Monday, December 21, 2015

The End-of-the-Year "Where Should We Go?" Post

It's been an interesting year and a quarter here at Wikipedia Sucks! - Wikipediocracy began it's final slide into irrelevance, major Wikipedia assholes were named and shamed (though Beyond My Ken will not bend and admit the game is done), and the eternal truth that Wikipedia is a doomed enterprise was promulgated. However, the shadows are falling on this enterprise:

My information is getting older. The information that was leaked to me was a few years old when I got it, and it's aging faster still. I want to talk about new fiascoes beyond whatever tomfoolery Jimbo or one of the "name" WMF'ers is involved with, but I'm noticing a lot of the stuff discussed online has to do with GamerGate and it is this blog's opinion that GamerGate is a cul-de-sac. It's "interesting" for the drama but utterly pointless in the end, like a split in a Trotskyist group. So what I need is to be clued into the non-GamerGate drama in the remaining cadre of Wikipedians. But those guys lead into point "B" which is....

I don't want to write about WikiPedos. But I will be forced to do so because I'm the only one with a working blog with the information on them - it was a real cottage industry last decade to name these people in now-abandoned blogs that I keep stumbling across.....Encylopaedia Dramatica is also a great source because they have chunks of the lawyered-to-death "Evil-Unveiled" copy-pasted and buried inside the website. The only reason I would "want" to name-shame these clowns is that they are there on Wikipedia not to get the facts straight, but to pick up young boys. It needs to be done, but it distracts from what I thought was going to be my bread and butter....

Nerd crimes. I'm talking about illegal rings of Warez traders doing their business inside Wikimedia Commons, hacker/cracker/script kiddies shooting the breeze in talk pages, late-stage phone phreakery discussed in the early 2000s version of Wikipedia.....I'm sure it happened, but I can't find traces, thanks to the Secret Collapse of 2007. I'd rather talk about technocrime or bizarro cults or UFO believers involved in technocrime-accomplishing cults rather than discussing Matthew Buck.

So this is where we are going, probably: more dumping of old scandals written in a way so that outsiders can understand them, research into new scandals to keep relevant, occasional posts on the child porn/child-molesting scum Wikipedia is shot through with, alongside the regular features of the blog. With any luck I will run out of the old material in two years.

I would like to thank all the readers for boosting our views from zilch to 21,940. I would especially like to thank all the German readers over the last month who showed up over 3Apes and SearchBastard thanks to that recent heise.de article on the subject of Wikipedia's prehistory. Vielen Dank. I would also like to encourage anybody who speaks African languages to translate these posts and send them around to African websites, and the same with Chinese ideograms. The people sailing into the sea that is the English-language internet need to be warned of the rocky shoals out there.

12 comments:

  1. >>GamerGate is a cul-de-sac

    No shit. Unfortunately it's probably the current #1 social-media attraction for angry-little-boy types, and will probably continue to be a big traffic magnet for some time. Like the numerous males who scour the web for torture porn (torture of women, of course), these asswipes are more commonplace than our society would like to admit. Traffic is traffic, and traffic is money.

    Speaking of "nerd crimes", the backdoor found in Juniper's operating system for network routers should be a major news story, but it was almost ignored except in certain obscure parts of the tech press. It was alleged to be the work of the NSA and hackers already knew about it and were exploiting it. All kinds of vile shit like this happens routinely, and Joe Blow ignores it all because he "doesn't understand" or doesn't care. Fresh meat for the grinder.

    http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/12/unauthorized-code-in-juniper-firewalls-decrypts-encrypted-vpn-traffic/

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  2. "....It was alleged to be the work of the NSA and hackers already knew about it and were exploiting it. All kinds of vile shit like this happens routinely....."

    If we hammer this across hard enough ("Tor has backdoors for the Fibbies!", "Google is an info broker!") it might finally fucking sink in to Johnny Normal not to trust Silly Valley.

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  3. The English Wikipedia brings in the big donation bucks despite its shark infested waters. Translating the WMF scandals for a wider audience is indeed a worldwide service.

    Though most people don't grasp the relevance of tech news to their lives, continuing to explain it accessibly gives people a chance to soberly reflect.

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    1. That's because it's less "news" and more "rewriting press-releases" in the main. We need a thousand Morozovs to smash the Silicon Valley bullshit machine.

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    2. Of all your present blog posts which one do you think would be most valuable if it were translated and disseminated as widely as possible? Also, which two posts would be your runners-up choices?

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  4. I really hope you are successful, because there is a desperate need for an alternative view of Wikipedia. Looking at WO today, it is no longer fit for that purpose. The management have banned or driven off almost everybody who isn't a hopeless wiki addict, presumably in response to the endless whining of the ever increasing membership of wiki insiders.
    I have never contributed to WP, WR or WO, I'm just someone who is fed up with search results being cluttered up with wikicrap and people quoting it on forums as if it was some sort of authoritative source instead of crap some basement dweller thought up and spends his life guarding to prevent his peers replacing it with other crap.

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    1. McPherson is an outstanding Wikipedia critic who contributes thought provoking analyses. WO is lucky to have him. He expresses the crux of many of Wikipedia's problems in layman's terms through a classical humanities lens. If he would write more on this topic in any venue, it would be a boon to society.

      WO appears to have strayed from many of its earliest choices vis-à-vis desirable methods of criticizing Wikipedia. They drove off thought leaders with clout who offered diverse perspectives. It's a shame.

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    2. He has certainly injected a note of sanity into the asinine "wikibreaks" thread on WO which was the one which finally made me realise the place had gone native. An entire thread full of hopeless wikiaddicts agreeing about how addicted they are, which could have taken place on WP itself.

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    3. That thread is worth reading for a chuckle. McPherson has the patience of a saint.

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  5. He's tying the hapless Brown in knots. "I'm not addicted but I can only prove that by quitting, which I won't do".
    All the wikiaddicts sincerely believe they are doing something worthwhile, when all they are doing is adding another reheated layer to the shit sandwich.
    I keep getting caught by the abstract of search results which always sounds so relevant, then I realise it's another fucking Wikipedia page which will be superficial and inaccurate.

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  6. "I keep getting caught by the abstract of search results which always sounds so relevant, then I realise it's another fucking Wikipedia page which will be superficial and inaccurate."

    Hasten the day!

    An illustrative example: Wikipedians will never be able to make medical articles safe and reliable despite taking baby-steps in that direction. The only safe options are requiring confirmed-identity registration and locking the articles after expert review. IIRC the current reform proposal merely seeks to have one expert-approved version of an article. If that's the case, the public will understand neither how to find the expert-approved version nor the risks of relying on Wikipedia medical articles.

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    1. How can any of their articles be "reliable" when the content is controlled by whichever lunatic has the most spare time and willingness to game their eminently gameable system?
      Even with the high profile ones which have been exposed, it took years for their systems to get rid of obvious abusers, and of course any attempts to clear up the resulting mess lasted a few hours.

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