The sooner you understand that Jimmy's agenda is "more money in Jimmy's wallet", the sooner you will be able to figure out the plan with Wikitribune (owned by "Jimmy Group Ltd").
The difference being -- Jimmy can't skim money off the top of Wikinews (so they are immaterial to him). He can skim money off the top of all these rubes donating to Wikitribune, because the money is all going to (I kid you not) "Jimmy Group Ltd". He is a shyster of the first order.
Also, due to Wikinews being non-profit, Jimbo can't skim an income off the top. With Wikitribune (owned by "Jimmy Group Ltd" -- I kid you not), all of the money will be in Jimbo's wallet, and he'll dole it out as he sees fit.
And painfully accurate.
How about Jimbo's plan to "fix" mean and ugly Internet comments? That was something called CiviliNation, a failed non-profit he set up with his girlfriend (not sure he was even divorced at the time).
On Reddit a few days ago, this was mentioned, and Jimbo insisted that he was the "primary funder" of CiviliNation. Let's see... 2010 Form 990: $25,420 in contributions; 2011: $12,240; 2012: $15,500; 2013: $24,568; 2014: $4,700. All summarized here: https://projects.propublica.or...
That's a total of $82,428.
If Jimbo were the "primary funder", let's say that's at least 50%, or $41,215. So, if he donated over $41K to CiviliNation, during a period that his gal-pal Weckerle took $63,228 in salary, and there were total contributions of $82,428, he's basically saying he bankrolled most of Andrea Weckerle's personal income from CiviliNation, with tax-deductible dollars. Which accomplished what? CiviliNation.org is barely a functioning website any more -- the last blog post was 13 months ago. Jimbo was so charitably inept that he forked over -- at a minimum -- $41,215 to a failed attempt to "fix" online civility that ultimately accomplished not much more than keeping his girlfriend Andrea in food, clothes, and shelter for a few years. With tax-deductible dollars, no less! And now he wants us to fund his *FOR-PROFIT* plan to "fix" journalism?
It's just sad. And pathetic.
The government that I pay taxes to has exempted this money-making scam as an "educational charity". If the scam artists are getting a tax exemption, while I have to pay full freight to the government, then that frankly gives me the right to do something more than just "don't use it".
This does *not* automatically mean that they are somehow wasting this money, giving its employees lavish salaries, or anything of the sort. It means we do not know. No amount of ridiculous theorising will change that.
I'm curious, would you call this known scandal to be "ridiculous theorising"?
I'm one of the comparatively few editors of Wikipedia who gets paid for my editing work. It only makes sense that as a "thank you", I should send a token of financial appreciation at fundraising time. Yet, when I try to send the Wikimedia Foundation a donation, they return it to me within the hour.
Even if they are reliable at serving up content, it's still content that is highly suspect in terms of accuracy.
One systematic survey of vandalism showed the thoughtfully-formatted vandalism will last at least for weeks, over 60% of the time:
http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...
Anyone see the hypocrisy of a politician who wants to restore an elective democratic government, so that it can champion gun-control laws and climate remediation, hiring an avowed anti-government, pro-gun Libertarian to rattle the cup for the politician? There will certainly be thousands of nitwits duped into giving money to this campaign, but the majority of observers will see it for what it is -- a fundraising drive for the personal aggrandizement of Lessig and Wales, which is *disguised* as a political movement.
Before you keep throwing money at the Wikimedia Foundation, educate yourself on whether they actually NEED any more money: http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...
Wikipedia is very strong on a very narrow set of articles: non-controversial scientific...
Really? Is that like how Wikipedia's article on inflammation said that pain in the inflamed tissue is caused by volcanic rock that is produced by the body? (And it said that for weeks on end, viewed about 100,000 times.)
Please, stop the mythology that Wikipedia is "very strong" on any set of articles.
http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...
> Good luck in life! Sounds like you have a really
> pleasant relationship with a special someone!
Said the guy who spends his weekends looking for the most uninteresting paragraphs of Wikipedia so he can make edits no one will care about. And then blogs about it.:-p
And then extensively quoted by a Washington Post journalist, leading to Slashdot fame, and even a small band of critical groupies. Indeed!
That sounds like a wasted opportinuty. You should have just deleted the information with a quick edit note of "deleting incorrect information" and seen how many times you could get into an edit war with someone trying to restore it.
No wasted opportunity -- my very first few reversions amply showed how a "mechanical personality" editor like Hell in a Bucket can react foolishly to vandalism -- or vandalism removal. Here's a nice actual photo of Mr. Hell in a Bucket: http://b.pcc2.fubar.com/61/97/...
Sorry that your view is not shared by Caitlin Dewey, then. Good luck in life! Sounds like you have a really pleasant relationship with a special someone!
And you've ignored the articles on Inflammation (100,000 page views, nine edits following the misinformation being inserted), Up in the Air (72,000 page views, 13 subsequent edits), and Newcastle upon Tyne (40,000 page views, and a whopping 74 subsequent edits). These were not "dusty little corners" of Wikipedia, as you'd like to believe.
You're not here to discuss reasonably. You're here to pretend you're smarter than me, or something.
No one knows if you made 30 or 500 edits. Or if twenty previous tests were flops. (To do it properly, you should have informed someone before doing the test.)
And then you chose which pages and which facts to edit. (With a clear interest in these changes going unnoticed.)
No one knows how selective you're being in these posts which feed your business's interests.
There is nothing reliable, scientific, or objective about your tests.
I see now that you are trolling, unworthy of reply. But, I'll at least say that I did inform the public before doing the test. I don't know how adding "seven carcasses of [[Welsh Corgi]] dogs that have been sacrificed with a [[khanda (sword)|khanda]] sword heated to at least 400 degrees Fahrenheit" to an article reflects a "clear interest in going unnoticed". It sounds like you're afraid to look at my documentation. I never promised that my experiment was scientific, but it was systematic, and the results are reliable, because they are simply "the results".
You sound a lot like a number of gravely underemployed 20-somethings living with their parents, whom I've encountered on Wikipedia. I get the great sense that you are jealous of the appeal, the orderliness, and the publicity of my experiment. Sorry, but that problem is on you to solve.
And guess who created the first interwiki linking configuration on Wikipedia, for the Wikia domain? None other than Angela Beesley, co-founder of Wikia (with Jimmy Wales).
And, by the way, guess how much of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees was populated by key players from Wikia, Inc. or Bomis -- the for-profit corporations of Jimbo Wales?
Indeed -- http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... -- see that that edit "got attention", like you said. Then a bot removed the concern. Then an IP address "gave attention" again. Then I changed it back again, and it stuck for a month until I disclosed the misinformation in my blog post. Your notion that "attention equals quick correction" doesn't hold water, at least in that case. (Though it's an obvious true-ish pattern.)
Thing is, I systematically tested the system.
You've provided your personal hunch. You are welcome to your opinions, of course.
I'll take my method over yours, thank you.
On the rare occasions that a "hoax" article such as "Jar'Edo Wens" stays around, it's because no one is visiting it.
No visits means it wasn't actually fooling anyone, so there was no hoax. It was just a dusty page, so dead and forgotten that no one had even thought of tagging it for deletion yet.
Truth is that there are very few people in the world who will bother inserting 30 hoax factoids into Wikipedia, and most people that try would get spotted quickly. It's very easy to spot suspicious contributors, and once you do then it's easy to check their other contributors.
Some of the misinformation that I inserted in the experiment was persisting on pages that got tens of thousands of page views. Granted, not every page-viewing session means that the specific misinformation will be read and cognitively evaluated by the reader, but let's just say that even 5% of page views led to a reader acquiring the misinformation. This still means that little old me was able to misinform a few thousand readers with an experiment that took me about four or five hours to set up. Had I not halted the experiment, many thousands more would have been misinformed.
You may comfort yourself with the notion that "there are very few people in the world" who will do what I did. But, then you discover the "Qworty" editor fiasco. Then the "Wifione" editor fiasco. Then the "Jagged85" editor fiasco (an editor who falsified so many articles, the Wikipedia community created a "cleanup template" to paste on the articles he touched, in hopes that it would facilitate restoration to truth). Each of these editors manipulated numerous pages, affecting thousands of people's intake of "knowledge". Nonetheless, the Wikimedia Foundation stands back, cajoling the volunteer editors to "keep up the good work" fighting vandals, while doing nothing themselves to implement features that would stifle vandalism. And the Foundation's savings account increased by nearly $6 million last year, and as long as that donation trend continues -- nothing will change.
I dunno . . . more than half of "cleverly-chosen minor falsehoods" inserted into 30 articles are corrected within 2 months? That sounds more like **is** self-correcting than **is not**.
...sigh...
Read more carefully -- most of the correcting process took place only after the experiment was voluntarily disclosed by me. If I had wanted to let the misinformation continue to persist, I'm sure at least half of the falsehoods would have gone for at least 6 months, and many for a year.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not also forget his other fantastic business ventures -- Openserving, Wikia Search, CiviliNation, Impossible.com, and The People's Operator!
The sooner you understand that Jimmy's agenda is "more money in Jimmy's wallet", the sooner you will be able to figure out the plan with Wikitribune (owned by "Jimmy Group Ltd").
The difference being -- Jimmy can't skim money off the top of Wikinews (so they are immaterial to him). He can skim money off the top of all these rubes donating to Wikitribune, because the money is all going to (I kid you not) "Jimmy Group Ltd". He is a shyster of the first order.
Also, due to Wikinews being non-profit, Jimbo can't skim an income off the top. With Wikitribune (owned by "Jimmy Group Ltd" -- I kid you not), all of the money will be in Jimbo's wallet, and he'll dole it out as he sees fit.
And painfully accurate. How about Jimbo's plan to "fix" mean and ugly Internet comments? That was something called CiviliNation, a failed non-profit he set up with his girlfriend (not sure he was even divorced at the time). On Reddit a few days ago, this was mentioned, and Jimbo insisted that he was the "primary funder" of CiviliNation. Let's see... 2010 Form 990: $25,420 in contributions; 2011: $12,240; 2012: $15,500; 2013: $24,568; 2014: $4,700. All summarized here: https://projects.propublica.or... That's a total of $82,428. If Jimbo were the "primary funder", let's say that's at least 50%, or $41,215. So, if he donated over $41K to CiviliNation, during a period that his gal-pal Weckerle took $63,228 in salary, and there were total contributions of $82,428, he's basically saying he bankrolled most of Andrea Weckerle's personal income from CiviliNation, with tax-deductible dollars. Which accomplished what? CiviliNation.org is barely a functioning website any more -- the last blog post was 13 months ago. Jimbo was so charitably inept that he forked over -- at a minimum -- $41,215 to a failed attempt to "fix" online civility that ultimately accomplished not much more than keeping his girlfriend Andrea in food, clothes, and shelter for a few years. With tax-deductible dollars, no less! And now he wants us to fund his *FOR-PROFIT* plan to "fix" journalism? It's just sad. And pathetic.
The government that I pay taxes to has exempted this money-making scam as an "educational charity". If the scam artists are getting a tax exemption, while I have to pay full freight to the government, then that frankly gives me the right to do something more than just "don't use it".
This does *not* automatically mean that they are somehow wasting this money, giving its employees lavish salaries, or anything of the sort. It means we do not know. No amount of ridiculous theorising will change that.
I'm curious, would you call this known scandal to be "ridiculous theorising"?
http://wikipediocracy.com/2014...
I'm one of the comparatively few editors of Wikipedia who gets paid for my editing work. It only makes sense that as a "thank you", I should send a token of financial appreciation at fundraising time. Yet, when I try to send the Wikimedia Foundation a donation, they return it to me within the hour.
Even if they are reliable at serving up content, it's still content that is highly suspect in terms of accuracy. One systematic survey of vandalism showed the thoughtfully-formatted vandalism will last at least for weeks, over 60% of the time: http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...
Anyone see the hypocrisy of a politician who wants to restore an elective democratic government, so that it can champion gun-control laws and climate remediation, hiring an avowed anti-government, pro-gun Libertarian to rattle the cup for the politician? There will certainly be thousands of nitwits duped into giving money to this campaign, but the majority of observers will see it for what it is -- a fundraising drive for the personal aggrandizement of Lessig and Wales, which is *disguised* as a political movement.
Before you keep throwing money at the Wikimedia Foundation, educate yourself on whether they actually NEED any more money: http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...
Couldn't be more wrong about the "dollars counting", I'm afraid. See this: http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...
Wikipedia is very strong on a very narrow set of articles: non-controversial scientific...
Really? Is that like how Wikipedia's article on inflammation said that pain in the inflamed tissue is caused by volcanic rock that is produced by the body? (And it said that for weeks on end, viewed about 100,000 times.) Please, stop the mythology that Wikipedia is "very strong" on any set of articles. http://wikipediocracy.com/2015...
This better not be one of those stupid blog posts from that guy who got caught trying to advertise on Wikipedia again.
I like that guy's blog posts. He usually has a very factual insight to offer on the nefarious goings on at the Wikimedia Foundation.
I'm trembling in fear.
> Good luck in life! Sounds like you have a really > pleasant relationship with a special someone!
Said the guy who spends his weekends looking for the most uninteresting paragraphs of Wikipedia so he can make edits no one will care about. And then blogs about it. :-p
And then extensively quoted by a Washington Post journalist, leading to Slashdot fame, and even a small band of critical groupies. Indeed!
That sounds like a wasted opportinuty. You should have just deleted the information with a quick edit note of "deleting incorrect information" and seen how many times you could get into an edit war with someone trying to restore it.
You mean like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
And this? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...
And this? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...
And this? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...
And even these (twice!)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...
No wasted opportunity -- my very first few reversions amply showed how a "mechanical personality" editor like Hell in a Bucket can react foolishly to vandalism -- or vandalism removal. Here's a nice actual photo of Mr. Hell in a Bucket: http://b.pcc2.fubar.com/61/97/...
Sorry that your view is not shared by Caitlin Dewey, then. Good luck in life! Sounds like you have a really pleasant relationship with a special someone!
Now you're caught.
And you've ignored the articles on Inflammation (100,000 page views, nine edits following the misinformation being inserted), Up in the Air (72,000 page views, 13 subsequent edits), and Newcastle upon Tyne (40,000 page views, and a whopping 74 subsequent edits). These were not "dusty little corners" of Wikipedia, as you'd like to believe.
You're not here to discuss reasonably. You're here to pretend you're smarter than me, or something.
No one knows if you made 30 or 500 edits. Or if twenty previous tests were flops. (To do it properly, you should have informed someone before doing the test.)
And then you chose which pages and which facts to edit. (With a clear interest in these changes going unnoticed.)
No one knows how selective you're being in these posts which feed your business's interests.
There is nothing reliable, scientific, or objective about your tests.
I see now that you are trolling, unworthy of reply. But, I'll at least say that I did inform the public before doing the test. I don't know how adding "seven carcasses of [[Welsh Corgi]] dogs that have been sacrificed with a [[khanda (sword)|khanda]] sword heated to at least 400 degrees Fahrenheit" to an article reflects a "clear interest in going unnoticed". It sounds like you're afraid to look at my documentation. I never promised that my experiment was scientific, but it was systematic, and the results are reliable, because they are simply "the results".
https://docs.google.com/spread...
You sound a lot like a number of gravely underemployed 20-somethings living with their parents, whom I've encountered on Wikipedia. I get the great sense that you are jealous of the appeal, the orderliness, and the publicity of my experiment. Sorry, but that problem is on you to solve.
>Wales dictated that "interwiki transclusion" links that included thousands of links to his for-profit enterprise Wikia site, should be "do follow",
I am interested in this. Do you have a citation?
Of course! I don't like to spout off accusatory claims, without having ample documentation.
http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/...
http://wikipediocracy.com/foru...
And guess who created the first interwiki linking configuration on Wikipedia, for the Wikia domain? None other than Angela Beesley, co-founder of Wikia (with Jimmy Wales).
And, by the way, guess how much of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees was populated by key players from Wikia, Inc. or Bomis -- the for-profit corporations of Jimbo Wales?
2003: 100%
2004 - early 2006: 80%
late 2006: 60%
2007: 28%
Indeed -- http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde... -- see that that edit "got attention", like you said. Then a bot removed the concern. Then an IP address "gave attention" again. Then I changed it back again, and it stuck for a month until I disclosed the misinformation in my blog post. Your notion that "attention equals quick correction" doesn't hold water, at least in that case. (Though it's an obvious true-ish pattern.)
Thing is, I systematically tested the system. You've provided your personal hunch. You are welcome to your opinions, of course. I'll take my method over yours, thank you.
On the rare occasions that a "hoax" article such as "Jar'Edo Wens" stays around, it's because no one is visiting it.
No visits means it wasn't actually fooling anyone, so there was no hoax. It was just a dusty page, so dead and forgotten that no one had even thought of tagging it for deletion yet.
Truth is that there are very few people in the world who will bother inserting 30 hoax factoids into Wikipedia, and most people that try would get spotted quickly. It's very easy to spot suspicious contributors, and once you do then it's easy to check their other contributors.
Some of the misinformation that I inserted in the experiment was persisting on pages that got tens of thousands of page views. Granted, not every page-viewing session means that the specific misinformation will be read and cognitively evaluated by the reader, but let's just say that even 5% of page views led to a reader acquiring the misinformation. This still means that little old me was able to misinform a few thousand readers with an experiment that took me about four or five hours to set up. Had I not halted the experiment, many thousands more would have been misinformed.
You may comfort yourself with the notion that "there are very few people in the world" who will do what I did. But, then you discover the "Qworty" editor fiasco. Then the "Wifione" editor fiasco. Then the "Jagged85" editor fiasco (an editor who falsified so many articles, the Wikipedia community created a "cleanup template" to paste on the articles he touched, in hopes that it would facilitate restoration to truth). Each of these editors manipulated numerous pages, affecting thousands of people's intake of "knowledge". Nonetheless, the Wikimedia Foundation stands back, cajoling the volunteer editors to "keep up the good work" fighting vandals, while doing nothing themselves to implement features that would stifle vandalism. And the Foundation's savings account increased by nearly $6 million last year, and as long as that donation trend continues -- nothing will change.
I dunno . . . more than half of "cleverly-chosen minor falsehoods" inserted into 30 articles are corrected within 2 months? That sounds more like **is** self-correcting than **is not**.
...sigh...
Read more carefully -- most of the correcting process took place only after the experiment was voluntarily disclosed by me. If I had wanted to let the misinformation continue to persist, I'm sure at least half of the falsehoods would have gone for at least 6 months, and many for a year.