Elon Musk and Wikipedia are feuding
Elon Musk and Wikipedia are feuding
The online encyclopedia stands accused of being far-left propaganda
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Instead of whining like a 5 year old, why doesn't he use his obscene wealth to pay an army of Chinese internet trolls to rewrite Wikipedia to his liking? I bet Wikipedia and the regular contributors wouldn't even have the resources to withstand the assault and correct the untruths faster than they'd be created.
Wikipedia is extremely resistant to this kind of thing. They've been dealing with it for decades now. All kinds of people have had that idea, sometimes professionally being paid by some company/country/individual to the tune of quite a bit of money. Sometimes they do succeed in bending the narrative slightly in particular ways, but the simple "overwhelm everyone's resources" approach that works a treat on Lemmy or Facebook can get simply brushed aside on Wikipedia because of its strong culture and good design features.
As an editor with advanced rollback rights on Wikipedia; I can agree with the above statement.
It is Extremely Difficult; even with slighly escalated rollback rights such as mine; to push an agenda on Wikipedia.
WP:NPOV is a good read and the editing community and contribution culture on Wikipedia enforces it strongly.
EnWiki itself for certain has some very strong Page Protection policies that prevent just any editor from munging up the encyclopedia or changing history.
It's safe to say that Wikimedia cannot be bent or broken easily by special interest groups...Vandalism and PoV pushing is quickly quelled by sysops on Wikipedia. There are more of us editors than Elon could ever possibly hope to take on.
Not even Elon Musk gets to ignore Wikimedia policies. That will never change. They are written in blood and sweat and cannot be manipulated. The entire foundation is set up in a way that it always, eventually, cracks down on corruption and greed. Not even a cabal of admins, bureaucrats and Wikimedia Stewards can help you.
Not even Elon Musk gets to ignore Wikimedia policies. That will never change.
I hope this is true. By the end of Trump's term, ICE may be able to simply storm the Wikimedia offices and shut everything down if they don't adhere to Trump's official truth.
I assume they have enough international presence that things will be able to continue, but their core office being in the US is no longer the pretty-good protection against authoritarian regimes trying to force them to alter what they're presenting. I'm sure they will fight, but a lot of the tools they used to use to fight with are being attacked, with quite a bit of success, right now.
By the end of Trump’s term
So, when he dies?
Because if ever there was US president who intends to try for "President for life", it's this guy.I was careful with my phrasing for exactly that reason. I think that, either, before the end of his current term things will blow up in such cataclysmic fashion that all bets are off for what comes next, or else Trump will be starting his third term in 2029.
As much as I am scared for it, I am hoping it is the first.
It is not only true; it is required by the WMF. Wikipedia and Wikimedia will go dark before it compromises those values.
Wikipedia can always be revived by it's massive worldwide community; on Tor even. Trump taking down the WMF servers won't help; the databases probably get backed up daily and would likely end up on torrents within moments of it being taken down.
You can buy all of wikipedia for like 100 bucks on a flash drive and can download the whole thing for free.
It ain't going nowhere
Yeah, as long as you exclude media like images, the entirety of Wikipedia can be compressed into hilariously small sizes. The “only current revisions and no talk” version is only 86GB uncompressed, and compresses down to 19GB.
There are even specialized readers that can read the compressed data on a page-by-page basis so you don’t need to decompress the entire thing to browse it.
Thank you. That was informative. I didn't know.
Do you think he got obscenely wealthy paying armies of people?
He's famous for firing people, not hiring
Shhh.
Not to give them ideas but couldn’t he just fund his own fake Wikipedia clone? X-cylipedia or some shit? Claim it’s the truth and it’s very existence becomes a PR trap for the media who will cover it like hotcakes for free
Not to give them ideas but couldn’t he just fund his own fake Wikipedia clone?
Isn't that basically what conservapedia is?
(Link is not to the actual site, but rather to an article about them - not giving that shithole traffic)
If people with this mindset could be happy with just having their own thing, not polluted with the ideas of others, there would be no conflict. Unfortunately the mindset requires that there can't be other people in the world doing their own thing.
SSSSHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! 🤫🤫🤫🤫🤫 Don't give anyone any ideas.
! shhhhhhhhh
Chinese internet trolls
You know you can hate somebody without associating them with Chinese people, right?
You know you can say "Chinese troll" without hating anybody, yes?
As in "the person is a troll" and "the person is Chinese". No hate anywhere: it's just two facts that happen to go together quite well because China is kind of notorious for being the place where you can find internet trolls for hire for cheap.
You need to stop thinking everything in terms of how racist it sounds.
China is kind of notorious for being the place where you can find internet trolls for hire for cheap.
Reflexively associating people & things you dislike with an ethnicity is a form of hate, and you are doing it. After all, America has plenty of – hell, I'd argue more – easily bought trolls available, and yet I don't seem to see a whole lot of people bringing up their nationality so much, assuming they mention them at all.
And I'm not going to ignore racist statements just because pointing it out causes tension.