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

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      123·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
        84·
        2 months ago

        elaborate reasons why it’s all true

        Usually it’s “just read these 10 hundred-year-old books” that they absolutely have not read.

        And if you ask them to make a point from those books, they can’t. Apparently they’re only comprehensible as a whole.

      • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          2·
          2 months ago

          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.”

    • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
      31·
      2 months ago

      I am pretty convinced that .ml is legitimately used as a Russian troll training ground before they get promoted to Facebook and reddit.

      • dx1@lemmy.world
        9·
        2 months ago

        Meanwhile, at .ml:

        Since Pi is infinite and non-repeating, would that mean any finite sequence of non-repeating numbers should appear somewhere in Pi?

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          7·
          2 months ago

          That’s actually a really good way to illustrate what is wrong with lemmy.ml.

          On math stack exchange:

          Let me summarize the things that have been said which are true and add one more thing.

          1. 𝜋 is not known to have this property, but it is expected to be true.
          2. This property does not follow from the fact that the decimal expansion of 𝜋 is infinite and does not repeat.

          On lemmy.ml:

          0.101001000100001000001 . . .

          I’m infinite and non-repeating. Can you find a 2 in me?

          You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere

          Why couldn’t you?

          Because you’d need to search through an infinite number of digits (unless you have access to the original formula)

          And:

          Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi

          And:

          Yes.

          And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.

          All heavily upvoted.

          • dx1@lemmy.world
            6·
            2 months ago

            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.

            • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
              9·
              2 months ago

              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.

              • VeganCheesecake
                7·
                2 months ago

                On lemmy.ml pretty much all reddit-like boards.

                You can’t really compare a stack exchange board about a specific topic with general purpose boards.

                • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
                  5·
                  2 months ago

                  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.

              • dx1@lemmy.world
                2·
                2 months ago

                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”.

        • cm0002@lemmy.world
          6·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
            8·
            2 months ago

            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:

            Yes, this is implied. It’s also why many people use digits of pi as passwords and make the password hint “easy as pi”.

            Yeah. This is a plot point used in a few stories, eg Carl Sagan’s “Contact”

            Yes

            Yes.

            And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.

            Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi

            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.

          • dx1@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 months ago

            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.

          • dx1@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 months ago

            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.

  • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
    94·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      137·
      2 months ago

      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.

        • Willy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          22·
          2 months ago

          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

          • fusionsaint@lemmy.world
            11·
            2 months ago

            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.

      • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
        16·
        2 months ago

        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.

      • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        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.

    • OminousOrange@lemmy.ca
      34·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
        8·
        2 months ago

        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.

  • FundMECFS
    85·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • lunarul@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • FundMECFS
        7·
        2 months ago

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

  • Zier@fedia.io
    67·
    2 months ago

    Wikipedia is an alien plot to get Earthlings to read more. DON’T FALL FOR IT!!! . . . ./s

    Please donate to Wikipedia if you can.

        • Saledovil@sh.itjust.works
          10·
          2 months ago

          In addition to what frazorth said, you can change how a statement is interpreted by simply using a passive voice. Compare “Alice was hit by Bob” to “Bob hit Alice”. Both statements are identical, but the former is a lot less accusatory towards Bob. This technique is used when reporting about Police abuse, or about how the civilians in Gaza are treated.

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
          8·
          2 months ago

          Information without context can create a different narrative than that same information with context.

          You see this in racially biased crime reporting. Without context, you see that one demographic is disproportionately prone to being arrested and convicted of crimes. The conclusion being aimed for is the expected racist one.
          With context, you see that criminality is roughly equally distributed, but that certain classes of crime are enforced with prison more often, that different demographics get disproportionately more attention from law enforcement, and that due to socioeconomic factors different demographics are more likely to inhabit income brackets where the likely types of crime are more likely to be harshly enforced.

          Information without context can be misleading. If someone seems to care about the conclusion you take away more than some bit of context that makes that conclusion less forgone, thats a sign they might be pushing a narrative.

          There is, unfortunately, a contrasting rhetorical trick where someone provides such an overwhelming amount of context that you cannot possibly handle all of it in a reasonable amount of time.

          Exactly where the line is is unfortunately not something I think there’s a simple answer for determining. I try to determine if it seems like the person is using the information to support their point, or if they’re using it to drown out opposition.

        • frazorth@feddit.uk
          5·
          2 months ago

          You’ve never heard of people bending the truth?

          Saying something factually correct, but misleading because parts are omitted?

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          The best propaganda is built on a foundation of truth. You’ll see this on fascist websites that love to flood their feeds with “black on black crime” stories, to heavily promote “white woman attacked by black man” news narratives, and to repeatedly post images of young black/latino men with facial tattoos or in mug-shot photos. Any individual statement can be validated as true, but deliberate miss-sampling of information leads the audience to develop broad negative biases towards certain demographics.

          Then you get a drum-beat of assertions about skin color as a heuristic for public safety. People are asserted as dangerous because of their skin color and you need to be proactive in keeping yourselves away from these people through… white flight and neighborhood gentrification, panicked public responses to black people, reporting black people in your neighborhood to the police as “suspicious”, leaning towards prosecution/high sentencing of black suspects when you’re a member of a jury pool, organizing with your neighbors to harass and expel black neighbors, pressure your school/local community center to hold back/suspend/expel black students disproportionately, and otherwise make your community hostile to black residents until you get a segregated neighborhood through public pressure.

          The combination of the cherry-picked information and the advocacy for populist segregation leads to more interracial conflicts and an increased anxiety between white and black residents. This sets off a wave of self-confirming incidents - you get to see more black people in your neighborhood punished by authority figures, which leads naive viewers to believe more of the “minorities are inherently evil” media narratives. More conflicts feed into the social media scene of cherry-picked video clips and biased news articles, with “innocent white person victimized by evil black person” becoming received wisdom rather than something you need to read in a headline anymore.

          People are trained into becoming racist over time by the engineered social dynamics.

  • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
    63·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • dx1@lemmy.world
      18·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    62·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Aslanta@lemmy.world
      7·
      2 months ago

      The politically elite are so used to puppeteering public sentiment with ease, and so confident in their efforts to suppress education in America that they have stopped trying to be sneaky. All American ‘news’ is propaganda and the this is a blatant attempt to divide the public on one of the last free resources for factual information**. Free as in non-criminalized. These types of posts by EM are to incite division in order to amp-up for the criminalization of information. And it’s not very difficult to see.

      **factual when readers uphold its integrity through critical consumption and editing.

      • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
        5·
        2 months ago

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

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

    • wowwoweowza@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 months ago

      Those tactics won’t really work here but if there’s a small army of them on super low IQ platforms their lies can spread.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      They’re half-ass trying to incite intergenerational conflict between X, Z, millenials, etc.

      That’s not even new.

      Dismissively saying “OK boomer” has been around for several years.

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
        4·
        2 months ago

        Not the same.

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

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      Who hates Wikipedia:

      Russia

      Is this even true? Has any Russian state official or organization indicated they give two shits about an English-centric US-hosted online encyclopedia? Ditto Israel.

      Feels like every time I read a “bad actors on the internet” story, I get someone in the comments insisting a foreign intelligence officer is secretly pulling all the strings. As though American propagandists and industrial scale media magnets aren’t willing or capable of doing the job themselves.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
        9·
        2 months ago

        They don’t actually hate Wikipedia. They hold that it’s not a primary source for things that require citation, and that it’s not a great textbook.

        Reading the Wikipedia page for optics is a bad way to learn optics.
        It’s also difficult to cite as a source because you can’t actually specify who you’re citing, which is why Wikipedia, for research purposes, is a great way to get a quality overview and the terms you need, and then jump to its sources for more context and primary sources as you need them.

        Encyclopedias in general are overviews or summaries of what they reference. Teachers would typically like you to reference something that isn’t a summary or overview when writing one, sincenthat what most of those reports are.

      • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
        5·
        2 months ago

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

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
      37·
      2 months ago

      Do download a copy of Wikipedia but give them some credit. This isn’t the first nor last attack on information freedom (see internet archive)

    • M600@lemmy.world
      7·
      2 months ago

      Can I get a TLDR. I’m on the page about downloading it, but there are so many files to download which makes me think I am looking at the wrong stuff.

      • ChogChog@lemmy.world
        11·
        2 months ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • MutilationWave@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 months ago

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

  • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
    46·
    2 months ago

    This unactionable vaguepost is what suffices as a YSK?

    Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK

    Why should I know this, OP?

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      44·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • MimicJar@lemmy.world
        10·
        2 months ago

        anyone who cares can find them pretty easily

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

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

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

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

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          24·
          2 months ago

          I just read a post that said Wikipedia was the best website on the internet, was that the misinformation?

          No.

          Someone else donated, was that misinformation?

          No.

          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.

          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.

          • MimicJar@lemmy.world
            11·
            2 months ago

            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.

        • Shardikprime@lemmy.world
          4·
          2 months ago

          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

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
      14·
      2 months ago

      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.

      An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

      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.

    • nyctre@lemmy.world
      13·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • sylphrin@sh.itjust.works
    38·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      110·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
        7·
        2 months ago

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

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

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

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          82·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • RustyEarthfire@lemmy.worldEnglish
            14·
            2 months ago

            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.

            • Harvey656@lemmy.world
              5·
              2 months ago

              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. :(

          • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
            11·
            2 months ago

            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.

            • nomy@lemmy.zipEnglish
              49·
              2 months ago

              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.

              • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
                6·
                2 months ago

                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.

                • nomy@lemmy.zipEnglish
                  8·
                  2 months ago

                  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.

              • slackassassin@sh.itjust.works
                2·
                2 months ago

                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.

                • nomy@lemmy.zipEnglish
                  3·
                  2 months ago

                  it’s not “hur-dur, just glue it” that everyone always paints it as.

                  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.

          • AlDente@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            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.

            • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
              4·
              2 months ago

              The executives are the ones bleeding the foundation dry.

              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.

              • AlDente@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                1·
                2 months ago

                Kiss my ass. Get the fuck out.

                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).

                • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
                  2·
                  2 months ago

                  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

          • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            2 months ago

            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.

  • BMTea@lemmy.world
    37·
    2 months ago

    “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.

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
        19·
        2 months ago

        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.

          • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            13·
            2 months ago

            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.

            • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
              6·
              2 months ago

              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.

              • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                4·
                2 months ago

                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 four two 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.

                • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
                  6·
                  2 months ago

                  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.

          • Telorand@reddthat.com
            3·
            2 months ago

            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.

            • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
              5·
              2 months ago

              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.

              • Telorand@reddthat.com
                1·
                2 months ago

                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.

                • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  2 months ago

                  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.

        • nyctre@lemmy.world
          6·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • Telorand@reddthat.com
            3·
            2 months ago

            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.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          12·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
            4·
            2 months ago

            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.