MAGA Puts Wikipedia in Its Crosshairs

Comments

• AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  “we’ve come to realize that people knowing stuff is real problem for our agenda.”

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• A_norny_mousse@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  Ever since Covid19 I heard people saying “Wikipedia is not objective”. Initially, a hard argument to go against, but my ultimate answer is this:
  Encyclopedia Britannica is not objective either. No *pedia is, online or otherwise. Nothing is. And still Wikipedia is one of the best options out there, not lastly because of how it’s organised. [That said, it does have - usually right-wing - strong bias in places, esp. non-English content which would need more eyes.]

  I’m not surprised this is now mainstream MAGA speak.

  I just hope Wikipedia is still international enough so that its content is ultimately out of the US government’s reach.

  They already have Conservapedia (click and weep), let them enjoy and contribute to it!

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• OboTheHobo@ttrpg.network ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Fyi everyone: you can download the entirety of Wikipedia yourself from kiwix and that it’s only about 50gb for the whole thing, 100 with all images.

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  • turdburglar@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    got a link or instructions? i’ll do it tomorrow as the next step on my self hosting journey.

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    • agroqirax@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Docker setup instructions: github.com/kiwix-tools/docker/server/README.md

      Download sim files from library.kiwix.org

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  • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    it will be out of date in an hour

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    • SulaymanF@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Most of Wikipedia articles hardly change over time. The entry for potassium for example, or Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The controversial or recent current events topics get most updates.

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    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Doesnt matter really if you have nothing at one point.

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    • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I used my old Grollier’s Multimedia Encyclopedia CD for years.

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• mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  FUCK THESE GUYS

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• Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Quick question, honest question…

  At what point are the right happy?

  Because the left will be happy when everybody has equal rights, and a high standard of living for everyone.

  So, if that’s the lefts benchmark of a great society, what’s the right fighting towards? Money? Power? Control?

  Then what?

  When is America “great again”?

  Because they’ve been pushing that slogan since the 80s. What’s the endgame here?

  Because from where I’m sitting, there is no endgame. Nothing will ever make them happy. Nothing will ever be good enough. So what the fuck is the point?

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  • manxu@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    Happiness is not shared as a goal. For some people, happiness is so distant, the only thing achievable is to make everyone else equally misérable. Think Fundie Christians talking about the Valley of Tears.

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  • Dogiedog64@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Fascism, as an ideology, is utterly fascinating to look at sometimes. It strikes so many wildly different mental chords that you can get lost trying to understand the minds of its believers and followers without even trying to, all while just drinking your morning coffee.

    At what point are the right happy?

    To answer this, it is utterly critical to mention that Fascism, as an ideology, is fundamentally predicated upon the idea that the Fascist “In-Group” is better than whatever “Out-Group” they are focused on at any given moment (Jewish people, LGBT+, Black people, Mexicans, etc.). To that end, they will stop at NOTHING to crush, oppress, exterminate, and ultimately obliterate that Out-Group completely, all the while screaming to their fellows and to anyone that will listen that the Out-Group is simultaneously infinitely weak and easy to crush, as well as insurmountably strong and impossible to resist. This contradiction allows them to drive themselves into a frenzy, by pissing each other off, as well as draw in new recruits who hear about the Out-Group as “weak” and decide they want to get in on it. Meanwhile, anyone who thinks deeper about this contradiction more easily writes off their movement as sloppy, reactionary, and ultimately harmless, since they clearly don’t know anything, letting them amass real public support under the radar for DECADES; we’ve seen this in America, with Fox News doing tons of heavy lifting for almost 50 years now in the Fascist PR department. It WORKS.

    Once the In and Out-Groups are established, and public support starts to amass, the Fascists move to take public office, often starting in smaller, local elections that nobody runs for, elections that they can get a bunch of their buddies in the In-Group to vote for. Once they achieve public office, they try to continue ascending the public ranks to further their group’s political legitimacy, often forming alliances and coalitions with other right-wing and conservative groups to garner additional support in the legislature. For a historical example, the actual Nazis did this in Weimar Germany, starting as a fringe group in local elections, slowly climbing the ranks and gathering support, and ultimately working with other conservatives to seize power. Once sufficiently embedded in the system, they start purging members who aren’t sufficiently zealous and loyal to the In-Group, now a Political Party, and continue raging about the Out-Group, but on a state-side, or even national scale.

    At this point, several things can happen. If there isn’t strong enough leadership in the party, it can splinter into a bunch of factions that hate each other, but still work together because they hate the Out-Group more. If there IS strong leadership in the Party, then they tend to make a mad grab for power, and consolidate it as much as they can. We saw this with Jan 6, Germany saw it with The Night of The Long Knives. Should this fail, the whole Party may very well self-destruct from infighting.

    Now, you may ask, “what does any of this have to do with my question???” Remember, the entire time they’ve been climbing the political ladder, they’ve been raging at the Out-Group constantly, whipping themselves ever higher into a frenzy, garnering more and more support as they gather legitimacy in local elections. And now that they’ve made their mad grab for power, should it succeed, they can actually ACT on all their rhetoric that more rational, level-headed people wrote off at the beginning.

    It starts with outright oppression, the boot of the state on the neck of the masses, usually focused on the Out-Group, but everyone feels it. Then it escalates, usually into mass-confinement and deportation of the Out-Group, while the oppression on everyone else gets worse. But as the rhetoric never ends, so too must the escalation; Extermination. Once the suffering and deportation of the Out-Group isn’t enough, always they turn to extermination. And once the Out-Group is gone…

    Well, they’ll just find a new one. And another. And another. Over and over, until there’s only one group left, after all the purging and expulsion and deportation and death - the In-Group. But they won’t stop there. No, they keep going, denoting various internal factions as the Out-Group, targets to purge and exterminate. Constantly, accelerating as the numbers get smaller, until the whole Party explodes.

    So. To answer your question, the Right will NEVER be happy, no matter how hard or how many Out-Group members they purge and exterminate. Because Fascism doesn’t have an endpoint where the In-Group “”“wins”“”. The entire ideology is fundamentally predicated on that singular idea, that the In-Group is better than the Out-Group, and the Out-Group MUST be destroyed, no matter what, and any questioning of that directive brands you a traitor to the Party and a member of the Out-Group. They’ll continue down that road, purging and screaming and oppressing and exterminating until the only thing left is a room of Party leader corpses full of bullets from each other’s guns. Or until they’re stopped. Whichever comes first.

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  • slaacaa@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    At what point are the right happy?

    Image

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    • NoodlePoint@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Also, they want streets full of Kluxers.

      Image

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    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Holy shit. I’m bad at telling if AI is obvious sometimes. Is this real? It has swastikas (obviously) but it also has the american flag.

      Is this 1930s? Or 2020s?

      God. The fact I even have to ask is in itself a reflection of where we are as a society I guess.

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  • AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Once they’ve dismantled all progress made towards equality, and they control all the resources again.

    People think this is a new fight, but it’s really the same one that we’ve been fighting forever. We just got too comfortable, and thought we couldn’t lose so much progress so quickly.

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  • TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They can’t be happy. The whole platform is to take the country back to before all of society started conspiring against the poor republican voter.

    The big lie is that the dog can never catch the car because it isn’t trans people or immigrants or minorities that are oppressing republicans. It’s their politicians, the corruption that is ingrained into the system, and the rich that fight to keep the system rigged that are oppressing them and clearly republicans will never fix that

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  • Doomsider@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Extremists are never satisfied, they always want more. They are basically stuck on a stupid loop and just jump to the next demand when they get what they want.

    We even have a special name for the current crew. They are called white extremists.

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  • Soup@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The very rich will never be happy. If a billion dollars doesn’t make them happy, what the fuck will? They just want the ability to impose whatever shitty will they have upon everyone and because it will hurt a lot of people they are constantly afraid and that fear leads to them doing even more horrible things.

    It’s a feedback loop that pushes them to do worse and worse things.

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  • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    At what point are the right happy?

    ENDLÖSUNG

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  • thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They will never be happy.

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  • peaceful_world_view@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I don’t know but I’m guessing there is a MASS GENOCIDE involved at some point.

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    • dubyakay@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Mass genocide? As opposed to what? Minor genocide? A genocide is a genocide, there are no adjectives to it.

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  • graycube@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I think they are trying to go back to before they were grown up and had to deal with adult issues. They idolize their innocent childhood and some how associated that as the time when America was great. They find it really confusing that the child’s perspective of that time window was flawed. They also find it confusing that different age conservatives all imagine a different time window for when life was good.

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  • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Most citizen level republicans generally believe what they want is good for people. They generally believe women aren’t capable and must be cared for. Or atleast deluded themselves into thinking to have and excuse for their lust. But either way they truly believe they are the good guys. They also believe in some instances the only way to help someone is to let them experience challenge and over come it. To them the only logical choice when presented with suffering is to over come it. Even if they have not had to suffer themselves so they don’t really understand what they are talking about. Most the time people are just stupid and don’t realize they won’t get what they want (generally the same thing as the left a happy well fed population). However there are certain more malevolence in some people at the higher levels of the movement which use the hatred and fear of the right to their own advantage.

    Most of their ideas stem from fear of something and most the people in charge benefit from stocking their fears.

    I know a lot of right wingers and have successfully brought a few back to reality. Most they time they are just confused.

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  • wordmark@mas.to ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    @Lost_My_Mind @return2ozma when their toilets are of pure gold while the rest of the world is kaputt .... nah not even then because living in a gated community is like golden prison

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• TechnoCat@lemmy.ml ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  They’re butthurt their changes to Wikipedia about Israel got removed for no citations.

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  • acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They’re butthurt their changes to Wikipedia in general got removed for no citations

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• teft@piefed.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Reality has a notable liberal bias so not surprising.

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• givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  They’re gonna try to break everything so AI looks competent, because they can’t make AI competent…

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  • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with their fascist attempts to rewrite history

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    • lemmysquezzy@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      👆 mm hmm

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  • IllNess@infosec.pub ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Maybe the AI doomers are right.

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  • ReCursing@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Random stretch is random

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    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Why do you think they just grabbed 10% of Intel?

      One of the biggest criticism of AI summaries is you could just look at Wikipedia…

      So you crush Wikipedia and then people can’t say AI is useless.

      It ain’t a stretch, it’s basic logical reasoning, can you not see how that would work or do you not understand how trump could do something as unethical and destroy a free resource to make a buck?

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• gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Anyone know where to get a pre-inauguration copy of the Wikipedia corpus?

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  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Chuck https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2025-08.zim.torrent in the Wayback machine

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  • bigchunga@feddit.online ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Maybe you can find something here: https://archive.org/details/wikimediadownloads

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• BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

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• Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Why not? Fascists hate nothing more than truth.

  FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

  Our ace in the hole is history, we know already how this story ends. Stop letting them turn the damn pages.

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• avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  One recent report raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the State of Israel.

  Of course they’d use the anti-Israel crutch.

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• FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Wikipedia has been shit for a long time, and it should be banned as being used as a source for anything serious. There are thousands of recorded, proven cases of incorrect and malicious updates to pages on there.

  As with most things, it started off great and then went to hell.

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  • Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    I there a technical term (or psychological or like a fallacy) for when someone sees something really good but not perfect and thus believes that the slightest bad thing they detect makes it all totally worthless?

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    • wordmark@mas.to ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      @Valmond @FreedomAdvocate

      So lets Start our own #Wikipedia? #LibrePedia? yes in German its #Schwarzseher means if someone is pessimistic sees everything negative (basically the opposite of optimist)

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  • EightBitBlood@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Practicing due diligence to make sure Wikipedia’s sources are legit isn’t difficult. You can check the sources listed on ever single Wikipedia entry yourself for bias. It’s not like they hide their sources. That alone is what makes it so valuable. Anyone trying to push a narrative can easily see it sourced as bullshit.

    Kind of like how the article you linked is a worthless, factless, opinion piece about Wikipedia becoming “woke” due to the feelings of Larry Sanger being hurt. Nothing that article says is based on anything factual, and the only studies mentioned are wildly taken out of context.

    Wikipedia let’s me do that analysis for myself, so I don’t get tricked into thinking an obvious piece of propaganda is real.

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    • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I agree with you that Wikipedia is good for finding sources and reading and coming to your own conclusions, but that’s not really the point of Wikipedia. If you can’t trust/believe the actual text of the pages and have to go and read every single linked article yourself then it defeats the purpose. It’s like getting cliff notes but having to go and read the full textbooks anyway.

      The co-founders opinion is pretty important in the matter.

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  • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Wikipedia has been shit for a long time

    it started off great and then went to hell

    This becomes obviously and extremely dumb once you try to imagine how this “going to hell” actually looks like. What you’re saying is, if you opened a Wikipedia article 15 or 20 years ago, you’d find “great” content, but in the meantime that article has become “shit”. Pure nonsense.

    In an another comment you say it’s bad that you have to double check the sources. But when it started, Wikipedia barely used sources at all! Just look at some random articles from the early days and see for yourself. These days an overabundance of sources could well be more of a problem for editors of big article.

    There are thousands of recorded, proven cases of incorrect and malicious updates to pages on there.

    Thousands? Probably tens, even hundred of thousands! You know how they’re “recorded and proven” most of the time? Through the built-in system that tracks every change since the site was created, and allows editors to check who did what, verify and reverse the bad edits.

    The co-founder also said Wikipedia is “broken beyond repair”… back in 2007. Already in 2006 he founded a website that he wanted to compete with WP. Is that before or after your “went to hell” era? My impression is, the guy is just butthurt the project has grown beyond him.

    As a relatively active WP editor, I agree that you absolutely shouldn’t take it for granted, and there’s a lot of absolutely frustrating crap on there, and there’s much that one would want to see fixed and improved structurally. But I really can’t tolerate this sort of nonsensical criticism.

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  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You use Wikipedia as a starting step and pivor from there to the cited sources and secondary sources.

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    • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Sure, I agree - but that doesn’t change the fact that Wikipedia as anything other than a link aggregator is trash for anything remotely subjective.

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• Smackyroon@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Twas but a matter of time

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