Submitted 7 months ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://gizmodo.com/maga-puts-wikipedia-in-its-crosshairs-2000649462
Not bias, but I was surprised to find out how Wikipedia is censoring information surrounding ChrisChan.
All of the articles mentioning him in English just say he’s an internet personality, and his English Wikipedia page has been removed.
That kind of censorship doesn’t sit will with me.
This is to stop a cyberbullying campaign against a disabled person
That kind of censorship doesn’t sit will with me. What else are they keeping from us?
probably other things to harrass individuals with?
Yeah, no.
It’s still censorship even if the person in question wants it to be censored.
These people know the CWCwiki exists, right? I mean I was obsessed with CWC a little over 10 years ago, too, but I have long since lost interest in the whole matter.
That doesn’t make it ok.
They’re really against anything nice that can be achieved through cooperation, aren’t they?
Or education. They absolutely hate education.
100% this. They don’t want educated people. And the news/media that does exist they want to control.
already have it all downloaded
MAGAt morons really hate facts…
The poor getting knowledge for free?! This is America!!!
MAGA = Make Americans Gormless Assholes
downloaded a backup yesterday
everyone with sense and 160GB should do the same
Just 160gb? I will get a USB and back up the whole thing.
25ish for your language of choice, 130 something for media files
very manageable, grab that copy
How?
There is an app called Kiwix if you use Linux (I think it’s a flatpak) or WSL for Windows! :)
damn look how correct and helpful these mfs are
There’s an article here on how to utilize Wikipedia offline, and you can look under the “Where do I get the dumps?” section for links to downloads.
Hey no fair, the US is just copying us! (UK)
We targeted Wikipedia first recently waaaaa
Are you guys having problems with your politics? I heard COVID vaccines is not free for everyone.
We’ve had problems with our politics for as long as politics has existed. It’s a miracle we have anything nice, and they’ve tried to claw back and there have been people undermining anything nice we have on Day 2+ of us getting it.
Sir you seem to have a bias for presenting unbiased facts. This simply can not be.
I wonder if they’re going to investigate conservapedia for bias.
Well, silver lining is now liberals might actually check to see if Wikipedia is getting it’s claims from right wing pundits.
How long is it going to be until America has a great firewall ala China.
I do tech support on a global company, and some customers have started to demand their cases not to be readable for our usa based colleagues, nor the shared info hosted on usa clouds. So that wall is somewhat already there.
Understandable. I kinda wish the UK would copy the EU’s move for digital sovereignty and invest in FOSS/Self Hosted shit but the OSA has kinda made me a bit worried about that. You could get it past the Flag Shaggers easy though.
Canadian here. Most of our data is stored by American companies, even if they’re physically located in Canada. And as Microsoft recently admitted, American law supercedes our data and privacy rights. So effectively the US has ownership of our government, education, and health records.
well it's already happening. look what recently happened in Mississippi with age verification.
protip if you're American and you ask "how long until America has such and such" chances are, 9 times out of 10, it's already happening or has happened and you're just not aware.
“Yo dog, I heard you like freedom so I gave you freedom from your freedom!”
The states are the future of Federal law. And all things considered, yeah.
We have the OSA here in the UK which requires age verification. I connected to a VPN server in America and got age gated because the server was in Texas. So much for “land of the free”.
No firewall, you’ll just have to log into the Internet via a federal ID and speeds will be cut in half because every packet gets copied to a government server for evidence against you-- I mean, to protect the children.
What are we, a bunch of Asians?
why doesn’t wikipedia just move out of the US?
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!
Holy fuck that was so much worse than I imagined.
Decided to try one of the less political articles to see what it’d look like.
One expert observes that “every school shooter has been heavily immersed in violent first person shooter games.”[1] Many bright futures of young men are destroyed by video game habits, and video games even cause harmful increases in blood sugar in players.[2]
Video games are addictive, train young mass murderers, and promote liberal talking points or ideas. <
That’s one of the first things it says. Then it goes on to talk about promoting homosexuality and some more bullshit. Good stuff…
Yeah they have those “favorite links” or some such on their main page, it’s a cringe fest.
At least now they have (some) sources in their articles, that’s relatively new. Still, I 'm not sure I even want to know what those are…
Video games are addictive, train young mass murderers, and promote liberal talking points or ideas.
I feel one of those is not like the others. Not that the other 2 make more sense.
“we’ve come to realize that people knowing stuff is real problem for our agenda.”
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Liberty does too.
FUCK THESE GUYS
Or, as GOP says, “Fuck your feelings”
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.
That’s highly dependent on how many, or which, languages you download, I think.
This is true, I was referring to english wikipedia.
it will be out of date in an hour
Any entry that is changing hourly (or even monthly) is probably not a topic you should be relying on an encyclopedia entry for anyway. Use the tool for what the tool is good for.
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.
I used my old Grollier’s Multimedia Encyclopedia CD for years.
Doesnt matter really if you have nothing at one point.
got a link or instructions? i’ll do it tomorrow as the next step on my self hosting journey.
Docker setup instructions: github.com/kiwix-tools/docker/server/README.md
Download sim files from library.kiwix.org
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.
Remember - the co-founder of wikipedia says that it has “abandoned neutrality” and has been taken over as a tool to push political agendas by one side.
so what? he’s also anti vax. why is the co-founder’s opinion on this any more relevant than anyone else’s? the guy is not involved with wikipedia anymore.
you could also frame this as saying wikipedia stopped trying to maintain a false balance.
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?
yes, it’s called the nirvana fallacy.
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)
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.
You use Wikipedia as a starting step and pivor from there to the cited sources and secondary sources.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
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?
In his essay, Umberto Eco is correct in his assessment that fascists will never be satisfied until they get rid of all of they hate, and achieve their own absolution and realization of their power fantasies, a world shaped by their warped concepts of purity and ego-driven heroism.
they are never happy.
that’s the point of being despotic. everyone is your enemy, always and forever.
They are already happy. The point of all this is to keep people ignorant and the working class divided- and they are getting straight A’s in that department.
If you mean the people who blindly go along with whatever ‘conservative’ politicians tell them then never, because of the previous point. There will always be a scapegoat to blame, to keep them mad, to distract from the Billionaires draining their pockets and eroding their rights. Immigrants, leftists, women, minorities, lgbt people… anyone who is different so they can play on these peoples xenophobia.
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.
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.
Thank you for articulating that so well.
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.
At what point are the right happy?
ENDLÖSUNG
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.
Anyone know where to get a pre-inauguration copy of the Wikipedia corpus?
Twas but a matter of time
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.
Reality has a notable liberal bias so not surprising.
They’re butthurt their changes to Wikipedia about Israel got removed for no citations.
They’re gonna try to break everything so AI looks competent, because they can’t make AI competent…
strung6387@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
Republicans would be upset about Wikipedia being censored if they knew how to read.