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Facebook, Axios and NBC Paid to Whitewash Wikipedia Pages
- Thorondor 8y agoSussman's Wikipedia contribution history is available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/BC1278 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/BC1278
- deathhand 8y agoThat you know of. Who knows how many sock puppet accounts they may have. Heck it could even be an additional fee 'well for an extra 10k I will create a new personality that isn't tied to anything'
- djmips 8y agoThat's what I would suspect. The main thrust is above board but why not tip the balance by corrupting Wikipedia editors or having a shadow stable of editors.
- fvjft 8y agoBlindly trusting what you read on Wikipedia is like blindly trusting what you read on the media. And I don't think there's much we can do to avoid it. Because conventional wisdom says more education will fix it. But wasn't there a study that showed that even highly educated people believe anything that confirms their biases?
- deathhand 8y agoTrusting something is inherently different then being provided information. Lets say I pump a state's aquifers dry to bottle water and there is a scandal about it. If I remove that information from the common information repository about my company is that ok?
- fvjft 8y agoIt's not okay, but that's not the point I'm making. What I'm saying is that people shouldn't take what they read in that "common information repository" at face value, because it can be edited by anybody. Hell, even if editing was restricted to a certain group of people, how do you know those people aren't being paid to lie or omit information? (i.e. what happens with the media)
- thundergolfer 8y agoYes that's basically true about people being susceptible to bias, regardless of education level, though highly educated people still perform better at critical understanding. Education is still the way to go, obviously.
- thegeomaster 8y agoOn the bright side, Wikipedia is great for learning about technical subjects because there's rarely (if ever) an agenda associated with that.
- roel_v 8y agoLol. Technical articles are the worst, there is always someone who needs to push their open source/free software morals and agenda on anything software-related.
- Dahoon 8y agoYou behave very much like those you accuse.
- wongarsu 8y ago> because there's rarely (if ever) an agenda associated with that. I wouldn't be so sure about that. SLS (the upcoming government funded rocket) is mostly a product of politics and lobbying and as such a very political subject. Quantum physics seems like an objective field until we start discussing funding for the next particle accelerator. Discussions about PHP have never been sane, even without Facebook having vested interest one way or the other. The laws of thermodynamics seem largely undisputed until the perpetual motion crowd starts another edit war. It's easier to determine facts in technical subjects, making the work of good Wikipedia mods easier. But that doesn't mean they are free of agendas or that those agendas don't influence Wikipedia
- pjc50 8y agoEducation is a lagging effect. What you put into the public school system today will take 50+ years to feed through to the pensioners with higher voter turnout. People have great difficulty operating in low-trust environments. It takes a lot of work and is mentally draining to check everything, to distrust your co-workers and family and correct them when they start talking about the flat earth. Far better to stop the falsehoods being dripped into the public sphere in the first place.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>Education is a lagging effect. What you put into the public school system today will take 50+ years to feed through to the pensioners with higher voter turnout. My brother and I went to high school in different states. The obvious differences in the education we got about politically charged topics was disgusting. The state I went to school in basically omitted anything that could lead one to question the government's decision making the way religious schools sometimes "forget" to teach evolution. It wasn't like they neglected to mention the Indian wars or Japanese internment in the 3rd grade because those are heavy topics for 3rd graders, they just gave those sort of things got a quick mention and no assigned work specific to them or serious discussion. They repeatedly failed to mention (early grades) or downplayed any legitimacy (later grades) of any grievance with the government. In retrospect they conspicuously skipped the 14th amendment (you know, the one that protects people from state encroachment on rights) because there's a very short path from it to some tough questions. Edit: Come to think of it the one history teacher I had who actually promoted critical thinking grew up out of state.
- badhatter 8y agoIt goes both ways though. In blue states You have some kids that are taught nothing of world war 2 but are taught everything about the civil war and slavery. Among other trends in educating differences. There are many more. Extreme right / Extreme left are both bad. Any extreme anti-another ideology is just asking for problems.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
- sam_goody 8y agoThe greater the agenda, the less you can rely on the data. But the agenda is not always obvious. I edited a technical subject [some 10+ years ago], and within minutes(!!) it had been changed again to a variant of what was originally there, I presume by a bot. Some further research taught me that the technical issue was actually a sensitive one for various new age groups. Since there is no way I could ever hope to manually compete with a team of scripted adversaries, I gave up. Taught me something about Wikipedia. Note: I have other edits that have been up for years, so not at all absolute.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 8y ago>Some further research taught me that the technical issue was actually a sensitive one for various new age groups. Please elaborate!
- gbear605 8y agoThere’s a decent chance it wasn’t a bot. I have about a hundred pages on my Wikipedia watch list, and I get emails everytime a change is made to them. I check each one for whether it is a good change or not. An unfortunately high percentage are not (and by not good change, I mean unambiguous things like typing random gibberish).
- Diederich 8y agoAre you comfortable saying what the technical subject was?
- cjslep 8y agoI'm currently reading Manufacturing Consent which to me shows how dangerous blindly following the mass media can be in a rigorous manner without requiring one to become a conspiracy theorist. There's certain ways to effectively critically read newspaper articles that I was taught at a young age and it's definitely a learned skill that I wish the US education system did better with.
- wongarsu 8y ago> without requiring one to become a conspiracy theorist. People conspire all the time, so shouldn't any sane person suspect some conspiracies? Hijacking the word "conspiracy theorist" to mean nut job seems like exactly the twisting of reality you are advocating to avoid.
- omeid2 8y agocounterconspiracy (noun) : a conspiracy to oppose or undermine something (such as another conspiracy) The big agencies are pretty well versed on this, look at the system approach they take on this one: https://jfkfacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Countering-Warren-critics-040167.pdf https://jfkfacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Countering-W... It is not the details of this specific conspiracy that is interesting, but the systematic approach to tackling it.
- Vinnl 8y agoIn this context, I interpret "conspiracy theorist" as someone who thinks there are relatively large groups of people conspiring, without the majority of people being aware of that. A small conspiracy when playing Diplomacy is believable, but e.g. one in which everyone behind mass media has agreed to put forward a certain message is not. Thus (not having read it myself), Manufacturing Consent could show how emergent properties of mass media might lead to them pushing a certain incorrect world view, rather than proposing a theory that requires the teams behind them to all agree to conspire and none of them to make that public knowledge.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
- reshie 8y agoeven geniuses can be fooled though they are just more likely able to disern right information and think critically about what is being presented but people are not masters of everything nor have the time to disect everything. there are times also when there are not multiple sources and yet true. but you are right blind trust is a fallacy but trust to some extant is necessary. biases has nothing to do with education but one may be more aware of them but i think thats more of a understanding of self or the human condition the scientific method tries to promote undiased results though but they do of course seep in.
- dredmorbius 8y agoI stumbled across an 1874 editorial rewvise war between the British authors and American publisher of Chamber's Encyclopaedia, which provides rare insight into the disagreements over and politicisation of information and its dissemination. My commentary: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chambers_encyclopaedia_editorial_statement/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber... Source: https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n13/mode/1up https://archive.org/stream/chambersencyclo00unkngoog#page/n1... The power to define narrative has always been immense.
- JProthero 8y agoThat was an interesting read for me – thanks for the link. I'm interested in how the centuries-old debate about protectionism and free trade has reignited over the past few years, and I'm also concerned about how Wikipedia's editorial community and processes are evolving. It was a surprise to see the two subjects combined like this, but given what you say about the power to define narrative, I suppose it shouldn't have been.
- dredmorbius 8y agoHa-Joon Chang, mentioned in my commentary, is probably among the best-informed modern scholars on the dynamics of the free trade debate. I'd shared the item with him. and he was kind enough to reply with thanks, though I'm not sure if he's made use of the example. The whole notion of narrative and its power, especially contrasted with discrete facts and fact-checking, is another area I've been exploring, arguably under the sscope of my blog's purview (intentionally both broad and vague, a blessing and curse). Douglas Ruskoff's "Team Human" blog explores this with George Monbiot here, quite well. Ep. 89 George Monbiot "Beyond Salvation and Disaster". Episode: https://shows.pippa.io/teamhuman/ep-89-george-monbiot-beyond-salvation-and-disaster https://shows.pippa.io/teamhuman/ep-89-george-monbiot-beyond... Media: https://feed.pippa.io/public/streams/58ad887a1608b1752663b04a/episodes/5b17df6eb3ae913450c0a2b7.mp3 https://feed.pippa.io/public/streams/58ad887a1608b1752663b04... The theme shows up both in the intro, at 4m30s, and in the conversation, starting at 11m30s, andcontinuing through the rest of the episode.
- pmoleri 8y agoI don't think that blindly trusting wikipedia is nearly as bad as blindly trusting media. Wikipedia, while not perfect, has a way to moderate itself. Media needs to deliver fresh and high impact news, this ends up being an incentive to replicate news from other media without fact checking or a minimum analysis. IMO while money can influence any of them, the incentives for poor content quality in media are worse.
- CM30 8y ago100% agreed with this. The 24 hour news cycle, the obsession with trends, the need for social media shares and the focus on 'get it out quick' over 'research the story well' has annihilated the quality of the media in general, and is responsible for about 80% of the problems facing journalism today.
- fakehistory 8y agoEducation is a tricky one too, considering bad actors like Mcgraw-Hill (who probably created all of your children's textbooks for elementary school) whitewashing all the things.
- deathhand 8y agoIf people are this open and brazen about it then ultimately we have passed the point of usefulness. This can be seen in social media vote farms where you pay for exposure. Once they start appearing en masse then it is the death knell of the platform. This also has a chilling effect on free speech and what an individual is allowed to know about an organization, person, company etc. As any 'trusted' source of information is now spoiled. The way we get ahead of this is do what the internet forefathers wanted to do to any problem... re-route. There are wiki clones and methinks their popularity will only grow now. This should be the chief concern for Jimmy Whales and the Wikimedia foundation if they actually cared about providing 'an encyclopedia for all' because they are no longer providing a platform for learning but rather just another corporate blog.
- oblio 8y ago> The way we get ahead of this is do what the internet forefathers wanted to do to any problem... re-route. There are wiki clones and methinks their popularity will only grow now. It's wishful thinking. In the software and internet world, once something is entrenched, it's rarely removed from first position unless it no longer serves its primary purpose to its main audience. Which Wikipedia does. It's a bit like Facebook vs Mastodon. Ask your non-techie friends about Mastodon and they'll probably go: that was a sort of elephant or dinosaur, wasn't it?
- xondono 8y agoI’m amazed of how many people share this “once stablished things never change” mentality in this forum. Most of the people reading here are either thinking of or trying or actually becoming living proof that this way of thinking is wrong. Maybe instead of asking non-techie friends about mastodon we should be asking kids about myspace..
- oblio 8y agoMyspace popped up before the market was mature and it definitely didn't have 80% market share all across the globe. Facebook might fall on its own due to user fatigue. But it will still have 1 billion users 20 year's from now :)
- l0b0 8y agoHere's a suggestion: _Allow each user to do only a certain amount of editing within a time period._ Of course there are technical difficulties with this, but if done right this would pretty much guarantee that edit farms and paid actors are much less useful. Wikipedia as a whole would probably be much more useful in the long run, since there are an absolutely massive long tail of experts in every conceivable field.
- josephg 8y agoThere's a long tail, but my understanding is that there's a core wikipedia contributor community who contribute a staggering number of edits[1]. If wikipedia limited the number of edits that each user could do, they would anger their core community. It would be similar to youtube putting a limit on the number of views each video was allowed to get. It would be suicide via the destruction of their tribe. And I don't even know if it would work that well. Per-IP edit limits would only stop PR companies with deep pockets for so long. They would do what the russians do, and just make account farms. [1] Or so I've been told. I'd love to see actual stats on this. It probably follows a Pareto distribution; but with what power? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
- Dahoon 8y ago>They would do what the russians do, and just make account farms. I'm sure whitehatwiki.com would have been called exactly that if it were from Russia or China.
- harry8 8y agoWhat a defence "I'm not the bad guy for robbing people's houses, the real bad guys rob and assault the occupants..."
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoI’m surprised Wikipedia doesn’t simply ban any communication through the Wikipedia platform itself between a person awaiting edit approval and others who could approve it. Similarly, why not put a strict word count limit on discussion on Talk pages. If you can’t make a rebuttle succinctly, then the risk of Talk page filibustering is too high and mitigating that risk matters more than letting people write diatribes of objections to decisions about edits.
- l9k 8y agoI disagree. I was surprised the conversations were public and visible on the website itself. What would be more scary, and probably happens already in other cases, is if nefarious editors organized via private channels.
- ilamont 8y agoA few people, however, have figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia’s supposedly neutral system to turn a profit. Neutral system? A few? Let's not kid ourselves here. Wikipedia is filled with bias. Yes, there are some informative articles and it's great that some people have spent a sizable chunk of time tending to the garden. But there's a lot of stuff missing, and the problems of new contributors being shut out or shut down is well-documented (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/520446/the-decline-of-wik...). As for paid/planted content, it's easy to spot certain types (fawning celebrity or corporate profiles) but others are far more subtle. And sometimes when I'm reading an apparently well-researched article on a technical, historical, or scientific topic, I wonder if some contributor way down the line had an axe to grind or is outright messing with audiences by inserting bogus information.
- snvzz 8y ago>wikipedia bias A favorite example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
- ihuman 8y agoI think thats the first time I've seen the "Extended confirmed protection" lock. > Extended confirmed protection, also known as 30/500 protection, allows edits only by editors with the extended confirmed user access level, granted automatically to registered users with at least 30 days tenure and 500 edits.
- badhatter 8y agoThis has been going on a very long time. Just take a look at any politicians Wikipedia page.
- Dahoon 8y agoIf you really want to see history rewritten on Wikipedia look at articles on US wars. Especially those about WW2 japan or war crimes by US GIs.
- sneak 8y agoFor seven years, what I strongly suspect is paid astroturfing has been up on wikipedia for one of the largest hotel/casino conglomerates on the Las Vegas strip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Las_Vegas_Sands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Las_Vegas_Sands It surprised me that nobody had added the “reads like an advertisement” template in all that time, so I did. Get out there and be vigilant.
- Dahoon 8y agoBut you could add “reads like an advertisement” on most things about/from/in the US. Reading the same articles in other languages gives a completely different picture. Wikipedia in English is heavily biased.
- tim333 8y agoWikipedia works quite well in spite of that though. The Sands article looks like it was written by a company employee / PR which I'm not sure is quite astroturfing. Depends on your definitions I guess. It reminds me of a page I put up on the company Algenol which I thought interesting as it was trying to make ethanol direct from algae and sunlight and saying it would be cheaper than regular fuel. Then the whole thing got rewritten by someone like Algenol's PR and someone flagged it but I couldn't be bothered to re-edit the whole thing - takes ages. Then Algenol kind of failed, fired the boss and went on to other things. Not sure how the page is now.
- jessriedel 8y agoCan someone link to a particularly egregious example of an untrue/non-POV/non-verifiable Sussman edit, or an in-bad-faith comment? So far the ones I see are basically reasonable.
- lordlimecat 8y agoTheir complaint seems to be that theyre reasonable but spun in the opposite direction. It's a fair point, but ignores that language like "X inaccurately reported Y" has its own angle. Maybe the reporter in question is generally quite accurate, and got a bad source. Should that context be included, or not, and is that spin? In other words, HuffPo is pretending that there's such a thing as being neutral, which is ironic considering how bad they are at it.
- jessriedel 8y agoYea, exactly. We don't expect reasonably accurate articles to arise because all editors are perfectly unbiased, we expect them to be created by the interaction of (inevitably) biased editors coming to a reasonable consensus.
- jakelazaroff 8y agoI think we also expect editors to be acting in good faith, though. The consensus in this case isn't reached because of an inevitable difference of opinion; one side has been paid to take his position. It's essentially astroturfing.
- jessriedel 8y agoBeing paid is not the same as acting in bad faith. Being paid is one potential source of bias, and happens to be one that is strong and particularly easy to objectively define (as opposed to, say, bias from one's political opinions). Everyone is biased, but some people at some times are acting in good faith despite their biases. The point of my comment is that you can't divide the world up into biased and unbiased, label the biased part astroturfing (or whatever), prohibit it, and then expect a nice unbiased outcome. Rather, everyone is biased in their own ways and to varying degrees. The good outcome come from the truth-tracking aspects of the process, not from have unbiased inputs.
- lordlimecat 8y ago>casual racism depository Nextdoor I think Sussman is getting edits approved because (at first glance) they're substantially better written and still fall within the bounds of dispassionate writing. Maybe Huffington Post could use some lessons in that, if their idea of journalism is to randomly drop not-dispassionate digs at Nextdoor with neither context nor justification.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- elfakyn 8y agoThe problem is that people often conflate dispassionate writing with neutral writing, which makes a biased dispassionate edit much more likely to get through.
- altfredd 8y agoSussman isn't "getting edits approved". He is literally bribing other editors in open. Ever wrote anything on Wikipedia talk pages? Unless you are commenting on article with hundred thousands of daily views, your comments will remain ignored for years. Nobody is going to "implement your suggestions" or "accept corrections", —at best you will be ignored, and at worst you will be told to f##k off in Wikipedia's politically correct newspeak. Who are the people, implementing his changes to pages? A certain number are of course bots and sock puppets. But relying on those exclusively is risky, and he would eventually get discovered and singled out by mods and check-users. So some of his editors got to be real people. Does he have an actual team of editors working on keeping articles updated full time through series of proxies? Probably not, — would be too expensive and also prone to ban. Let's perform a mental experiment: you are a poor sod in Cambodia/North Korea/Thailand etc. who have recently discovering a beauty of Wikipedia. You look at the talk page of "Facebook" article and stumble upon comments of some guy, who says, that he is a representative of dedicated PR company. You make some quick calculations: your daily wage is several orders of magnitude smaller than average US wage, and the guy is probably getting paid A LOT of money by Facebook and the likes; going to darknet to regularly buy a new bunch of "proxies" (hacked computers in US residential areas) will costs you $XX per month; if you get him to pay you $YY, the rest of money will be your net profit... You can guess the rest.
- booleandilemma 8y agoThe problem is that all sources of information are biased. And it’s worse than that. People you meet on the street are biased. Your own friends are biased. I’m biased. People that claim they’re unbiased are definitely biased. Everyone has an angle, everyone has their own personal and cultural historical baggage that’s going to color their perception of everything from commercials to politics. It’s up to you to think critically, get information from multiple diverse sources, and form your own (biased) opinion, and always, always, be skeptical.
- minikites 8y agoThat requires a level of media and information literacy that is evidently uncommon in the general public.
- roman_g 8y agoAt least they are biased consistently and they truly believe they are not. When you agree to say and protect a set of views and facts carefully described in a contract... it's another thing.
- narag 8y agoThe problem is that all sources of information are biased. I disagree. Maybe everybody is biased. But the problem's just not that one. Judges and juries are biased, but we still trust them with Justice, that means deciding on life and freedom for many. The problem is not bias, but giving up to bias instead of trying to overcome it. And of course if you got paid by a party in the controversy, you should know you've given up any hope of honesty.
- stevespang 8y agoSussman get's paid more than the amount of the bribes used by the wealthy to get their kids into colleges
- saltvedt 8y agoMy project, the news aggregater Cited News (https://cited.news/ https://cited.news/), uses Wikipedia references as source for news.
- aboutruby 8y agoCool project, but I don't see the link with the article apart from being related to Wikipedia. It might be better off as a Show HN.
- saltvedt 8y agoI tried adding it: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Facebook&type=revision&diff=887903150&oldid=887791830 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Facebook&type=rev... The article is dated on 14. of March though, so it should not appear on the front page but here: https://cited.news/wikipedia_pages/date/2019-03-14 https://cited.news/wikipedia_pages/date/2019-03-14
- babyslothzoo 8y agoDoes anyone take Wikipedia seriously at this point? Calling Wikipedia 'neutral' is comical, it's full of opinion, ideology, bias, misinformation, disinformation, astroturfing, and other nonsense noise and utter garbage.
- unethical_ban 8y agoI wouldn't bet my PhD on it, or get the entirety of my education on a complex subject from it. Though it has a TON of factually correct statements. It is a good starting point for a ton of stuff, and I would never wish it to be gone.
- IronWolve 8y agoWikipedia reflects what people believe to be the Truth, so historical or news are often filled with mistakes and half-truths. My favorite wikipedia deletion was an armchair historian who would correct common myths, such as Canada did not have Troops in the Vietnam war. He would even link to the Canadian military site that listed medals to soldiers station in Vietnam. He kept getting all his updates reversed, as the perceived fact was the only one allowed. His proof was discarded. He finally gave up, and only updated his personal comment page. And then the wikipedia did a personal page purge to stop searches from showing personal pages. Coincidence? I doubt it. Those who control the history books they say.
- andThenHN 8y agoAnd then there's HN...
- Rebelgecko 8y agoThere's been a couple times that I've revisited a Wikipedia article and noticed that someone had erased a negative section about a person or organization. I've always wondered if it was organic or part of a larger for-pay effort