He generally shows most of the signs of the misinformation accounts:

  • Wants to repeatedly tell basically the same narrative and nothing else
  • Narrative is fundamentally false
  • Not interested in any kind of conversation or in learning that what he’s posting is backwards from the values he claims to profess

I also suspect that it’s not a coincidence that this is happening just as the Elon Musks of the world are ramping up attacks on Wikipedia, specially because it is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others, and tends to fight back legally if someone tries to interfere with the free speech or safety of its editors.

Anyway, YSK. I reported him as misinformation, but who knows if that will lead to any result.

Edit: Number of people real salty that I’m talking about this: Lots

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      1·
      5 months ago

      Yeah, there’s kind of a Poe’s Law situation.

      A lot of the sincere tankies, though, at least want to talk about what they’re into, and have elaborate reasons why it’s all true. The low-effort “I can’t even be bothered to try to mount a defense, I just wanted to say Wikipedia is doxing its users and kowtowing to fascist governments, and now that I’ve said it my task is done” behavior is a little more indicative of a disingenuous propaganda account in my experience.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
        3·
        5 months ago

        elaborate reasons why it’s all true

        Usually it’s “just read these 10 hundred-year-old books” that they absolutely have not read.

        And if you ask them to make a point from those books, they can’t. Apparently they’re only comprehensible as a whole.

    • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      I am pretty convinced that .ml is legitimately used as a Russian troll training ground before they get promoted to Facebook and reddit.

      • dx1@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 months ago

        Meanwhile, at .ml:

        Since Pi is infinite and non-repeating, would that mean any finite sequence of non-repeating numbers should appear somewhere in Pi?

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          1·
          5 months ago

          That’s actually a really good way to illustrate what is wrong with lemmy.ml.

          On math stack exchange:

          Let me summarize the things that have been said which are true and add one more thing.

          1. 𝜋 is not known to have this property, but it is expected to be true.
          2. This property does not follow from the fact that the decimal expansion of 𝜋 is infinite and does not repeat.

          On lemmy.ml:

          0.101001000100001000001 . . .

          I’m infinite and non-repeating. Can you find a 2 in me?

          You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere

          Why couldn’t you?

          Because you’d need to search through an infinite number of digits (unless you have access to the original formula)

          And:

          Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi

          And:

          Yes.

          And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.

          All heavily upvoted.

  • Shelbyeileen@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 months ago

    I do the research and script writing for a documentary company. In 2023, I noticed that the pages of serial killers I’d been researching, started mentioning political affiliation in the top paragraph… but they all said Democrat (or socialst, communist sympathizer, anti-fascist, etc). Then, one of the murderers I was researching, who was literally a Republican politician who killed his wife , said Democrat and I had a team investigate. It got corrected, but we have no idea if it was one person or a group that changed the pages. Someone out there wants murderers to be associated with democrats.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        5 months ago

        They don’t actually hate Wikipedia. They hold that it’s not a primary source for things that require citation, and that it’s not a great textbook.

        Reading the Wikipedia page for optics is a bad way to learn optics.
        It’s also difficult to cite as a source because you can’t actually specify who you’re citing, which is why Wikipedia, for research purposes, is a great way to get a quality overview and the terms you need, and then jump to its sources for more context and primary sources as you need them.

        Encyclopedias in general are overviews or summaries of what they reference. Teachers would typically like you to reference something that isn’t a summary or overview when writing one, sincenthat what most of those reports are.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Who hates Wikipedia:

      Russia

      Is this even true? Has any Russian state official or organization indicated they give two shits about an English-centric US-hosted online encyclopedia? Ditto Israel.

      Feels like every time I read a “bad actors on the internet” story, I get someone in the comments insisting a foreign intelligence officer is secretly pulling all the strings. As though American propagandists and industrial scale media magnets aren’t willing or capable of doing the job themselves.

  • madthumbs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    This seems like an attempt at vote manipulation or brigading. Reddit doesn’t allow it, is it allowed here or something?

    Wikipedia is only a source for truth for people that either don’t know what it’s protecting or are in the genocidal cult it is protecting.

        • M137@lemmy.world
          1·
          5 months ago

          I seriously don’t understand this kind of reaction to being corrected about mistakes. All it does is show everyone that you’re even dumber than previously shown via the mistake and makes it obvious you don’t care to learn anything from it so you’ll continue being just as dumb.
          Learn from it instead and thank them for teaching you something.
          But you’re clearly not mentally grown and/or smart enough to not react like a 5-year-old to someone pointing out you’ve made a mistake. And it’s hilarious that you don’t realize how childish and dumb you make it clear you are by this kind of reaction and choosing to show it with a reply.

  • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    Interesting all this WP news I’m hearing today. Last week I downloaded the entirety of Wikipedia. Anyone can do it, the base archive (no pictures) is only about 25G, although the torrent is slow AF, took me… almost 2 weeks to download it.

    I did this because I feel like this might be the last chance to get a version of it that has any vestige of the old order in it, the old order being “trying to stick to ideals and express truth rather than rewriting history to the fascists’ specifications.”

    I’d love to be wrong, but if I’m not, I feel like it will potentially be a good reference in the future if needed.

    • OminousOrange@lemmy.ca
      1·
      5 months ago

      Kiwix is a self hostable option for this, and you can get other content databases as well, like wikiHow, iFixit, and Khan Academy.

      The downloads are much faster than two weeks too.

      • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
        1·
        5 months ago

        Just some context, Hetzner gave the shaft to the Kiwix project and took down their content servers without any apparent notice (Kiwix’s side of the story at least), and they had to rebuild it with another provider.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      1·
      5 months ago

      This is in the news because Wikipedia is refusing to rewrite history to the fascists’ specifications.

      https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrdydkypv7o

      It’s possible that India will succeed at eroding by a little bit Wikipedia’s resistance to having things rewritten because of various powerful people demanding it. But, if you’re looking for an organization that’s resistant against those demands, I don’t think you will be able to find one that is anywhere near the equal of Wikipedia in terms of the scale at which it operates combined with the resistance it puts up when people do this.

  • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    On lemmy, this is far more likely to be some weird tankie shit about western propaganda. Though it is definitely noteworthy that the far right and far left seem to push a lot of the same misinformation on here.

    Also, in general lemmy trolls are super easy to spot because they don’t do anything else. All they do is whine about democrats or post Russian propaganda and never engage on any other topics.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      0·
      5 months ago

      Yeah horseshoe theory is an actual thing and it shows hard here on Lemmy. Same lies, same taxticts, different extremists.

    • lukewarm_ozone@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Last time I heard about wikipedia’s donation campaign (maybe 2 4 years ago or so), it was notorious for advertising in such a way as to imply your funds would be used to keep wikipedia alive, whereas the reality was that only a small part of Wikimedia Foundation’s income was needed for Wikipedia, and the rest was spent on rather questionable things like funding very weird research with little oversight. Did this change? If it didn’t, I wouldn’t particularly advise anyone to donate to them.

      • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
        0·
        5 months ago

        This perspective is very common in online communities about any sort of charity or non-profit.

        “Don’t donate money to whatever charity, they just waste the money on whatever thing”

        Truthfully, it’s just an excuse to assuage the guilt arising from refusing to support these organisations.

        • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Truthfully, it’s just an excuse to assuage the guilt arising from refusing to support these organisations.

          Sometimes.

          Sometimes it’s a pretty accurate statement.

          I used to run a medium-large charity. I have a fair bit of experience in fundraising and management. Most donators would be shocked at how little their donation actually achieves in isolation. Also at the waste that often goes on, and certainly the salaries at the upper tiers.

          And I could also say that guilt is exactly why people donate. It’s to feel good about themselves, they’re buying karma. Central heating for the soul. I won’t say that’s a bad thing, but it is a thing. It’s also exactly how charities fundraise, because it works. That’s why your post and tv adverts are full of pictures of sad children crying. Every successful charity today is that way because it knows how to manipulate potential supporters. Is that always wrong? Of course not, charities couldn’t do good things without money. But sometimes the ethics in fundraising are extremely flexible.

      • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        I actually took a look at Wikipedia’s accounts last week as I remembered that campaign when I saw the latest campaign and did some due diligence before donating. I didn’t donate, but I’m still glad Wikipedia exists.

        What I remembered: That hosting costs were tiny and Wikimedia foundation had enough already saved up to operate for over a hundred years without raising any more.

        What I saw: That if that was true, it isn’t any longer. It’s managed growth.

        I don’t think they are at any risk of financial collapse, but they are cutting their cloth to suit their income. That’s normal in business, including charities. If you stop raising money, you stagnate. You find things to spend that money on that are within the charity’s existing aims.

        Some highlights from 2024: $106million in wages. 26m in awards and grants. 6m in “travel and conferences”. Those last two look like optional spends to me, but may be rewards to the volunteer editors. The first seems high, but this is only a light skim

        Net assets at EOY = $271 million. Hosting costs per year are $3million. It’s doing okay.

        If you’re curious; https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

        • lukewarm_ozone@lemmy.todayEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          Thanks for the link! Yeah, $3M for hosting out of their massive budget is what I was talking about - Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline. I don’t see how to estimate how much of that “salaries” part is related to Wikipedia rather to their other business. But even taking the most optimistic possible reading, I think it’s still true that the marginal value of donations to Wikimedia foundations will not be in support of Wikipedia’s existence or even in improvements to it, but in them doing more unrelated charity.

          (If you want to donate specifically to charities that spread knowledge, then donating to Wikipedia makes more sense, though then in my opinion you should consider supporting the Internet Archive, which has ~8 times less revenue, and just this year was sued for copyright infringement this year and spent a while being DDOSed into nonfunctionality - that’s a lot of actually good reasons to need more money!).

          • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
            0·
            5 months ago

            Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline.

            Is it your impression that paying the people who work for you is optional for a technology company?

            The salaries mostly are in the $100k-350k range, maybe up to $500-700k in the C suite. They’re perfectly reasonable by the standards of a San Francisco tech company that operates at the scale that Wikipedia does. The full list of exact salaries and recipients is listed in their form 990 filings if you want to read them for yourself.

            Edit: Phrasing

            • AlDente@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              Is it your impression that paying the people who work for you is optional for a technology company?

              What a bad-faith argument. You seem willfully obtuse towards any data presented to you and unnecessarily hostile in all of your comments. I took a look at the most recent 990 form you reference, and it lists compensation for a mere 13 individuals, with a total compensation just over $4-million in sum. This is in no way counter-evidence that spending (ultimately due to the decisions of these executives) is at runaway levels. Salaries and wages have increased 22% compounding year-over-year for the last four years on average. This is a 120% increase in only four years (from $46,146,897 to $101,305,706).

              These trends have been continuously called out for almost a decade now, but this exponential growth continues nonetheless. All while expenses for core responsibilities remain flat. Wikipedia should be setup to succeeded indefinitely at this point if it weren’t for these decisions.

              • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
                0·
                5 months ago

                Thanks for the link! Yeah, $3M for hosting out of their massive budget is what I was talking about - Wikipedia could lose 90% of their cashflow and not be in any danger of going offline.

                Is it your impression that paying the people who work for you is optional for a technology company?

                What a bad-faith argument.

                I’m just going to let that little exchange stand on its own.

                I took a look at the most recent 990 form you reference, and it lists compensation for a mere 13 individuals, with a total compensation just over $4-million in sum.

                Hm, you’re right. I had looked at some kind of summary that listed people for every year, and somehow thought that it was breaking down salaries for everyone, but it’s only the top people.

                Let’s look a different way. https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikimedia_Foundation_2021_Form_990.pdf&page=9 says that there are 233 people who earn more than $100k (so basically, full-time people in a white-collar role). So if you make a ballpark estimate that for each one of those people, there’s one other person doing janitorial work or similar that makes average $50k/yr, and average out the $88M they spent on salary in 2022 over all those 466 people, you get $327k per year for the white collar people. Presumably there’s also some amount on part-time work, or grants, or something like that. But the point is, it’s not that there is some absurd amount of money going missing. It’s just that they employ a few hundred people and pay SF-tech-company salaries.

                This is in no way counter-evidence that spending (ultimately due to the decisions of these executives) is at runaway levels. Salaries and wages have increased 22% compounding year-over-year for the last four years on average. This is a 120% increase in only four years (from $46,146,897 to $101,305,706).

                These trends have been continuously called out for almost a decade now, but this exponential growth continues nonetheless. All while expenses for core responsibilities remain flat.

                Didn’t you just get super offended that I pointed out that paying the people who work for you is, in fact, a “core reponsibility”, and so this argument doesn’t make sense?

                I’m happy with Wikipedia paying their people. If there was one person making $5M per year, then I’d be fine with that, even though there isn’t. If there was one person making $50M per year, maybe I’d have some questions, but nothing like that is happening.

                Wikipedia should be setup to succeeded indefinitely at this point if it weren’t for these decisions.

                You said I sound hostile. Stuff like this is why. I’ve been dealing with maybe 5-10 different people who all have some kind of different reason of bending their way around to the conclusion “and so Wikipedia sucks.” I don’t think spending money that’s coming in, on paying people to do Wikipedia work, spells doom for Wikipedia. I don’t think that makes any sense. And, there’s been such a variety of “and so that’s why Wikipedia sucks” comments I’ve been reading that all don’t make any sense if you examine them, that it’s made me short-tempered to any given one.

                I like Wikipedia. I think it’s good.

                • AlDente@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  1·
                  5 months ago

                  I’m going to try to keep this super simple:

                  Salaries and wages have increased 22% compounding year-over-year for the last four years on average. This is a 120% increase in only four years (from $46,146,897 to $101,305,706).

                  Didn’t you just get super offended that I pointed out that paying the people who work for you is, in fact, a “core reponsibility”, and so this argument doesn’t make sense?

                  At this point, I sincerely think you are being obtuse; unless you believe everyone at Wikipedia, on average, is receiving 22% raises, every single year. This is not Wikipedia “paying the people who work for you,” it’s aggressive expansion, at an exponential level. In the words of Guy Macon from almost a decade ago, “Wikipedia has Cancer.” I don’t believe any company, non-profit or for-profit, can sustain this limitless expansion in the long run. And Wikipedia’s management does this all while trying to guilt trip people for donations, usually under the guise of needing it to survive. In sum, I don’t agree with the financial decisions of Wikipedia’s management, and therefore, no longer donate to them.

                  On the other hand, I don’t dislike Wikipedia or the services they provide. I’ll echo your own words: I like Wikipedia, I think it’s good, and I never said otherwise. I even referenced their website when writing all of my responses on this topic. I find it unfortunate that you interpret these sort of critiques as “and so Wikipedia sucks.” Furthermore, I don’t like how you justify your hostility based on critical responses. This is a discussion board, not an echo chamber. However, I’m very thankful that you didn’t respond with “go fuck yourself” or “kiss my ass” like you did in your last response to me. Also, I hope your having a good start to the weekend. ✌

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    11·
    5 months ago

    Wikipedia is just another website run by some privileged dickheads and their mods.

    I’m not bothering to argue whether it’s better or worse than other websites.

    But only a fool would trust it or believe that it’s inherently “good”.

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
    01·
    5 months ago

    This unactionable vaguepost is what suffices as a YSK?

    Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK

    Why should I know this, OP?