Wikipedia-adjacent: Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson a plagiarist

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Strelnikov
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Wikipedia-adjacent: Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson a plagiarist

Post by Strelnikov » Tue Aug 17, 2021 5:44 pm

From Buzzfeed News: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/de ... -mikkelson

Not only did David Mikkelson rewrite articles from multiple newspapers or online news sources* for the Snopes website between 2015-2019, he concocted a fake writer, "Jeff Zarronandia", for the articles he knew he would get hate mail over. This persona wrote 23 articles for the site. In total Mikkelson wrote 54 plagiarized articles, that they know of.

*Buzzfeed News namechecks the BBC, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, NBC News, CNN, The New York Times, Reuters, E! Online. There may be more, and the number of ripped-off stories might grow.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson a plagiarist

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Tue Aug 17, 2021 8:21 pm

The editor directing staff to rewrite competitors stories just enough to avoid copyright infringement so as to drive traffic to your site is exactly what the Mail does. Perfectly legal, and yet mentioned many times as a justification by Wikipedia editors to ban the Mail.

Snopes has done this, as well as literal copyright infringement.

Wikipedia shall not be banning Snopes anytime soon. Why?

Do you really need to ask. The Mail is the most popular and most right wing newspaper in Brtiain. Snopes is a self appointed fact checker devoted to debunking right wing journalism.

Worse, that shitehouse Steven Slater, recently quoted a source by Stephen Harrison as an explainer in the "Wikipedia's War on the Mail" piece, in response to this Snopes news, claimed that a history of plagiarism is not one of the things Wikipedia uses to asses a source's reliability.

Total liar.

I mean, I SUPPOSE all that shite about industrial scale plagiarism as a business model in the DAILYMAIL debate (most of it dumped in there by Guy Macon) had nothing to do with anything, but as we all know, the email exchanges between the panel of closers as they allegedly weighed up the strength of everyone's arguments rather than just vote counting, are apparently state secrets.

Never mind the fucking obvious question, if Wikipedia doesn't consider a history of plagiarism to affect a source's reliability, why the hell not? It's basic straight up dishonesty.

Wikipedia is biased, and the seeds of that bias are the corrupt morals of people like Slater. People who don't even hide what they're doing.

The inherent corruption of the Daily Mail ban will bite them in the ASS forever. And it would have made sense if it had worked, but it hasn't. Everyone now knows it wasn't about the reliability of Wikipedia, courtesy of Slate, because they sure took their sweet time even starting to clear out Mail references. And their real goal, to somehow harm the Mail, has been a huge failure. It's gone from strength to strength.

And it's certainly no fucking surprise to see a modern day "fact checker" had a remarkably Wikipedia like approach to breaking news - copy it wholesale so it looks like you're fast, and then rewrite it on the go, as live copy. He's not a trained journalist, and neither are Wikipedia editors.

Into the sea with them all.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson a plagiarist

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:54 am

Jake Is A Sellout wrote:
Tue Aug 17, 2021 8:21 pm
The inherent corruption of the Daily Mail ban will bite them in the ASS forever.
Okay, thanks, made your point.....this is FAR from the only stupid source purge they have done over the years. You would not believe the past and current screaming matches over personal blogs and group blogs. Things like Gawker/Gizmodo, Engadget, Medium, Vox, Metafilter and now Substack, have been "cited as reliable sources" over and over. And removed over and over. And replaced over and over.

If you don't believe me: punch "wp:an" in the Wikipedia searchbox, followed by the name of the blog.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson a plagiarist

Post by Jake Is A Sellout » Thu Aug 19, 2021 12:12 pm

ericbarbour wrote:
Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:54 am
Jake Is A Sellout wrote:
Tue Aug 17, 2021 8:21 pm
The inherent corruption of the Daily Mail ban will bite them in the ASS forever.
Okay, thanks, made your point.....this is FAR from the only stupid source purge they have done over the years. You would not believe the past and current screaming matches over personal blogs and group blogs. Things like Gawker/Gizmodo, Engadget, Medium, Vox, Metafilter and now Substack, have been "cited as reliable sources" over and over. And removed over and over. And replaced over and over.

If you don't believe me: punch "wp:an" in the Wikipedia searchbox, followed by the name of the blog.
The Mail isn't a blog, it's a mainstream newspaper, a proper newspaper, the most widely read newspaper in Britain. And the Wikipedians aren't going backwards and forwards, and there was no screaming. They simply decided they didn't like it, for obvious reasons (it's right wing), cherry picked some examples of alleged unreliability, made a fraudulent statement of consensus, and shut down any and all subsequent opposition, then and subsequently. There will be no reversal.

That is the difference. That is the point.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson a plagiarist

Post by Strelnikov » Sat Nov 27, 2021 1:14 am

It's been quiet in the months since that article came out.

Too quiet....
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson a plagiarist

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Dec 01, 2021 8:25 pm

Strelnikov wrote:
Sat Nov 27, 2021 1:14 am
It's been quiet in the months since that article came out.

Too quiet....
No different from the brutal shrieking around Section 230 "reform". It could lead to wide-ranging changes in the US political landscape, as well as in other countries. But it's a "boring nerd-ish subject" so all those pathetic corporate journalist-things simply ignore it.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211 ... -230.shtml

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson a plagiarist

Post by Strelnikov » Wed Dec 08, 2021 10:48 pm

Yes, the real stuff is never discussed until the other shoe drops. And then when it does, all the same crappy editorials are written and everybody cries crocodile tears, etc.

Utter nonsense, and a result of the death of true journalism in the United States.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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