Stupid Wiki-news of the week

[ericbarbour]

This guy was unusual among journalists, he actually poked around under the hood to see how the "community" "operates". But he did NOT look into the past ugly history of Israel-Palestine battles on WP, and failed to notice that pro-Israel extremists practically dominated it for the first 10 years of its existence. EVERYONE is fighting to bias WP content. It goes back and forth.

https://jewishjournal.com/cover_story/3 ... nce-oct-7/

Plus....."When it comes to Packers history, Wikipedia is like a book full of April Fool's jokes." Coulda told them that. WP is boiling over with sports trivia, plus plenty of errors and unseen vandalism.

https://www.packers.com/news/please-don ... rs-history

Finally, someone did a study of "orphan" articles. "The EPFL team is continuing to collaborate with researchers at the Wikimedia Foundation", o rly? What makes them think the WMF will do anything about the problem? They never did before!

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-05-orp ... pedia.html

[ericbarbour]

Have a stupid July update.

The pathetic begging has begun again. Still invoking the Jimbo name. (It seems to me that he could demand that the WMF start PAYING HIM for the use of his name. They can damn well afford it by now. WP isn't for sale but HE is!)

begging-again-july-2024.jpg (73.98 KiB) Viewed 17121 times

Plus, a "dark mode" was finally enabled. After some 15 years of begging by users.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07 ... nd-mobile/
Some blubbering about this appeared on Reddit last year. And Gwern Branwyn, one of WP's most autism-prone insiders, was available to make long tl;dl excuses.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comm ... t/j92fyn3/

[ericbarbour]

And now they're trying to sell "hardware".....

https://boingboing.net/2024/08/01/wikip ... fline.html

Heilman has been monkeying around with this idea for more than TEN years. He wasn't the first to think of an offline WP box, but he's powerful enough to push it into production. Already sold out the first run.

https://mdwiki.org/wiki/WikiProjectMed: ... t-in-a-Box
https://store.wikimedia.org/products/internet-in-a-box

[ericbarbour]

Good idea, bad idea, or pointless? You tell me. (Just remember that every commercial LLM has already scraped the entire contents of all Wikimedia sites, plus everything else, so this open-source project will already be operating at a disadvantage.)

https://tech.eu/2024/09/17/wikimedia-da ... evelopers/

[Archer]

Good idea, bad idea, or pointless? You tell me. (Just remember that every commercial LLM has already scraped the entire contents of all Wikimedia sites, plus everything else, so this open-source project will already be operating at a disadvantage.)

https://tech.eu/2024/09/17/wikimedia-da ... evelopers/

Word embeddings have been a standard tool in NLP/machine learning at least as early as google's word2vec paper. You can probably find a variety of good word embeddings by searching around. It's also fairly straightforward to engineer and 'train' your own. Word2vec is a simple model and for data you only need a good-sized sample of English prose. The article is annoyingly vague and doesn't really say much (or perhaps I'm not up-to-date on the latest jargon). I'd probably just use my own, considering Wikimedia was somehow involved, which is generally not a good thing. One should not accept free gifts from those of questionable character.

[ericbarbour]

Barely mentioned anywhere other than in running-sports publications:

https://runningmagazine.ca/the-scene/u- ... ntroversy/
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-a ... wikipedia/
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/life/a6 ... ntroversy/
https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a6239 ... a-scandal/
https://athleticsillustrated.com/the-fa ... has-begun/

That's some really embarrassing sockpuppetry. Also, Lululemon is a terrible sponsor, if they drop someone because their husband did crappy COI edits on WP. This shit happens EVERY DAY somewhere on an WMF wiki, and they usually get away with it; Ed Fitzgerald has been getting away with it for 16 years....but to hell with that, I've got something to make the gorge rise.

https://uwaterloo.ca/arts/events/how-wi ... e-internet

[Archer]

https://uwaterloo.ca/arts/events/how-wi ... e-internet

You just know the whole thing had to be pure, aggrandizing bullshit. I'd love to take a few polysci classes just so that I could obliterate whatever nonsense they're slinging, right there in the classroom. It would be so awesome. Juvenile power fantasies aside, I do wonder what the typical program looks like.

[Archer]

Is there a video of that talk somewhere?

Professor Steinsson finds that the rise of Wikipedia as a source of objective information is mainly the result of extreme ideologues quitting Wikipedia en masse.

It seems to me that Wikipedia's role (or at least one of them) is laundering the mass media's propaganda as public consensus. This is what they call a "neutral point of view". Naturally then, anyone with opinions, morals, or generally inclined to think for themselves probably counts as an "extreme ideologue" on Wikipedia. Who are these "extreme ideologues"? In any case, I'm sure they 'quit' because they found themselves subject to technical circumstances that prevented them from contributing. Certainly not because they were formally banned, which is an entirely different thing. Definitely not a contrived, hair-splitting distinction.

[ericbarbour]

Is there a video of that talk somewhere?

Doesn't appear so. Once a Microsoft Teams stream is shut down, that's it.

Steinsson's paper is on the Cambridge website.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals ... E7DEFB65EE

It was MENTIONED in one of those tedious and cringey little WMF videos that no one ever watches. Featuring His Holiness The Wales. Never any bad news or "disturbing information" in any of these videos. Apparently they gave Steinsson an award for "Best Student Paper". As usual, awards go only to their friends and supporters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhzzIburQW4

His comment:

Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change.

Is an outright stinking LIE.

People who push "fringe content" either become insiders and keep pushing their fringe content; freaks like David Gerard, Will McWhinney, SlimVirgin, Drmies, Piotrus, Cirt and his dozens of sockpuppets, varous pro-Israel anti-Palestinian accounts, "British Isles" squabblers, and a whole mishmash of other editwarriors qualify here.

Or they become targets for people like Gerard, Guy Chapman, the "Guerilla Skeptics" or the like, and are forced out after years of infighting.

Steinsson doesn't even bother to define "fringe content" anyway. Lots of vague mushmouthing but no DETAILS.

[ericbarbour]

Look thru the Wikimedia official YouTube channel. It dates back to the 2013 Wikimania.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheWikimediaFo ... n/featured

Far and away the most popular video is the one that announced their Android app six years ago. Everything else gets a few thousand views AT BEST. Large numbers of them get less than 100 views. Either no comments, or comments are disabled.

THAT is how a cult runs its YT channel.