YSK There’s someone running around Lemmy posting misinformation against Wikipedia

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.

That's now poe's law, it would be Occam's razor.

The most likely scenario here is not many puppet accounts spreading sarcasm or parody but rather that there are many actors that all true believers in what they are all saying. They sound the same because they are feeding off the same talking point.

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?

Weird, seems like it's completely related to me.

Thanks mom

Via Lemmy?

Source?

Shit. I better donate.

That's interesting and terrifying all at once. If the Indian government is successful, it will basically set the precedent for other powerful entities such as autocrats, oligarchs, and corporations to also force Wikipedia to edit their content to suit their desires. I donate frequently and will keep making sure they can win.

Wow, they really sued the Wikimedia Foundation instead of trying to find a reliable source to refute the article's claims. I looked up the edits they made. They removed content, citing various Wikipedia policies that govern how the article should be phrased.

In general, so long as the information is presented in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner and cites a reliable source, it can go in the article. Wikipedia's job is to summarize what reliable sources say about a subject.

So all ANI would've needed to do was find a reliable source (preferably more than one) refuting the claims they want to refute. The most they'd likely be able to do is put both points of view in the article rather than removing one point of view entirely from the article, which is what they were trying to do.

Instead, they went to court about it.

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.

Yes it does. That was my response to them. But this is pretty acceptable to prevent vandalism.

Unfortunately it won't, assuming Lemmy grows.

Lemmy doesn't get targeted by bots because it's obscure, you don't reach much of an audience and you don't change many opinions.

It has, conservatively, ~0.005% (Yes, 0.005%, not a typo) of the monthly active users.

To put that into perspective, theoretically, $1 spent on a Reddit has 2,000,000x more return on investment than on Lemmy.

All that needs to happen is that number to become more favorable.

You don't analyze the text necessary, you analyze the heuristics, behavioral patterns, sentiment....etc It's data analysis and signal processing.

You, as a user, probably can't. Because you lack information that the platform itself is in a position to gather and aggregate that data.

There's a science to it, and it's not perfect. Some companies keep their solutions guarded because of the time and money required to mature their systems & ML models to identify artificial behavior.

But it requires mature tooling at the very least, and Lemmy has essentially none of that.

spend money to generate quality LLM output, they can post as much as they want on virtually all social media sites.

$20 for a chatgpt pro account and fractions of pennies to run a bot server. It's really extremely cheap to do this.

I don't have an answer to how to solve the "motivated actor" beyond mass tagging/community effort.

But something like Reddit at least potentially has the resources to throw some money at the problem. They can employ advanced firewalls and other anti-bot/anti-AI thingies. It's very possible that they're pioneering some state-of-the-art stuff in that area.

Lemmy is a few commies and their pals. Unless China is bankrolling them, they're out of their league.

Wikipedia financials can be found here under Finances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

What has that got to do with the price of fish?

Many people say

How does that work?

The ability to control the narrative of public discourse is one of the first things that needs to dismantled. The propaganda machine and it's made up culture war/distraction needs to go.

And the fact that it's escalated to the point of wealthy elites trying to dismantle public access to information should be deeply alarming for all of us... because then all we have for information is what they tell us.... and that's a dystopia i have no intention of experiencing.

Not the same.

I mean actively blaming specific generations for political and financial issues. Yeah, we blame the boomers for a lot, but now the complainers are shifting focus.

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.

Look no further than wikipedia to provide that information haha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_pages_banned_in_Russia

State actors often pose as normal editors on wikipedia, in order to try and cover for things they do. Corporations often do the same thing, via their PR firms.

Its pretty well documented on the WP logs.

No its true actually. Vladimir (the impaler) Putin and President Xi got together and had a secret meeting all about how Wikipedia is the greatest threat to their total dictatorship of Earth, because its the only thing keeping the American citizens so free and open minded and a place where people can go to learn about forbidden topics like Tank Girl and Winnie the Pooh. Putin got mad because he read the article about Grizzly bears and it said he'd probably die if he tried to wrestle one, so he spun up his special government botnet from his elite hacker force and activated his army of Tankie sleeper agents on Lemmy to make an attack on the Freedom of Information Act (thats a special law that Biden made to try to protect wikipedia and keep free speech safe).

this is a joke about foreign influence on Lemmy, not about Wikipedia itself. I like wikipedia

Ditto Israel.

Lol. You should learn the differences between russians and zios.

• https://electronicintifada.net/content/ei-exclusive-pro-israel-groups-plan-rewrite-history-wikipedia/7472
• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups
• https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240620-zionist-lobby-group-labelled-propaganda-and-misinformation-source-by-wikipedia/

He said tech bros, not tech-minded people. Big difference. Tech bros are the fuckers who run all the crypto and NFT grifter shit and other such things such as twatter.

The last thread OP participated in features a comment from OP countering something said about Wikipedia by wikipediasuckscoop. Looks like that's who.

Doesn't LW have a rule against desinformation and asking for reliable sources since the cat vegan food affair?

Wow. Thanks for sharing that profile... that is dedication to the niche issue of smearing Wikipedia.

Thanks! Blocked em

Horseshoe theory doesn't fit-- it's stethoscope theory

In this case it's not so much horseshoe theory as it is that most tankies on lemmy are just trolls, or teenagers parroting trolls.

Thank you!

I have heard A user I am not allowed to dox posted that wikipedia makes a ton of money, way more than neccassary to run the site. The excess is getting funneled into the pockets of millionaires, in the ballpark of 300m/y. _ Is this not true?_ With this further understanding, would you be able to link a source verifying/disproving this claim?

To be clear, I have always been pro wiki, it stunned me when I read that.

Edit: had to do some formatting to emphasise a couple bits for the less reading inclined among us

NO NO CREDIT GIVEN MUST SHOUT

Wikipedia is pretty large now, even for text only versions. So the most recommended option to download/read an offline version is by using “Kiwix”.

Kiwix is a reader designed to open and operate archived websites like Wikipedia that are stored in a .zim (think z-file compression but for websites).

Kiwix is open sourced and readers can be installed on your pc, phones, self-hosted as a website, etc.

You can check out their Kiwix library for a list of curated zim’s beyond Wikipedia that are updated on a schedule

You can also use their zimit tool to archive websites on your own as well.

It took a day for me to grasp all these concepts since they were designed mostly for Wikipedia archival purposes but it’s amazing how robust the tools and community are.

I consider myself pretty savvy but I'm also at a loss. I thought and still think you can download all the text but there are so many readers there, different file types. When I finally got to some raw data it was from 2008.

"the page"? Do you mean kiwix?

And bots

It is about the wikimedia content creators not getting a proper share while the wikimedia foundation acts basicly like Peta, Green Peace and other "Charity"-Buisnesses by using drastic and guildinducing ads even in third world countries. The server activty is funded for aprox the next 100 years and the content is created for free. Most of the money is therefore actually going to around 700 employees in the adminstration, that work on new projects, lobbying or ideas like wikimedia enterprise. But this in turn is not what the ads imply.

Apparently that particular round of slander was not as successful as this one.

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/

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.

Well, that's definitely a super trustworthy thing, not at all relevant to the question of whether there is misinformation floating around that is targeted at Wikipedia.

I looked up their financial reports somewhere else in these comments when talking to someone else, and long story short, it's not true. Also, just to annoy anyone who's trying to spread this type of misinformation, I just set up a recurring $10/month donation to Wikipedia. I thought about including a note specifically requesting that it be used only for rather questionable things and funding very weird research, but there wasn't a space for it.

I will investigate this claim independently.

and the rest was spent on rather questionable things like funding very weird research with little oversight

Was this "weird research" basically research into things like "Why are white, wealthy males the ones most likely to be WP editors?"

Pathos is a simple marketing mode that is one of three used by every company and I don’t really see a problem with it. It’s intentionally contrary to the one for-profit companies use to gain revenue—fear.

Now they have ten more

Yes, they have a lot of server hardware, and some IP (ie, like logos and such).

Well, Google takes 15 to 30% off the in-app purchases made through Google Play, so you would probably be giving back Google their own money anyways, plus it would fool many people who might think they're giving 10€ when actually they're only giving 8,50€ or 7€ to Wikipedia and the rest to Google.

Opinion rewards?

Eeeeh, more debatable since someone would actually need to write the capability for the bot to talk to the platform. It's still a much lower threshold, but it's not a free ride.

anyone who cares can find them pretty easily

I care, I have found nothing similar to what you're discussing.

anyone who reads this and then also reads the misinformation, will be able to see the connection

I just read a post that said Wikipedia was the best website on the internet, was that the misinformation? Someone else donated, was that misinformation? People have shared a variety of thoughts around Wikipedia, most of them are positive, but some are negative.

Negative doesn't mean wrong. Negative doesn't mean misinformation. It might be, but it isn't certain.

I mean, you can say all of this stuff... or you could actually post links to evidence.

Hi, I hope you're having a great day. What a silly question you asked, as we all know there are 8 R's in the word strawberry. I hope you will go on having a wonderful day.

I had heard a long time ago that Wikipedia donations are largely useless and haven't actually gone to anything but profits in awhile. That second part however is demonstrably false with Wikipedia one of the few information outlets that CORRECTLY label Israel's actions as genoicde.