YSK There’s someone running around Lemmy posting misinformation against Wikipedia
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
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You just described the average Tankie around here lmao
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.
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.
This is an excellent suggestion for how to deal with this. I can’t thank you enough.
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.
You’re right, I was misremembering Poe’s law. We need a law for “there is no point of view so idiotic that someone won’t be out there passionately proclaiming it, not because they are a propaganda troll, but because they really believe it.”
That sounds like the Dunning Kruger Effect.
Maybe we could call it Bucket's Law
I am pretty convinced that .ml is legitimately used as a Russian troll training ground before they get promoted to Facebook and reddit.
Meanwhile, at .ml:
That's actually a really good way to illustrate what is wrong with lemmy.ml.
On math stack exchange:
On lemmy.ml:
And:
And:
All heavily upvoted.
IDK if you're allowed to link to lemmy.ml here or what, but the post ID is 24032724. The response to "You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere" - "You can, it’s literally the way the number is defined." - is +8/-1. Plus the original guy pointing out the 10100[...] sequence is +21/-1. What are you saying is the issue? If it's "they'll just upvote anything that sounds right", I think you're gonna find that's true on reddit, and true here, as well.
I'm saying the issue is that on math stack exchange, the people who actually understand the issues involved are generally the ones talking and being listened to. On lemmy.ml, the guy saying you can't prove that a sequence of 0s and 1s doesn't contain a 2 has +5 upvotes. You can look over the comments, and even more so than for politics, it's just really apparent that there are quite a lot of people who have no idea what they're talking about exchanging confident proclamations to each other about what it is that's going on.
I'm not trying to hate on anyone for not knowing something. I'm hating on them for thinking they know something, and need to teach it to everyone else, when they are mistaken and haven't made even the basic effort beyond "I just thought for 2 seconds and decided this is how it works" to figure out what's going on.
On
lemmy.mlpretty much all reddit-like boards.You can't really compare a stack exchange board about a specific topic with general purpose boards.
There are plenty of Reddit-like boards which feature people who generally know what they’re talking about. Reddit used to be one, years ago, remember jokes about how the comments were a better way to learn the truth of the story than reading the article?
There are places on Lemmy that are like that, too. Weirdly enough, this comments section is a good example. The people voting are extremely capable to identify the bullshit and downvote it, it’s actually very accurate. Just have a look around. It’s not always like that. Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, and some of the tech-focused communities are notable places where the idiots outnumber the rest of the people, but it’s not at all a universal feature of Reddit-like general purpose forums. It just takes a little while to build the culture that way, and a lot of Lemmy is actively hostile to building it because the wrong people are so aggressive about pushing the wrongness, and it kind of chases people away unless they’re cool with that.
I was thinking earlier about how fucked we are in the U.S., that the MAGA contingent, and to a degree the Dem contingent as well, have accepted mentalities that are incorrect and actively reject correction. That people (the population in general) are being trained to reject the fundamentals of logic, and associate all opposing viewpoints with an evil "other".
Even the most extreme extremist of echo chambers will have benign random conversations. Singling out a random blurb of conversation, without even any source link, is just cherry picking.
It's even worse when you link to the actual comments.
https://lemmy.ml/post/24032724
They are having an extended conversation about a question which has an actual real mathematical answer. The correlation between what mathematics knows about it, and the things the lemmy.ml people are trying to say about it with a tone of voice that implies they have some knowledge and you need to listen to them, is almost nonexistent.
There are, to be fair, a bunch of highly-upvoted explanations of the real answer, which is that we don't know. But there are also plenty of top-level comments getting lots of upvotes, which say things like:
It's actually extremely popular, it looks like, to just come up with some kind of random nonsense and then for one of the lemmy.ml people to be telling other lemmy.ml people that your random nonsense is the answer they're looking for. When it comes out of the realm of politics and into the realm of mathematics, it suddenly looks really jarring and weird that they're all so committed to sitting around handing out wrong answers to each other all day.
Are we saying it's an echo chamber, or a literal propaganda training ground commissioned by the Russian government?
I'm not sitting here saying that one random thread I spotted when I jumped over there totally disproves either of those. It's more of an amusing counterexample. I would LOVE if people would stop doing this thing where they expect you to defend an argument you didn't make, I feel like I've pointed out it on this site 3 times in as many days.
In the comments they go into why it's not even true that an infinite non-repeating sequence must contain all other finite sequences (10100100010000[...] example not containing any other digits). So it would follow that they wouldn't contain all infinite sequences either. I think.
Meanwhile actually at .ml: let's deify a murderer because he killed somebody we don't like and he's fucking gorgeous. Nevermind that he's a rich antiwoke Musk-lover, murder is cool.
Bro, why are you attacking people unrelated to the post's topic?
Weird, seems like it's completely related to me.
Could you be anymore vague
Yeah, I was trying to talk about the situation without specifically linking to the comments or starting any kind of brigade situation. I figured being vague was better than being inflammatory, and anyone who cared enough would know what I was taking about, which seems to be accurate.
be any more vague
be vague anymore
Don't split the lanes, man.
Thanks mom
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.
Thanks for that, idk why I'm being attacked.
My response is lighthearted. Your comment is beyond rude and unnecessary. Please consider not going about your life ruining others' day.
Edit: How have 18 people found it worth while to downvote me asking someone to stop being rude?
I too, like to post idiotic things on the Internet.
Stop being rude.
I believe some of us can still get a joke
So.... uhhhh, why did you post an incredibly racist picture here?
It's Musk, he's spreading the disinformation about how Wikipedia leaks your data
Via Lemmy?
Via people. Who go on Lemmy.
Source?
My source is it's a joke on how Musk is a misinformation merchant that profits from the attention of greedy and gullible chuds, or the outrage of people that feel disenfranchised by the billionaire class.
I understand you feel that way. I thought you had a source for the claim you made. My searching for anything related to what you said pulls up nothing.
So for the record, your claim is bullshit. You are spreading misinformation about something because you’re mad that you think Elon spreads misinformation.
K
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-takes-aim-at-wikipedia/ar-AA1wrixP
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/elon-musk/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/elon-musk-europe-surging-far-right-rcna185145
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-2024-twitter/674149/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2024/01/11/why-did-elon-musk-buy-twitter-rather-than-launching-a-new-platform/
https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-news-spreads-faster-true-news-twitter-thanks-people-not-bots
Woosh
Chandler?
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.
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.
Shit. I better donate.
I donate every year and they made it easier than ever this year if you use Apple Pay or anything equivalent. Like 15 seconds and that includes chhosing amount.
edit: for us with the lazys
Thanks for posting this. I just gave my entire Apple Cash balance. I had no idea what I was gonna use it for and this seemed likea worthy cause. Wikipedia just got $140 because of you.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting, that's too bad. Seems like it's not an uncommon occurrence for Hetzner.
There are major issues with wikipedia, I say this as someone with thousands of edits. But I know exactly who you are talking about and they spread pure BS.
The last time I saw them their account was called “ihatewikipedia” or “fuckwikipedia” or something like that lol and they were just spreading conspiracies. Or useless drama. Like they were going on about how wikipedia “invades your privacy”, it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing.
Unless something changed, this part was at least partially true at one point. But only for anonymous edits iirc. Usually happened for IPs shared by a lot of people like from a campus or some VPNs, probably due to a lot of vandalism from such IPs.
Yes it does. That was my response to them. But this is pretty acceptable to prevent vandalism.
It's likely this is a bot if it's wide spread. And Lemmy is INCREDIBLY ill suited to handle even the dumbest of bots from 10+ years ago. Nevermind social media bots today.
Ur a bot. I can tell by the
pixelsunicode.Edit: joking aside you bring up a good point and our security through
anonymitycultural irrelevance will not last forever. Or maybe it will.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.
To be fair, it's virtually impossible to tell whether a text was written by an AI or not. If some motivated actor is willing to spend money to generate quality LLM output, they can post as much as they want on virtually all social media sites.
The internet is in the process of eating itself as we speak.
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.
yes of course there are many different data points you can use. along with complex math you can also feed a lot of these data points in machine learning models and get useful systems that can perhaps red flag certain accounts and then have processes with more scrutiny that require more resources (such as a human reviewing)
websites like chess.com do similar things to find cheaters. and they (along with lichess) have put out some interesting material going over some of what their process looks like
here i have two things. one is that lichess, which is mostly developed and maintained by a single individual, is able to maintain an effective anti-cheat system. so I don't think it's impossible that lemmy is able to accomplish these types of heuristics and behavioral tracking
the second thing is that these new AIs are really good. it's not just the text, but the items you mentioned. for example I train a machine learning model and then a separate LLM on all of reddit's history. the first model is meant to try and emulate all of the "normal" human flags. make it so it posts at hours that would match the trends. vary the sentiments in a natural way. etc. post at not random intervals of time but intervals of time that looks like a natural distribution, etc. the model will find patterns that we can't imagine and use those to blend in
so you not only spread the content you want (whether it's subtle product promotion or nation-state propaganda) but you have a separate model trained to disguise that text as something real
that's the issue it's not just the text but if you really want to do this right (and people with $$$ have that incentive) as of right now it's virtually impossible to prevent a motivated actor from doing this. and we are starting to see this with lichess and chess.com.
the next generation of cheaters aren't just using chess engines like Stockfish, but AIs trained to play like humans. it's becoming increasingly difficult.
the only reason it hasn't completely taken over the platform is because it's expensive. you need a lot of computing power to do this effectively. and most people don't have the resources or the technical ability to make this happen.
$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.
openAI has checks for this type of thing. They limit number of requests per hour with the regular $20 subscription
you'd have to use the API and that comes at a cost per request, depending on which model you are using. it can get expensive very quickly depending on what scale of bot manipulation you are going for
Yep, any operation runs the risk of getting caught by OpenAI.
See this article of it happening:
https://openai.com/index/disrupting-a-covert-iranian-influence-operation/
Heuristics, data analysis, signal processing, ML models...etc
It's about identifying artificial behavior not identifying artificial text, we can't really identify artificial text, but behavioral patterns are a higher bar for botters to get over.
The community isn't in a position to do anything about it the platform itself is the only one in a position to gather the necessary data to even start targeting the problem.
I can't target the problem without first collecting the data and aggregating it. And Lemmy doesn't do much to enable that currently.
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.
Misinformation… you mean lies?
Wikipedia is an alien plot to get Earthlings to read more. DON'T FALL FOR IT!!!!! . . . ./s
Please donate to Wikipedia if you can.
I've heard wikipedia has alot of money anyway but i don't know.
Wikipedia financials can be found here under Finances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
Here's another good summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
What has that got to do with the price of fish?
did you reply to the wrong thing? or you specialize in bad jokes that are impossible for anyone to think funny?
Many people say
Who hates Wikipedia:
The misinfo crowd has been twiddling their collective thumbs since the election and trump winning. Can’t make up bs about egg and gas prices anymore. They’re half-ass trying to incite intergenerational conflict between X, Z, millenials, etc. Guess they found a new target. Exact same MO. Repeat the claim ad nauseam, refuse to acknowledge any contrary argument, their argument is objectively false.
Examples? Links?
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?
It only applies to misinformation that might cause significant harm to some organism, which doesn’t apply to this.
Personally, I don’t think that LW should make the attempt to police misinformation completely, since it’s sort of a judgement call a lot of the time. I think it’s better that people be able to argue out whether something is true or false, or intended disingenuously or not, all on their own without the mods needing to decide for them, because misinformation has such a big grey area that you can’t make an objective determination and be right about it 100% of the time.
I proactively remove disinfo accounts from piefed.social. Banned.
strongly recommend you look into Phillip's own activity: habitually stalking users, accusing them of spreading misinformation, and hiding their true intentions. his presence is toxic as fuck, and I don't trust their "analysis" one iota.
I think directly accusing people of spreading misinformation, explaining why, and letting them defend themselves if they want to, is a pretty good activity to do. Mostly, I only do it when something really annoys me, like for example someone claiming a free encyclopedia project for the internet is supporting genocide, kowtowing to fascist regimes, and many of their editors are quitting because it isn't even safe to contribute to the project because they will dox you whenever asked.
this is not the first time you have made spurious accusations of spreading misinformation. it's toxic as fuck. I wish you'd just get out of the fediverse instead of launching new instances when people start to ban your account.
Tbh I think that the Linux sucks guy is a different person
no. but your research is about as good as philips
Yes, but for evidence to the contrary, we elected Trump.
I agree, but ironically you see this reason used quite a lot of ![email protected]
![email protected] has quite a few examples
What!
Wow. Thanks for sharing that profile... that is dedication to the niche issue of smearing Wikipedia.
Money makes the world go round
I'm looking for a job
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.
Thinking of the most recent so-called "far left" thing I saw about Wikipedia, it was a video by BadEmpanada talking about the different portrayals of the Uyghur situation in China. A pretty balanced take btw, looking pretty impartially at all evidence and questioning the mindset of people with different perspectives on it. The discussion of WIkipedia there was that it does naturally take on some bias due to a reliance on Western media as authoritative or reliable sources. I think that is a fact. There's a process to determine something as fact which I think is too quick, the second there's something of a perceived consensus of experts or authoritative sources, something is stated as fact. In hard sciences, that's typically fine, but in politics or recent history, IMHO you need a much more meticulous approach, because you're in dangerous territory the second you start treating any propaganda narrative as fact.
Yeah horseshoe theory is an actual thing and it shows hard here on Lemmy. Same lies, same taxticts, different extremists.
Horseshoe theory doesn't fit-- it's stethoscope theory
Dammit. That's too funny and I want someone to share this with but nobody i know is the right mix of wierd to get it
Same. I guess we were able to share it together though, so that's something!
Yeah that's just horseshoe theory with extra steps and gymnastics to be able to say that far left is okay, really, they never do anything wrong, trust me!
Unless they do as tankies ARE the far left
Do you do yoga? Because that is quite the stretch
It’s not any kind of judgment about right or wrong. It’s just an observation that some nutty behaviors like kicking someone out of your web forum the instant they dissent in any way, or openly defending your chosen government even when it’s killing people like they’re spraying for weeds in the garden, are unique to far-right individuals and tankies, and unknown and abhorred pretty much everywhere else.
That is my point, tankies and far right are the same thing
'people who disagree with me are all the same, banning people for dissent on a hair trigger'
looks at moderation history CW: bigotry ::: spoiler spoiler
:::
Charming.
in b4 'it was only tactical bigotry': still bigotry
Hard to fault any of the bans/removals I see here, looks like centrist extremists are capable of being toxic AF too
Okaaay. One more for the blocklist, thanks for digging that up. What a guy...
Sure, if you never bothered to learn about politics, you might think like you do.
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.
Yeah, far right says the same and I'm not buying it from them either
People posting misinformation? On Lemmy? No. It can't be.
What is this false narrative? Genuine question, I'm out of the loop and might not recognize the misinformation if/when I see it.
Sorry if it's a stupid question, couldn't work it out from a quick scan of the comments.
Yeah, the comments have gone completely off the rails.
The false narrative is that Wikipedia is doxxing the identities of its users to the Indian government, because they kowtow to any fascist government that asks them to. The reality is that the Indian government is mad about content on Wikipedia, has taken Wikipedia to court, and they've been fighting in court to avoid changing the content or revealing the user identities, and have proposed a compromise where they reveal some parts of the user identity to only the judge in the case, so that some procedural things can be satisfied without compromising the privacy of their users and also without getting WP shut down in India because they're thumbing their noses at the court.
What's actually happening sounds reasonable to me. The way the person is presenting it sounds like Wikipedia is doing terrible things on purpose and we shouldn't support them, and to me it looks like they're totally uninterested in addressing the discrepancy.
Thank you!
I have heardA 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
It's not true. Audited financial statements are here:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
Their gross income for each of the last couple of years was around $160 million. I have no idea where you got the idea that there's "ballpark" $300 million per year of "excess," but that part definitely is totally untrue and a few minutes of checking can disprove it. I assume the rest of it is made up also. Wikipedia is one of the top ten web sites in the world. I have no real idea whether $160 million is a reasonable amount of money to use to operate the site, or whether there is "excess" someone is siphoning off, but the specific statements you're making are disprovable, and I tend to assume they originally were made up for the same reasons as the other made-up statements I'm talking about in this post.
It does look like they don't currently have any funding issues. They have 1.5 years of reserves and give about 15% of their income out in grants to other organizations. And like most web sites, the actual hosting costs are a relatively small part of their operation.
Very true. But what if Elon goes on a crusade against Wikipedia? Or he'll, just continues to spread misinformation/slander against it? He wouldn't have to spend a penny and Wikipedia would start feeling the burn, his influence is great sadly. The sheer amount o people that would cause problems for them would grow exponentially. 1.5 years is not enough when this asshole is basically the president for the next 4 years. It's very sad things have gotten this bad. :(
Their own charts in your link show that web hosting expenses have flatlined over the last decade. Digging into the PDFs in the sources, you can see this was only $2,335,918 in 2019. They even spent more on travel and conferences that year. As contributions continue to grow, the spending category that is growing far faster than any other is salaries and wages. Their CEO made $789k in 2021, all while content is created by volunteers. I like Wikipedia and the content they host; however, I think any increase in contributions is just going to line the pockets of the executives.
Edit, just to be clear: I'm not defending the wildly inflated numbers quoted above; however, I believe they are right in concept. The executives are the ones bleeding the foundation dry. The chart I previously mentioned is below. Internet hosting and many of the other smaller expense categories have been relatively flat year-over-year, but salaries and wages are increasing at an unsustainable runaway pace.
Kiss my ass. The form 990s show all salaries for developers, administrative staff, executives, and all. You picked the one year when the CEO made $789k, instead of $200-400k, and then claimed that the CEO making four times the engineer salaries is "bleeding the foundation dry" and eating up the whole $186M they brought in that year, or something. The CEO makes about double what the developers make, in most years, and the developers have competitive salaries. Good. That's how it should be.
This is how modern social media propaganda works. One person says wikipedia is kowtowing to fascist governments and doxxing its members. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that $300 million "excess" went missing and no one knows where it went, implying that someone is skimming off money and we shouldn't be donating because the whole thing is corrupt. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion someone else says that wikipedia is slanting all its coverage to a pro-Western, pro-Israel slant and covering up the truth through a narrative enforcing task force. That turns out to be bullshit, but during the discussion, someone else combs through their financials and finds out that the CEO is making some money, and uses phrases like "bleeding the foundation dry" or "all while content is created by volunteers."
Get the fuck out. Stop coming up with new bullshit to use to attack wikipedia. I don't care if the CEO made $700k. I hope it doubles, and I hope they use my $10/month to make it happen. Wikipedia is doing great stuff, and the vigor with which this variety of transient Lemmy villains is popping out to use this various array of bad-faith bullshit to attack them only demonstrates to me that they're doing something right.
Yikes, wow! Totally not an unhinged response. You seem hyper-focused on whatever what said today and assume everything is related to it. I haven't even read Musk's statements because his opinions don't mean anything to me. In reality, concerns with Wikipedia's financials are nothing new. One of the OG posts highlighting concerns circulated in 2016 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer) and has continuously been updated with each new year's disclosures. I believe I first saw it when the author did a Q&A on r/IAmA, 8 years ago (link). In sum, nothing has been done to change course and spending has only increased. In reality, the Wikipedia Foundation and Endowment have over $400-million in assets and core functionality should be able to continue indefinitely. I want to see Wikipedia succeed, and I think it could easily be set for lifetimes if managed appropriately. Looking at core responsibilities (internet hosting), there is no reason why Wikipedia can't thrive on their investment income. I can only assume those encouraging Wikipedia's current path hope for someone with a bigger checkbook to come by and bail them out (with strings attached, of course).
Lol
Nice, appreciate it. I would assume I mistve read one of the posters you were referring to. I didnt care enough to check myself, as I have never had enough money to donate in the first place. But wikipedia is in my top 4 most used websites, so your post caught my attention and you seemed to be educated enough on the situation to simply ask you. Seemed like a pointless he said/she said without your source though, hence requesting it.
Lazy users just posting whatever 3rd hand half truth they misunderstood is a scourge. It might as well be a glue-pizza recommending AI post.
Glue pizza might actually be better. Ask yourself why anyone would need to make cheese stick to pizza. Because that's not really a typical culinary issue. So, the answer came from practical effect strategies for a commercial cheese-stretch shot.
Now, I'm not saying that there isn't still an issue with this type of misunderstanding. But, it's not "hur-dur, just glue it" that everyone always paints it as.
It's more interesting than that and raises issues about how questions are framed and how answers are digested.
I agree AI hallucinations can be far more dangerous and more believable than glue on pizza. I used that reference because everyone remembers it. Pulling "answers" with no context is the problem.
Except i didnt "just post" it. I asked someone who seemed knowledgable. Pardon me for seeking correction.
Nb4 you tell me to "just google it" while putting on your signature look of superiority
Edit: better yet, i asked it in response to an incredibly vague post which offered no info on the claims actually being stated. So, what, everything posted about wikipedia is untrue? Well someone in this thread said its a good source of info, guess i need to disregard that too.
You made a claim with absolutely no references or sources then asked someone else to disprove your claim. That's not how conversations or debates work at all. If you're incapable of fact checking even the most basic statement conversations with you will never be productive and you'll only be a useful idiot repeating the last thing you misread, do better.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
Alright, Ill accept that my phrasing was poor. Evidently I should've phrased it as "a user that I am not allowed to dox posted this bit of possible misinformation."
I figured there would be high enough reading comprehension to make my meaning clear, since I clearly framed it as possible misinformation in a thread about misinformation. Short of the comment i replied to, the thread did not actually state any of the misinformation that people were actually supposed to look out for.
DOWNLOAD A COPY OF WIKIPEDIA NOW. RIGHT NOW. DO NOT WAIT.
WIKIPEDIA WILL BE RUINED IN (just guessing) THREE MONTHS (I hope I’m wrong)
I'm pretty sure it's Elon.
There's an option to donate on their website here: https://donate.wikipedia.org/ I'm starting monthly at $5 and possibly bumping up to $10 later on.
There was a big "information" campaign against donating to wikipedia say 6 months - 2 years ago, anyone know what happened/why?
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.
Thanks.
Yeah I always thought it be a bit wild they needed money so frequently.
Apparently that particular round of slander was not as successful as this one.
Last time I heard about wikipedia's donation campaign (maybe
24 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.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/
Love that everyone on this thread is a financial analyst and a 501c consultant.
For-profit companies have the margins they do because they’ve successfully detached humanity from their spending obligations. Wikipedia does not need to do quarterly global lay-offs or labor off-shoring when their technology doesn’t meet release deadlines. They are a nonprofit. They exist to bring factual, accessible information to the world. If you support for this cause, donate. If you don’t, don’t donate or don’t use. If you care for the cause but want the CEO to take a paycut, well, find them one who will stick around for more than a few years on less than the average mega CEO salary. Because most of them have not.
So people shouldn't have an opinion unless they're professionally qualified? I'm not sure that's how the internet works.
And also, people absolutely should check how their money will be spent when they consider donating. It's their money, remember.
I get that, and it's often true I think. But when the thing that they do that you use and like is such a tiny part of their spending, is it still true?
I care about Wikipedia's website. I would donate to that. I don't care about the other 90% of the things they would spent my donation on. Should I still donate?
If you’re asking that question because you’re genuinely conflicted about donating and you’re not just here spreading divisive nonsense on behalf of Elon Musk, you could do a deeper delve into the entire foundation or look up the Wikipedia page on Income Statements.
You seem to be hung up on the operating expenses. That’s just a finance term for certain operational costs like the electricity bill and insurance. It does not mean the total of what it costs to run the organization and that everything else is in excess. Similarly, salary expenses includes everyone from the HR department to the custodians, not just the rich CEOs.
As I explained, I was going to donate. I did my due diligence about where my money would go and made my decision. I provided the link to Wikipedia's own declared for the benefit of others and shared some of my reasonings elsewhere in this post.
But in your world, anyone who questions anything is a shill for Musk? Or just those who hold a differing opinion to yours?
No shit, Sherlock. But where did I mention CEOs? Where did I mention Musk, come to that?
Anyway, I'm done arguing with you. Goodbye.
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!).
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
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.
I'm just going to let that little exchange stand on its own.
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.
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.
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.
I'm going to try to keep this super simple:
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. ✌
Great points and thank you for the shoutout for Internet Archive. I just made my first donation.
Yep. Just like for-profit companies, having a diverse range of revenue streams is necessary for securing the financial health of the organization. While Wikipedia receives significant donations from companies like Google and Microsoft, it is essential to also solicit contributions from individuals to ensure that their income is not overly reliant on a single source. Just like in for-profits, Wikimedia likely determines the percentages of income from various sources needed to maintain this diversity. This concept seems particularly important for Wikipedia given its mission to provide unbiased information.
On another note, I’ve seen your same “100 years” notion mentioned a few times on this post. I can’t imagine that everyone who’s saying it independently had the idea to analyze their financial statements and calculate projections over 100 years. Is this an article you’re quoting? Just curious.
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.
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.
Usually it's a gateway argument towards the right...
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 wondered when writing my comment whether people would combine this with the vague statement in the opening post and conclude "aha, I will now take this as misinformation without checking", but then I looked at your other comments and saw you were actually talking about some India-related conspiracy I heard nothing about. Yet apparently you nevertheless think my comment is intentional misinfo?? That isn't very coherent, is it now?
I was talking about your comment. The idea that because they pay people salaries, including a few hundred K per year for the people at the top, they’re drowning in money and there’s no point in donating as long as they can pay their hosting bills and nothing else, is wrong. Furthermore I suspect that at least some of the bunch of people who suddenly started coming out of the woodwork to say a few variations on that exact same thing are part of some kind of deliberate misinformation, just because it’s kind of a weird conclusion for a whole bunch of people to all start talking about all at once. Doubly so because it isn’t true.
There’s a whole separate thing where one of the other commenters sent me an article saying Israel is attacking Syria with nuclear weaponry and I only don’t know about it because I consume hopelessly pro-Western propaganda sources like Wikipedia, and he sent me India.com as his backing for it. That’s nothing to do with you, though.
I in fact don't think that - to get the sort of people you want to be running your company, a good salary is necessary. I suspect a lot of the people that wikimedia employs are unnecessary because this is way too much money to be spending on salaries overall, but I have no way of checking it since they don't provide a breakdown of the salaries involved. I do think, however, that a company that's not drowning in money wouldn't be giving a bunch of generic research grants.
That's valid, though I note that in the worlds where I am a normal person and not an anti-wikipedia shill, the reason why I'm saying these things now and not at other times is because I saw this post, and you wrote this post because you saw other people talk about some India-related Wikipedia conspiracy theory, and one reason why you'd see these people crawl out of woodwork now is because wikipedia ramps up their donation campaign this time of year, prompting discussion about wikipedia.
The main issue I take with your opening post is its vagueness. You don't mention any details in it, so it effectively acts as a cue for people to discuss anything at all controversial about wikipedia. And the way you frame the discussion is that such narratives "are fundamentally false" because Wikipedia "is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others" - that's assuming the conclusion. It's no surprise that this results in your seeing a lot of claims about Wikipedia that you think are misinformation!
P.S. Rethinking my previous comment a bit, it's probably good overall that reading my comment made you donate to charity out of spite - even a mediocre charity like Wikimedia most likely has a net positive effect on the world. So I guess I should be happy about it. Consider also donating to one of these for better bang on your buck.
To clarify, you don't think not-for-profits should fund grants for things that (by vote of the board) aligns with their mission?
I'm trying to figure out your beef with them.
Yes they do. It’s named by the individual, their position, and the exact salary they earned in each year. Look up the form 990s.
Completely true. I decided that being vague wasn’t great but it was better than brigading against the person I had in mind when that wasn’t the point. I figured people who had seen the stuff would know what I was talking about and figure it out, which mostly turned out to be accurate.
The narrative that led me to make the post was that Wikipedia is doxxing its editors to any fascist government that asks. I talk more about it here:
https://ponder.cat/post/1100747/1312503
Not quite. Personally, I think WP is a force for truth in the world, but that wasn’t why I am justifying this, it’s just me talking.
Also, I had legit forgotten that the government that WP has been fighting in court not to dox its users to, is India. I connected it to a later person who sent me a source from India.com, after spending so much time talking to people who think Israel is nuking Syria or Wikimedia is skimming $300 million of “excess” money off every single year (see the link above where someone references that misinformation and then I address it). Part of the reason I am short-tempered about false claims that make Wikipedia sound bad is that I’ve been talking with people who are making 4 or 5 different big ones just in these comments alone, and they all turn out to be bullshit, but the sum total of all of them getting repeated, I think, can be significant.
Just to be clear, I’m not necessarily saying you are one of those misinformation people. But the claim that Wikimedia has so much money that donations are unnecessary, putting “salaries” they’re spending donations on in quotes, things like that, is definitely one of those misinformation claims.
I will investigate this claim independently.
That's not allowed on Wikipedia, you have to use verifiable information from reliable secondary sources instead.
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.
The wikimedia foundation has hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.
Now they have ten more
Yes, they have a lot of server hardware, and some IP (ie, like logos and such).
really wish there was a way to pay with "Google play" because I found a way to get Google play money by lying to google lol
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.
Better than letting that survey money expire and staying 100% with Google.
Opinion rewards?
ding ding ding!
I use a Firefox extension that occasionally googles random jibberish so about once a day I'll get an opinion thing asking about the search results. Today I got one that was asking about 'china next gen aircraft'. I got like 80 cents from it which is 80 cents less I'll have to pay for my mullvad subscription!
I'm donating 10 a month. Least I can do. It's one of the last "good" places on the internet
I heard the guy who wrote Lemmy ate a GMO tomato, and enjoyed it.
Lemmy is too small to be a worthwhile target for musk-like campaigns. It's usually just people escaping their echo chambers to get their rage fix. If you're able to think for yourself, there's really no negative impact and scrolling past is a great solution.
Honestly. Could be any user on any platform, Lemmy not excluded.
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.
The entire 485 word intro to his Wikipedia page is unsourced:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
Is it space karen?
In addition to that person, you should also know about me. I'm awesome!
Bots running on LLMs are probably being unleashed.
Well fundamentally there's no difference between a stubborn right winger and a right wing GPT bot.
So if they don't change their tone after being presented with correct information they should be ostracized from these spaces.
The right wing extremists and bots should be contained to Twitter
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.
If it's the account that has already be pointed out it's very likely just a person. Probably angry that they didn't got their way into editing some wikipedia's article on their specific bias and got too affected by it.
This unactionable vaguepost is what suffices as a YSK?
Why should I know this, OP?
I replied to the person directly with why it isn’t true, and I reported them with an actionable report.
I wasn’t sure about the ethics of brigading or linking directly at the person, but presumably anyone who cares can find them pretty easily, and anyone who reads this and then also reads the misinformation, will be able to see the connection and make their own decision about whether I am speaking truly.
I care, I have found nothing similar to what you're discussing.
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.
No.
No.
And then I asked the person about this genocidal cult and got no response whatsoever, almost as if it was, not just a negative thing, but a wild and inaccurate thing said apparently with not even a little pretense that it corresponded to the truth. Was that misinformation? Yes!
Hope this helps.
So the "other" thread links here, so I'm going to link to them. https://lemmy.world/post/23535522
I think that thread would have been a much better thing to post. However this isn't some secret project, this is a single account that is obviously labeled, so this whole post is just a silly.
YSK conspiracy theorists exist.
You are asking weighted nuance from Lemmy. You might as well squish rocks to get water.
This post just reads as it could have been a mod report and that's about it. Looks like outrage for the sake of outrage
The person claiming every piece of negative information about russia and china and other similar places is a usa psyop is now quoting rules against a post trying to make people aware of misinformation?! Color me surprised.
Oh hello mr Russian-pretending-to-be-American.
You've never answered why you pretend to be American while at the same time clearly supporting Russia and spreading Russian propaganda.
Are you such a weak-willed American you've bought into Russian propaganda?
Isn't it annoying when you can't just delete my comment and ban me like you alway do, mr Pro-Russian?
(This guys has said things like "reality has a well known Russian propaganda bias".)
He's pro-Russian, and will never answer that particular question despite being ready to lie about everything else, because he knows even a clear lie of "I hate Putin" written by him in the context of him being American could be reason enough for him to accidentally fall out of a window. Because Russia is a shithole autocracy.
This guy never states shit, goes around spamming wannabe good looking lists of links of shit that's incredibly easily shown to be utter shit, but because there's so much, it'll always just diverge from the actual point.
It's got a name.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
Spreading FUD everywhere.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
All you need to do to prove this is try to get him to answer whether he's pro-Russian or not. Not a hard question, yet he just can't manage answering it.
I mean, you can say all of this stuff... or you could actually post links to evidence.
Look at his profile.
Then look at my post.
Then look at the modlogs from the times on the screenshots of those posts.
It's common knowledge lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml are complete tankies. D'you know why?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation
One of the easiest ways to spot Russians disinfo is when they pretend to be stupid to say that Russia doesn't use disinfo, or that at least definitely not on Lemmy, no way.
And the exact same guys absolutely refuse to answer a simple yes or no question. Are you pro-Russian or not? Are you?
While claiming they're American. Saying Russia is doing all the right things while criticising every Russian enemy and supporting China. Literally everything is in line with Russian propaganda. Yet they can't say whether they're pro-Russian or not. While clearly being pro-Russian, and adamantly claiming to be American?
That isn't enough for you to figure it out? Alrighty then, let's do it the way he does; just spam the ever living fuck out of anything tangentially related.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/D8A8A74976408CF7EC329827AFFFD3FC/S0003055421001507a.pdf/div-class-title-why-botter-how-pro-government-bots-fight-opposition-in-russia-div.pdf
https://en.zois-berlin.de/publications/russian-state-sponsored-media-and-disinformation-on-twitter
That 404's, but it's on the wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20210916150314/https://en.zois-berlin.de/publications/russian-state-sponsored-media-and-disinformation-on-twitter
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_disinformation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/schwerpunkte/EN/disinformation/examples-of-russian-disinformation-and-the-facts.html
https://www.state.gov/russias-pillars-of-disinformation-and-propaganda-report/
What's your theory? That he's an America hating American who loves Russia, hates facts and has made it his life mission to emulate Russian propaganda, but is still too ashamed of it to take a stance on whether he's pro-Russian or not? And that sounds probable to you...?
Oh okay, so I looked at the post and the posted modlog. Looks like that's all I need to know.
I've never spent so much time writing paragraphs and paragraphs about one Lemmy mod, and maybe you shouldn't, either.
So you think it's not good to expose Russian disinformation? Or are you saying he isn't spreading Russian disinformation?
Because you're saying one or the other with this "you're being sad, stop being like that, you're writing too much". This is a forum. People write on forums. If a text long enough to merely have paragraphs instead of pages is too long for you, then I can't help you.
True, this tells us nothing
I don't trust Wikipedia, but I do think they're a good STARTING POINT for research, the problem comes when it's used as the end-all be-all
Can you be specific about this misinformation so I don't just point fingers at anyone who doesn't worship the ground Wikipedia walks on. Like what are they saying and why isn't it true?
And his name is Elon Musk
Are you there universal monk?
As long as people keep in mind what Wikipedia is, there should be no issue. There's a reason teachers never allow it as a source, but it is great as an introduction to any topic, from which point you can further your own research.
I don’t think it will, though. I’ve reported the misinformation, and it’s still up as of right now.
I honestly am not even sure that mods should be in the habit of deciding that things are “probably” misinformation and removing them. In practice, they are not in that habit, so it’s not a solution. And even if they were, I certainly don’t think that the whole topic should be banned for discussion among the rest of us.
Dude. It's Christmas, and even if it wasn't, mods aren't a 24/7 presence.
If something gets seen and handled in a day or two, it's fine for anything that isn't illegal or dangerous to the instance.
Not that the mods/admins have to agree with your interpretation of whatever it is being misinformation to the kind of standard that needs intervention, but there's other reasons it could still be up that are entirely unrelated
Completely agree on all fronts. Personally, the idea “just report it, don’t say anything, mods will deal with it with their powers, it’s not for you to make these decisions or talk to one another about these things” seems kind of paternalistic on both fronts. There’s no guarantee that they’ll get it right 100% of the time, and even if they did, it would be good for us to talk about what’s going on when there is an issue that does (or doesn’t, if I am off base about this) impact the nature of the discussion on the network.
I agree, and I think you approached this well.
Thanks! I mean, it has hundreds of upvotes, clearly there are some people who are interested in talking about the topic and hearing what I have to say. I think the number of people who want to dogpile various lengths of essays at me about how entirely unreasonable all of this is, on my part, is maybe not correlated with the community's overall reaction to it. Which in itself is pretty interesting.
My guy it's fucking Christmas day.
The post itself is 2 hours old right now.Your response to that post is a whole whopping 4 hours old right now. Allow the admins to have at least a small grace period where they aren't sitting right at the controls. Lemmy is nowhere near as big as Reddit, with large admin and mod teams able to take shifts.I don’t think moderator action is the right way to handle this. I reported it so they can be aware, but I think community discussion is the right way to handle this.
you just want to spread mistrust among the users.
These are random, anonymous accounts. Not trusting you is the default mode. The fuck are you talking about?
There's a lot of people posting lies and acting weird on Lemmy at the moment unfortunately. There's been a sudden shift from evidence based to being an echo chamber
A few months ago you could have a discussion and people would exchange evidence. Now evidence no longer matters. People here have started acting the same as places like truth social unfortunately. It's a pity and I do miss the real discussions here I used to have.
In fact, it's part of the reason I've started to move back to Reddit.
"PSA I reported an account because they have bad arguments in my opinion" seems like a terrible precedent of a post for this sub. Why are people upvoting this junk.
Where’s a better place to put it, do you think?
You should just report, block, and move on. If someone is a regular offender, their instance admin can just ban them. If they operate their own instance, they can be defederated.
It's good to identify bad actors, but there's no shortage of people with dumb opinions (even on Lemmy), and pointing them out like this only gives them more attention—exactly the kind of thing they want.
Fuck that approach. It just shields trolls and other bad actors from consequence
Notice how I said "report" as the first action. If you want to keep seeing their bullshit, that's your business, but the Fediverse works by not giving those people an audience.
If you want to be their own personal poltergeist, haunting their every comment, that's your choice, but I would never recommend anyone waste their sanity and emotions on a bad actor here on Lemmy any more than they have to.
If literally everyone did what you recommend, that would be a feasible approach. But for various reasons that's obviously not gonna happen. What does happen when people try that is the troll continues to shit up the community for everyone else and a few people reporting them once sometimes does next to nothing. Hence you get someone like linkerbaan or universalmonk shitting in the pool for months without consequence. If you don't block them, you can continue to report them and/or call them out, which leads to shit actually happening.
Like I said, "reporting" is the thing people should be doing first. But OP is so bothered by whatever person's bullshit that they felt the need to make a PSA about it, and that to me says they need to just block and move on with their life. I would give the same recommendation to other people who are getting fixated on individual bad actors.
Trolls don't deserve to live in your head rent-free.
The first step to solving any problem that takes cooperation to solve is raising awareness. A single report from a person here and there is not that.
I think you're more hung up up on analyzing the psychology of those trying to raise that awareness. You may not be reading them accurately, but even if you are I don't see that mattering very much. It's not your call what is mentally healthy for everyone else.
Couldn’t agree more.
Then why are you trying to be cute and not call out the username (or usernames if they are using alts)? This doesn't identify jack, just says that someone exists doing something nonspecifically bad towards wikipedia.
As important as Wikipedia is, there are a ton of legitimate problems with the site and community moderators. Some of the drama that comes out of there is downright otherworldly. Without examples it's hard to take what you're saying seriously.
Edit: Either there's enough direct screenshotted evidence that this needs to be a specific call for admins to ban this person, or this just comes across as absurd escalation of some stupid internet debate.
Second edit: it's wikipediasuckscoop
Do we really need a warning for someone so obviously biased? Next you'll be warning us that madthumbs might have some reservations about the usefulness of linux.
I think it’s useful to talk about. I’m not sure why so many people are coming out lecturing me that this should be a forbidden topic for discussion.
I'm not getting that from the responses. What I've seen is
These all seem to reiterate the idea that "this is not a good post" and not "this subject is taboo".
But, if you're messing this up, does that jeopardize your own efforts?
I've literally seen no one say that it's forbidden. Maybe one of the comment chains from someone I already have blocked does, but there's only
fourtwo of those.I see plenty of people saying this is a stupid post. A post that is uselessly vague. A post that is almost entirely purposeless.
I understand wanting to avoid brigading, but as it stands this post amounts to "You all should know that I reported someone (I won't say who, tee hee) for posting something that I think is misinformation about Wikipedia (I won't say what, tee hee). It's really bad, but you'll just have to take my word for it. This person I won't name is just the worst. You need to know they're the worst. But you don't need to know who they are or what they said, that's not important! Also I have vague consipiratorial feelings about anyone who would speak ill of Wikipedia after Musk said bad things about it, because no one could possibly have grievances or concerns with Wikipedia that are still valid despite Musk's derangement."
If you wanted to spread awareness, you should have named the problem user. If you wanted to force the admins into action you should have named the problem user.
If you are willing to give the admins time to handle things properly, especially during the fucking holidays where they likely have other things to do, instead of needlessly raising an alarm on something pitifully small... then you should have waited a few days for them to do something before running off to play vigilante with this post.
If you want to make people waste time trying to evaluate if you're a nutter, thin skinned, or otherwise blowing smoke... you make a post like this one.
Either you had enough evidence to make this warning/call out post legitimately, and then you make it with names, screenshots, and fucking receipts... or you give admins time to respond and sit until they show they won't do something.
This weak, vague post just says that you're too impatient to let the admins work, you don't trust them to do what you think is the right thing, but you're also chickenshit that they might ban you for talking about it. Rather than post this from a throwaway made on another instance you make this useless thing.
TL;DR- People are telling you that this attempt to "warn" people is worthless without actionable info.
6 different people have reported my post, so presumably they think it should be forbidden, at least.
Hundreds of people have upvoted this post, so presumably they think it’s a worthwhile post. You are welcome to your opinion that it isn’t, of course.
Blocking shields you from seeing their comments. But others will still see them. You'll be unable to call them out the second time they lie if you do it like that. Which is fair enough if that's what you wanna do, but it's not a solution to the current issue that op is describing.
And that's why reporting is such an important step that we should all be doing. That's why I mentioned it first. Blocking is for your benefit, but it's not strictly necessary, and the spirit of my comment is to let the admins handle it without giving them engagement or more exposure.
So you can be a vigilante if you want, but with the number of people out there who have dumb opinions, it seems like a waste of time to try to play admin without actual admin powers.
OP doesn't identify bad actors. They say bad actors exist which is next to useless
In a DM to the mods.
I think a related community would be https://lemmy.ca/c/fediverselore
I specifically didn’t pick that one because it’s discouraged to post about a situation you are directly involved with there.
I couldn’t really find a good place to post about it, to be honest. This community seemed arguably okay for this kind of random stuff, and I do think it’s worth talking about this kind of thing, if we’re going to have a social network which isn’t overflowing with propaganda garbage. Also, a bunch of the people upvoting this post seem to agree with me.
Sure. I didn't know you already put some thought into this. And I'm not in charge here. We can leave this up to the mods of YSK. If they decide to keep this post around, it's probably alright.
in the garbage
Stay scratched
I've run across Wikipedia hate as well on Lemmy.
I have never. You are spreading misinformation now. MAAAAADDDSSSSS!
It’s funny that most of the .world posts are like
I have been using lemmy.world for over a year. I have no clue what you're referring to, in all honesty.
lmao or l'Mao
Ayyy L-Mao
i see, another person thought of this joke
If by "most" you mean something I've never seen then yeah. You just made something up cuz your butt hurts. Not surprising in the least.
Maybe I misspoke; I meant “the commenters in this thread” because I was definitely reacting to some comments i saw here
2:45am but close enough
what does this mean
Reference to the "4am" username I guess.
👍 and I'm still awake when I should be asleep rn
ah. it's 5oclock somewhere
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".
Who cares? If anything this just amplifes the misinformation.
I don't know exactly what is going on with WikiPedia right this moment, mostly because I am neither glued to the news nor to WikiPedia, and I have no idea who this user you talk about is or what they are saying. However, WikiPedia isnt exactly a 100% trustworthy source, and it never really was.
Calling WikiPedia a "force for truth" is kind of silly, in my opinion. It can be helpful with basic information or finding potential sources, but it is definitely not something you should just immediately take everything on the site at face value. Within the last maybe 10 years or so, the credibility of its sources have started to come into question, at least on some of their recently authored/edited articles. It certainly doesnt help that literally anyone can edit most pages, and that WikiPedia is not a verifiably neutral information source on most things. What I mean by this is that, WikiPedia might list both positive and negative reception about a certain film or video game, for example, but they usually wont mention whether the negative points are outliers or whether there is overwhelmingly more positive reception except if there is a controversy section. This gives a surface appearance of being neutral, but actually skews toward whichever side is the dissenting opinion. For video games and film, they at least list reviews which can kind of mitigate this, but on articles regarding history or art, you cant exactly put reviews on historian/artist opinions. This can lead (and has lead) to some instances of sources quoting themselves (which I think is against WikiPedia rules?) and other hilarity.
It brings tons of information to the masses, all over the world, in every language, for free, without ads. Shut the fuck up.
And some people really don’t like that it does that.
Yes it does. But not all of that information is always true. Wikipedia pages are vandalized all the time, people quote sources that are later revealed as made up or not credible, these are all things that happen everywhere, WikiPedia is not immune to this. That is why I said WikiPedia is not a "force for truth." It can be correct, but can you guarantee that every time you go to WikiPedia, the information on any given page will always be 100% correct? This is all I meant.
i would call being resistant to misinformation, being a force against misinformation, is that enough to warrant calling it a force for truth?
They do it for free, too, what more you can ask for? Well you can unreasonably ask them, these people, humans, fallible biological machines, to "be" correct 100% of the time, even when moderators may not be available, even when people didn't yet report misinfo, something you'd never ask anyone else to do or be.
Oh wait you did ask that, so I think there's a very good reason to believe you don't really care for what you preach.
Do you ever go back to a WikiPedia article after you read it to check if it has been updated? Yeah, didn't think so. Most people don't. Thats why there is danger in just believing everything on WikiPedia because its on there and its free. Its not a bad resource, but it isn't always a good source either.
But obviously you and others have some weird fetish regarding WikiPedia, so I guess this is where the conversation stops. People here be making it out like I am saying WikiPedia is evil and that is definitely not what I am saying, but I suppose on Lemmy it doesn't really matter. People believe whatever they want to regardless.
k
All those words... not one article of falsehood to back it up with.
You are allowed to freely link wikipedia here, and post screenshots.
Go ahead. Hit us with some examples. You likely have plenty of pages in mind already, so this shouldn't take long.
I hear a lotta hearsay...
There will always be issues with Wikipedia, but overwhelmingly it is a useful and reliable resource. Also, "its sources" are any reputable journalism from around the world.
Well as I said it, isn't completely useless. I mean, sources aren't always reputable. People make mistakes, people act in bad faith, things happen.
I was just saying that WikiPedia is not a "bastion of truth," because it is very susceptible to wrong information. Sure, the information may be correct most of the time on popular high traffic pages, but on low traffic pages, or pages that used to be low traffic and suddenly became high traffic because of some topical issue, can you really be sure that you aren't reading wrong or biased information? That is all I am bringing up. I think any person with a brain can realize this, but I wanted to be sure to mention it regardless, as many people seem to not meet that low specification.
I remember some guys in high school altered the wikipedia page for the high school or principal or something and it was up in its altered hilarious state for a few days before it got reverted. I always think about that when reading Wikipedia pages. I might be reading a Wikipedia page during a window where the information is maybe disingenuous. Always good to be on your toes.
I've heard from a few people that there are people that edit a lot of articles with a lot of bias and have been getting away with it. It'd be interesting for a journalist to really go into it.
This is definitely the case for certain niche topics. A few power editors can push agendas as long as they have a handful of reliable sources, no end of time, and a good knowledge of Wiki's bureaucratic processes.
Love wiki, but don't take it for more than a very useful encyclopedia - as the name suggests.
This I definitely agree with. Some of the rest of your message is, in my opinion, not exactly how it works, but all of this is besides the point. What I am saying is misinformation is that WP doxxed its editors to an Indian court, kowtows to any fascist government that asks them to, or is protecting a genocidal cult. All of those were claimed and then when we tried to talk about the claims with the person posting them, that person either evaporated or dissembled about it.
If someone posted an article saying that anyone can edit Wikipedia so take it with a grain of salt, I would never have cared and probably would have upvoted them.
No
if this was written by anyone else, I'd take it with a grain of salt.
I just don't believe you.
On the contrary, seems like a lot of disinformation accounts are trying to elevate Wikipedia as a credible source. Seems to be coming from the same people pushing pro-western narratives. Which isn’t surprising, as western governments have been caught funding mass editing to promote western narratives.
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-state-sponsored-disinformation/
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the effort to elevate Wikipedia as “credible” has been ramped up during this genocide. The Zionists teach classes to their people on how to manipulate the site for their narrative.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups
Wikipedia source of truth?
That's pretty bold.
Blanket statement is the argument of the uneducated.
I agree, but that... kind of seems like a blanket statement.
That's pretty
boldpeer reviewedFYFY.
I still want to have a copy of it when the world ends and I somehow survive. So I would say it is a decent source of truth.
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.
I’m fascinated. Explain?
The person you’re responding to has their own crazy agenda against Linux, so don’t expect a rational discussion.
They also found time to say, “Both sides of US politics are full of shit and balance each other out to distract us from our real problems.”
What a perfectly natural thing to say, in conjunction with suddenly hating on Wikipedia right at this particular moment.
If by this a person means something akin to, “No warfare except class warfare,” then I might agree. There are important differences between the Republicans and Democrats, but ultimately both take most of their funding from billionaires, and that’s at odds with what the working class needs.
If instead it’s an excuse to be disengaged from what’s happening or to excuse voting for awful people, then no, I can’t agree.
I mean Linux is fucking annoying or rather the users are annoying. Everytime the word windows gets mentioned there are dozens of people talking about Linux even if that has nothing to do with the topic
It just so happens that they picked things to accuse me of, for no reason at all, which overlap with things I could get banned for.
Must be a coincidence.
What cult? And what is Wikipedia protecting?
I'm in like 5 genocidal cults at this particular moment. You'll need to be more specific.
I guess you're the person OP is talking about.
Why don't you post some of your weird Linux trolling outside your sad little echo chamber?
Lol you will get roasted even worse than here, is the answer. Some people have the saddest lives.
You know what an echo chamber is and ask that question. lol
Aw poor little baby mad about Linux made a he-man Linux haters club. Sad no one will join it 😭
Honestly hilarious that this is the only reply you responded to. Hit a nerve?