Las Vegas shooting and the Wikipedia mess that ensued

[ericbarbour]

You can't even mow down a bunch of people in Vegas without someone on WP starting a squabble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Strip_shooting

This talkpage stuff is especially disgusting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:2017 ... tisemitism

I have been a victim of a possible antisemetic attack here on the discussion page. A user deleted my post with the comment, that Israeli news agencies aren't reliable because they are Israeli (Jewish?). Antisemitism is not ok.--Albin Schmitt (talk) 10:33, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Were the Israeli news sources trying to claim that he was a convert to Islam? The only vandalism I've seen so far has been claims that he was motivated by "Islam" and so people could blame "Muslims" and "Islam" for the attack/as the motivation. Israeli news sources often are shit barring Haaretz but that has to do with the editorial positions and the posturing they take to "make people more sympathetic to Israel" regardless of what it does. Anyone ranting about "Jewish media is bad because it's Jewish", on the other hand, is an idiot to say the least. 70.31.82.231 (talk) 11:08, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Most Israeli news sources are very good, but if you think Haaretz is a good source, then I'm afraid your opinions aren't worth much. Haaretz is absolute garbage and far-left extremist propaganda. And there is no need to "make Israel look good" because it's not doing anything wrong anyway. The vast majority of so-called "criticism" of Israel is due to anti-Semitism. 213.59.229.154 (talk) 11:28, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

No, they're mostly rubbish. Always calling Palestinians "terrorists" regardless of what they actually are, presenting a false historical narrative, calling any and all criticism of Israel "Jew-hatred", etc.... Haaretz really is the only one worth reading. Your froth and bile towards Haaretz shows that you're, to the contrary, either a likudnik, a "settler", or an expansionist Israeli nationalist-- the real extremist in other words! Israel is morally the worst party in the Israel-Palestine-Lebanon conflict, and has done plenty of wrong in both Palestine and Lebanon. In closing, keep on making accusations of "antisemitism" trite and meaningless. 70.31.82.231 (talk) 13:19, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Calling oneself a "victim" of an "attack" in the aftermath of 50 deaths (and maybe more) because someone deleted a post and gave a reason is a bit melodramatic. 47.137.183.192 (talk) 12:29, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Yes, Mr. Schmitt saw a spurious/stupid report online claiming that Stephen Paddock was a Muslim extremist. Take it out and you're an "antisemetic" whatever.

The article is only 12 hours old as of this writing and it already has a massive talkpage. InedibleHulk, who I've already documented for his notorious doodling of articles about mass murders, is all over this one.

[Strelnikov]

Are they also having a meltdown over the BLP of Tom Petty, because he was declared dead and then they retracted it, but he is dying slowly without the machines?


I thought we were getting better this year, despite Priznit Dorito.


This band is becoming a gang of ghosts.

[ericbarbour]

Even better: 4channers tried to claim Geary Danley was the shooter. He is married to Marilou Danley, a friend of the actual shooter (Stephen Paddock), . And a variety of right-wing blogs and forums spread this cheerfully, and managed to affect Google search results for hours. Including Everipedia, one of those stupid Wikipedia-spinoff-but-not-liberal wikis.

https://thinkprogress.org/gateway-pundi ... 0ad08276f/

The Gateway Pundit post, which has since been deleted (but has been saved in Google’s cache), cites Everipedia, a Breitbart-endorsed Wikipedia competitor, as well as “other reports.” “Everipedia.com reports that Geary was another angry far-left shooter,” Hoft wrote. “According to other reports, Danley was married to Marilou Danley, an Asian-American from the Philippines.”

https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/vegas-s ... ry-danley/

Damn Everipedia article was quickly changed, but the shit continued to spread. There you are: fake news from the shrieking right.
https://everipedia.org/wiki/geary-danley/
This blog also claimed Danley was the killer. "Oh, we never said that!"
http://ussanews.com/News1/2017/10/02/hu ... ry-danley/

Original 4chan thread
https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/143664688

[ericbarbour]

Are they also having a meltdown over the BLP of Tom Petty, because he was declared dead and then they retracted it, but he is dying slowly without the machines?

Hells yeah. Talkpage is getting really pathetic. Endless demands for page protection and fighting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Tom_Petty

Metafilter's knuckleheads still think he's dead......
http://www.metafilter.com/169746/Into-t ... -Wide-Open
Did they censor it? Yup....
http://www.metafilter.com/169745/this-is-NOT-ok

They also have a Vegas shooting thread
http://www.metafilter.com/169739/50-plu ... s-shooting
in which some have been claiming the shooter was a "Muslim extremist".......plus the usual spluttering about guns. I would tend to agree that this country doesn't deal with firearms properly, but it's really painful to read a thread full of whiny shit like this. Splutter splutter upvote.

Story on CNN right now that gun stocks are up this morning. Sturm Ruger up 3%, former Smith & Wesson up 4%.

Fuck guns. Fuck guns and fuck the media and the lobbyists and Hollywood and right-wing and "moderate" politicians and every other shitbag entity that lines their pockets by gaslighting the American public into believing that private firearm ownership is the natural order and that owning a firearm for defense is a reasonable course of action rather than a good way to improve the odds that you or your family members die by a piece of lead ripping your innards apart. I've been an expat for four years, and you know what, it's been really fucking hard but goddamn if I haven't felt a real and tangible sense of freedom now that I no longer have to worry that I am making myself a target by attending any public gathering or entertainment event, weigh up the risk that unbalanced people who try to strike up a conversation with me on the street are packing heat, or consider whether I'm putting myself at risk by visiting the home of a right-wing family member or acquaintance. My heart goes out to all the family and friends of the victims that have senselessly lost their lives because their countrymen (including plenty of my own relatives and loved ones) have been sold an obscene man-boy cowboy fantasy of shooting the bad guys and riding off into the sunset.
posted by aerobic at 7:42 AM on October 2 [32 favorites]

Maybe Trump could dedicate another golf trophy to the victims
posted by BungaDunga at 7:47 AM on October 2 [59 favorites]

Did Metafilter mods censor this thread? You betcha!

[Couple comments removed. HyperBlue, this isn't the first mass shooting thread where you've come on strong with a pushy "it's not guns, it's mental health" take and you absolutely need to cut it out with that now and going forward.]
posted by cortex at 7:52 AM on October 2 [58 favorites]

[ericbarbour]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense ... vegas.html

Social media has been used to wrongfully identify mass murderers in the past. Reddit users notoriously launched a digital manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013, plastering pictures of a innocent student named Sunil Tripathi, who had gone missing and was actually dead, across the internet. In the wake of the 2015 massacre at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, 4chan users were likely trying to fool the media into using the photo of popular music reviewer who bore a passing resemblance to the actual shooter. A TV news show then actually did end up using the wrong picture. And in 2016, after a shooting that killed five police officers, Dallas police released the photo of a suspect on Twitter. Yet the photo linking him to the crime remained on the internet long after he was cleared.

Remember that Wikipedia is just another social website. All of them are susceptible to manipulation, because people are. The loudest idiot makes the "truth".

[Mutineer]

Did Metafilter mods censor this thread? You betcha!

[Couple comments removed. HyperBlue, this isn't the first mass shooting thread where you've come on strong with a pushy "it's not guns, it's mental health" take and you absolutely need to cut it out with that now and going forward.]
posted by cortex at 7:52 AM on October 2 [58 favorites]

Everybody else gets a take, why shouldn't Hyperblue get a take? And then the ominous command from "cortex" (which is not even a Wikipedia username as far as I can tell) seems to me an intimidation tactic as routinely used by the administrative sector. Cortex says "pushy" and refers to prior history but he doesn't link to anything at all.

Much remains to be discovered about the shooter (motivation?!). I see it as three possibilities:

1) He went insane.
2) It's terrorism (but in order for it to be terrorism he had to have had some political goal).
3) He was truly evil, rationally plotting his own suicide but with some idea that he gained something (history?) by taking a lot of others whom he did not even know with him.

[ericbarbour]

Everybody else gets a take, why shouldn't Hyperblue get a take? And then the ominous command from "cortex" (which is not even a Wikipedia username as far as I can tell) seems to me an intimidation tactic as routinely used by the administrative sector. Cortex says "pushy" and refers to prior history but he doesn't link to anything at all.

That is typical Metafilter. See the ED article for more about them. (yes, the primary mods have Wikipedia articles, all of which have been edited by themselves or friends.)
https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/MetaFilter
Insulting but basically accurate....

[The End]

It's still too soon. If they waited a few weeks, there would be enough factual information to write at least a small, substantial encyclopedia article. But... this is Wikipedia. It's been that way since 2001.

[Strelnikov]

Did Metafilter mods censor this thread? You betcha!

[Couple comments removed. HyperBlue, this isn't the first mass shooting thread where you've come on strong with a pushy "it's not guns, it's mental health" take and you absolutely need to cut it out with that now and going forward.]
posted by cortex at 7:52 AM on October 2 [58 favorites]

Everybody else gets a take, why shouldn't Hyperblue get a take? And then the ominous command from "cortex" (which is not even a Wikipedia username as far as I can tell) seems to me an intimidation tactic as routinely used by the administrative sector. Cortex says "pushy" and refers to prior history but he doesn't link to anything at all.

Much remains to be discovered about the shooter (motivation?!). I see it as three possibilities:

1) He went insane.
2) It's terrorism (but in order for it to be terrorism he had to have had some political goal).
3) He was truly evil, rationally plotting his own suicide but with some idea that he gained something (history?) by taking a lot of others whom he did not even know with him.

We have no idea why Stephen Paddock killed all those people; he had no ties to any political groups, was a boring real estate millionaire. Maybe he had a Charles Whitman tumor in his head that drove him to set up a sniper's nest in the Mandalay Bay hotel over a few days. We need time to figure this mess out.

[ericbarbour]

It's still too soon. If they waited a few weeks, there would be enough factual information to write at least a small, substantial encyclopedia article. But... this is Wikipedia. It's been that way since 2001.

For the first few years there wasn't this insane push to "keep up with breaking news". Only around 2005, when the big growth explosion, did it attract nut-cases who thought Wikipedia had to be "everything". Including the "free CNN", or the "universal newspaper" or whatever. It will never be "all human knowledge" and they damn well know it. But the lies were more effective than "sanity".

If Wales and his buttlickers had simply instituted common-sense rules, like "no BLPs" and "no breaking news" prior to 2005, it would not be so damn dysfunctional today.

And don't forget Wikinews. Look at the front page today. Miserable. Wikinews is always days or weeks behind Wikipedia on breaking items. And remember that it was started in November 2004, by the ever-glorious Erik Moeller. Pi zero and that shrieking idiot "Blood Red Sandman" appear to be the last two active administrators left. It's dying and I defy anyone to prove otherwise.