Wikipediot unwittingly reveals Wikipedia's danger to society in the Wikipedia community newsletter

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Jake Is A Sellout
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Wikipediot unwittingly reveals Wikipedia's danger to society in the Wikipedia community newsletter

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Thu Apr 29, 2021 8:18 am

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

To a non-retard, it might seem an obvious point to make, that a freely licensed image placed in a prominent location on a Wikipedia article, is going to get noticed and probably used by third parties.

It is perhaps unsurprising that a Wikipediot of 18,000+ edits and 6 years of service, still doesn't know the basic purpose of Wikipedia, and the basic mechanisms by which they intend to achieve that purpose. Wikipedia wouldn't be what it is, after all, without the free labour of thousands of utter retards.

What disturbs me most, however, was how this Wikishit also seemed to have absolutely no awareness of other important factors in play here.

Wikipedia is allegedly meant to be neutral, yet he titled this piece, "Changing the world". So, it can be reasonably concluded that this guy's new found use of Wikipedia, getting imagery of protests out to news media quickly, is not for the purpose of neutral documentation of world events, but active participation in those protests.

This is bad enough, but the guy also showed absolutely no awareness of the grave responsibility this places on a budding wikishit photojournalist. The responsibility to ensure that your imagery and their descriptions are accurate and neutral.

It has been a running joke on Wikipedia for as long as I can remember, that their policy "Wikipedia is not the news", is more accurately rendered as, "Wikipedia is the news, and fuck those pricks at Wikinews". Similarly, "Wikipedia is not social media", is actually, "Hashtag Wikipedia, bitches".

It is unsurprising therefore, that when describing the power of using Wikipedia to get topical imagery out there fast, to change the world, he said......
This process can be likened to retweet and share buttons on social media.
Quite.

The lessons here are obvious. Despite the fact Wikipedia is clearly ripe for abuse by both protestors and state agencies looking to either promote or discredit protests, Wikipedia still doesn't, and likely never will have, any mechanism for ensuring images are what they claim to be.

I think we all know, and this isn't a recent phenomenon, faking/staging/misrepresenting imagery is one of the most effective propaganda tools there has ever been.

And needless to say, Wikipedia also don't ask potential editors, "Are you a good guy, here for the right reasons?". They just hope, and maybe, sometimes, check, but obviously only if the purpose or reasons don't obviously align with their own well known ideological biases.

After all, if you said to people, you can't edit Wikipedia if you have a purpose other than the free dissemination of neutral and accurate knowledge, well, would they have any editors at all?

The less said about the creepy valentines image, the better. I'm cruel, I'm not that cruel.

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Re: Wikipediot unwittingly reveals Wikipedia's danger to society in the Wikipedia community newsletter

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Apr 29, 2021 8:24 pm

Jake Is A Sellout wrote:
Thu Apr 29, 2021 8:18 am
To a non-retard, it might seem an obvious point to make, that a freely licensed image placed in a prominent location on a Wikipedia article, is going to get noticed and probably used by third parties.
Millions of websites have been scraping images from WP since 2005 routinely, including commercial news sites who could easily afford to take their own damn photos, or at least pay for them.
Wikipedia is allegedly meant to be neutral, yet he titled this piece, "Changing the world". So, it can be reasonably concluded that this guy's new found use of Wikipedia, getting imagery of protests out to news media quickly, is not for the purpose of neutral documentation of world events, but active participation in those protests.
You will see more of this in coming years. The nerds have already tried to fiddle with American and UK political process by tolerating people like David Boothroyd/Sam Blacketer, a petty Labourite who openly despised David Cameron, diddling political WP content. In the past they could always claim "oh well, that biased political content was made by unpaid volunteers, and Section 230 anyway, so fuck off". The next logical step would be open attempts to manipulate political-party internal operations and public elections by posting false information in WP articles. It's been tried before in random places (consider all that Trump crap) but there was no concerted effort. Give the bastards a few more years.

They even inserted Boothroyd into this article and therefore cannot claim "ignorance":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politico- ... x#Internet
For example, Wikipedia is a major global channel and is currently the thirteenth most visited website in the world.[98] In 2009 it found its objectivity being compromised at the highest levels with a member sitting on the influential Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) who had an undisclosed conflict of interest. It was revealed that David Boothroyd - a serving Labour Party Councillor for Westminster City[99]—had gained a seat on the Arbitration Committee under the pseudonym of "Sam Blacketer" and also went on to make controversial edits to the Wikipedia entry on the then Leader of the Opposition, later Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron. Boothroyd was also found to have operated prior his appointment to the Arbitration Committee other contemporary accounts—a practice in Wikipedia known as 'sock puppetry'—to give undue weight through appearing as different identities to a particular point of view as opposed to representing a neutral point of view (NPOV). Given Wikipedia's presence and influence in the world, the "affair" attracted mainstream media and other new media attention nationally and internationally, which damaged Wikipedia's standing among readers.[100][101][102] Boothroyd was forced to step down from the Arbitration Committee, although he claimed he had already asserted his intention to resign.
Jake Is A Sellout wrote:It has been a running joke on Wikipedia for as long as I can remember, that their policy "Wikipedia is not the news", is more accurately rendered as, "Wikipedia is the news, and fuck those pricks at Wikinews". Similarly, "Wikipedia is not social media", is actually, "Hashtag Wikipedia, bitches".
You got it. Plus Wikinews has long been controlled by people who were too crazy even for Wikipedia. And there are STILL people who use talkpages and IRC channels as "social media". Some of the little shits even go for adminship--but still don't do much actual "work".

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