2:14 am

Checking in on something I've posted before. Wikipedians often attempt to "fix society" by wiki. A hopeless and doomed idea, but that doesn't stop them from making content, and fighting over it!

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

Major editor: an obvious WP addict and ADHD sufferer named Elinruby. Works in IT, predictably. Look at the talkpage archives. Second major contributor, Beanyandcecil, is obsessed with the Shock collar article, and has been grinding it since 2010. He appears to have a sockpuppet, Vectronn.

Let random crazy people write something, and you get (shock horror) random crazy. And sometimes they try to be judge and jury.

(fwiw I spent much of my childhood growing up in Albuquerque. Its police department has "enjoyed" a dark reputation for violence and corruption and craziness for more than 100 years. Multiple federal lawsuits and other attempts at reform have been of questionable effectiveness. Mr. Boyd remains dead, and the two guys who did him in, continue with their lives. And nothing in that town changes.)

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Aug 09, 2018 10:27 pm

A giant bizarre mess:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... t_abortion

Mostly the work of one freak. Who was later banned as an abusive sock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Beachcomb

The alleged main account, Guessing Game, reeks of ADHD craziness, and i do NOT see a clear connection. Guessing Game was really (too) fond of this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_a ... characters

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by Strelnikov » Fri Aug 10, 2018 2:23 pm

ericbarbour wrote:Jesus, this looks like a petty backstab on a government official who has been dead a long time:

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

Almost 80% of this article is blubber about "Mole allegations", something WHICH WAS NEVER PROVED, okay?? Just because Peter Wright whinged about something in his book doesn't make it true.
Wright retired in January 1976, upon reaching age 60, and, by his own account, was enraged at being denied a pension for his 30 years of service, on highly legalistic and technical grounds. He emigrated to Tasmania, Australia, where he wrote an account of his work at MI5. Despite attempts by Margaret Thatcher's government to suppress the publication and distribution of Spycatcher, it was finally published in 1987, and eventually sold over two million copies around the world.[11]

Try asking that looney UK government fan Dormskirk why he cares about this shit so much. Is he just a dedicated follower of the "espionage biz", or is he a UK government mole looking to control WP content about "people Whitehall don't like"? I could ask the same about several other major contributors to the Hollis article. One of them, Petrus Magnus, did very little outside of sniping at Roger Hollis.


There are people who think Harold Wilson, Prime Minister from 1965-70 and 1974-76, was also a Soviet mole, and MI5 kept a file on him because he was too comfortable with the USSR for their liking. Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsey (Lobster magazine) wrote their book Smear!: Wilson and the Secret State (1992) to show how British intelligence went after Wilson for years with the help of the Conservative Party. Some of the talk about Roger Hollis being a Soviet mole is scapegoating for MI5 failures during the 1950s-1960s, some of it might be revenge for this line:

In the same essay, Saunders wrote of the Communist Party of Great Britain: ‘In the international communist movement, the British party was a laughing stock, correctly assumed to be so thoroughly penetrated that it was virtually a branch of the Security Service. As [MI5 Director General] Roger Hollis told the home secretary in 1959, “we [have] the British Communist Party pretty well buttoned up.’ It was more than mere containment, says [David] Cornwell, who ran agents into the party. “We kept it afloat. In fact, we owned it.”’
Since MI5 had known about the Soviet subsidies to the CPGB since the 1930s and not exposed them, ‘We kept it afloat’ is literally true.

That's Robin Ramsey writing in his "View from the Bridge" column in Lobster back in 2015, quoting Francis Saunders in the London Review of Books. The Communist Party of Great Britain went under after the USSR did, replaced by a number of other British communist parties, some of whom predated the 1990s. The other element keeping the "Hollis: was he or wasn't he?" question alive was the chance to write books keeping your pet theory going; (Henry) Chapman Pincher wrote Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders and Cover-Ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain in 2009 when he was 95, rehashing Peter Wright's arguments that Hollis was a Soviet mole. I think that Pincher (who had been doing investigative journalism on spies since the 1950s) knew what sells and what doesn't and that blaming one guy is more emotionally satisfying than admitting that British counterespionage was full of unimaginative careerists and people firing in the dark.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Aug 23, 2018 9:37 pm

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