4 ms·
Honestly, what kind of harm was it?
by kunley 1y ago
Honestly, what kind of harm was it?
- varjag 1y agoIf you let astroturfing happen on Wikipedia grounds it'll become a piece of useless crap just like the much of the rest of Internet. If you read the report you'll learn that the promoters weren't content just with their own entry but tried to sneak in references into unrelated popular articles.
- decimalenough 1y agoYup. From the report: On the English Wikipedia alone, Woodard’s name was inserted into no fewer than 93 articles, including Pliers, Brown pelican and Bundesautobahn 38.
- kunley 1y agoDidn't know that. I was referring to translations, which while being silly seem not that much of an issue. After all he provided the content in multiple languages (I know, I know)
- gpvos 1y agoOne incident like this is not a huge problem, but it sets a terrible precedent that could turn Wikipedia into the same sludge as the rest of the internet. Best to nip this kind of thing in the bud.
- rchard2scout 1y agoIt also does harm to the communities of smaller Wikipedias: 'a user from the Tumbuka Wikipedia reported that they had initially felt "hope and joy that a small community had then gained another native editor", before finding out that this account had been a promotional sockpuppet.'
- jdranczewski 1y agoAllowing mass machine translation of Wikipedia articles into other languages is a problem, because it floods smaller language wikis with low quality text. If a user wants machine translated pages, they can machine translate them themselves.
- Levitz 1y agoReminds me of those "Edit Wikipedia as homework" college assignments.