000Edit wars over Israel spur rare ban of 8 Wikipedia editors.
InternetCitizen2Right wing trashing nice things. Typical.
BetaBlakeIt’s all they’re capable of
Elon just like to stir shit to get more money. He entirely lacks empathy so anything he’s doing has nothing to do with believing in something. He’s a child breaking the toys of others solely because he can.
The sooner everyone realizes all CEOs are like this, just not as vocal and in the spotlight the better society will be.
Maybe this is the big filter, the one from the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox that destroys civilizations before they can spread past their own planet. Not nuclear bombs or viruses or AI or grey goo nanomachines but overcoming the fact that the worst garbage of the species rises to positions of power because they don’t have any morals that would slow them down or give them pause for thought before exploiting the rest of the species in any way possible.
Bet Hitler had the same personality.
Editors meaning random users. Shitty people do shitty thing and get banned, not really news, let alone technology news.
Avid AmoebaIncrease your monthly donation to Wikipedia.
TxzKcredibility pro-Israel critics and right-wing voices
lol.
schnurritoWikis are unsuitable for anything contentious. Wikis are the solution to the problem of crowdsourcing objective facts, what makes them great is that anyone can add a few (even very obscure) ones; on anything contentious there are way too many, not too few, people wanting to write about them, making the wiki a solution to a nonexistent problem. This news story is yet another example of this.
… and hardly anything is more contentious than Israel/Palestine, which is why wikis work least well for articles on that.
Israel Palestine isn’t contentious when discussing the fact that Israel is genocidal. It is universally agreed by genocide scholars and frankly anyone who has seen what Israel is doing to Palestinians (if one believes Palestinians are people that is).
The only thing that is contentious is that Israel and its supporters don’t like it when people state facts about them.
deegeeseThere’s a problem when pro-Palestinian editors start adding terms like “apartheid regime” and “settler colonialism“ which don’t have a formal academic definition. Then the other side can fairly claim they’re pushing personal opinions.
It’s tough to maintain academic detachment when writing about an ongoing genocide.
When South Africa calls it an apartheid, it’s probably an apartheid
Either that or posturing. South Africa has its fair share of skeletons in its closet.
It’s not a skeleton in their closet, they had an apartheid so are fully qualified to call other states apartheid.
What I’m saying is they swapped apartheid for a lot of racism and racially backed violence. Check out this Wikipedia article:
A Gauteng government official, Velaphi Khumalo, stated on Facebook “White people in South Africa deserve to be hacked and killed like Jews. [You] have the same venom. Look at Palestine. [You] must be [burnt] alive and skinned and your [offspring] used as garden fertiliser”. A complaint was lodged at the Human Rights Commission, and a charge of crimen injuria was laid at the Equality Court. In October 2018, he was found guilty of hate speech by the court, for which he was ordered to issue an apology.
And:
After 76-year-old white professor Cobus Naude was murdered in 2018, black senior SANDF officer Major M.V. Mohlala posted a comment on Facebook in reaction to Naude’s murder, stating “It is your turn now, white people… [he] should have had his eyes and tongue cut out so that the faces of his attackers would be the last thing he sees”
These are prominent community members calling for overt violence against the white minority, and they merely get a slap on the wrist.
It’s not just white minorities:
In 2015, Phumlani Mfeka, a KwaZulu-Natal businessman and the spokesman for the radical Mazibuye African Forum, tweeted “A good Indian is a dead Indian”. He published a letter in the city press claiming that South Africans of Indian origin have no right to citizenship or property in South Africa. Mfeka also claimed there is a “ticking time bomb of a deadly confrontation” between Africans and Indians in KwaZulu-Natal. The South African court barred him from making anti-Indian remarks in November 2015.
There’s also racism directly against Jewish people:
In 2009, South Africa’s deputy foreign minister, Fatima Hajaig, claimed that “Jewish money controls America and most Western countries.” Her comments prompted criticism by Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and a reported “dressing down” by President Kgalema Motlanthe.>She subsequently apologized on two occasions for her remarks.
In 2013, ANC Western Cape leader Marius Fransman claimed 98% of land and property owners in Cape Town are “white” and “Jewish.” The allegation turned out to be false.
So I really don’t trust a country’s statements on racism when there’s such systemic racism throughout the community and government. They are hardly an authority and certainly don’t have the moral high ground.
I’ll instead trust disinterested parties’ opinions on the matter, along with the relevant facts.
Apartheid does have a definition, though.
Sure, but what is an “apartheid regime”?
I mean I know what it is, but can you cite reliable sources to meet Wikipedia’s standard under this sort of scrutiny? Sounds difficult.
Israel/Palestine is truly a conflict where no matter what argument you raise (on either side), there is a counterargument.
The argument against yours, for example, is here: …blogspot.com/…/a-really-strange-genocide.html
I am generally very sympathetic to the Palestinians and think the immediate root cause of the present situation is the fact that Israel has been blockading Gaza for more than a decade, not allowing movement in or out of it, which I do not think can be justified by anything. I regularly read the blog I linked to above (yes, I consciously read things I don’t agree with), its author would probably say that the immediate root cause is something Hamas did in October of 2023. Difficult to say how to “neutrally” present that, right?
Being “neutral” doesn’t mean agreeing with everyone. Some people are wrong.
Just because a counterargument exists does not mean it is meaningful.
“Nuh-uh” is a counterargument. It’s just one relegated to grade school playgrounds and internet discussions.
The response to your link would be: Are Palestinians allowed to use those hospitals in any significant numbers?
This guy also considers the second intifada to be a genocidal campaign (lol what???) so they're too detached from reality to be taken seriously either way.
To commmit a genocide, one needs motive, opportunity and the means to carry out the crime. Hamas has repeatedly stated that killing all the Jews is an objective of theirs. But objectively, they have neither opportunity nor means. Israel, in particular the ruling Likud Party, has satisfied all three preconditions, though.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#International…
the German legal scholar Stefan Talmon told Süddeutsche Zeitung that Israel was not committing genocide in Gaza, but conceded that Israel had committed war crimes.[356] International law professor Sabine Swoboda also argued that although Israel may have broken international law, it had not committed genocide because its intent was not genocidal.[357] In January 2024, lawyer Eugene Kontorovich called the genocide allegations “absolutely absurd” and a “farce”, and called for Israel to immediately end its acceptance of the ICJ’s jurisdiction in response to South Africa’s case.[358] In an August 2024 op-ed in the New York Daily News, lawyer Eli Rosenbaum wrote that Israel’s actions in Gaza are not genocidal
The article has of course other voices as well.
The article also cites people with „danger of genocide“ or war crimes. Neither of which is actually genocide.
For something to qualify as genocide, the special intent „dolus specialis“ is a key requirement. Most of the article lists acts and doesn’t get into this much.
An issue is that Amnesty International and Ireland expanded the definition of genocide for the case of Gaza specifically.
Regardless if it qualifies as genocide or not, the situation is terrible.
But it’s less unsuitable than any alternative avenue for contentious information (traditional news media, youtube/podcasts, social media, etc) - for the simple reason that wikipedia encourages citing sources, while every other platform discourages it.
citing sources such as … “traditional news media”, right?
It’s also crap at screening sources for credibility.
There’s currently a big hubbub going on in the Wikipedia Gulf of Mexico talk page about changing the name to Gulf of America.
That’s incredibly dumb.
I mean, for localized pages maybe. Probably best to stick it under the “dumb stupid politics” section, though.
I took a really big shit the other day. Like, really BIG. We can call it the shit of the americas and anyone that disagrees could make it a big hubbub.
Just because it was a president saying something stupid does not prevent it from being stupid.
Wikipedia was here before those dudes and will be here after them. They are small in the grad scale of things.
👍Maximum Derek👍I downloaded a copy of Wikipedia via kiwix before the 20th, knowing herr Musk’s grudge against them.
Suppose those of us who’ve missed the bus want to get a copy of the content from before the 20th, is that still available? In other words, do they offer downloads of older versions of the content?
The most recent version in the kiwix ui is from Jan of 24. Wikimedia’s various download mirrors look like they offer stuff from largely from April or May.
You guys all downloaded offline versions of Wikipedia…right?
𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠I did that once and then installed it onto my Nintendo DS.
win95Seriously? I need this on my DS now too but I think it’d be a huge file
Oh yeah, you need one of those cards that takes an SD card. I think you do need the nopic download to keep the filesize manageable.
You find the nopic version is still usable? I haven’t used the offline content, but I feel like no images would leave me wanting more. Then again, for what it is, it’s still pretty awesome, and I understand that storage space is a consideration.
Yeah, most of the pages is text anyway.
Thank you! I love this idea
140ish gigs for the kiwix copy
That’s not huge, but I recently ran into some issues of my DS lite not accepting a too big SD card
JackbyDevThe size of the latest version of articles (no history) and without any media (as in pictures and videos) is pretty small. It’s less than 200 GB.
Yeaaa, but even then, wikipedia is still someone else’s version of reality.
Do you have a link to another site that’s an encyclopedia of human history and reality that has been vetted and is properly sourced?
Wikipedia has ALWAYS been a war front, and not a reliable source of info.
Wikipedia is the least unreliable, accessible source of information by a long shot.
I don’t even know a single contender that maintains similar scope, accuracy and accessibility.
Looking for a single source for all information is the pitfall. Wikipedia has and always been internet war on “narratives” whatever the field may be. It is perhaps a starting point for most generic of things. But when it comes to topics that are related to or with implications in cultural, political, geopolitics etc in nature, there is information war going on. And the winners are usually the side with the most number of people writing on wiki. To trust it as the ultimate source of facts would make one fallable to a more sophisticated form of influencing that we see on social media.
What would you then consider to be a “reliable source of information”? It sounds like your criteria for that are so high that it’s unlikely anything would reach up to that level. After all, should we ever trust any source as “the ultimate source of facts”? If all you wanted to point out was that noone can absolutely trust all of Wikipedia then fine I guess, but I would hope and doubt almost anyone here would have that mindset.
I would also say that many Wiki pages have a mix of overall neutral or positive-leaning text about the subject while e.g. a criticism section includes very good negative-leaning info. As an example, the Disney page (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walt_Disney_Company) has mostly neutral or positive information about the company, no doubt much of which is written by Disney fans. But it also has a good and sometimes savage criticism and controversies section. I have of course seen Wiki articles that are very skewed, but I’ve also seen very skewed research articles, lexicon entries etc. Wikipedia’s rules and the community of moderators trying to apply them as best as they can gives it a better chance than many other sources to correct in time at least.
Another point is that less and less counts as “the most generic of things”. The basic facts of biological development, evolution, even meteorology and chemistry are being increasingly questioned with nonsense. There is an immense value in all the hard work poured into improving, spreading and preserving that “generic” information. Wikipedia is a collective treasure shared with all the world. It shouldn’t be taken as gospel, nothing should like you point out, but despite its imperfections it’s worth so, so much.
Reminder that Wikipedia is not a source, its just a bunch of nerds creating version of reality through consensus*
*and its easy to just create sockpuppets and pretend you are different editors when they are all just one person (or organization), and manufacture a false consensus
I’d need a source on that.
Damn the downvotes. Where is OP wrong?
Wikipedia CEO literally said that’s what he wants. He wants people to debate. He’s done interviews where he doesn’t want a single person to be the source of truth. The chaos is what brings consensus.
You have to be stupid if you don’t think companies don’t pay people for this. It’s really not difficult to hire a “Reputation Management” team to sprinkle positive information or at least control it. Im in team meetings about it, where we have staff members who moderate major social groups and lie about endorsements.
While it’s correct to say that wikipedia is not an “original” source, it’s disingenuous and / or hyperbole to suggest that “it’s a bunch of nerds creating a version of reality”.
The vast majority of hours invested into wikipedia are provided by volunteers who believe in the freedom of accurate, factual, unbiased information.
Of course the quality or balance of information is threatened by bad actors, but significant resources are invested in mitigating that threat. This post is a great example of cautious, transparent editorial decisions.
It isn’t easy to create sockpuppets because in case of a fight like here, Wikipedia decisions are taken by the oldest members. 20 new accounts can’t override the decision of a 10 years old account with a lot of contributions.
Wikipedia has its issues, but not this one.
souperkAre there any other, less biased, sources on the topic?
After skimming through the decision of the arbitration comitee, I feel there more than a few inconsistencies in the article.
A quick google search revealed only Isreal friendly sources covering the decision…
I haven’t looked but this sounds like something that only Israel-friendly-sources would find news worthy.
To everyone else it’s just trolls getting banned.
Wikipedia was right in calling the ADL untrustworthy.
Fuck the whole conflict. Nobody will fucking solve the conflict by posting on the internet, but we are getting so many idiots spouting propaganda, misinformation and utter nonsense. Nothing good will come out of discussing this over 100 year old clusterfuck of a conflict online and nothing good will come from pushing a shit agenda into Wikipedia. The best way to deal with it is to just ignore everything about it.
Elrecoal19_0You can ignore politics, but politics won’t ignore you