> Before being named U.S. attorney, Martin appeared on Russia-backed media networks more than 150 times, The Washington Post reported last week. In one appearance on RT in 2022, he said there was no evidence of military buildup on Ukraine’s boarders only nine days before Russia invaded the country. He further criticized U.S. officials as warmongering and ignoring Russia security concerns.
This is getting ridiculous. Is there anyone associated with this administration who does not have a record of promoting Russia's positions?
Martin was also at the coup attempt on Jan 6 and on that day said "Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy. Ignore #FakeNews". https://archive.ph/jekzQ
That's more relevant. RT has had some fairly legitimate people on it such as Larry King, Julian Assange, John Pilger, Amy Goodman... Many Pulitzer prize and Peabody winners ... It's a mixed bag, people can't be so reductive about it.
Not defending it, but just saying that being on RT doesn't necessarily imply anything.
That’s not how foreign policy and international politics work. Every country would be enemies with every other country in that case.
All the pro-Palestinian anti-Israel country would be enemies of the US then, including Japan. You’d be supporting Trump’s tariffs and anti-China us or them stance then towards every country that has friendly business relations with China, which is everybody at this point. Heck, even Taiwan and China are friends more than Westerners would like to think. Meanwhile, America is friends with countries like Saudi Arabia and countries that keeps a blind eye to the funding of terrorism in America
There’s a reason the famous saying is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” rather than “the friend of my enemy is my enemy”
Entirely uncritical state controlled or substantially aligned media masquerading as news is always bad and should be criticized. See also almost anyone called on in White House press briefings these days.
Plus, you are saying it like all propaganda is somehow the same. Rosie the Riveter != "Russia isn't going to do anything...well, it's America's fault...NATO something something...actually, Ukraine basically deserved it."
Not who you are responding to, but given that as rational humans, we have the capacity to make non-binary comparisons, Kremlin propaganda is indeed far worse than most. I say this as a European who sees clear flaws in the US system, but that does not make the Russian system good, or even a little good. It is objectively horrible. The Russian people, for one, deserve far better.
It is important to point out that Russian propaganda is actually excellent propaganda. However, their message is the at the very bottom:
There is no truth, up is down, nothing matters, the invader is the victim, etc.
Source for that? My impression is that Democracy Now!, while it has a clear perspective and set of biases, has been fairly independent. I don't think Goodman herself would be involved with them, but I think some of her sometimes guests have been.
In general I agree with folks replying to you that RT is not trustworthy and someone being involved with it is a red flag.
> Not defending it, but just saying that being on RT doesn't necessarily imply anything.
I'm not sure who's claiming that here. The RT appearance in question is about him spreading disinformation and Russian propaganda on the eve of Ukraine invasion.
It's pretty constant on hn. People paint everything from country X, holistically, with some broad and blunt moral brush.
It reads like a cartoon. Everything from China is loaded with secret spyware snooping on you for countless unspecified evils - everything out of Russia by anyone is part of some secret global propaganda network.
I point it out as absurd and reductive whenever I see it and people dogpile on me like I desecrated a sacred cow.
The world is incredibly complex and a simple label doesn't cut it. Wernher von Braun was a Nazi but that doesn't mean his work on rocketry was fictional lies.
You need to assess things based on the merits of the thing, not on any narratives of attributive associations you're choosing to assign.
The US government is also framed the same way on HN, though I don't like this metrics gathering method.
Most discussions are of the war in Ukraine which also connects to US politics. It's going to be negative and treated extremely suspect because Putin is ex KGB, lied that he wouldn't invade, the war itself, and their influence in US elections.
This is about the Russian government though. If your argument is that it's wrong in these constraints then I disagree but your generalization is valid. My original comment was about Russia as a whole but I think I wrong to try to shift to that as it doesn't come up
The majority that did vote, voted for this. The participation rate has always been low in rich western countries. Given the standards of media literacy and civics education, there's no evidence that a higher participation rate would have changed the outcome.
Everybody votes in Australia (not sure how rich, but in top 20 for sure). If you don't you have to show cause or pay a AUD$50 fine. I know some think this is anti-freedom, but it does prevent farces like the current USA. Historically there have been problems in the past (30 years ago) but these days the Australian Electoral Commission (Independent from government) revise electoral boundaries to ensure no more gerrymanders.
I was going to say that it was a majority this time, but it seems like the results shifted as more votes were counted after election night, and he ended up with 49.8%. Still, unbelievably, pretty close to a majority.
We regularly have 92% - 93% participation in federal elections here in Australia. Having one next weekend, and already record numbers of pre-poll votes.
This article contains a fun breakdown of the types of informal votes including a category for "the usual anatomical drawings" (0.7% of informal votes):
Arguments based on voter participation overlook that voting is a statistical sample of the population. The people who don’t vote broadly break down roughly the same way as the people who do vote. And even to the extent they don’t, it’s risky to make assumptions about how they would have voted.
If you can generalize about non-voters, it’s that they’re broadly more anti-institution than voters—which is what causes them to put less stock in the institutional practice of voting. In the U.S. in the Trump era, that has meant that non-voters or infrequent voters support Trump somewhat more strongly than regular voters.
That an enormous sample size. Statistically a complete participation should be very close, so the burden of proof lies with those who claim it would be different. Regardless of whether Trump would have won or not, that is a clear indication of evenly split public sentiment. So we still get to justly reap the fruits of our collective choices. There is no exoneration by whimsically dreaming of improbable alternatives.
I don't think it is was that hard to vote. That is a straw man to avoid facing the hard truth of American apathy. Now next election, perhaps we can have a conversation on that point. Things a trending rather poorly right now.
The majority did not vote for Trump, and I question how many of the minority that did vote for him voted for this, specifically. Almost certainly not all of them, given his approval rating is now well below his popular vote share.
100% of voter age Americans made a decision. That includes not registering to vote or not voting.
Pretend I want a snack, I can choose between a cookie and an apple. If I dislike both then I also have the option to not get a snack. Neither is selected.
This is different from not voting because a candidate still wins.
If the US wanted voting to be more popular, there would be a Federal Holiday to promote it. There is no incentive when there are known costs...at least since the wild inflation of the 80s when it got prohibitive to lose a shift and the slow dissolution of union jobs. This is the result of the tyranny of indifference. Those that benefit continue to promote and benefit, those that do not, are disenfranchised. It's a common theme in history.
There is no democracy without a free press, or else no one can make an informed decision. I doubt that the press can be called free when it’s owned by oligarchs.
I mean yes? Democracy is a pretty poor model for governance. IMO peak enlightenment happened circa the 17th or 18th century when classical liberalism decided government should be based on individual liberties and anything outside of that is decided democratically not because it is a good system but because votes are roughly a tally of who would win if we all pull knives on each other because we didn't like the vote.
Democracy is not 2 parties doing voter suppression and gerrymandering as a filter to pass the result to an electoral college.
The US system was never designed to be fair to individuals in the first place, pointing at it as a failure of democracy is IMHO pulling the actual issues under the rug.
It’s basically impossible to engage in meaningful voter suppression in a country where election results can be cross-checked against high-quality polling.
“Gerrymandering” also has no effect on Presidential elections. And in 2024, Republicans won a larger share of the House popular vote than their share of House seats.
Voter suppression is the act of limiting the pool of voters. That includes putting large swaths of the population behind bars or flagged as non eligible to voting, putting barriers to voter registration etc.
It can never be 0 and every country will have a minimum requirement, but the degree to which it is done in the US is far ahead of most western country.
Gerrymandering has an effect on the criteria for voter eligibility, the voting rules in the state etc. It's not direct but who's in power has a sizeable effect on who will have an easier time voting.
No, “voter suppression” is the act of preventing legitimate voters from voting. Society determining that categories of people shouldn’t vote (children, felons, non-citizens, etc.) isn’t voter suppression, it’s simply establishing qualifications for voting. The goal isn’t to get to 0 or try to get as close to 0 as possible. People who should vote should be able to vote, while people who shouldn’t vote shouldn’t be able to vote.
In the modern era, we should probably narrow the franchise, instituting civics tests and restricting voting to natural born citizens. Statistically, both of these would have hurt my party in 2024, so this isn’t self-interest speaking.
How can someone talk about democracy peaking when the franchise was extended to a tiny minority of the population. You don't give a damn about individual liberties, you only care that the "right" people have liberty.
Ah yes, the wonderful time of enlightenment when all straight white Christian land-owning men's rights became recognized, not just the nobility's. Just a few short centuries from there, the rights of poorer white men, children, women, people of any other skin color, non-Christian, and LGBT people would be recognized too.
I'm not convinced at all that the election wasn't stolen. Trump ran is a very bland campaign to the point where he was skipping major events and people in his circle seemed assured of victory months before the election.
I know that Harris put up zero fight about it. I infer that she believed it to be legitimate.
That's not definitive, to be sure. But it's sufficient for me to believe that we did this to ourselves. Now all we can do is figure out how we're going to get through it.
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think actual election fraud, big enough to steal an election, would be too big to miss.
Yes, it might only take a small number of votes in the right place, but either you somehow know the right place, or you have to move a lot of votes.
There's a reasonable discussion to be had along the lines of 'these guys seem to be doing everything they whine about', but could they get a big operation done without a) bragging openly about it, b) leaving a big trail, or c) having a falling out with a conspirator who then tells all.
Adding on, certainly gerrymandering and voter supression laws affect voting results, but I have trouble calling that stealing an election.
Trump did thank that "very popular guy. He was very effective. And he knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers, those vote counting computers, and we won Pennsylvania in a landslide." If Biden or Obama had said something like that the nation would be in uproar.
Also consider the circumstantial evidence of Musk illegally promising to pay people (via lottery) to vote, and then using the defense that the lottery was actually rigged.
If nothing else, that establishes a willingness to tamper with elections.
Democracy built lies, decide, and rejection of facts through propaganda.
Really need a viable means to fight it, say allowing an elected official's constitutes being able to sue them for no less than $10,000 for incidence of bearing false witness. Help erode the dark money networks.
Also having a 4th branch of Governments, the people with State and Federal binding resolution, would help. Only way to overrides those in power is to unionize the will.
The suing thing would be cool but the court system is slow by design. I can't see it working in practice however I'm also really fed up with the bullshit so i understand.
Well, considering they have a very high ranking guy in the Putin regime who considers that to be his full time job, google "Vladislav Surkov", they seem to be doing a fairly effective job of it so far.
Yeah, everything about this administration makes perfect sense if we assume that Trump is a Russian asset. Of course billionaires like Thiel and Musk have their say as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see America sell weapons to Russia, and provide them military support in the future when they launch their next invasion.
The English Wikipedia is a massive target for influence campaigns. I don't think there are any other communities as resilient as it. Just an example:
There's certain individual or group that edited under the name "Icewhiz", was banned, and now operates endless sockpuppet accounts in the topic area to influence Wikipedia's coverage on the Middle East. One of them was an account named "Eostrix", that spent years making clean uncontroversial edits until one day going for adminship.
Eostrix got 99% approval in their request for adminship. But it didn't matter, because an anonymous individual also spent years pursuing Eostrix, assembling evidence, and this resulted in Eostrix's block just days before they became a Wikipedia administrator.
It's a useful contrast to a place like Reddit, where volunteer moderators openly admit to spreading terrorist propaganda or operating fake accounts when their original one gets banned. You don't get to do that on Wikipedia. If you try, someone with far too much time on their hands will catch you because Wikipedia doesn't need to care about Daily Active Users and the community cares about protecting a neutral point of view.
Not denying the existence of influence campaigns. There have been several major pro-Palestinian ones recently, which is probably why this letter has been sent. But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up. Most social media websites don't care and would rather you don't bring it to their attention. That is why Reddit banned /r/bannedforbeingjewish.
I knew IceWhiz. You are correct that he (or rather "they") eventually was kicked from the site. But he/they operated on the site for years and was the biggest PITA you can imagine. He must have single-handedly scared away two dozen honest contributors with his BS. It is very, very easy to game the rules on Wikipedia. Wars of attrition goes on for years. Normal people don't waste their time. IceWhiz and his meat puppets have endless patience and all the time in the world.
Right. The fact that someone so terrible got 99% approval and only one anonymous investigator was able to stop them makes me think that it's likely a lot of other terrible admins who didn't have an anonymous investigator go after them probably go through the process.
And the times I've brought up the fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable before, I've had numerous editors come in and claim that wasn't true and that people could rely on the claims they find in Wikipedia. This runs counter to the claim that Wikipedia editors know about these influence campaigns and openly fight about them. A lot of the active and vocal editors are openly dismissing such concerns.
One can look into Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski's report about how the Polish ultranationalists have distorted the Holocaust topic area on Wikipedia (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) if they want to find a counterexample. To the best of my understandings so far, I think Icewhiz is a good guy, just that he doesn't have strong grasp about Wikipedia's guidelines, particularly regarding multiple accounts, and was the victim of sustained smear campaigns by Polish ultranationalists who were able to psychologically manipulate the admins into banning him in order to let their distortionist edits stick. Now he's an Emmanuel Goldstein figure for both the ultranationalists and the pro-Hamas editors who seek to deflect external scrutiny to their edits.
A month after that article was published (and shortly after the article was posted on Wikipedia), the Arbitration Committee opened a sua sponte case to review the topic area despite the substance of that article being "Icewhiz was right".[1] It resulted in bans of Icewhiz' enemies for distorting the Holocaust topic area. I think moderators on pretty much any other website would laugh and ignore an article like that as being whining from a user they banned.
I agree that Icewhiz is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like figure at this point who's used by pro-Hamas editors/ultranationalists. A bunch of those pro-Palestinian editors that loved to complain about Icewhiz to deflect from their own behaviour were topic-banned from Israel-Palestine area a few months ago in January.[2]
It's challenging to deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict on any website that allows for user contributions. There's astroturfing and nation-state backed influence operations from probably a dozen countries. I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.
> only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy
This is false. The talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gamergate_(harassment_cam... lays it out clearly: because of the nature of Gamergate (misogynist harassment campaign), the page about Gamergate is heavily scrutinized in order to make sure that all source cites follow the same reliable-source rules that are in force across all of Wikipedia. Please don't lie about Wikipedia.
Do you have any specific examples? You mentioned the Gamergate article but your assertion that it doesn’t reference non-primary sources needs some citations that all of the academic and media sources were directly involved. Since it was a harassment campaign involving journalists, there’s a big question about what a policy would need to look like to prevent someone from attacking a journalist and then saying Wikipedia can’t use their work because they’re involuntarily involved.
I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention. Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.
I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now;
Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected.
There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia about a cameras development process simply deleted. Maybe it is truly for the better, but it is not really that easy to add to the meat of the project, without someone else's approval.
Third, the begging banners really feel a bit gross; I know the size of the endowment, and how long it would be able to sustain the project (forever essentially)... It really feels like the foundation is using the Wikipedia brand to funnel money to irrelevant pet causes. This really puts me off contributing.
I've also edited random things in the past. Like inaccuracies in Comp.Sci. topics.
I used to like Wikipedia but I'm changing my mind. One thing amongst many others was seeing some company that competed with the startup I worked in basically introduce marketing material into the site. It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.
I'd need some serious convincing to restore my trust in it. There are still some good technical/science articles I guess. It kind of sucks that instead of getting more reliable information on the Internet we're trending towards not being to trust anything. It's not clear how we fix this since reliability can not be equal to popularity.
> It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.
In fairness, this does mean the system is working.
I made an edit last year, it immediately got reverted and I got a banner on my user page for vandalism. I complained about that, other people agreed with me but the person who reverted my edits never responded. So there it sits.
It really feels that way because that's what they're doing. There's a legit non-profit internet encyclopedia barnacled with a bunch of generic left wing political stuff, except the barnacle is bigger than the boat.
Yeah I stopped donating to Wikipedia once I learned where the money goes.
Even if it ends up supporting causes I agree with, why would I need the Wikimedia Foundation as an intermediary? I could just give money directly to the causes!
I created a page, it got declined because the guy who two films have been made about didn't count as important enough. I kind of get it, but still, did kill the energy slightly.
If you care about a topic and want to edit Wikipedia but do not want to deal with the process, you can simply talk about what you want to change on the discussion page. Is there an equivalent workaround when it comes to creating new pages?
You can create a page as an anonymous user. The content and subject is much, more more important than the fact of being created as an anonymous user. If that's the process you want to avoid, there's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... but that one is more geared towards people who are already engaged with Wikipedia. An outsider saying "well, someone, but not me, should do something about this problem," is just as welcome on Wikipedia as it is anywhere else.
I tried on a completely uncontroversial page that documented a certain idiom and examples of where it was used.
My edit was reverted, twice, because apparently there is no such thing as a notable source for lines from a 1980s British TV episode, not even a fan website that has a transcript for all of them. Gave up after that.
I tried volunteering and contributed a few thousand edits, and ended up brigaded into hours of silly reviews by sock puppets and their crony admins. The bureaucracy is nuttier than a Monty python sketch. Endless futile debates on talk pages.
It’s not supposed to have many rules (according to the Jimbo gospel), but admins apply policy pages as law , and given how many inane and convoluted policies there are, you can be censured for practically anything with the right quote. You can see these sockpuppet brigades watching and pouncing on the edit history of any semi controversial page.
It’s a pathetic monoculture that lacks any self awareness or sense of introspection. Critical discussions are quickly shut down and the authors are put into a penalty box.
Leadership needs to address the power dynamics, and come up with a better self regulating structure. Editors need to identify themselves and their agenda. Networks & brigades need to be monitored and shutdown using activity tracking.
Wikipedia’s social network is operating with 1990s era protocols but their influence via syndication on every common news surface means they are way too influential. Google, Alexa, LLMs and mainstream media all syndicate Wikipedia content as gospel. But the content is completely unregulated.
For most things the talk pages will explain why it is restricted, but if someone forgot to put a notice there, there's also a giant list of "the following topic areas reliably attract disruptive editing and get people angry, so admins move much more quickly to restrict editing than they would otherwise." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions#Ac...
> please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think!
Last time I tried to do that, I flagged a citation that went to a book saying the opposite of what wikipedia was citing it in support of as "failed verification".
This attracted the attention of an editor, who showed up to revert my flag, explaining that as long as the book exists, that's good enough.
Wikipedia could improve noticeably by just preventing the existing editors from making edits.
> In view of public criticisms, including those expressed by Wikipedia Co-Founder Dr. Lawrence M. Sanger, regarding the opacity of editorial processes and the anonymity of contributors, what justification does the Foundation offer for shielding editors from public scrutiny?
What is happening is very scary. Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say. I think this has been the case at anytime in history. However, now, with the internet, it is easy to spread such lies to mass and easy for such leaders to make blind followers.
The only YC figure who espouses any position on U.S. federal politics is Paul Graham, who loudly campaigns against the current administration almost every day on Twitter.
Wealthy people who could be coined liberal-tarians or just your average tech bro political grab bag largely backed Trump out of financial interest and who, imo, deluded themselves that the administration would be unsuccessful at "the bad stuff" much like his 2016 run.
No amount of shouting from the rooftops that this time was actually different convinced anyone. I can't really blame
us collectively, we resoundingly voted for this— it's as much of a mandate you're likely to ever get in the US and we're in the find out stage of fucking around.
Looking back on old social media posts the theme is that everyone, supporters and not, were high on copium that Trump would do <list of things I like | aren't so bad> and the <list of truly terrible things> was just obviously crazy and wouldn't actually happen or were a joke.
Well, the good news is that there's a very convenient link at the bottom of the page here on HN for the AI startup school [1] which is host to a bunch of people that you should recognize.
I'm just curious why you think it helps the Republican cause? When I saw this reported in the media my feel was this is something Democrats are going to latch on to demonstrate the government is seeking to intimidate the judicial branch.
I guess it can have different interpretation.
Either way I'd really prefer not to see this stuff on Hacker News. We have enough things that push people buttons in other places.
Acting DC AG Martin has a history of sockpuppetry. Bought a sycophant a laptop and then ghostwrote Facebook posts attacking a judge in a case against Martin. Should have been disbarred.
> “Wikipedia is one of the last places online that shows the promise of the internet, housing more than 65 million articles written to inform, not persuade,” the Wikimedia Foundation said Friday in a statement
Well that is apparently very false when it comes to american politics and jewish matters. On the positive side, for other countries and languages the biases are very different and quite wide ranging.
Maybe this threat by the US government is a good thing, it will force wikipedians to take their head out of the sand and go back to wide-ranging NPOV , and remove all those judgemental adjectives and epithets that are thrown around in so many articles.
I don't believe the idea of wikipedia can be threatened because it is a really resilient idea across political lines and there are billions who will want to recreate it.
""But one of the most significant differences critical for moving from polarization to productivity, is that the Wikipedians who write these articles aren’t actually focused on finding the truth. They’re working for something that’s a little more attainable, which is the best of what we can know right now. "
Decentralization typically means instead of being subject to one crazy government you are subject to multiple and have to deal with all.
I think wikipedia's approach of centralizing in one place but allowing downloading backups and making all sourcecode and server config public is better. If the worst happens anyone can setup a fork.
Start backing it up now. Partisan influence could be as minor as forcing some edits or as major as pulling their DNS. Every authoritarian in the world follows this same playbook. Over started looking into kiwix.
Reason and truth are the enemy of authoritarian regimes. They want you to believe that truth is subjective. Truth and reason provide alternative legitimacy to authority. If nothing is true, there is no basis on which to judge those in power.
There is a long legacy of authoritarian regimes attacking curious places, universities, historians, museums, books or any institution that grounds itself in reality which provides you a way to reasonably criticize authoritarian actions. Many authortarian regimes will "purge" as many of the country's intellectuals as they are able.
Wikipedia is absolutely the enemy of this administration and authoritarians everywhere in the world would love to see it's demise or collapse into chaos.
Whether the Wikipedia page for Israel says Gaza is a genocide or not, or that it's an ongoing debate matters. It matters because it influences what people think and therefore what they consent to or what they deem worth fighting for or applying resources to and that goes for just about any issue out there. If you can't read about the suffering that racism has caused, then how bad is racism really? If there are no examples of successful labor movements, then why would you hopelessly start one?
an encyclopedia is supposed to be broader than any other biased information source, so i think your last paragraph is false. people are supposed to make up their own mind
It’s pretty clear from this blogpost that Larry Sanger has abandoned a pursuit of truth and neutral point of view and instead does not like how reality fails to conform to his personal biases and preferences about the way the world is.
Organizations can't have commitments to truth. Only people can. And there is no mechanism that ensures that editors and admins have a commitment to truth.
OK, I can't argue with that. Timothy Snyder might make a similar correction, "markets can't be free, only people participating in the market can be free" is something he says frequently.
If only people can have commitments to truth, which organization, institution, or media do you think has a leader that seems to have a commitment to truth, especially truth in their institution? Who is our gold standard of "as good as it gets"?
> Reason and truth are the enemy of authoritarian regimes. Truth and reason provide alternative legitimacy to authority. If nothing is true, there is no basis on which to judge those in power.
Well said.
Hannah Arendt wrote a great book about this, but it sounds like you might have already read it.
I haven't. I would imagine Timothy Snyder is an avid fan of, if not a major historian of, Hannah Arendt and I probably got that through Snyder. I had actually not heard of her specifically yet.
After the Reichstag fire, political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote that “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.” Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.
Authority is never legitimate. Those that claim special rights to it because they bring "truth" or "reason" are the most suspect of them all.
> Many authortarian regimes will "purge" as many of the country's intellectuals as they are able.
This is a letter not the killing fields.
> It matters because it influences what people think
That people find this a defensible position and believe that just finding the "right editors" or "true guardians" can vouchsafe this poor outcome for humanity is always surprising to me.
Shouldn't people have access to reported information and then come to their own educated conclusions?
> If there are no examples of successful labor movements, then why would you hopelessly start one?
The existence of Wikipedia is a convenience and perhaps not one that should be given tax free status. I think the selected history of labor movements will be just fine.
Even if Wikipedia died tomorrow because of one letter you could still walk into any bookstore in America and buy a book on any subject you want.
The ADL and other Jewish organizations have pointed out that aside from articles about Israel that articles about or mention Jewish topics generally have been editing with disinformation or that made Jews out to be the aggressors.
I agree with you that in order to believe in the ideals of liberal democracy that we must have a core belief in truth. And it's absolutely true that the Trump administration has taken a position that is deeply chilling on the issue of speech. It's clear they want to be the sole arbiters of what "truth" is and they want to use their power to manipulate the reality.
All that said, I cannot as a Jew ignore the fact that Wikipedia is not in itself neutral, and that "more eyes" does not negate systemic bias. What I've seen as a Jew is what the true meaning of marginalized minority is, which is to say that if you are truly a minority and truly marginalized then in a vote of "truth", your reality will be dismissed if it conflicts with the vast majority, and that Jews are only 0.2% of the world population.
While I brought it up, I am not debating the issue of antisemitic bias in Wikipedia[1] as anything other than an illustration of your point of objective truth being true, but also that we can't simply rely on the wisdom of the crowd to materialize that truth.
To preemptively address the issue that's bound to come up when I post this- I'm not arguing that the evils of silencing the entire Wikipedia project are equal to or a fair response to Wikipedia's antisemitic bias. I do believe Wikipedia needs to address its bias problem and that's best done through internal reform.
Two wrongs don't make a right, nor are two wrongs always of equal weight.
[1] Firstly because my point is separate, and secondly because I've encountered the exact issues I've found in Wikipedia elsewhere, which is why I'm sure I'll be voted down.
I agree 100%. It's exhausting fighting against antisemitic bias, and it feels like it's everywhere these days. My problem with Ed Martin is that what he is doing is clearly wrong. Hannah Arendt wrote a book about people like him.
At a time when students are having their visas revoked merely for writing Op-Eds critical of Israel, it's rather ridiculous to see the pro-Israel side acting like you're the ones being persecuted everywhere.
Basically, almost any time Zionists are mentioned, they're mentioned in a negative light and with genuine disinformation, such as that Zionism is the belief that Arabs needs to be destroyed. That is like saying the Civil Rights movement in the US was about killing white people.
They also position things in such a way that implies antisemitic things, such as saying that Zionism is only 200 years old, or discussing the Israel wars only or primarily through an Arab lens.
These biases around Jewish topics are small individually but large in aggregate, especially in how they present Jews and Jewish topics.
Multiple Jewish and civil rights organizations have done a more comprehensive job at discussing this, even organizations who don't usually agree on things. While they talk about "anti-Israel bias" Wikipedia articles on or mentioning Zionism (80% of Jews are Zionist) are IMHO just as, if not more damaging, and demonstrate the issue.
Most importantly though, talk to the Jews in your life about this. They will tell you.
I don't know if that statement is true or not, but it certainly seems like a specific enough statement that could be proved or disproved given enough effort.
Most of the jews I know are through anti-genocide activism and they have a different view of this. I wanted to check because it is important to me that I not engage in antisemitism. Thanks for the info.
The idea of contrasting what I said with being "anti-genocide" implies that people who disagree with you are "pro-genocide".
Once one believes that those who disagree with them are "pro-genocide", then they can easily dismiss anything the other has to say say or any view they have, since they're functionally dehumanized.
I would ask that, if you can, try to consider that there are nuances, and that using triggering language does not bring understanding, it only amplifies conflict.
That said, this conversation has been too difficult for me, and I'm not going to engage with you on it further.
No I mean literally we are part of an organization focused on preventing and ending genocide broadly. Israel-palestine is one of them but there are several others ongoing and several more that may escalate into genocide in the next few months or years. I do see why you have a hard time with wikipedia.
> Once one believes that those who disagree with them are "pro-genocide", then they can easily dismiss anything the other has to say say or any view they have, since they're functionally dehumanized.
I would really like you to read this back to yourself and think about it deeply, really deeply.
I tried giving it a shot. It starts with an "executive summary", followed by an intro to how Wikipedia works. The very first link to any concrete evidence is by a guy who has a page on PragerU with gems like "Russian collusion hoax" and how the "mainstream media" is "fake news".
It's a pretty simple case of Wittgenstein's ruler for me. It tells me more about ADL as an org than the content.
This is the same ADL that said that Nazi salutes are fine, but that protesting against genocide isn't? Why do we care what the ADL says about anything? They're fascist sympathisers.
It was not remotely okay that they did this, and I agree that refusing to speak out severely hurt their credibility. The next time I get a fundraising email, I'm going to tell them they can kiss something.
Demanding moral perfection from an organization in order to believe that discrimination exists is a standard that I don't believe is fair to any group.
Did you read the statement they put out later that day about Musk, or the day after?
I agree this was a terrible move on the ADL's part, and there have been others, but you're essentially labeling the oldest anti-hate group "fascist" because you disagree with one statement they made.
This dismisses any concerns they raise, or if someone else says the same as them, then they too must be pro-facist.
Could you point me to an example of what you have in mind on wikipedia? I'm admittedly not as practiced at discerning subtle antisemitism as I am some other forms of discrimination. But also usually when it's being alluded to in the abstract like this people mean something closer to "criticism of israel's actions."
I didn't read that because the person asked for an example and you directed them to a 150 printed page article where you didn't specify which page(s)
This is the equivalent of stating that dinosaurs evolved into birds then when asked for one piece of evidence directing a person to a book, by another author, on how dinosaurs evolved into birds
He doesn't have a leg to stand on and he knows it. Otherwise he would empanel a grand jury and wait for indictments. He is a partisan sadist and he loves to use the legal system to abuse people.
It’s a similar nonsense letter to the same ones he sent to several prominent medical journals. Speech chilling, 1st amendment violating unsubstantiated threats on DOJ letterhead. Of all the unfit people in this administration, he’s likely the most unfit. His entire career has been deeply unethical and partisan and often borderline illegal.
I have a question on non-profits in general. What exactly is the advantage of being incorporated as a non-profit, when all you have to do to not be taxed as a for-profit corporation is spend all your money each year and not show any profit? It seems you'd have more privacy as a for-profit corporation, since you don't have to disclose donors.
If I donate to a
501(c)(3) organization, the donation gets very favorable treatment by the tax code, reducing my taxes (provided I have income that can be cancelled out by the donation).
hmm, please correct me if I'm wrong, but donations just decrease your tax liability by the amount you've donated. It's the same as if you donated your pre-tax dollars to 501(c)(3) org.
The second sentence is mostly accurate, but the first implies something else.
If your taxable income was $50,000 and you donate $10,000, and (some other conditions) your taxable income would now be $40,000; same as if you managed to move the money pre-tax.
However. If you donate aprechiated capital assets, you get two benefits. Your taxable income is offset by the value of the asset, and the capital gains disappear. It's much better than selling the asset and donating the proceeds; and it's handy if you don't have good records for your cost basis.
Charity non-profits -- 501c3 organizations -- have donations that are tax deductible for their donors. Other kinds of nonprofits have other advantages to their stakeholders, but usually the attention around "nonprofits" is specifically about 501c3 orgs.
Serious question, after the past few months, how can anyone deny that America is heading in a totalitarian direction? Those of you who believe that all of the many actions that have happened in the past few weeks are "okay", please explain your perspective without resorting to "whataboutism" or cherry picking only one or two of the things that have occurred lately. Because from what I'm sitting, this is not behavior of a government based on democratic ideals.
I'm not an American so I'm kind of looking at this from the side but I'll try to engage here...
What does "heading in a totalitarian direction" mean in this context exactly?
I'm not trying to use this as a "cherry pick" but this was news from today:
"Trump administration reverses abrupt terminations of foreign students’ US visa registrations
DOJ announced the reversal in federal court after weeks of intense scrutiny by courts and dozens of restraining orders issued by judges."
How is this consistent with your theory/hypothesis?
I think what's important is not to look solely at evidence supporting your idea. The important thing is to find things that disprove your idea. That's the scientific method. I.e. finding something that weakens your hypothesis is what you need to look for. If you're not able to find anything at all disproving your theory then we should be really worried but I think there are actually many things going on that are consistent with a functioning democracy. Keep in democracy doesn't necessarily mean acting in ways that you consider to be good. You might think it's crazy to make deep cross cuts in the government but if this is what people voted for then maybe that can play out. Yes, it seems arbitrary and maybe important things are being cut, which is no different than what you'll see when companies do layoffs. But there's also a lot of resilience. At least I don't think it's anti-democratic to run on a platform of reducing government costs and then act on it. If anything the opposite. It might be really bad, but democratic, or it might end up being a good idea. Another example is you probably think it's crazy for the US to abandon Ukraine. I don't like that either but the US government can set foreign policy and it was reasonably clear that's the way they were going to go before the elections. Is this good for the world? I don't think so. Is it anti-democratic. I don't think so either. How will it play out? Who knows.
I would say that Trump is pushing the limits of presidential powers more than others before him. Some of the actions his administration is taking are borderline anti-democratic and borderline legal. But many of them are actually legal and some others will work their way through the courts. Even the Supreme Court which is generally right leaning has rebuked Trump and will likely not blindly side with him.
I'm not a fan of this administration but at least so far it doesn't look like it's the end of democracy in America. That seems like fear mongering. I think the "opposition" would be better off trusting democracy more, highlighting how its policies contrast with the current government policies, the problems it would solve better for Americans compared with the current government etc. This is probably going to end up being better for America's democracy in the long run. The erosion of democracy is partly due to the incessant attacking and divisiveness/polarization. Focus on common ground which I think is actually larger than what most think and trying to let better ideas win vs. being critical of everything is better. Not that you shouldn't speak out against obviously bad actions but it seems we are just 100% focused on attacks.
The US states also have a lot of power. The citizenry have a lot of power. Senate/congress. Courts. I think you guys will be fine but let's see how it goes. To me the bigger risk is the loss of common ground and polarization. If you have half the country basically feeling the other half is the enemy rather than debate policies that's something that can lead to trouble.
I think it’s fairly obvious that the Democrat establishment has been abusing its power through NGOs, media collusion, judicial overreach, lawfare, selective non-prosecution, show trials, pre-emotive pardons, vaccine mandates, de-banking/de-platforming and censorship. A little pushback and suddenly it’s “totalitarianism”.
Citation needed for anything on the scale we’ve seen - for example, the topic of this discussion is a non-profit having their status threatened for non-specific reasons which appear to be constitutionally-protected speech. If it’s “fairly obvious”, you should have no trouble providing examples of something equivalent to this legal threat.
I recall right-leaning social media sites like Gab, Parler, r/TheDonald, Infowars being taken offline.
I can’t read the WP article because it’s paywalled, however I have been suspicious of Wikimedia for a long time. I used to donate to them thinking I was helping to keep the severs running, then being alarmed to find the money was going on all sorts of nonsense. The former CEO (Maher) was blatantly a political/intelligence operator. Fits the pattern of the establishment/powers-that-be abusing the NGO/non-profit sector to illicitly further their aims, so I’m not surprised the new DoJ are looking into them.
Those sites weren’t taken offline by Democratic officials, they had to find new hosting after breaking the contracts they entered into with private companies. They were still free to move elsewhere, as they did, whereas in this case Wikipedia is being threatened with penalties for remaining in the country.
I would also note that the last straw for companies like Parler was involvement in a violent attempt to overthrow the government whereas in this case the objection appears to be constitutionally-protected speech. Again, those are nowhere near comparable situations. Where is something like, say, going after a right-wing non-profit because they published content which criticized Biden?
What are the Top 10 Elements of the Authoritarian Playbook?
1. Divide and rule: Foment mistrust and fear in the population.
2. Spread lies and conspiracies: Undermine the public’s belief in truth.
3. Destroy checks and balances: Quietly use legal or pseudo-legal rationales to gut institutions, weaken opposition, and/or declare national emergencies to seize unconstitutional powers.
4. Demonize opponents and independent media: Undermine the public’s trust in those actors and institutions that hold the state accountable.
5. Undermine civil and political rights for the unaligned: Actively suppress free speech, the right to assembly and protest and the rights of women and minority groups.
6. Blame minorities, immigrants, and “outsiders” for a country’s problems: Exploit national humiliation while promising to restore national glory.
7. Reward loyalists and punish defectors: Make in-group members fearful to voice dissension.
8. Encourage or condone violence to advance political goals: Dehumanize opposition and/or out-groups to justify violence against them.
9. Organize mass rallies to keep supporters mobilized against made-up threats: Use fearmongering and hate speech to consolidate in-group identity and solidarity.
10. Make people feel like they are powerless to change things: Solutions will only come from the top.
only about 10% of their contributions are needed to run the websites. WMF should have their non-profit status revoked since they are defrauding contributors . They need to restructure and break up the scam into “real Wikipedia” , a legit nonprofit and the scam that consumes 80-90% of contributions.
In my humble opinion Wikipedia is the single best thing thing to emerge from the Internet boom. Its name is a wordplay on one of the most important intellectual projects of the Enlightment.[0] The DC prosecutor letter reads like something straight out of the totalitarian playbook.[1]
Please donate now to show your support. It's time to fight back against this crap.
Hi I don't know if you know it but Wikipedias not that poor or hard pressed... Atleast, the whole "donate or we broke" narrative that they build every few months is complete bullshit
https://youtu.be/3t8GUbzVxmQ?si=sa_oHe3DA_QmpGcE
The scale of deep body trauma that has been done to the US will not seem clear today, but it will have dire consequences for the future trajectory of US. I am sad for this, for the current status quo I was born under, but I suppose History must happen.
I'm not sad for myself. I'm older and established. I'm scared for my cousins, nieces, nephews, and children for the fucking train wreck they're going to step into.
It was bad enough with 2001, 2008, and 2020. But this is next level.
The PhD institution I went to reduced their acceptance from 50 to 26. There is fear of not securing funding. The damage done is projects that are promising were cut. These projects will get picked up by other countries. The damage in the long term will be losing our edge in many regards, which will harm our economy. Where I did my undergrad just replaced their dean with an AIPAC member who has no experience in academia (a first in nearly two hundred years of this institution's). It is insane what is happening. A judge in Wisconsin was arrested today. There are those who believe America is resilient. The damage being done (I can promise you) will cause this great nation unbelievable harm in the long run, when this traitor in charge and his foreign allies (Putin and Netanyahu) which he promises allegiance to OVER our constitution and our moral values have long since passed. There is much noise, much of it as a distraction, but on the small level, many changes (most recently the NSF director leaving) are tangible changes that have a real impact that is certainly felt immediately in budget cuts, but will be even more drastic in its long term strategic impact. Also, I fly a bunch, and I see an immediate change in the respect America used to command abroad. Our values and reputation, which took over a hundred years in the making, became a laughing stock, and our closest allies no longer view America as a beacon.
The US has not been a force for good in the world in some time, if ever.
Unfortunately for Americans, it has to get worse before it can get better. Much worse.
The institutions are deeply corrupt, and have been for decades. They must be destroyed and possibly replaced. It sucks, and it will hurt. It may even possibly require an entire revolution, as many of the deeply evil US institutions such as the CIA and FBI are so deeply and tightly integrated with the federal government that it may require destruction of the state itself.
The status quo has been comfy for a lot of Americans, but the world as a whole is not a better place because Facebook and Lockheed and the US CIA exist.
This has been pending for most of a century.
What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society.
Revolutionaries tend to suffer from extreme naivete or arrogance. They don't understand that idealists like them usually get pushed aside or killed by the real crazies during the power vacuum stage, then the country becomes significantly worse. It's happened so many times in history. Until the US starts killing half of its population like Pol Pot did it can always get worse.
Over the last thousand years, humans have become more educated and more connected. Violent deaths have been steadily falling.
Over the last hundred years, American military and paramilitary forces, and their vendors, have subverted transparency and democracy to turn America into a military dictatorship.
There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
The culture of the 3.6% of people who live in the current territory of the USA will be irreparably damaged, however. This may not be entirely a bad thing, given how significant an outlier the US lifestyle is compared to the rest of the world.
> There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
We're talking about long-term cycles of change here so it is difficult to opine with certainty leaving a lot of room for differing opinions. Unfortunately, however, I think the end of Pax Americana will usher in increased conflict and violence, particularly in the West which has experienced a long period of peace due to American dominance.
Remember when people pretended it was the scandal of all scandals that the IRS was reviewing PACs who were forbidden from doing political activity for political activity? And now many of those same people are cheering this, and the act blue ‘investigation’, and the threats against Harvard’s tax exempt status for nakedly corrupt reasons? Man I wish shame still had some stopping power.
I don't think those accusations need to be taken seriously while they're being hyped by people like Jim Jordan. If they have evidence of wrongdoing they should forward it to the DoJ and write it up in an indictment, where it can be reviewed by a court and jury that will evaluate the claims made therein.
I’m sure you’d find the exact same thing if some grifty billionaire funded a fake investigation into those people who were contributing money to WinRed and yet, only one of the two is facing investigation.. it is so far past the time when this DOJ should be given the benefit of the doubt and steel manning their obvious corruption doesn’t make anyone seem scholarly, just credulous.
It's not true that only one of the two is facing investigation. Multiple state AGs are investigating WinRed, and rightly so - there's substantial evidence that they're using dark patterns to trick people into recurring donations when they intended to donate only once. The controversy is that a political official is ordering an investigation of ActBlue, not that political fundraising platforms ought to be above scrutiny.
Federally it certainly is true. And I agree, they shouldn’t be above scrutiny which is why it’s so important for the DOJ to maintain their independence and to avoid partisanship.. but Elon was loudly claiming they were funding the Tesla protests a few weeks ago and the rest of the administration got in line to encourage this pretextual nonsense.
It turns out the name of the political donation game is recurring donations and spammy messages. I 100% believe people donated to some random cause via act blue and didn’t realize they were signing up for recurring donations through there —- like all political fundraising arms do as evidenced by all the people complaining that WinRed incessantly removes money from their account that they didn’t authorize. But again, only 1 of the 2 is being investigated and it’s obviously a corrupt investigation so here we are.
Now imagine a sitting President personally saying 'the highest holders of my grift coin get a personal visit with me'. That would seem odd, wouldn't it?
You can call Donald Trump a dirtbag and say that giving visits to Trump token holders is corrupt. You can and should investigate whether that is illegal. I have no issue with this.
That doesn’t mean that random people who don’t know who an organisation is should be giving political donations to that organisation.
In short, your logical fallacy is: whataboutism
——
Edit for Fauntleroy below due to rate limit:
No. The only thing I have discussed is the accusations against actblue, which I did not bring up. I have bought up no other topics.
—-
Edit for deadfred: hence asking about if anyone is alleging identical behaviour from WinRed earlier. From what I have seen, they are not.
Edit 2 for deadfred: "You narrowed to ActBlue" no I did not. mikeyouse bought ActBlue up. "there is no need to go into specifics of ActBlue" yes there is - either they did what they are being accused or they did not.
Accusing others of whataboutism is a way to dodge the real point: if identical behavior is excused for allies but condemned for opponents, the outrage isn't about ethics it's about weaponized partisanship.
Edit in response: The broader conversation is about weaponizing government power against political opponents, ActBlue was just one example give in many being discussed. You narrowed to ActBlue to have something you felt you could condemn safely, while ignoring the larger pattern. That selective focus is the weaponization your argument is trying to distract from.
Edit: Stepping back and noting the pattern there is no need to go into specifics of ActBlue. Especially when this VERY administration is blatantly selling access with their shill coin. Your hyper focus is a weaponized distraction, a 'gotcha' from the larger discussion. The administration does not care about corruption in fundraising, they care about targeting their opposition and shutting down any influence they have via fundraising, via information/knowledge sharing on the web, via universities with students willing to challenge the status quo.
While ActBlue was the first example mikeyouse bought up, and it happens not reflect very well on the Democrats, we can just as easily discuss Harvard racially discriminating and vuolating title 9 to control campus admissions, hiring and speech if you like.
I have never had a single problem with Wikipedia in 20 years, and I don't believe an alternative exists. All text written on Wikipedia is royalty free and so are most of the images. The meaningfulness of that can't be overstated. Wikipedia is the web's greatest website and a wonder of the world.
You can't love the web without loving Wikipedia, so I'm wary of anyone who disrespects it.
No, Wikipedia is no better than any other site which allows user edits and in many ways reliably biased towards certain narratives - which narrative depends on the subject of the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia articles should always be read in conjunction with the Talk and Edit history pages and even then it is necessary to find original sources for any claims made in Wikipedia articles.
If you call something gender fluid you lose tax exempt status? Good to know.
I just feel that logically this doesn't make any sense. Having the view or even promoting the idea that a mythical creature is "gender fluid" isn't an overt political action. It doesn't help any political party or politician. There are numerous fully-compliant tax-exempt organizations that directly aid LGBTQIA+ individuals. How are these above board but having someone submit content to your organization that claims the Nure-onna might be genderfluid is crossing into the realm of politics by influencing election outcomes?
Do you have the Japanese folklore monster article? Citation needed please. Because, if the monster can, you know, shift genders, then maybe gender fluid is an accurate term.
Despite anything he may say about himself, Larry Sanger is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "the founder of Wikipedia". He was a paid employee of the project in 2001; his involvement with the site ended in early 2002 when funding for the position ran out. His experience with the site nearly 25 years ago does not make him an authority on how it is run today.
Wikipedia’s article on Sanger calls him cofounder and credits him with its name:
“ Lawrence Mark Sanger (/ˈsæŋər/ ⓘ;[1] born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies.”
"Co-founder" is debatable, but he certainly wasn't "the founder" of the site.
Regardless - whether you choose to describe Sanger's early involvement with Wikipedia as a "founder" or not, 2002 was a long time ago, especially online. The site which he was involved with was very different from the one which exists today.
I agree. Wikipedia used to be a useful starting point for almost any research.
Today, not so much. I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an analysis of just one topic where it was shown that circular referencing was used to establish a narrative.
Coming back to the point at hand: the US attorney targeting Wikipedia is merely restating allegations which have been made by many others on Wikipedia’s biases for and against certain topics and individuals.
No, that depends on your viewpoint. Those who come from a "democrat" background will certainly consider Trump to be more controversial than Obama while those from a Republican background will see Obama - especially second-term Obama - as far more controversial than Trump. Independents will vary on their interpretation but Obama is not likely to end up in the history books as the 'Change agent' he promised to be and will mostly likely be seen as partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA due to his use of and support for identity politics in a (successful) attempt to win a second period by cobbling together the 'coalition of the oppressed'.
How Trump will end up in the history books wholly depends on whether he succeeds in his attempts to curtail globalism and save the USA from becoming insolvent due to the rising debt. If the economy fails his presidency will as well and with that he'll be remembered for all the controversy around his political career. If he succeeds he'll be seen as a 'realpolitiker' who pulled the USA out of the downward spiral it had been in since ... the late 90's? The end of the cold war?
Of course there is also the chance of a large-scale conflict breaking out during his watch in which case his place in the history books also depends on how that ends.
> Obama is not likely to end up in the history books as the 'Change agent' he promised to be and will mostly likely be seen as partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA
That's a fantasy. His mere existence in the position, contradicts the premise. Hillary hoped to be in a similar position...history would have also been kind to her, despite her vicious nature by the obvious virtuous implications (a woman can become POTUS).
No, that's not accurate. When people talk about the "deterioration of race relations", they're referring to a well-documented phenomenon (https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx) where poll respondents say race relations are bad (and trending downwards) since 2015 while they were good from 2001 to 2013. I'm skeptical that Obama bears any responsibility for this, given that the trend didn't start until his second term, but it's a real trend and not a euphemism.
It's hard to take you seriously when you employ 'democrat' background and Republican as contrasting terms. Referring to the Democratic party and its supporters is more easily effected by saying [the] Democrats. This sort of baity rhetoric undermines any aspirations to objectivity.
Yes, as described in the blog post, I would imagine the median Fox News viewer to find Wikipedia biased. But the median Fox News viewer is not the median American, much less median world citizen.
But no seriously, having finished reading it, this article is incredibly Christian-centric and Americentric.
Regarding the missing topics mentioned in the article (updated to quote them for convenience):
The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing “Obamagate” story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump.
For example, the September 11 attacks on the US Embassy in Benghazi objectively happened - few people on the left or right would pretend they did not happen or that were not notable events of Barack Obama’s presidency (as the article discusses).
This is not a matter of whether you watch Fox News or not.
Have you bothered to do any sort of comparison as to how similar attacks are reported? At a quick glance, I see nothing on George W Bush's wiki page[0] about the 2002 consulate attack in Kolkata[1], for example.
Not that it's necessarily wrong for it to not be listed there, though. The article on GWB is about him and what he did as president - it isn't meant to be a complete history of the United States between 2001 and 2009.
I have trouble believing anyone with the remotest knowledge of US politics is unaware of the scandal, but https://www.britannica.com/event/2012-Benghazi-attacks . 'Reactions and investigation' has the information you apparently missed all these years.
The article is nonsense. It links to Obama's Wikipedia page and complains Obama's page doesn't talk about Benghazi. But Obama's Wikipedia page links to a huge article about.... Benghazi. So his complaint is what, the article about Benghazi isn't summarized on Obama's Wikipedia page? Weak sauce.
> Main articles: 2011 military intervention in Libya and 2012 Benghazi attack
> In February 2011, protests in Libya began against long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi as part of the Arab Spring. They soon turned violent. In March, as forces loyal to Gaddafi advanced on rebels across Libya, calls for a no-fly zone came from around the world, including Europe, the Arab League, and a resolution[378] passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate.[379] In response to the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 on March 17, the Foreign Minister of Libya Moussa Koussa announced a ceasefire. However Gaddafi's forces continued to attack the rebels.[380]
> On March 19, a multinational coalition led by France and the United Kingdom with Italian and U.S. support, approved by Obama, took part in air strikes to destroy the Libyan government's air defense capabilities to protect civilians and enforce a no-fly-zone,[381] including the use of Tomahawk missiles, B-2 Spirits, and fighter jets.[382][383][384] Six days later, on March 25, by unanimous vote of all its 28 members, NATO took over leadership of the effort, dubbed Operation Unified Protector.[385] Some members of Congress[386] questioned whether Obama had the constitutional authority to order military action in addition to questioning its cost, structure and aftermath.[387][388] In 2016 Obama said "Our coalition could have and should have done more to fill a vacuum left behind" and that it was "a mess".[389] He has stated that the lack of preparation surrounding the days following the government's overthrow was the "worst mistake" of his presidency.[390]
The link is there (I don't know how long it's been there but don't care to investigate), but there is no text about the Benghazi attack on the US Embassy - just other topics. Many people can and would criticize Barack Obama and his then-Secretary of State for inaction to protect the embassy from an attack the embassy saw coming.
Why are you glad for a downvote? Just because you don't agree with Sanger's point of view does not make it less worthwhile to read about it. Censorship is not something to be glad about and yes, downvoting opinions outside of your desired narrative until they are greyed out into oblivion or killed is a form of censorship.
Exactly, he sees the problem clearly. And this article was five years ago. It's become even more entrenched now. There's basically no way of fixing this.
We can see similar problems with other sites that rely on volunteer labor, like Reddit.
> Damn Wikipedia character assassinating critics now
FTFY. If you go dig deeper at foundation.wikimedia.org you'll inevitably come across an Israeli court document describing systemic smear defamation and libel campaign mounted by toxic editors against an academic, which lasted around a decade.
You should make an account on Wikipediocracy (which is frequented by many Wikipedia editors and insiders) and express all your paeans about Wikipedia's supposed infallibility, and see how fast you'd get dressed-down.
Talking about our march into fascism is still considered off topic here apparently. Isn’t that exactly the sort of topic a supposed forum of hackers ought to be discussing however?
This forum, in spite of the name, was never about the older hacker ethos that began way back when. It was founded by a VC and was called "Startup News" at first, only changing its name six months later. It was created by the wealthy, for those who wanted to get wealthy (and make it's founder wealthier in the process). It co-opted "hacker".
The concern is that it's too easy to contribute to hot political topics. Moderation wants to prevent this forum from becoming identical to so many others, and the only tool available is to deemphasize posts.
That’s an absolutely valid point — it’s important to prevent discussions from devolving into chaotic political battles. But there is a clear limit to how far you can go. When moderation starts suppressing or de-emphasizing information simply because it doesn’t align with a certain viewpoint — even when that information is objectively true — it’s no longer moderation, it’s censorship.
What’s happening around Wikipedia shows how quickly the protection of truth can turn into political pressure: when a platform is accused of "propaganda" simply because its content is inconvenient for certain groups.
I really hope we are not yet at the point where mere disagreement automatically makes someone a propagandist who must be silenced by force.
I fully agree with you. Maybe I wrote it in a bad way. I do not like that these things that are objectively wrong for a functioning democracy are getting flagged because for some reason this got political connotations. I consider it dangerous and I do not understand why this is controversial at all.
They aren't, and nobody has the political cajones to actually pick that fight. But that doesn't mean that many of them aren't breaking tax laws left and right.
the Overton window has shifted sharply Right. if you've shifted along with it, the institutions that haven't shifted at all look like they've moved sharply Left.
Wikipedia hasn't shifted particularly Left since 2020. Centrists are just blind to shifts of the Center. it's the political equivalent of the equivalence principle.
I had the same thought but most European countries don't have as wide freedom of speech laws as the US. Same problem with moving to Australia or New Zealand, though it'd be awesome to have a project like that based here.
Not funny. My family is bilingual english/spanish and my wife is a green card holder but not a citizen. Doesn’t seem far fetched. But if we go down… it won’t be without a fight.
I recommend fleeing not fighting. Over 100 000 people fled Germany in the 1930s, which might have seemed like an over-reaction, except, well, you know what happened to many of those who didn't.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
It's an account created to avoid doxxing myself. My Wikipedia username is easily linked to my main HN account. I still rarely make minor Wikipedia edits now and then, and don't want my account banned.
Anyone who's edited Wikipedia long enough will recognize the pattern of what I'm describing. It's not a misrepresentation.
They (those worried about commie political bias) could do their own public digital university and social media websites. Instead of being free, they could charge a fee that would both serve to repel the freetards and fund the project.
Oh shit! That happened already, didn't it? How is it going at attracting talented individuals?
We should remember that anti-wikipedia propaganda exists for decades now. Despite of that, it is a place cherished by many (including non commies). Its demise would be a public disaster.
Hoarders will maintain copies of it. And if there is bias, there will be tons of biased bootlegs around.
Further investigation would be more wise than rapid decisions by instinct.
As soon as Harris ran for POTUS they edited out that her dad was characterized as a Marxist scholar and then viciously defended any attempt to re-instate it.
More accurately, they rejected the wave of people who tried to add that single word to characterize of his entire career but were not otherwise contributing anything to the article. There’s a good discussion here highlighting how they were looking for substantial improvements by people who were actually familiar with his work, not just trying to affix a label to someone they were otherwise unfamiliar with.
It does, but both side's followers are blind to it when their side does it. Or they think it's ok for their side to do it. I'm not sure which is scarier
Agreed, the pandemic authoritarianism was far more invasive, with non-compliance being life ruining for many, so I don't think it's really comparable to the current administrations clownish floundering.
Acting like they are the same shamefully diminishes the previous administrations actions, which is particularly dangerous since their documented suppression of the now widely accepted lab leak theory has resulted in little action to prevent further illegal gain of function research. Its inevitable we will face yet another worldwide pandemic in the next decade or so while this careless research continues without proper safety controls or scrutiny.
You’re not arguing in good faith if you’re not recognizing that the “pandemic authoritarianism” started under Trump, or asserting that the lab leak theory was ever suppressed (it was continuously discussed throughout - just check the comments here for the last 5 years!) or that the most criticized theories making wild claims about bioweapons or gain of function research are now widely accepted. Many assessments have included the possibility of a lab leak of a natural specimen from the beginning, but in the absence of evidence nobody credible is saying more than, say, the CIA’s “low confidence” back in January.
A lot of what you refer to as "pandemic authoritarianism" took place under Trump as well. Vaccine mandates have been part of many jobs for years and years. It's not a Republican or Democrat thing.
Do people genuinely believe that Wikipedia isn't biased? On topics like race, climate, immigration, COVID-19 etc, a fair estimate is that it's about 1 standard deviation left of the median American. It's about as left as NPR.
This will sound rude but I mean it respectfully. If you believe NPR is not left leaning then you are in a severe filter bubble and may want to update your news diet.
Point taken, but I think my comment is a reflection of the problems with the modern use of "left" and "right".
Yes, of course NPR is more on the side of democrats than republicans.
But, it is very much pro-business, and often pro-war status quo ("right"). And, as I mentioned ("identity politics"), also very much pro-diversity in race/gender/etc. ("left").
So, IMHO, very much "centrist", not "left" (except on race/sex/gender).
also english wikipedia is actually for english speakers.. so it includes countries that aren’t america. there’s a reason they didn’t name it american wikipedia.
It sounds weird. Why does it look like a conspiracy theory?
Yo dawg, I heard you like to appeal to conspiracy theory types...
Why would someone introduce lots of seemingly indiscernible edits into important articles, fully knowing that the edit history is available to anyone who wants to look?
It would make more sense to spread propaganda in a place that doesn't fully track it.
Unless the exposition of such tracking edits as an obvious smoking gun exists to be staged to look like someone else did it.
Of course, it could all be to trigger a recursive conspiracytheorypocallipse that further erodes any belief in community generated content.
What should we do, Master Anakin? There's too many of them conspiracies.
Wikipedia/Wikimedia could move to a country that allows this type of manipulation on their platform or figure out how to comply with the existing US law.
Wikipedia could also stop operating as a 501c3 and incorporate.
But the typical out for these organizations are that they are not responsible for what people post. I don’t feel like that is very responsible. They already have moderation on the platform.
But Wikimedia/pedia can’t claim 501c3 status. It could spin off the political content/controversial into 501c4 which has more leeway. It can tighten editorial controls, emphasize first amendment, look at Section 230. Publish reports showing how misinformation is identified and corrected, partner with fact checking organizations.
But also if they cannot police their own content without an unpaid army of volunteers then herein lies the bigger issue with their model.
Except they have a financial cancer. If the government investigations uncover more scandals, beyond what were found in the Israel-Palestine topic area, public support and goodwill for Wikipedia will evaporate overnight, and they'll have no choice but to liquidate or absorbed into a successor organization.
https://archive.is/JozhY
> Before being named U.S. attorney, Martin appeared on Russia-backed media networks more than 150 times, The Washington Post reported last week. In one appearance on RT in 2022, he said there was no evidence of military buildup on Ukraine’s boarders only nine days before Russia invaded the country. He further criticized U.S. officials as warmongering and ignoring Russia security concerns.
This is getting ridiculous. Is there anyone associated with this administration who does not have a record of promoting Russia's positions?
Martin was also at the coup attempt on Jan 6 and on that day said "Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy. Ignore #FakeNews". https://archive.ph/jekzQ
That's more relevant. RT has had some fairly legitimate people on it such as Larry King, Julian Assange, John Pilger, Amy Goodman... Many Pulitzer prize and Peabody winners ... It's a mixed bag, people can't be so reductive about it.
Not defending it, but just saying that being on RT doesn't necessarily imply anything.
These things are complicated. Alex Jones and Michio Kaku were both on Genesis for instance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_Communications_Netwo...
We have the capability of being adults here. Whether we are or not is always a choice.
One time sure, 150+ on the Russia propaganda network ? I’m drawing my own adult conclusions about it: “The friend of my enemy is my enemy”
Yes. 150+ times is akin to Funding an individual, rather than seeking to add a unique perspective.
That’s not how foreign policy and international politics work. Every country would be enemies with every other country in that case.
All the pro-Palestinian anti-Israel country would be enemies of the US then, including Japan. You’d be supporting Trump’s tariffs and anti-China us or them stance then towards every country that has friendly business relations with China, which is everybody at this point. Heck, even Taiwan and China are friends more than Westerners would like to think. Meanwhile, America is friends with countries like Saudi Arabia and countries that keeps a blind eye to the funding of terrorism in America
There’s a reason the famous saying is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” rather than “the friend of my enemy is my enemy”
Comparing the choices of individuals with foreign diplomacy is specious. It is much harder for countries to have principles than individuals.
The same can be said of boardroom politics and board of directors. Or investment circles such as tech venture capital
RT is not legit. It is Russian propaganda. When those people participated they were collaborators.
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Entirely uncritical state controlled or substantially aligned media masquerading as news is always bad and should be criticized. See also almost anyone called on in White House press briefings these days.
Plus, you are saying it like all propaganda is somehow the same. Rosie the Riveter != "Russia isn't going to do anything...well, it's America's fault...NATO something something...actually, Ukraine basically deserved it."
Not who you are responding to, but given that as rational humans, we have the capacity to make non-binary comparisons, Kremlin propaganda is indeed far worse than most. I say this as a European who sees clear flaws in the US system, but that does not make the Russian system good, or even a little good. It is objectively horrible. The Russian people, for one, deserve far better.
It is important to point out that Russian propaganda is actually excellent propaganda. However, their message is the at the very bottom:
There is no truth, up is down, nothing matters, the invader is the victim, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_propaganda_in_the_Russia...
If NelsonMinar doesn't say it, I will.
It is.
Stop trying to make everything equal.
> Amy Goodman
Source for that? My impression is that Democracy Now!, while it has a clear perspective and set of biases, has been fairly independent. I don't think Goodman herself would be involved with them, but I think some of her sometimes guests have been.
In general I agree with folks replying to you that RT is not trustworthy and someone being involved with it is a red flag.
Ed Martin made 198 TV appearances on RT in 2023 and 2024.
How many RT TV hits did Larry King do? How recently did King appear on RT?
( Larry King died in Jan 2021.)
> Not defending it, but just saying that being on RT doesn't necessarily imply anything.
I'm not sure who's claiming that here. The RT appearance in question is about him spreading disinformation and Russian propaganda on the eve of Ukraine invasion.
It's pretty constant on hn. People paint everything from country X, holistically, with some broad and blunt moral brush.
It reads like a cartoon. Everything from China is loaded with secret spyware snooping on you for countless unspecified evils - everything out of Russia by anyone is part of some secret global propaganda network.
I point it out as absurd and reductive whenever I see it and people dogpile on me like I desecrated a sacred cow.
The world is incredibly complex and a simple label doesn't cut it. Wernher von Braun was a Nazi but that doesn't mean his work on rocketry was fictional lies.
You need to assess things based on the merits of the thing, not on any narratives of attributive associations you're choosing to assign.
Yes but in this case, the dude in question was uncritically parroting Russian propaganda - as do most people on RT, since that's its purpose.
Why use a non-example to mention it though?
>everything out of Russia by anyone is part of some secret global propaganda network.
Who has claimed all Russians are part of a large propaganda network. This is about a government news network.
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The US government is also framed the same way on HN, though I don't like this metrics gathering method.
Most discussions are of the war in Ukraine which also connects to US politics. It's going to be negative and treated extremely suspect because Putin is ex KGB, lied that he wouldn't invade, the war itself, and their influence in US elections.
This is about the Russian government though. If your argument is that it's wrong in these constraints then I disagree but your generalization is valid. My original comment was about Russia as a whole but I think I wrong to try to shift to that as it doesn't come up
Russia interfered with our elections and is actively hostile to us. It's not a meme, it's real.
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We voted for this! This is “democracy” at work
Less than 30% of voter age Americans voted for this
The majority that did vote, voted for this. The participation rate has always been low in rich western countries. Given the standards of media literacy and civics education, there's no evidence that a higher participation rate would have changed the outcome.
Everybody votes in Australia (not sure how rich, but in top 20 for sure). If you don't you have to show cause or pay a AUD$50 fine. I know some think this is anti-freedom, but it does prevent farces like the current USA. Historically there have been problems in the past (30 years ago) but these days the Australian Electoral Commission (Independent from government) revise electoral boundaries to ensure no more gerrymanders.
> The participation rate has always been low in rich western countries.
The general election in 2022 had 84,2% of eligible voters in Sweden.
Italy had 64% for the parliamentary elections in 2022, which is the lowest ever but it's pretty far from 30%.
just to note that if “30% voted for this” participation was roughly 60%
63.9% per https://www.cfr.org/article/2024-election-numbers Which apparently was quite high. Only 3 presidential elections in the past 100 years exceeded 63%: 1960, 2020, and 2024.
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Plurality, not majority. It may be pedantic but it's an important difference.
I was going to say that it was a majority this time, but it seems like the results shifted as more votes were counted after election night, and he ended up with 49.8%. Still, unbelievably, pretty close to a majority.
Under fifty percent for what it’s worth. And there was a lot of disenfranchisement
We regularly have 92% - 93% participation in federal elections here in Australia. Having one next weekend, and already record numbers of pre-poll votes.
It’s almost like elections are held on Saturdays and participation is compulsory.
Almost…
And those that don't vote have to show a very good reason, or pay a fine, or face gaol.
Must be the sausages
Not majority, under 50%
> The participation rate has always been low in rich western countries.
Australia has entered the chat.
For reference, informal votes were around 5% in our last federal election:
https://results.aec.gov.au/27966/website/HouseInformalByStat...
This article contains a fun breakdown of the types of informal votes including a category for "the usual anatomical drawings" (0.7% of informal votes):
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/04/22/2025-federal-election-p...
You can't bring them up without including that voting is compulsory there.
See my sibling comment. Getting your name checked off is compulsory but nothing stops you from handing in a blank ballot.
Arguments based on voter participation overlook that voting is a statistical sample of the population. The people who don’t vote broadly break down roughly the same way as the people who do vote. And even to the extent they don’t, it’s risky to make assumptions about how they would have voted.
If you can generalize about non-voters, it’s that they’re broadly more anti-institution than voters—which is what causes them to put less stock in the institutional practice of voting. In the U.S. in the Trump era, that has meant that non-voters or infrequent voters support Trump somewhat more strongly than regular voters.
There’s also no evidence that increased turnout would have had the same result.
What seems to be overlooked in these conversations is the skill with which American voters have been disenfranchised by partisan forces.
It’s easy to blame people for not voting if you ignore the real difficulties in actually casting a vote for many Americans.
That an enormous sample size. Statistically a complete participation should be very close, so the burden of proof lies with those who claim it would be different. Regardless of whether Trump would have won or not, that is a clear indication of evenly split public sentiment. So we still get to justly reap the fruits of our collective choices. There is no exoneration by whimsically dreaming of improbable alternatives.
I don't think it is was that hard to vote. That is a straw man to avoid facing the hard truth of American apathy. Now next election, perhaps we can have a conversation on that point. Things a trending rather poorly right now.
In fact there was an extensive analysis of the election by Democrat pollster David Shor, who found that 100% turnout would have resulted in an even larger Trump win, by 4.8 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202...
This has been the pattern for awhile now. The pool of politically unengaged people are especially Trumpy compared to regular voters: https://abcnews.go.com/538/vote-back-trump/story?id=10909062...
The majority did not vote for Trump, and I question how many of the minority that did vote for him voted for this, specifically. Almost certainly not all of them, given his approval rating is now well below his popular vote share.
100% of voter age Americans made a decision. That includes not registering to vote or not voting.
Pretend I want a snack, I can choose between a cookie and an apple. If I dislike both then I also have the option to not get a snack. Neither is selected.
This is different from not voting because a candidate still wins.
If the US wanted voting to be more popular, there would be a Federal Holiday to promote it. There is no incentive when there are known costs...at least since the wild inflation of the 80s when it got prohibitive to lose a shift and the slow dissolution of union jobs. This is the result of the tyranny of indifference. Those that benefit continue to promote and benefit, those that do not, are disenfranchised. It's a common theme in history.
>If the US wanted voting to be more popular, there would be a Federal Holiday to promote it.
I agree but it doesn't actually matter. 97% can vote by mail, early, or another method besides election day according to this article https://www.cbsnews.com/news/map-early-voting-mail-ballot-st...
>There is no incentive when there are known costs... is the result of the tyranny of indifference.
What is the cause of the Indifference in your opinion ?
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Voters who do not vote say "I'm fine with all winners", like "What pizza do you want?" - "I'm fine with every pizza".
And those that stayed at home deserve what they got.
David Schor’s analysis found that if everyone had voted, Trump would have won by 4.8 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202...
What presidential elections are you comparing it to?
"American democracy"
And a minority of those who did vote voted for this.
There is no democracy without a free press, or else no one can make an informed decision. I doubt that the press can be called free when it’s owned by oligarchs.
I mean yes? Democracy is a pretty poor model for governance. IMO peak enlightenment happened circa the 17th or 18th century when classical liberalism decided government should be based on individual liberties and anything outside of that is decided democratically not because it is a good system but because votes are roughly a tally of who would win if we all pull knives on each other because we didn't like the vote.
Democracy is not 2 parties doing voter suppression and gerrymandering as a filter to pass the result to an electoral college.
The US system was never designed to be fair to individuals in the first place, pointing at it as a failure of democracy is IMHO pulling the actual issues under the rug.
It’s basically impossible to engage in meaningful voter suppression in a country where election results can be cross-checked against high-quality polling.
“Gerrymandering” also has no effect on Presidential elections. And in 2024, Republicans won a larger share of the House popular vote than their share of House seats.
Voter suppression is the act of limiting the pool of voters. That includes putting large swaths of the population behind bars or flagged as non eligible to voting, putting barriers to voter registration etc.
It can never be 0 and every country will have a minimum requirement, but the degree to which it is done in the US is far ahead of most western country.
Gerrymandering has an effect on the criteria for voter eligibility, the voting rules in the state etc. It's not direct but who's in power has a sizeable effect on who will have an easier time voting.
No, “voter suppression” is the act of preventing legitimate voters from voting. Society determining that categories of people shouldn’t vote (children, felons, non-citizens, etc.) isn’t voter suppression, it’s simply establishing qualifications for voting. The goal isn’t to get to 0 or try to get as close to 0 as possible. People who should vote should be able to vote, while people who shouldn’t vote shouldn’t be able to vote.
In the modern era, we should probably narrow the franchise, instituting civics tests and restricting voting to natural born citizens. Statistically, both of these would have hurt my party in 2024, so this isn’t self-interest speaking.
How can someone talk about democracy peaking when the franchise was extended to a tiny minority of the population. You don't give a damn about individual liberties, you only care that the "right" people have liberty.
That poster is specifically arguing against democracy
Your right. I stand corrected. They don't give a damn about democracy or individual liberties.
Ah yes, the wonderful time of enlightenment when all straight white Christian land-owning men's rights became recognized, not just the nobility's. Just a few short centuries from there, the rights of poorer white men, children, women, people of any other skin color, non-Christian, and LGBT people would be recognized too.
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I'm not convinced at all that the election wasn't stolen. Trump ran is a very bland campaign to the point where he was skipping major events and people in his circle seemed assured of victory months before the election.
I know that Harris put up zero fight about it. I infer that she believed it to be legitimate.
That's not definitive, to be sure. But it's sufficient for me to believe that we did this to ourselves. Now all we can do is figure out how we're going to get through it.
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think actual election fraud, big enough to steal an election, would be too big to miss.
Yes, it might only take a small number of votes in the right place, but either you somehow know the right place, or you have to move a lot of votes.
There's a reasonable discussion to be had along the lines of 'these guys seem to be doing everything they whine about', but could they get a big operation done without a) bragging openly about it, b) leaving a big trail, or c) having a falling out with a conspirator who then tells all.
Adding on, certainly gerrymandering and voter supression laws affect voting results, but I have trouble calling that stealing an election.
Points B and C are believable. Constant headlines about screw ups like the signal chats and sloppy handling of data from doge
Trump did thank that "very popular guy. He was very effective. And he knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers, those vote counting computers, and we won Pennsylvania in a landslide." If Biden or Obama had said something like that the nation would be in uproar.
https://www.youtube.com/live/kdvpXxXVyok?si=XALuK7No9-PLQBAr...
Also consider the circumstantial evidence of Musk illegally promising to pay people (via lottery) to vote, and then using the defense that the lottery was actually rigged.
If nothing else, that establishes a willingness to tamper with elections.
Democracy built lies, decide, and rejection of facts through propaganda.
Really need a viable means to fight it, say allowing an elected official's constitutes being able to sue them for no less than $10,000 for incidence of bearing false witness. Help erode the dark money networks.
Also having a 4th branch of Governments, the people with State and Federal binding resolution, would help. Only way to overrides those in power is to unionize the will.
The suing thing would be cool but the court system is slow by design. I can't see it working in practice however I'm also really fed up with the bullshit so i understand.
Good luck relying on a court of law when the President suspends courts and arrests judges. The latter is happening right now.
If Russia were trying to destroy the United States from the inside, how would things be any different than they are now?
If they were any good at it there would probably be less overt Russian sympathizing.
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Except that's not coming from the top. Tens of millions of people wanted this.
Maybe this is indeed what Russia would do to us. But we're beating them to the punch by doing it to ourselves.
Why do you assume it has to come from just the top?
The Internet Research Agency explicitly focused on the masses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
Or they’re aiding it.
They'd be the exact same.
It's like like Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics was a wish list.
Well, considering they have a very high ranking guy in the Putin regime who considers that to be his full time job, google "Vladislav Surkov", they seem to be doing a fairly effective job of it so far.
Russia has a pretty high ranking guy in the US Government as well, google Krasnov.
Yeah, everything about this administration makes perfect sense if we assume that Trump is a Russian asset. Of course billionaires like Thiel and Musk have their say as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see America sell weapons to Russia, and provide them military support in the future when they launch their next invasion.
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The English Wikipedia is a massive target for influence campaigns. I don't think there are any other communities as resilient as it. Just an example:
There's certain individual or group that edited under the name "Icewhiz", was banned, and now operates endless sockpuppet accounts in the topic area to influence Wikipedia's coverage on the Middle East. One of them was an account named "Eostrix", that spent years making clean uncontroversial edits until one day going for adminship.
Eostrix got 99% approval in their request for adminship. But it didn't matter, because an anonymous individual also spent years pursuing Eostrix, assembling evidence, and this resulted in Eostrix's block just days before they became a Wikipedia administrator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...
It's a useful contrast to a place like Reddit, where volunteer moderators openly admit to spreading terrorist propaganda or operating fake accounts when their original one gets banned. You don't get to do that on Wikipedia. If you try, someone with far too much time on their hands will catch you because Wikipedia doesn't need to care about Daily Active Users and the community cares about protecting a neutral point of view.
Not denying the existence of influence campaigns. There have been several major pro-Palestinian ones recently, which is probably why this letter has been sent. But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up. Most social media websites don't care and would rather you don't bring it to their attention. That is why Reddit banned /r/bannedforbeingjewish.
I knew IceWhiz. You are correct that he (or rather "they") eventually was kicked from the site. But he/they operated on the site for years and was the biggest PITA you can imagine. He must have single-handedly scared away two dozen honest contributors with his BS. It is very, very easy to game the rules on Wikipedia. Wars of attrition goes on for years. Normal people don't waste their time. IceWhiz and his meat puppets have endless patience and all the time in the world.
Right. The fact that someone so terrible got 99% approval and only one anonymous investigator was able to stop them makes me think that it's likely a lot of other terrible admins who didn't have an anonymous investigator go after them probably go through the process.
And the times I've brought up the fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable before, I've had numerous editors come in and claim that wasn't true and that people could rely on the claims they find in Wikipedia. This runs counter to the claim that Wikipedia editors know about these influence campaigns and openly fight about them. A lot of the active and vocal editors are openly dismissing such concerns.
One can look into Shira Klein and Jan Grabowski's report about how the Polish ultranationalists have distorted the Holocaust topic area on Wikipedia (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) if they want to find a counterexample. To the best of my understandings so far, I think Icewhiz is a good guy, just that he doesn't have strong grasp about Wikipedia's guidelines, particularly regarding multiple accounts, and was the victim of sustained smear campaigns by Polish ultranationalists who were able to psychologically manipulate the admins into banning him in order to let their distortionist edits stick. Now he's an Emmanuel Goldstein figure for both the ultranationalists and the pro-Hamas editors who seek to deflect external scrutiny to their edits.
A month after that article was published (and shortly after the article was posted on Wikipedia), the Arbitration Committee opened a sua sponte case to review the topic area despite the substance of that article being "Icewhiz was right".[1] It resulted in bans of Icewhiz' enemies for distorting the Holocaust topic area. I think moderators on pretty much any other website would laugh and ignore an article like that as being whining from a user they banned.
I agree that Icewhiz is an Emmanuel Goldstein-like figure at this point who's used by pro-Hamas editors/ultranationalists. A bunch of those pro-Palestinian editors that loved to complain about Icewhiz to deflect from their own behaviour were topic-banned from Israel-Palestine area a few months ago in January.[2]
It's challenging to deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict on any website that allows for user contributions. There's astroturfing and nation-state backed influence operations from probably a dozen countries. I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
There's a survivorship bias in play here as we don't have a good other sample or more to compare to. After Wikipedia went big in the 2000s it was for a very long time a de-facto monopoly for people seeking out reference information on the Internet. Even Google's Knol project, which was intended to be a Wikipedia competitor, faltered after a few years. Same goes for Everipedia as well.
Did you read this post?
"Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record"
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
I'm gonna guess from your phrasing that you're a denier of the genocide being committed by Netanyahu and the IDF.
The infamous "Philip Cross" always comes to mind.
https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/Philip_Cross
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> only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy
This is false. The talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gamergate_(harassment_cam... lays it out clearly: because of the nature of Gamergate (misogynist harassment campaign), the page about Gamergate is heavily scrutinized in order to make sure that all source cites follow the same reliable-source rules that are in force across all of Wikipedia. Please don't lie about Wikipedia.
Do you have any specific examples? You mentioned the Gamergate article but your assertion that it doesn’t reference non-primary sources needs some citations that all of the academic and media sources were directly involved. Since it was a harassment campaign involving journalists, there’s a big question about what a policy would need to look like to prevent someone from attacking a journalist and then saying Wikipedia can’t use their work because they’re involuntarily involved.
Anecdote != evidence.
Also, your anecdote is specifically about a social media article about an attempt to use social media spaces to harass people.
Seems extra “special case” to me.
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> You'll get a bunch of leftist (because they don't have jobs) volunteer moderators with an agenda.
What do you consider a leftist? Why do you think they don't have jobs?
Did you read this post?
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention. Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.
I have in the past, but three things put me off doing so now;
Pages where I can spot inconsistencies are often controversial, with long dense discussion pages, edits here are almost impossible beyond trivial details. I dont mind fixing trivia, but not if the actual improvement I think I can make is rejected.
There is a bit of a deletionist crusade to keep some topics small, for example, Ive had interesting trivia about a cameras development process simply deleted. Maybe it is truly for the better, but it is not really that easy to add to the meat of the project, without someone else's approval.
Third, the begging banners really feel a bit gross; I know the size of the endowment, and how long it would be able to sustain the project (forever essentially)... It really feels like the foundation is using the Wikipedia brand to funnel money to irrelevant pet causes. This really puts me off contributing.
I've also edited random things in the past. Like inaccuracies in Comp.Sci. topics.
I used to like Wikipedia but I'm changing my mind. One thing amongst many others was seeing some company that competed with the startup I worked in basically introduce marketing material into the site. It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.
I'd need some serious convincing to restore my trust in it. There are still some good technical/science articles I guess. It kind of sucks that instead of getting more reliable information on the Internet we're trending towards not being to trust anything. It's not clear how we fix this since reliability can not be equal to popularity.
> It just feels like it's too big and there are too many interests that want to distort things. I was surprised to see some article recently removed effectively rewriting history and directing to some alternative version. I just checked again and it's been restored but it just seems like the wild west.
In fairness, this does mean the system is working.
I made an edit last year, it immediately got reverted and I got a banner on my user page for vandalism. I complained about that, other people agreed with me but the person who reverted my edits never responded. So there it sits.
It really feels that way because that's what they're doing. There's a legit non-profit internet encyclopedia barnacled with a bunch of generic left wing political stuff, except the barnacle is bigger than the boat.
Yeah I stopped donating to Wikipedia once I learned where the money goes.
Even if it ends up supporting causes I agree with, why would I need the Wikimedia Foundation as an intermediary? I could just give money directly to the causes!
I created a page, it got declined because the guy who two films have been made about didn't count as important enough. I kind of get it, but still, did kill the energy slightly.
If you care about a topic and want to edit Wikipedia but do not want to deal with the process, you can simply talk about what you want to change on the discussion page. Is there an equivalent workaround when it comes to creating new pages?
You can create a page as an anonymous user. The content and subject is much, more more important than the fact of being created as an anonymous user. If that's the process you want to avoid, there's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... but that one is more geared towards people who are already engaged with Wikipedia. An outsider saying "well, someone, but not me, should do something about this problem," is just as welcome on Wikipedia as it is anywhere else.
I suppose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... is the closest equivalent but not really the same thing.
I tried on a completely uncontroversial page that documented a certain idiom and examples of where it was used.
My edit was reverted, twice, because apparently there is no such thing as a notable source for lines from a 1980s British TV episode, not even a fan website that has a transcript for all of them. Gave up after that.
I tried volunteering and contributed a few thousand edits, and ended up brigaded into hours of silly reviews by sock puppets and their crony admins. The bureaucracy is nuttier than a Monty python sketch. Endless futile debates on talk pages.
It’s not supposed to have many rules (according to the Jimbo gospel), but admins apply policy pages as law , and given how many inane and convoluted policies there are, you can be censured for practically anything with the right quote. You can see these sockpuppet brigades watching and pouncing on the edit history of any semi controversial page.
It’s a pathetic monoculture that lacks any self awareness or sense of introspection. Critical discussions are quickly shut down and the authors are put into a penalty box.
Leadership needs to address the power dynamics, and come up with a better self regulating structure. Editors need to identify themselves and their agenda. Networks & brigades need to be monitored and shutdown using activity tracking.
Wikipedia’s social network is operating with 1990s era protocols but their influence via syndication on every common news surface means they are way too influential. Google, Alexa, LLMs and mainstream media all syndicate Wikipedia content as gospel. But the content is completely unregulated.
And don’t get me started on Wikimedia Foundation.
Why? Bots reverse every edit.
I always wonder why certain topics are locked.
For most things the talk pages will explain why it is restricted, but if someone forgot to put a notice there, there's also a giant list of "the following topic areas reliably attract disruptive editing and get people angry, so admins move much more quickly to restrict editing than they would otherwise." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions#Ac...
Tried many times, nothing sticks. Lots of resistance.
> please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think!
Last time I tried to do that, I flagged a citation that went to a book saying the opposite of what wikipedia was citing it in support of as "failed verification".
This attracted the attention of an editor, who showed up to revert my flag, explaining that as long as the book exists, that's good enough.
Wikipedia could improve noticeably by just preventing the existing editors from making edits.
Why is their editor so awful to use?
I don't know, but it's definitely not a lack of funding.
Please do not edit, write for, read, or cite Wikipedia. If you care about or know about a topic, consider writing a book or article about it.
Here's the letter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ocNyx34Et19sKtlta0bTPPzSPcp...
No claims, no evidence. No sources, except "it has come to my attention" and "information received by my office".
Yikes that letter is alarming.
> In view of public criticisms, including those expressed by Wikipedia Co-Founder Dr. Lawrence M. Sanger, regarding the opacity of editorial processes and the anonymity of contributors, what justification does the Foundation offer for shielding editors from public scrutiny?
Larry Sanger has been criticizing Wikipedia for more than 20 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Criticism_of_Wiki...
The author of that letter is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Martin_(Missouri_politician... - "the first U.S. attorney for D.C. in at least 50 years to be appointed without experience as a judge or a federal prosecutor".
What is happening is very scary. Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say. I think this has been the case at anytime in history. However, now, with the internet, it is easy to spread such lies to mass and easy for such leaders to make blind followers.
“Some people say.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYA9ufivbDw
Remember as you read more and more news like this that many of the owners of Y Combinator supported this.
The only YC figure who espouses any position on U.S. federal politics is Paul Graham, who loudly campaigns against the current administration almost every day on Twitter.
Who, specifically, are you referring to; and what have they done or said to make you believe that they support this?
Wealthy people who could be coined liberal-tarians or just your average tech bro political grab bag largely backed Trump out of financial interest and who, imo, deluded themselves that the administration would be unsuccessful at "the bad stuff" much like his 2016 run.
No amount of shouting from the rooftops that this time was actually different convinced anyone. I can't really blame us collectively, we resoundingly voted for this— it's as much of a mandate you're likely to ever get in the US and we're in the find out stage of fucking around.
Looking back on old social media posts the theme is that everyone, supporters and not, were high on copium that Trump would do <list of things I like | aren't so bad> and the <list of truly terrible things> was just obviously crazy and wouldn't actually happen or were a joke.
Well, the good news is that there's a very convenient link at the bottom of the page here on HN for the AI startup school [1] which is host to a bunch of people that you should recognize.
[1] https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus
Their silence now is cowardly.
In before this thread is also flagged for being "political".
There's a post that the FBI arrested a judge who helped an illegal immigrant avoid capture during a court proceeding.
900+ upvotes
- it has nothing to do with tech
- it's about a hot button political issue
- it helps the Republican cause.
Not flagged
I'm just curious why you think it helps the Republican cause? When I saw this reported in the media my feel was this is something Democrats are going to latch on to demonstrate the government is seeking to intimidate the judicial branch.
I guess it can have different interpretation.
Either way I'd really prefer not to see this stuff on Hacker News. We have enough things that push people buttons in other places.
The only moderator action taken on this submission was to prevent it from being downweighted by community flags – 5 hours ago.
Acting DC AG Martin has a history of sockpuppetry. Bought a sycophant a laptop and then ghostwrote Facebook posts attacking a judge in a case against Martin. Should have been disbarred.
https://www.propublica.org/article/ed-martin-trump-interim-d...
It's always projection with the MAGA crowd
> “Wikipedia is one of the last places online that shows the promise of the internet, housing more than 65 million articles written to inform, not persuade,” the Wikimedia Foundation said Friday in a statement
Well that is apparently very false when it comes to american politics and jewish matters. On the positive side, for other countries and languages the biases are very different and quite wide ranging.
Maybe this threat by the US government is a good thing, it will force wikipedians to take their head out of the sand and go back to wide-ranging NPOV , and remove all those judgemental adjectives and epithets that are thrown around in so many articles.
I don't believe the idea of wikipedia can be threatened because it is a really resilient idea across political lines and there are billions who will want to recreate it.
The bias also exists very strongly in the German Wikipedia.
Haven't read the article in full yet, but it reminded me of this nice excerpt on Wikipedia and truth and the best of what we know:
https://emilygorcenski.com/post/on-truth/
""But one of the most significant differences critical for moving from polarization to productivity, is that the Wikipedians who write these articles aren’t actually focused on finding the truth. They’re working for something that’s a little more attainable, which is the best of what we can know right now. "
Letter should be thrown in the trash. Let him bring up charges if they feel a crime has been committed.
Seems relevant: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
[flagged]
Wikipedia needs decentralized hosting infra, away from any single country. It is way too important.
Decentralization typically means instead of being subject to one crazy government you are subject to multiple and have to deal with all.
I think wikipedia's approach of centralizing in one place but allowing downloading backups and making all sourcecode and server config public is better. If the worst happens anyone can setup a fork.
The hosting isn’t important, it’s easy to move or have an offline copy already. The access to fundraising is much more important and more complicated.
Start backing it up now. Partisan influence could be as minor as forcing some edits or as major as pulling their DNS. Every authoritarian in the world follows this same playbook. Over started looking into kiwix.
IA is at risk too.
You can download backups of Wikipedia articles at dumps.wikimedia.org. For the IA they had a plan to move to Canada back in 2017.
Reason and truth are the enemy of authoritarian regimes. They want you to believe that truth is subjective. Truth and reason provide alternative legitimacy to authority. If nothing is true, there is no basis on which to judge those in power.
There is a long legacy of authoritarian regimes attacking curious places, universities, historians, museums, books or any institution that grounds itself in reality which provides you a way to reasonably criticize authoritarian actions. Many authortarian regimes will "purge" as many of the country's intellectuals as they are able.
Wikipedia is absolutely the enemy of this administration and authoritarians everywhere in the world would love to see it's demise or collapse into chaos.
Whether the Wikipedia page for Israel says Gaza is a genocide or not, or that it's an ongoing debate matters. It matters because it influences what people think and therefore what they consent to or what they deem worth fighting for or applying resources to and that goes for just about any issue out there. If you can't read about the suffering that racism has caused, then how bad is racism really? If there are no examples of successful labor movements, then why would you hopelessly start one?
an encyclopedia is supposed to be broader than any other biased information source, so i think your last paragraph is false. people are supposed to make up their own mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia
According to its cofounder, Wikipedia abandoned truth long ago.
https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
It’s pretty clear from this blogpost that Larry Sanger has abandoned a pursuit of truth and neutral point of view and instead does not like how reality fails to conform to his personal biases and preferences about the way the world is.
What organizations, institutions, or media do you think have a greater commitment to truth, or even just a commitment to truth?
Organizations can't have commitments to truth. Only people can. And there is no mechanism that ensures that editors and admins have a commitment to truth.
OK, I can't argue with that. Timothy Snyder might make a similar correction, "markets can't be free, only people participating in the market can be free" is something he says frequently.
If only people can have commitments to truth, which organization, institution, or media do you think has a leader that seems to have a commitment to truth, especially truth in their institution? Who is our gold standard of "as good as it gets"?
> Reason and truth are the enemy of authoritarian regimes. Truth and reason provide alternative legitimacy to authority. If nothing is true, there is no basis on which to judge those in power.
Well said.
Hannah Arendt wrote a great book about this, but it sounds like you might have already read it.
I haven't. I would imagine Timothy Snyder is an avid fan of, if not a major historian of, Hannah Arendt and I probably got that through Snyder. I had actually not heard of her specifically yet.
https://history.yale.edu/news/timothy-snyder-has-been-awarde...
Apparently Snyder received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.
He quotes her here: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/04/preparing-for-an...
After the Reichstag fire, political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote that “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.” Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.
So everything wiki mods believe is truth? What about those who never even got a chance to speak out?
It's always controlled by. Winners write the history. Now Americans decide what's truth and fact
Wikipedia has at least 15 million articles in languages other than English and around 7 million English articles.
Are you asserting that it is standard that Americans are writing and moderating all of these articles in other languages?
>Now Americans decide what's truth and fact
what about evidence?
> provide alternative legitimacy to authority.
Authority is never legitimate. Those that claim special rights to it because they bring "truth" or "reason" are the most suspect of them all.
> Many authortarian regimes will "purge" as many of the country's intellectuals as they are able.
This is a letter not the killing fields.
> It matters because it influences what people think
That people find this a defensible position and believe that just finding the "right editors" or "true guardians" can vouchsafe this poor outcome for humanity is always surprising to me.
Shouldn't people have access to reported information and then come to their own educated conclusions?
> If there are no examples of successful labor movements, then why would you hopelessly start one?
The existence of Wikipedia is a convenience and perhaps not one that should be given tax free status. I think the selected history of labor movements will be just fine.
Even if Wikipedia died tomorrow because of one letter you could still walk into any bookstore in America and buy a book on any subject you want.
>The existence of Wikipedia is a convenience and perhaps not one that should be given tax free status.
Because it's a convenience?
Aren't you making their point though?
The ADL and other Jewish organizations have pointed out that aside from articles about Israel that articles about or mention Jewish topics generally have been editing with disinformation or that made Jews out to be the aggressors.
I agree with you that in order to believe in the ideals of liberal democracy that we must have a core belief in truth. And it's absolutely true that the Trump administration has taken a position that is deeply chilling on the issue of speech. It's clear they want to be the sole arbiters of what "truth" is and they want to use their power to manipulate the reality.
All that said, I cannot as a Jew ignore the fact that Wikipedia is not in itself neutral, and that "more eyes" does not negate systemic bias. What I've seen as a Jew is what the true meaning of marginalized minority is, which is to say that if you are truly a minority and truly marginalized then in a vote of "truth", your reality will be dismissed if it conflicts with the vast majority, and that Jews are only 0.2% of the world population.
While I brought it up, I am not debating the issue of antisemitic bias in Wikipedia[1] as anything other than an illustration of your point of objective truth being true, but also that we can't simply rely on the wisdom of the crowd to materialize that truth.
To preemptively address the issue that's bound to come up when I post this- I'm not arguing that the evils of silencing the entire Wikipedia project are equal to or a fair response to Wikipedia's antisemitic bias. I do believe Wikipedia needs to address its bias problem and that's best done through internal reform.
Two wrongs don't make a right, nor are two wrongs always of equal weight.
[1] Firstly because my point is separate, and secondly because I've encountered the exact issues I've found in Wikipedia elsewhere, which is why I'm sure I'll be voted down.
I agree 100%. It's exhausting fighting against antisemitic bias, and it feels like it's everywhere these days. My problem with Ed Martin is that what he is doing is clearly wrong. Hannah Arendt wrote a book about people like him.
At a time when students are having their visas revoked merely for writing Op-Eds critical of Israel, it's rather ridiculous to see the pro-Israel side acting like you're the ones being persecuted everywhere.
Since when do two wrongs make a right?
The fact that my comment is -2 on HN is a great example of the problem.
I'm working on a solution to the effects of this isolation, but it's not ready for a big announcement.
Could one of you point me to antisemitic bias on wikipedia just so I have a concrete example at hand?
Basically, almost any time Zionists are mentioned, they're mentioned in a negative light and with genuine disinformation, such as that Zionism is the belief that Arabs needs to be destroyed. That is like saying the Civil Rights movement in the US was about killing white people.
They also position things in such a way that implies antisemitic things, such as saying that Zionism is only 200 years old, or discussing the Israel wars only or primarily through an Arab lens.
These biases around Jewish topics are small individually but large in aggregate, especially in how they present Jews and Jewish topics.
Multiple Jewish and civil rights organizations have done a more comprehensive job at discussing this, even organizations who don't usually agree on things. While they talk about "anti-Israel bias" Wikipedia articles on or mentioning Zionism (80% of Jews are Zionist) are IMHO just as, if not more damaging, and demonstrate the issue.
Most importantly though, talk to the Jews in your life about this. They will tell you.
https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/wikipedia-entrie...
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-846563
https://cameraoncampus.org/blog/seven-tactics-wikipedia-edit...
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...
https://www.standwithus.com/post/it-s-time-to-correct-wikipe...
https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-s-pro-hamas-edit...
>Basically, almost any time Zionists are mentioned, they're mentioned in a negative light and with genuine disinformation,
Your first statement is a sweeping generalization that you can't prove
I don't know if that statement is true or not, but it certainly seems like a specific enough statement that could be proved or disproved given enough effort.
Most of the jews I know are through anti-genocide activism and they have a different view of this. I wanted to check because it is important to me that I not engage in antisemitism. Thanks for the info.
The idea of contrasting what I said with being "anti-genocide" implies that people who disagree with you are "pro-genocide".
Once one believes that those who disagree with them are "pro-genocide", then they can easily dismiss anything the other has to say say or any view they have, since they're functionally dehumanized.
I would ask that, if you can, try to consider that there are nuances, and that using triggering language does not bring understanding, it only amplifies conflict.
That said, this conversation has been too difficult for me, and I'm not going to engage with you on it further.
No I mean literally we are part of an organization focused on preventing and ending genocide broadly. Israel-palestine is one of them but there are several others ongoing and several more that may escalate into genocide in the next few months or years. I do see why you have a hard time with wikipedia.
> Once one believes that those who disagree with them are "pro-genocide", then they can easily dismiss anything the other has to say say or any view they have, since they're functionally dehumanized.
I would really like you to read this back to yourself and think about it deeply, really deeply.
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...
Read it for yourself.
I tried giving it a shot. It starts with an "executive summary", followed by an intro to how Wikipedia works. The very first link to any concrete evidence is by a guy who has a page on PragerU with gems like "Russian collusion hoax" and how the "mainstream media" is "fake news".
It's a pretty simple case of Wittgenstein's ruler for me. It tells me more about ADL as an org than the content.
The analysis there is not convincing.
It is obvious that Wikipedia admins communicate with each other. The fact that Aljazeera is referenced is also okay.
In fact, this is not the official Israeli narrative, it seems rather trustworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_co...
Instead of posting another person's argument that contains your source can you be more specific?
This is like citing an entire book to prove a point.
I'm not sure the organization that defended Musk's Nazi salute is a reliable source on antisemitism.
This is the same ADL that said that Nazi salutes are fine, but that protesting against genocide isn't? Why do we care what the ADL says about anything? They're fascist sympathisers.
It was not remotely okay that they did this, and I agree that refusing to speak out severely hurt their credibility. The next time I get a fundraising email, I'm going to tell them they can kiss something.
Demanding moral perfection from an organization in order to believe that discrimination exists is a standard that I don't believe is fair to any group.
I don't demand "moral perfection", but I draw the line at overt fascism. The ADL are fascist sympathisers.
Did you read the statement they put out later that day about Musk, or the day after?
I agree this was a terrible move on the ADL's part, and there have been others, but you're essentially labeling the oldest anti-hate group "fascist" because you disagree with one statement they made.
This dismisses any concerns they raise, or if someone else says the same as them, then they too must be pro-facist.
Could you point me to an example of what you have in mind on wikipedia? I'm admittedly not as practiced at discerning subtle antisemitism as I am some other forms of discrimination. But also usually when it's being alluded to in the abstract like this people mean something closer to "criticism of israel's actions."
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...
I didn't read that because the person asked for an example and you directed them to a 150 printed page article where you didn't specify which page(s)
This is the equivalent of stating that dinosaurs evolved into birds then when asked for one piece of evidence directing a person to a book, by another author, on how dinosaurs evolved into birds
OK yeah I've read that. Thanks.
It's 2 paragraphs... What's the substance of the allegation?
He doesn't have a leg to stand on and he knows it. Otherwise he would empanel a grand jury and wait for indictments. He is a partisan sadist and he loves to use the legal system to abuse people.
It’s a similar nonsense letter to the same ones he sent to several prominent medical journals. Speech chilling, 1st amendment violating unsubstantiated threats on DOJ letterhead. Of all the unfit people in this administration, he’s likely the most unfit. His entire career has been deeply unethical and partisan and often borderline illegal.
But what about The Twitter Files?! (cue X-Files intro music)
The allegation is the substance.
I have a question on non-profits in general. What exactly is the advantage of being incorporated as a non-profit, when all you have to do to not be taxed as a for-profit corporation is spend all your money each year and not show any profit? It seems you'd have more privacy as a for-profit corporation, since you don't have to disclose donors.
If I donate to a 501(c)(3) organization, the donation gets very favorable treatment by the tax code, reducing my taxes (provided I have income that can be cancelled out by the donation).
hmm, please correct me if I'm wrong, but donations just decrease your tax liability by the amount you've donated. It's the same as if you donated your pre-tax dollars to 501(c)(3) org.
The second sentence is mostly accurate, but the first implies something else.
If your taxable income was $50,000 and you donate $10,000, and (some other conditions) your taxable income would now be $40,000; same as if you managed to move the money pre-tax.
However. If you donate aprechiated capital assets, you get two benefits. Your taxable income is offset by the value of the asset, and the capital gains disappear. It's much better than selling the asset and donating the proceeds; and it's handy if you don't have good records for your cost basis.
Charity non-profits -- 501c3 organizations -- have donations that are tax deductible for their donors. Other kinds of nonprofits have other advantages to their stakeholders, but usually the attention around "nonprofits" is specifically about 501c3 orgs.
Eligibility to receive grants & tax deductible donations, public perception & credibility
Well, why go after everything?
Serious question, after the past few months, how can anyone deny that America is heading in a totalitarian direction? Those of you who believe that all of the many actions that have happened in the past few weeks are "okay", please explain your perspective without resorting to "whataboutism" or cherry picking only one or two of the things that have occurred lately. Because from what I'm sitting, this is not behavior of a government based on democratic ideals.
I'm not an American so I'm kind of looking at this from the side but I'll try to engage here...
What does "heading in a totalitarian direction" mean in this context exactly?
I'm not trying to use this as a "cherry pick" but this was news from today: "Trump administration reverses abrupt terminations of foreign students’ US visa registrations
DOJ announced the reversal in federal court after weeks of intense scrutiny by courts and dozens of restraining orders issued by judges."
How is this consistent with your theory/hypothesis?
I think what's important is not to look solely at evidence supporting your idea. The important thing is to find things that disprove your idea. That's the scientific method. I.e. finding something that weakens your hypothesis is what you need to look for. If you're not able to find anything at all disproving your theory then we should be really worried but I think there are actually many things going on that are consistent with a functioning democracy. Keep in democracy doesn't necessarily mean acting in ways that you consider to be good. You might think it's crazy to make deep cross cuts in the government but if this is what people voted for then maybe that can play out. Yes, it seems arbitrary and maybe important things are being cut, which is no different than what you'll see when companies do layoffs. But there's also a lot of resilience. At least I don't think it's anti-democratic to run on a platform of reducing government costs and then act on it. If anything the opposite. It might be really bad, but democratic, or it might end up being a good idea. Another example is you probably think it's crazy for the US to abandon Ukraine. I don't like that either but the US government can set foreign policy and it was reasonably clear that's the way they were going to go before the elections. Is this good for the world? I don't think so. Is it anti-democratic. I don't think so either. How will it play out? Who knows.
I would say that Trump is pushing the limits of presidential powers more than others before him. Some of the actions his administration is taking are borderline anti-democratic and borderline legal. But many of them are actually legal and some others will work their way through the courts. Even the Supreme Court which is generally right leaning has rebuked Trump and will likely not blindly side with him.
I'm not a fan of this administration but at least so far it doesn't look like it's the end of democracy in America. That seems like fear mongering. I think the "opposition" would be better off trusting democracy more, highlighting how its policies contrast with the current government policies, the problems it would solve better for Americans compared with the current government etc. This is probably going to end up being better for America's democracy in the long run. The erosion of democracy is partly due to the incessant attacking and divisiveness/polarization. Focus on common ground which I think is actually larger than what most think and trying to let better ideas win vs. being critical of everything is better. Not that you shouldn't speak out against obviously bad actions but it seems we are just 100% focused on attacks.
The US states also have a lot of power. The citizenry have a lot of power. Senate/congress. Courts. I think you guys will be fine but let's see how it goes. To me the bigger risk is the loss of common ground and polarization. If you have half the country basically feeling the other half is the enemy rather than debate policies that's something that can lead to trouble.
I think it’s fairly obvious that the Democrat establishment has been abusing its power through NGOs, media collusion, judicial overreach, lawfare, selective non-prosecution, show trials, pre-emotive pardons, vaccine mandates, de-banking/de-platforming and censorship. A little pushback and suddenly it’s “totalitarianism”.
Citation needed for anything on the scale we’ve seen - for example, the topic of this discussion is a non-profit having their status threatened for non-specific reasons which appear to be constitutionally-protected speech. If it’s “fairly obvious”, you should have no trouble providing examples of something equivalent to this legal threat.
I recall right-leaning social media sites like Gab, Parler, r/TheDonald, Infowars being taken offline.
I can’t read the WP article because it’s paywalled, however I have been suspicious of Wikimedia for a long time. I used to donate to them thinking I was helping to keep the severs running, then being alarmed to find the money was going on all sorts of nonsense. The former CEO (Maher) was blatantly a political/intelligence operator. Fits the pattern of the establishment/powers-that-be abusing the NGO/non-profit sector to illicitly further their aims, so I’m not surprised the new DoJ are looking into them.
Those sites weren’t taken offline by Democratic officials, they had to find new hosting after breaking the contracts they entered into with private companies. They were still free to move elsewhere, as they did, whereas in this case Wikipedia is being threatened with penalties for remaining in the country.
I would also note that the last straw for companies like Parler was involvement in a violent attempt to overthrow the government whereas in this case the objection appears to be constitutionally-protected speech. Again, those are nowhere near comparable situations. Where is something like, say, going after a right-wing non-profit because they published content which criticized Biden?
I have no idea if that's true, maybe it is, but the parent specifically asked for a response without whataboutism.
Dems and republicans both do their political corruption, Trump is something else.
https://commonslibrary.org/authoritarianism-how-you-know-it-...
What are the Top 10 Elements of the Authoritarian Playbook?
1. Divide and rule: Foment mistrust and fear in the population.
2. Spread lies and conspiracies: Undermine the public’s belief in truth.
3. Destroy checks and balances: Quietly use legal or pseudo-legal rationales to gut institutions, weaken opposition, and/or declare national emergencies to seize unconstitutional powers.
4. Demonize opponents and independent media: Undermine the public’s trust in those actors and institutions that hold the state accountable.
5. Undermine civil and political rights for the unaligned: Actively suppress free speech, the right to assembly and protest and the rights of women and minority groups.
6. Blame minorities, immigrants, and “outsiders” for a country’s problems: Exploit national humiliation while promising to restore national glory.
7. Reward loyalists and punish defectors: Make in-group members fearful to voice dissension.
8. Encourage or condone violence to advance political goals: Dehumanize opposition and/or out-groups to justify violence against them.
9. Organize mass rallies to keep supporters mobilized against made-up threats: Use fearmongering and hate speech to consolidate in-group identity and solidarity.
10. Make people feel like they are powerless to change things: Solutions will only come from the top.
only about 10% of their contributions are needed to run the websites. WMF should have their non-profit status revoked since they are defrauding contributors . They need to restructure and break up the scam into “real Wikipedia” , a legit nonprofit and the scam that consumes 80-90% of contributions.
Same person also threatened the New England Journal of Medicine. Thought crime is real.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/health/nejm-prosecutor-le...
As a non american that edited wikipedia.
You guys control the servers, if anything you have the psyop advantage.
However, the librarians are very vocal about self determination and keeping wikimedia out of important decisions.
In my humble opinion Wikipedia is the single best thing thing to emerge from the Internet boom. Its name is a wordplay on one of the most important intellectual projects of the Enlightment.[0] The DC prosecutor letter reads like something straight out of the totalitarian playbook.[1]
Please donate now to show your support. It's time to fight back against this crap.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A9die
[1] "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_giv...
Hi I don't know if you know it but Wikipedias not that poor or hard pressed... Atleast, the whole "donate or we broke" narrative that they build every few months is complete bullshit https://youtu.be/3t8GUbzVxmQ?si=sa_oHe3DA_QmpGcE
The scale of deep body trauma that has been done to the US will not seem clear today, but it will have dire consequences for the future trajectory of US. I am sad for this, for the current status quo I was born under, but I suppose History must happen.
I'm not sad for myself. I'm older and established. I'm scared for my cousins, nieces, nephews, and children for the fucking train wreck they're going to step into.
It was bad enough with 2001, 2008, and 2020. But this is next level.
The PhD institution I went to reduced their acceptance from 50 to 26. There is fear of not securing funding. The damage done is projects that are promising were cut. These projects will get picked up by other countries. The damage in the long term will be losing our edge in many regards, which will harm our economy. Where I did my undergrad just replaced their dean with an AIPAC member who has no experience in academia (a first in nearly two hundred years of this institution's). It is insane what is happening. A judge in Wisconsin was arrested today. There are those who believe America is resilient. The damage being done (I can promise you) will cause this great nation unbelievable harm in the long run, when this traitor in charge and his foreign allies (Putin and Netanyahu) which he promises allegiance to OVER our constitution and our moral values have long since passed. There is much noise, much of it as a distraction, but on the small level, many changes (most recently the NSF director leaving) are tangible changes that have a real impact that is certainly felt immediately in budget cuts, but will be even more drastic in its long term strategic impact. Also, I fly a bunch, and I see an immediate change in the respect America used to command abroad. Our values and reputation, which took over a hundred years in the making, became a laughing stock, and our closest allies no longer view America as a beacon.
The US has not been a force for good in the world in some time, if ever.
Unfortunately for Americans, it has to get worse before it can get better. Much worse.
The institutions are deeply corrupt, and have been for decades. They must be destroyed and possibly replaced. It sucks, and it will hurt. It may even possibly require an entire revolution, as many of the deeply evil US institutions such as the CIA and FBI are so deeply and tightly integrated with the federal government that it may require destruction of the state itself.
The status quo has been comfy for a lot of Americans, but the world as a whole is not a better place because Facebook and Lockheed and the US CIA exist.
This has been pending for most of a century.
What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society.
> What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society.
Can you walk me through how you see this playing out, step-by-step?
I want to believe!
Revolutionaries tend to suffer from extreme naivete or arrogance. They don't understand that idealists like them usually get pushed aside or killed by the real crazies during the power vacuum stage, then the country becomes significantly worse. It's happened so many times in history. Until the US starts killing half of its population like Pol Pot did it can always get worse.
Over the last thousand years, humans have become more educated and more connected. Violent deaths have been steadily falling.
Over the last hundred years, American military and paramilitary forces, and their vendors, have subverted transparency and democracy to turn America into a military dictatorship.
There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
The culture of the 3.6% of people who live in the current territory of the USA will be irreparably damaged, however. This may not be entirely a bad thing, given how significant an outlier the US lifestyle is compared to the rest of the world.
> There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
We're talking about long-term cycles of change here so it is difficult to opine with certainty leaving a lot of room for differing opinions. Unfortunately, however, I think the end of Pax Americana will usher in increased conflict and violence, particularly in the West which has experienced a long period of peace due to American dominance.
> but the world as a whole is not a better place because Facebook and Lockheed and the US CIA exist.
You've cherry-picked a few bogeymen.
What about Norman Borlaug, Bell Laboratories, the Gates Foundation, Margaret Sanger and the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology?
Remember when people pretended it was the scandal of all scandals that the IRS was reviewing PACs who were forbidden from doing political activity for political activity? And now many of those same people are cheering this, and the act blue ‘investigation’, and the threats against Harvard’s tax exempt status for nakedly corrupt reasons? Man I wish shame still had some stopping power.
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I don't think those accusations need to be taken seriously while they're being hyped by people like Jim Jordan. If they have evidence of wrongdoing they should forward it to the DoJ and write it up in an indictment, where it can be reviewed by a court and jury that will evaluate the claims made therein.
I’m sure you’d find the exact same thing if some grifty billionaire funded a fake investigation into those people who were contributing money to WinRed and yet, only one of the two is facing investigation.. it is so far past the time when this DOJ should be given the benefit of the doubt and steel manning their obvious corruption doesn’t make anyone seem scholarly, just credulous.
It's not true that only one of the two is facing investigation. Multiple state AGs are investigating WinRed, and rightly so - there's substantial evidence that they're using dark patterns to trick people into recurring donations when they intended to donate only once. The controversy is that a political official is ordering an investigation of ActBlue, not that political fundraising platforms ought to be above scrutiny.
Federally it certainly is true. And I agree, they shouldn’t be above scrutiny which is why it’s so important for the DOJ to maintain their independence and to avoid partisanship.. but Elon was loudly claiming they were funding the Tesla protests a few weeks ago and the rest of the administration got in line to encourage this pretextual nonsense.
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Go ahead and read some of the thousands of 1-star reviews on TrustPilot for WinRed:
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/winred.com?stars=1
It turns out the name of the political donation game is recurring donations and spammy messages. I 100% believe people donated to some random cause via act blue and didn’t realize they were signing up for recurring donations through there —- like all political fundraising arms do as evidenced by all the people complaining that WinRed incessantly removes money from their account that they didn’t authorize. But again, only 1 of the 2 is being investigated and it’s obviously a corrupt investigation so here we are.
Now imagine a sitting President personally saying 'the highest holders of my grift coin get a personal visit with me'. That would seem odd, wouldn't it?
You can call Donald Trump a dirtbag and say that giving visits to Trump token holders is corrupt. You can and should investigate whether that is illegal. I have no issue with this.
That doesn’t mean that random people who don’t know who an organisation is should be giving political donations to that organisation.
In short, your logical fallacy is: whataboutism
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Edit for Fauntleroy below due to rate limit:
No. The only thing I have discussed is the accusations against actblue, which I did not bring up. I have bought up no other topics.
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Edit for deadfred: hence asking about if anyone is alleging identical behaviour from WinRed earlier. From what I have seen, they are not.
Edit 2 for deadfred: "You narrowed to ActBlue" no I did not. mikeyouse bought ActBlue up. "there is no need to go into specifics of ActBlue" yes there is - either they did what they are being accused or they did not.
Accusing others of whataboutism is a way to dodge the real point: if identical behavior is excused for allies but condemned for opponents, the outrage isn't about ethics it's about weaponized partisanship.
Edit in response: The broader conversation is about weaponizing government power against political opponents, ActBlue was just one example give in many being discussed. You narrowed to ActBlue to have something you felt you could condemn safely, while ignoring the larger pattern. That selective focus is the weaponization your argument is trying to distract from.
Edit: Stepping back and noting the pattern there is no need to go into specifics of ActBlue. Especially when this VERY administration is blatantly selling access with their shill coin. Your hyper focus is a weaponized distraction, a 'gotcha' from the larger discussion. The administration does not care about corruption in fundraising, they care about targeting their opposition and shutting down any influence they have via fundraising, via information/knowledge sharing on the web, via universities with students willing to challenge the status quo.
While ActBlue was the first example mikeyouse bought up, and it happens not reflect very well on the Democrats, we can just as easily discuss Harvard racially discriminating and vuolating title 9 to control campus admissions, hiring and speech if you like.
You started this (soon to be flagged to nonexistence) chain with whataboutism.
>soon to be flagged to non existence
Are you organizing a brigade offsite?
Is this the start of the shakedown by Trump to start allowing misinformation?
I fear the answer is yes. Did you hear about the "gala dinner" for the top 220 holders of his meme coin? I wish I was joking.
Power corrupts...
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Well seems the war on truth has started. There is a 1984 quote about history that escapes me now.
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
Probably:
> We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?
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I have never had a single problem with Wikipedia in 20 years, and I don't believe an alternative exists. All text written on Wikipedia is royalty free and so are most of the images. The meaningfulness of that can't be overstated. Wikipedia is the web's greatest website and a wonder of the world.
You can't love the web without loving Wikipedia, so I'm wary of anyone who disrespects it.
In my 20-year experience with Wikipedia, I've seen one factual error relating to the Chicago Cubs, something really minor. But yeah, that's it.
Absolute nonsense. Wikipedia is infinitely better than every source of “facts” out there.
No, Wikipedia is no better than any other site which allows user edits and in many ways reliably biased towards certain narratives - which narrative depends on the subject of the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia articles should always be read in conjunction with the Talk and Edit history pages and even then it is necessary to find original sources for any claims made in Wikipedia articles.
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If you call something gender fluid you lose tax exempt status? Good to know.
I just feel that logically this doesn't make any sense. Having the view or even promoting the idea that a mythical creature is "gender fluid" isn't an overt political action. It doesn't help any political party or politician. There are numerous fully-compliant tax-exempt organizations that directly aid LGBTQIA+ individuals. How are these above board but having someone submit content to your organization that claims the Nure-onna might be genderfluid is crossing into the realm of politics by influencing election outcomes?
I hope we don't ban Sci-Fi because someone reads all the 'current thing woke infected' 1960s sci-fi where gender switching was super common.
Do you have the Japanese folklore monster article? Citation needed please. Because, if the monster can, you know, shift genders, then maybe gender fluid is an accurate term.
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Despite anything he may say about himself, Larry Sanger is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "the founder of Wikipedia". He was a paid employee of the project in 2001; his involvement with the site ended in early 2002 when funding for the position ran out. His experience with the site nearly 25 years ago does not make him an authority on how it is run today.
Wikipedia’s article on Sanger calls him cofounder and credits him with its name:
“ Lawrence Mark Sanger (/ˈsæŋər/ ⓘ;[1] born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
"Co-founder" is debatable, but he certainly wasn't "the founder" of the site.
Regardless - whether you choose to describe Sanger's early involvement with Wikipedia as a "founder" or not, 2002 was a long time ago, especially online. The site which he was involved with was very different from the one which exists today.
I agree. Wikipedia used to be a useful starting point for almost any research.
Today, not so much. I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an analysis of just one topic where it was shown that circular referencing was used to establish a narrative.
Coming back to the point at hand: the US attorney targeting Wikipedia is merely restating allegations which have been made by many others on Wikipedia’s biases for and against certain topics and individuals.
His argument is that Trump is being criticized more for being controversial than Obama.
Honestly. Is Trump not more controversial than Obama?
No, that depends on your viewpoint. Those who come from a "democrat" background will certainly consider Trump to be more controversial than Obama while those from a Republican background will see Obama - especially second-term Obama - as far more controversial than Trump. Independents will vary on their interpretation but Obama is not likely to end up in the history books as the 'Change agent' he promised to be and will mostly likely be seen as partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA due to his use of and support for identity politics in a (successful) attempt to win a second period by cobbling together the 'coalition of the oppressed'.
How Trump will end up in the history books wholly depends on whether he succeeds in his attempts to curtail globalism and save the USA from becoming insolvent due to the rising debt. If the economy fails his presidency will as well and with that he'll be remembered for all the controversy around his political career. If he succeeds he'll be seen as a 'realpolitiker' who pulled the USA out of the downward spiral it had been in since ... the late 90's? The end of the cold war?
Of course there is also the chance of a large-scale conflict breaking out during his watch in which case his place in the history books also depends on how that ends.
Time will tell.
> Obama is not likely to end up in the history books as the 'Change agent' he promised to be and will mostly likely be seen as partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA
That's a fantasy. His mere existence in the position, contradicts the premise. Hillary hoped to be in a similar position...history would have also been kind to her, despite her vicious nature by the obvious virtuous implications (a woman can become POTUS).
> partly responsible for the deterioration of race relations in the USA
This is just a euphemism for "he was black in public and lesser white people didn't like it".
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No, that's not accurate. When people talk about the "deterioration of race relations", they're referring to a well-documented phenomenon (https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx) where poll respondents say race relations are bad (and trending downwards) since 2015 while they were good from 2001 to 2013. I'm skeptical that Obama bears any responsibility for this, given that the trend didn't start until his second term, but it's a real trend and not a euphemism.
It's hard to take you seriously when you employ 'democrat' background and Republican as contrasting terms. Referring to the Democratic party and its supporters is more easily effected by saying [the] Democrats. This sort of baity rhetoric undermines any aspirations to objectivity.
Yes, as described in the blog post, I would imagine the median Fox News viewer to find Wikipedia biased. But the median Fox News viewer is not the median American, much less median world citizen.
But no seriously, having finished reading it, this article is incredibly Christian-centric and Americentric.
There's always Conservapedia: https://www.conservapedia.com
Regarding the missing topics mentioned in the article (updated to quote them for convenience):
For example, the September 11 attacks on the US Embassy in Benghazi objectively happened - few people on the left or right would pretend they did not happen or that were not notable events of Barack Obama’s presidency (as the article discusses).This is not a matter of whether you watch Fox News or not.
Have you bothered to do any sort of comparison as to how similar attacks are reported? At a quick glance, I see nothing on George W Bush's wiki page[0] about the 2002 consulate attack in Kolkata[1], for example.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_attack_on_American_cultur...
Not that it's necessarily wrong for it to not be listed there, though. The article on GWB is about him and what he did as president - it isn't meant to be a complete history of the United States between 2001 and 2009.
I agree -- which is also why the absence of Benghazi on Obama's wiki page is not, in my view, a sign of bias.
How is that remotely similar? There was not a scandal implicating George Bush regarding the Kolkhata attack.
What scandal implicated Obama in the Benghazi attack? Be precise.
I have trouble believing anyone with the remotest knowledge of US politics is unaware of the scandal, but https://www.britannica.com/event/2012-Benghazi-attacks . 'Reactions and investigation' has the information you apparently missed all these years.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204712904578090... - "What we now know—and still don't—about President Obama's 9/11." is pretty good too.
Oh look!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack
They creatively censored it under the title “2012 Banghazi Attack”
The article is nonsense. It links to Obama's Wikipedia page and complains Obama's page doesn't talk about Benghazi. But Obama's Wikipedia page links to a huge article about.... Benghazi. So his complaint is what, the article about Benghazi isn't summarized on Obama's Wikipedia page? Weak sauce.
> So his complaint is what, the article about Benghazi isn't summarized on Obama's Wikipedia page?
No. His complaint is:
> The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi
Visit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
Read:
> Libya
> Main articles: 2011 military intervention in Libya and 2012 Benghazi attack
> In February 2011, protests in Libya began against long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi as part of the Arab Spring. They soon turned violent. In March, as forces loyal to Gaddafi advanced on rebels across Libya, calls for a no-fly zone came from around the world, including Europe, the Arab League, and a resolution[378] passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate.[379] In response to the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 on March 17, the Foreign Minister of Libya Moussa Koussa announced a ceasefire. However Gaddafi's forces continued to attack the rebels.[380]
> On March 19, a multinational coalition led by France and the United Kingdom with Italian and U.S. support, approved by Obama, took part in air strikes to destroy the Libyan government's air defense capabilities to protect civilians and enforce a no-fly-zone,[381] including the use of Tomahawk missiles, B-2 Spirits, and fighter jets.[382][383][384] Six days later, on March 25, by unanimous vote of all its 28 members, NATO took over leadership of the effort, dubbed Operation Unified Protector.[385] Some members of Congress[386] questioned whether Obama had the constitutional authority to order military action in addition to questioning its cost, structure and aftermath.[387][388] In 2016 Obama said "Our coalition could have and should have done more to fill a vacuum left behind" and that it was "a mess".[389] He has stated that the lack of preparation surrounding the days following the government's overthrow was the "worst mistake" of his presidency.[390]
The link is there (I don't know how long it's been there but don't care to investigate), but there is no text about the Benghazi attack on the US Embassy - just other topics. Many people can and would criticize Barack Obama and his then-Secretary of State for inaction to protect the embassy from an attack the embassy saw coming.
The article above that we are discussing discusses the omission of the Benghazi attack as an aspect of Barack Obama‘s presidency.
I actually clicked this link in good faith. Glad to see the downvote I can’t make arrived.
Why are you glad for a downvote? Just because you don't agree with Sanger's point of view does not make it less worthwhile to read about it. Censorship is not something to be glad about and yes, downvoting opinions outside of your desired narrative until they are greyed out into oblivion or killed is a form of censorship.
Exactly, he sees the problem clearly. And this article was five years ago. It's become even more entrenched now. There's basically no way of fixing this.
We can see similar problems with other sites that rely on volunteer labor, like Reddit.
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A polemic! It must all be true.
Last revised by deleted account 1 month ago
Damn Wikipedia assassinating critics now? Where will it all end
> Damn Wikipedia character assassinating critics now
FTFY. If you go dig deeper at foundation.wikimedia.org you'll inevitably come across an Israeli court document describing systemic smear defamation and libel campaign mounted by toxic editors against an academic, which lasted around a decade.
You're trying too hard, much like the writer of this polemic.
You should make an account on Wikipediocracy (which is frequented by many Wikipedia editors and insiders) and express all your paeans about Wikipedia's supposed infallibility, and see how fast you'd get dressed-down.
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"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
Talking about our march into fascism is still considered off topic here apparently. Isn’t that exactly the sort of topic a supposed forum of hackers ought to be discussing however?
This forum, in spite of the name, was never about the older hacker ethos that began way back when. It was founded by a VC and was called "Startup News" at first, only changing its name six months later. It was created by the wealthy, for those who wanted to get wealthy (and make it's founder wealthier in the process). It co-opted "hacker".
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The concern is that it's too easy to contribute to hot political topics. Moderation wants to prevent this forum from becoming identical to so many others, and the only tool available is to deemphasize posts.
That’s an absolutely valid point — it’s important to prevent discussions from devolving into chaotic political battles. But there is a clear limit to how far you can go. When moderation starts suppressing or de-emphasizing information simply because it doesn’t align with a certain viewpoint — even when that information is objectively true — it’s no longer moderation, it’s censorship. What’s happening around Wikipedia shows how quickly the protection of truth can turn into political pressure: when a platform is accused of "propaganda" simply because its content is inconvenient for certain groups. I really hope we are not yet at the point where mere disagreement automatically makes someone a propagandist who must be silenced by force.
Hot political topics are often semi protected anyways.
I fully agree with you. Maybe I wrote it in a bad way. I do not like that these things that are objectively wrong for a functioning democracy are getting flagged because for some reason this got political connotations. I consider it dangerous and I do not understand why this is controversial at all.
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Churchs are tax exempt. Are they supposed to be neutral?
Yes.
They aren't, and nobody has the political cajones to actually pick that fight. But that doesn't mean that many of them aren't breaking tax laws left and right.
well no one said churches should remain tax exempt
what drift? What do you consider "neutrality"?
the Overton window has shifted sharply Right. if you've shifted along with it, the institutions that haven't shifted at all look like they've moved sharply Left.
Wikipedia hasn't shifted particularly Left since 2020. Centrists are just blind to shifts of the Center. it's the political equivalent of the equivalence principle.
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I had the same thought but most European countries don't have as wide freedom of speech laws as the US. Same problem with moving to Australia or New Zealand, though it'd be awesome to have a project like that based here.
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Not funny. My family is bilingual english/spanish and my wife is a green card holder but not a citizen. Doesn’t seem far fetched. But if we go down… it won’t be without a fight.
I recommend fleeing not fighting. Over 100 000 people fled Germany in the 1930s, which might have seemed like an over-reaction, except, well, you know what happened to many of those who didn't.
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799635.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's an account created to avoid doxxing myself. My Wikipedia username is easily linked to my main HN account. I still rarely make minor Wikipedia edits now and then, and don't want my account banned.
Anyone who's edited Wikipedia long enough will recognize the pattern of what I'm describing. It's not a misrepresentation.
I would really like to read some concrete examples.
As a start you can look at the following page.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchWikipediaDie/wiki/scandals
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They (those worried about commie political bias) could do their own public digital university and social media websites. Instead of being free, they could charge a fee that would both serve to repel the freetards and fund the project.
Oh shit! That happened already, didn't it? How is it going at attracting talented individuals?
We should remember that anti-wikipedia propaganda exists for decades now. Despite of that, it is a place cherished by many (including non commies). Its demise would be a public disaster.
Hoarders will maintain copies of it. And if there is bias, there will be tons of biased bootlegs around.
Further investigation would be more wise than rapid decisions by instinct.
Can you give particular examples of the particular worldview that they are trying to push?
Saw this on Twitter a while ago:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
10 seconds on Google:
https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically...
As soon as Harris ran for POTUS they edited out that her dad was characterized as a Marxist scholar and then viciously defended any attempt to re-instate it.
More accurately, they rejected the wave of people who tried to add that single word to characterize of his entire career but were not otherwise contributing anything to the article. There’s a good discussion here highlighting how they were looking for substantial improvements by people who were actually familiar with his work, not just trying to affix a label to someone they were otherwise unfamiliar with.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Rhododendrites#Don...
But the Democrats tried to control misinformation during a public health crisis so it goes both ways.
It does, but both side's followers are blind to it when their side does it. Or they think it's ok for their side to do it. I'm not sure which is scarier
You’re painting with an awfully broad brush, omitting both the magnitude of the difference and far overstating the homogeneity of one of those sides.
Agreed, the pandemic authoritarianism was far more invasive, with non-compliance being life ruining for many, so I don't think it's really comparable to the current administrations clownish floundering.
Acting like they are the same shamefully diminishes the previous administrations actions, which is particularly dangerous since their documented suppression of the now widely accepted lab leak theory has resulted in little action to prevent further illegal gain of function research. Its inevitable we will face yet another worldwide pandemic in the next decade or so while this careless research continues without proper safety controls or scrutiny.
You’re not arguing in good faith if you’re not recognizing that the “pandemic authoritarianism” started under Trump, or asserting that the lab leak theory was ever suppressed (it was continuously discussed throughout - just check the comments here for the last 5 years!) or that the most criticized theories making wild claims about bioweapons or gain of function research are now widely accepted. Many assessments have included the possibility of a lab leak of a natural specimen from the beginning, but in the absence of evidence nobody credible is saying more than, say, the CIA’s “low confidence” back in January.
> Its inevitable we will face yet another worldwide pandemic in the next decade or so
If we do, the absurdities about masks and vaccines that were spread by some will make it last just as long as the covid one
A lot of what you refer to as "pandemic authoritarianism" took place under Trump as well. Vaccine mandates have been part of many jobs for years and years. It's not a Republican or Democrat thing.
Wikipedia is not owned by “The Democrats.” Its editors are a pretty diverse and esoteric bunch.
How do I start worshipping Wikipedia so it can become a church?
Wiccanpedia.
Do people genuinely believe that Wikipedia isn't biased? On topics like race, climate, immigration, COVID-19 etc, a fair estimate is that it's about 1 standard deviation left of the median American. It's about as left as NPR.
Are you assuming bias/opinion is one-dimensional and the "median American" stands for the Truth?
No but thanks for asking.
NPR is left {{Citation needed}} [1]
[1] outside of identity politics
This will sound rude but I mean it respectfully. If you believe NPR is not left leaning then you are in a severe filter bubble and may want to update your news diet.
Point taken, but I think my comment is a reflection of the problems with the modern use of "left" and "right".
Yes, of course NPR is more on the side of democrats than republicans.
But, it is very much pro-business, and often pro-war status quo ("right"). And, as I mentioned ("identity politics"), also very much pro-diversity in race/gender/etc. ("left").
So, IMHO, very much "centrist", not "left" (except on race/sex/gender).
If the median American thought the Earth was flat, should it treat that as a valid theory?
If only if were that easy. American politics is mostly fought over interpretations, not simple facts.
ok but what’s the crime?
also english wikipedia is actually for english speakers.. so it includes countries that aren’t america. there’s a reason they didn’t name it american wikipedia.
Yeah I agree there doesn't seem to be a crime. I was addressing the tone of the comment thread.
All US organizations should seriously consider moving out of the country, at this point; it might become harder to do it in the future
It sounds weird. Why does it look like a conspiracy theory?
Yo dawg, I heard you like to appeal to conspiracy theory types...
Why would someone introduce lots of seemingly indiscernible edits into important articles, fully knowing that the edit history is available to anyone who wants to look?
It would make more sense to spread propaganda in a place that doesn't fully track it.
Unless the exposition of such tracking edits as an obvious smoking gun exists to be staged to look like someone else did it.
Of course, it could all be to trigger a recursive conspiracytheorypocallipse that further erodes any belief in community generated content.
What should we do, Master Anakin? There's too many of them conspiracies.
Wikipedia/Wikimedia could move to a country that allows this type of manipulation on their platform or figure out how to comply with the existing US law.
Wikipedia could also stop operating as a 501c3 and incorporate.
But the typical out for these organizations are that they are not responsible for what people post. I don’t feel like that is very responsible. They already have moderation on the platform.
But Wikimedia/pedia can’t claim 501c3 status. It could spin off the political content/controversial into 501c4 which has more leeway. It can tighten editorial controls, emphasize first amendment, look at Section 230. Publish reports showing how misinformation is identified and corrected, partner with fact checking organizations.
But also if they cannot police their own content without an unpaid army of volunteers then herein lies the bigger issue with their model.
or they could move to a country that respects the rule of law and continue operating as they do at present
may I suggest Switzerland
Except they have a financial cancer. If the government investigations uncover more scandals, beyond what were found in the Israel-Palestine topic area, public support and goodwill for Wikipedia will evaporate overnight, and they'll have no choice but to liquidate or absorbed into a successor organization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER