Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Admin's Manipulation "Messed Up Perhaps 15,000 Students' Lives"
Andreas Kolbe writes: Recently, "ArbCom", Wikipedia's highest court, banned an administrator account that for years had been manipulating the Wikipedia article of a bogus Indian business school – deleting criticism, adding puffery, and enabling the article to become a significant part of the school's PR strategy. Believing the school's promises and advertisements, families went to great expense to send sons and daughters on courses there – only for their children to find that the degrees they had gained were worthless. "In my opinion, by letting this go on for so long, Wikipedia has messed up perhaps 15,000 students' lives," an Indian journalist quoted in the story says. India is one of the countries where tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet, making Wikipedia a potential gatekeeper.
without further fact checking, is a complete idiot.
Or as Ronald Reagan once said, "Trust, but verify."
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Here in the US, colleges still send thick glossy booklets full of pretty pictures of campus locations students will hardly ever see in rare weather conditions with attractive and diverse people they'll never meet. Then we wonder why we have millions of non-STEM graduates serving coffee and whining about "student debt relief" for their useless degree(s). To me, all the "extra" college grads we have in the country are a much bigger deal than "just" 15K people getting a little wiser on how the world really works.
... are bogus as far as I can tell.
I've worked with plenty of Indian engineers (mechanical, electronic, and software) over the past 30+ years, and my general impression is that at least 50% have no knowledge of the subject matter at all. As far as I could tell they simply purchased a document claiming they had a degree. So, this appears to be just another example.
"Verifiability not truth" is the shelter biased and power-hungry Wikipedia editors hide behind. Post an article or fact they don't like and they'll do their level best to claim it's not a good source using nebulous definitions and intra-Wiki politics. The author of a cited article can himself say, "that's not what I meant" and it will be rejected. One symptom of this source problem is a lack of consistently followed, useful guidelines for source material. Oh, there are guideline, they're just not consistently followed and entrenched interests have allowed their definitions of a good source to slide to support various point of view various editors want to push. NPOV is a religion they follow like a Baptist in his cups.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I think the problem is that there is a lose affiliation. Wikipedia is responsible for what its employees, paid or unpaid do. The administrators are not just members of the general public, wikimedia gives them special privileges. The administrator in this case seems to have had an affiliation with the school, and was doing things at wikipeida to lie for/about the school.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Ive worked with numerous indian H1B holders. The ones that are smart enough to apply for citizenship and get the hell out of whatever indentured servitude theyve been thrust into are the ones I love working with. Eloquently spoken as always, they will be the ones that bring insight and technical expertise along for any meeting or project.
On the other hand, ive had many experiences with ESL H1B holders that amounted to nothing short of a phone tech in the states. Any H1B hired for any oracle product for example is a roll of the dice. Ive worked with a senior level RDBM that after an entire year of working on a project and requesting funding, quit when it was revealed the funding had all been directly applied to Oracle Gold support and remote hands. H1B sysadmins that just reboot servers all day long to fix problems, or feverishly post to message boards with an irate "please respond immediately" seem to be the bulk of what ive encountered in linux and unix. Ive been present for meeting room meltdowns and phantom disappearances where H1B holders just quit showing up for a project as well.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Here, just for you, a quote from the Slashdot headline itself, not even the article:
> India is one of the countries where tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet, making Wikipedia a potential gatekeeper.
How do you say "Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia" in Hindi?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Their facebook page is driving a pro-feminist agenda, and welcoming women-only posts in wikipedia under the guise of promoting "gender diversity". Last time I checked, promoting a diversity of something is welcoming from all sides, and nobody ever was preventing some sexes to use wikipedia. It is really a nice strategy to flip the bird to the people who most helped you grow. I have contributed to wikipedia in the past, but I am done with them.
There are lots of Wikipedia admins who are social entrepreneurs of one form or another. This should be clear if you think about the fact that they are not getting paid for this. Sure there are idealists; but there are also lots of admins who get their reward out of the fact that they can use Wikipedia to influence public opinion – via the top Google search result – in line with their social, commercial or political agenda, and do so anonymously. No one should be surprised by this. You get what you pay for.
Wrong. Administrators are not employees, they are volunteers taking on extra jobs, nominally to execute the rules established by the community as a whole. In a community of mostly pseudonymous volunteers it can be very difficult to detect and respond to conflicts of interest in such people. Still, the community needs to find a way to do better.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
can be found in this article by Mridula Chari on scroll.in: Wikipedia bans editor for consistent bias in favour of Arindam Chaudhuri's IIPM. Includes some more details on goings-on in the Indian-language Wikipedias (Marathi etc.)
The impoverished people living in rural areas, without affordable access to the Internet, and the people that can afford to send their kids to this school, are probably disjoint sets.
One might even blame Indian journalists, like the one who is quoted in this article blaming Wikipedia, for not better informing the public about legitimate and scam educational institutions.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The problem with your perspective is that you want one party to carry all the blame. Pointing out that someone made a stupid decision (your label of "blaming the victim") does not mean that the other parties do not have responsibility.
Spread the blame to everyone that made poor choices: Indian Institute of Planning and Management, Wikipedia and those that enrolled without verifying their expectations.
Victim idolizing has got to stop.
Actually, the Just World Hypothesis (link ironically to Wikipedia) can help to explain the cognitive process behind the behavior that you observe with regards to "victim blaming". I found it fascinating when I first read about it (probably here on /.)
Read the summary:
The only site that is available to many people. The only other available source would be PR stuff from that very school.
Trying to cross check the promises in some school leafl3eats using a usually trustworthy (and the only available) source isn't a masterpiece, but within the available means, "due diligence"
bickerdyke
Come on folks. Please verify your Wikipedia finds with something reliable. I use Reddit!
Why EXACTLY is this a troll post mods? We are talking about poor people whose only access to online info is a Wikipedia under the control of scammers...I don't see how they can be seen as anything BUT innocent victims....yet we see post after post blaming them because they didn't have the wealth to do the research YOU take for granted...want to blame them for being dirty and brown while you're at it?
If anybody should be considered trolls its those jackholes that always blame the victim, which sadly we see here every.single.time. there is a post here where somebody was preyed upon by somebody else.
As for TFA...if Wikipedia has any kind of morals at all they would demand their name be taken off of Wikipedia Zero and the site shut down, since they obviously aren't willing to spend any of the millions Jimbo is constantly begging for to actually police the site, only acting AFTER the article was called out by the Indian press and judiciary.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I don't think that blaming the victim is inherently immoral. There are several moral codes, including the Abrahamic faiths, that include some aspect of blaming the victim. For instance rape victims are supposed to be stoned to death, under most circumstances. Basically, if they are within earshot of others, then obviously they didn't yell loud enough, so they should be punished. There's an allowance for a woman who is outside walking around beyond where others can hear her. I disagree with this specific rule, but there is obviously room for debate on whether or not blaming the victim is immoral.
I happen to think it is perfectly reasonable for those who have not done due diligence to bear some of the burden when they get scammed. For instance, if I give money to somebody soliciting at my doorstep for a charity I've never heard of, I share some of the responsibility for my loss. Worse, I have given a scammer funds with which to propagate their misdeeds to more victims. I think this position is perfectly moral.
Saying somebody is not moral just because they don't share the same morals as you is fallacious at best, and quite possibly hypocritical. I think it's immoral to cut off the hand of a thief. I think it's immoral to commit adultery. I think it's immoral to pay CEO's 100x what their laborers make. But if you happen to think that these things are A-OK, it doesn't make you an immoral person. It just means we have different values.
Perhaps that's because all of the blame naturally falls on one party. Remove all stupidity from the world and there will still be crime. Remove all the crime from the world and there is none.
Stupidity is contextual anyway and accurate judgments of it don't cross cultural and social barriers readily. In some places, leaving your door unlocked is not at all stupid. Locking your door borders on criminal in some places. In some places wasting your time and energy locking up your tools at the end of the day is stupid. In others, not doing so would be stupid. The constant though is that the person who steals your stuff is in the wrong.
Consider, in small places, that is places where you can actually know everyone there and where communication with the outside is limited, caveat emptor often does not really apply. No merchant in that situation is going to risk being run out of town over a few small items. Just imagine one day that small place gets a connection to the internet. To you and me, actually responding to a spam is stupid. There's no way you won't get ripped off. But to the people in that small place, there is nothing stupid about it. It's simply a novel situation they are ignorant of.
Spoken like someone who can't even begin to imagine living somewhere that doesn't have ubiquitous communication with the outside world.
Forget the Internet - find some folks in the area who graduated from this school, and ask them directly how useful their degree is. Seems pretty effing simple, doesn't it? Even if you have to travel a little or call long distance to do it, a little money spent now saves a ton of cash spent later.
India:
Surface area 3,287,590 km2
Population 1,210,193,422
[Source]
If a young university/school teaches 1000 students a year and has been going (for example) for 10 years, that's around 10,000 alumni in total. In a country of over a billion people, that's just over 0.0008% of the population. One in every 121,019 people. What are the chances of finding people who graduated from the school?
Imagine you're sitting in Guin, Alabama, and you want to know about the reputation of Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. Are you going to just "find some folks in the area who graduated from this school"? That's what you're talking about here.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Bullshit. From the article: "Students paid up to $15,000 for IIPM’s courses."
So they can plunk down $15,000 in fees but can't "afford data charges" to do a tiny bit of non-wikipedia research on what that $15,000 is going to get them?
Again, bullshit.
Wikipedia Zero has not been launched in India. Check the map.
The article does not say that Wikipedia Zero is their only connection to the internet just that it is free. If one has enough money to spend on tuition to a business school one probably has enough money to do a Google search to verify a Wikipedia entry.
they also had been led to believe that they had researched by drinking from the unerring fountain of all human knowledge.
Anyone who still believes that needs help.
I can only guess that it is something to do with the whole Ayn Rand/superman philosophy beloved of software developer libertarians.
"I make a few hundred thousand a year because I got a Computer Science degree and work in silicon Valley, therefore so can anyone else, and someone who is not at least reasonably rich is just a loser responsible for their own poverty, stupidity and poor choice of career and domicile."
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it