Crap or questionable articles

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

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Jul 13, 2019 6:22 pm

Not only is this a badly-written, incoherent and badly sourced article.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_O ... _Francisco)

...it was mostly written by one Sherry Reson. Who was a member of Project One and mentions herself in the damn article.
ECOS
Principals: Ralph Scott, Ray Krauss, Mya Shone, Mary Janowitz, Sherry Reson, Craig Mosher, Andy Bucchiere

She's got a Facebook if you would like to mock her "good work for the Magicalpedia":
https://www.facebook.com/sherry.reson

(Part of the failure here is that the article contains the only mention on Wikipedia of the notorious Eric P. Dollard. I'm surprised that hasn't been purged from WP by now. Obviously the "insiders" are allowing this article to exist as-is and untagged because Project One, a legendary SF hippie art co-op, is getting "special treatment". Dollard is listed in the "to-do" section of RationalWiki but doesn't have an article there yet. Wonder why.)

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Jul 24, 2019 2:00 am

On 7/23/19 5:23 PM, 'Scott Johnson' scottjohnson1@cox.net [TUBECOLLECTORSASSOCIATION] wrote:
> I’d like to try my hand at building some neon lamps such as these. Anyone know, offhand, what the partial pressures of neon and/or argon are typical in a tube like this?

Try looking up "Penning mixture" in books on tube or lamp manufacturing. (Don't bother with the Wikipedia article, it has a major error.)

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Jul 29, 2019 8:04 pm

This one has it all: paid, crap, bad referencing, etc.

From a friend:
18 hours ago a YouTuber named Quinton released a video revealing comics featuring Garfield more than a year before his accepted "first appearance" date. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPidZP_3X8). (Interestingly, the new date is January 8, 1976, the day after I was born.) You can literally watch Wikipedians editing the Garfield article as they incorporate this new information. I doubt they tried to independently verify it with the source newspaper before doing the edits.
I wonder how Jim Davis will react, if at all, to having these pre-syndication comics brought back to public awareness. Apparently he never mentioned them in any interviews.

My comments:
This "Quinton" guy is a great example of the slow-spreading evil of YT as a "platform". Not only is it annoying to be lectured about the paragon of stupid comic strips by a hairy incel; that hairy incel has 321,000 YouTube subscribers....and most of his uploads are unwatchable shit. Someone out there takes him "seriously". And now he's being used as a "reliable source" on Wikipedia. Inevitable.
(Many of the numerous WP articles about Garfield were created or heavily edited by IP addresses from the area of Muncie, Indiana. That's where Jim Davis lives. It is quite possible that Davis himself has been editing his own WP content or getting someone he knows to do it. A routine occurrence and a major violation of the "ROOLZ". I would expect this, since Davis is a notorious narcissist and thrower of tantrums. Muncie still sucks.)

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Jul 31, 2019 9:11 pm

Another item from a friend:
i saw this guy when looking at Danny Whitten, who died in 1972 yet somehow was also in EBTG which formed in 82, with a ten year dead corpse apparently. the guy also wrote one article whose subject appears valid but idk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... /1968VWBus

one more for the shit pile. you can extract a diff from the Whitten article, he did it over two or three edits.

if you know anything about Denise McCluggage, have a look at her article they wrote.


My response went on a bit, take it or leave it:
Thanks, I had heard about this years ago, didn't make a note. The McCluggage article is more-or-less correct but could be a lot better. Sports Illustrated has a far better article than WP.

https://www.si.com/racing/2018/10/29/de ... journalist

I was reminded of the quiet little Alan Dershowitz shitstorm of 2005. He had been editing his own bio and someone removed the self-glorifying crap, so Dershowitz directly contacted Jimbo and DEMANDED he "fix" it. No doubt legal threats were made. And Jimbo did. He also ordered insiders to "keep this article positive". Even today the Dershowitz article is excessively positive and barely mentions his first wife, who "committed suicide" after a ruinous divorce. Conspiracy theorists suspect Dershowitz murdered her and covered it up by threatening to sue anyone who wrote about the story. They may be right but you can't read about any of this on WP.

Dershowitz has made a LOT of enemies in recent years--but you also can't read about that on WP. He's a Big Friend Of Israel and that's more important. (His longtime friendship with Jeffrey Epstein has been attracting a LOT of bad attention recently.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Alan ... protection

Note that Xed was criticizing Jimbo on the talkpage. Jimbo later permabanned Xed after two (very mean and petty) early arbitrations. He was one of WP's best early content writers--but too honest, fought with Jimbo and Jayjg over content abuses. A perfect example of Wales powertripping. I wrote this up for the book wiki, but do you think anyone noticed or cares? Not that I've seen.

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by Abd » Thu Aug 01, 2019 6:08 pm

ericbarbour wrote:This one has it all: paid, crap, bad referencing, etc.
Yet something I found worth looking at.
From a friend:
18 hours ago a YouTuber named Quinton released a video revealing comics featuring Garfield more than a year before his accepted "first appearance" date. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPidZP_3X8). (Interestingly, the new date is January 8, 1976, the day after I was born.) You can literally watch Wikipedians editing the Garfield article as they incorporate this new information. I doubt they tried to independently verify it with the source newspaper before doing the edits.

So I watched it. Yes, first reaction, similar to Eric. But then I saw something much deeper, perhaps.
I wonder how Jim Davis will react, if at all, to having these pre-syndication comics brought back to public awareness. Apparently he never mentioned them in any interviews.

My comments:
This "Quinton" guy is a great example of the slow-spreading evil of YT as a "platform". Not only is it annoying to be lectured about the paragon of stupid comic strips by a hairy incel; that hairy incel has 321,000 YouTube subscribers....and most of his uploads are unwatchable shit. Someone out there takes him "seriously". And now he's being used as a "reliable source" on Wikipedia. Inevitable.

this was not "unwatchable shit." Basically, Quinton is highly self-expressed. He has a very narrow field he has explored, one might say obsessively. But he's witty and has self-awareness. He's found something very unusual, and he's excited about it. I know what that's like, to notice something that nobody else has seen, sometimes one might be unique on the planet.

Nobody is forced to watch his videos. Except maybe some Wikipediots, but only if they choose to. Is this guy reliable source?

Well, maybe. In a proper project, a source like him might be cited with attribution and caution. He's claiming to have seen scans of the actual cartoons. He shows images. How is that different from some anonymous Wikipedian claiming to have seen a source in a newspaper archive. That is, in fact, reliable source by policy, unless challenged, and sometimes the challengers lie.

Quinton is a real person, apparently, not anonymous. I'd say his testimony has weight, where it is clearly based on personal experience and he might even be considered an expert on the topic.
An actual scholar would certainly take him seriously.
(Many of the numerous WP articles about Garfield were created or heavily edited by IP addresses from the area of Muncie, Indiana. That's where Jim Davis lives. It is quite possible that Davis himself has been editing his own WP content or getting someone he knows to do it. A routine occurrence and a major violation of the "ROOLZ". I would expect this, since Davis is a notorious narcissist and thrower of tantrums. Muncie still sucks.)

OMG. Rule violation! Wikipedians and others VIOLATE RULES!

Who the fuck cares? If there were a reliable structure, rule violations would trigger attention, that's all. So what if Davis has edited his article, violating COI policy? It's a wiki, it can be fixed. But by whom? Who is responsible?

And the generic answer to that question is that nobody is responsible. And that's the fatal flaw underneath so many Wikipedia issues.

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Aug 18, 2019 5:43 pm

"nobody is responsible" sometimes obtains. But surely, this pile of extremely nerdy garbage did not write itself.

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

Top contributor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GusF

So bad, there's an AV Club article about it

https://www.avclub.com/plenty-of-sci-fi ... 1837226129

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:24 am

What am I supposed to think about "infoboxes" and the Magicalpedia when I see shit like this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-12
A total of 1,234 were eventually built.[2]

Number built 1,248

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Sep 06, 2019 6:20 am

Terrible article for a famous research submarine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Star_4000

Some of the worst writing I've seen on en-wp yet, and I've seen a LOT. Inadequate sources, no illustrations, etc.
The Great Encyclomonster fails to explain this stuff:
Instrument packages have consisted of three precision velocimeters (two NUS TR-4's and one TR-5), two Dymec temperature sensors, one Bissett-Berman salinometer, one or two Vibrotrons, and four Fjarlie bottles with four reversing thermometers each.

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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Sep 07, 2019 12:27 am


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Re: Crap or questionable articles

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Sep 28, 2019 12:46 am

!!!!!!!!!!!!WIKIPEDIA QUALITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Kosachev
In July 2011, on ONForume Lipetsk called Transnistria change leadership, independence and refuse to be part of Moldova.[18] In August 2011, Russian journalist Dmitry Ermolaev Kosachev accused of trying to "surrender" of Transnistria.[19]
!!!LOLWUT????

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