Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney
(washingtonpost.com)851 points by coloneltcb a day ago
851 points by coloneltcb a day ago
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 had basic facts about mathematics which are wrong deleted in revisions by editors with no knowledge of the subject beyond having asked ChatGPT (which repeats the wrong shit on Wikipedia). It's hard to be worth it. Wikipedia's biggest problem is the editors.
Wikipedia is really, really bad at mathematics. The tone is all over the place, from “plagiarized from an undergrad textbook” to “crackpot with an axe to grind against Cantor.”
A new layer of Citogenesis? ( https://xkcd.com/978/ )
Interesting. Do you have an example? I'll go look!
I think the "deletionist" tendency is one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia. At least it's the main thing that prevents me from making significant contributions. I say tendency, but maybe it really is more of a crusade. Deletion and rejection definitely seem to be the default "predisposition." I've seen a lot of examples of apparently well meaning contributors being pushed away by the need to establish "notability" for a subject and the expectation that all information must be referenced to a fairly limited number of approved reliable sources. These are norms which have been built over a long period of time so it would be incredibly difficult to change them now.
Exactly. It makes it basically impossible to get niche industry/trade information and history onto wikipedia unless it was so newsworthy it's covered everywhere.
Yet when I (or others) are trying to raise the issue on certain Reddit communities in addition to Lemmy people there still prefer to bury their heads in the sand. Often they'll simply resort to personal attacks and so on just to avoid facing the fact that Wikipedia is not as infalliable as they think at all.
Example:
If that's the intention, fine. But don't be surprised when no one but the most committed politicians want to bother trying to contribute to the project.
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.
The only few times I tried to make small edits, typo corrections, or similar, they just got immediately reverted as vandalism. So when I found a page that is largely wrong about a relatively obscure historical figure that I actually know a lot about and have plenty of source material for, I didn't really feel motivated to put the work in to clean it up.
For reasons unknown, I am much better than many at navigating this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
https://x.com/arjie/status/1847046183342297498?s=46
If you share with me what your change is I might be able to get it done.
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.
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've done a fair bit of editing over almost 20 years. Some of my photos are featured in small articles, and I've only had a few of my edits reverted, always for sensible reasons. It's easy to get started, and the pitfalls (chiefly, adding commentary without a source) are well documented.
So on that basis, I agree. Please edit. It's easy. Start small.
That said, I've watched entire articles vanish under the banner of non-notability, which were clearly notable if one bothered to find some citations. The deletionists have a process and a timeline, while the contributions come slowly and sporadically. This asymmetry is a cancer. If there's a treadmill belt pushing articles off the site which fail to run fast enough, then it's impossible for small articles, which are just learning to crawl, to survive long enough to survive. It's not a test of notability, it's a test of Wiki-savvy among an article's supporters.
The best way to make a new article actually stick around, is to basically build the whole thing elsewhere, which takes weeks or months of effort for a single person since it's not collaborative, then plonk it into Wikipedia fully formed, and maybe, just maybe, it might have enough citations to pass the test of notability. But this means that, from the outset, it represents a single author's viewpoint.
Deletionists eviscerate what makes Wikipedia interesting, and they're the main reason I haven't edited more.
This needs to be talked by a lot! However per my experiences and those of others if you go to either the "front page of the internet" or Lemmy the competitor you'll get side-eyed and harassed by people who thinks that you're a "far-right obscurantist" for simply criticizing Wikipedia.
I tried to get interested in Wikipedia and the crazy level of gatekeeping over topics these editors had no clue about was frustrating to me. They don’t know what is notable and they have no business telling people what to do in many instances (esp with more obscure topics).
Interesting how so many people are answering that they've had trouble!
How about I look at some of those cases? Especially if it's relatively recent, I can take a look. Leave me a message here, or at my email address (see my HN info) , or on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kim_Bruning
I'm not very active anymore, but I'll check in the next couple of days and see what I can do. Really to be able to help I generally need links to revisions, but if you have a username, a page, and a reasonably short time frame (a concrete date) I might be able to figure out the relevant revisions from there.
To onlookers: When I investigate cases like this, there's often a "catch." Sometimes contributors really did break Wikipedia policies — and just don’t mention that part when telling their side of the story.
Now I'm certainly not saying every case is like that, so I will look, and if you don't get what the issue was, I'll try to explain. In some cases if it was recent and it somehow wasn't fair, I might even be able to'fix' it within the bounds of Wikipedia policy.
> How about I look at some of those cases?
Please note that, although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them. It’s always like this with Wikipedia detractors; I don’t know why, but it is. Complaints and horror stories galore, but nobody will link to any of it, preventing anybody from investigating what actually happened.
Because we/they have detached from the issue. It was a bad experience and thus it gets pushed aside. I also have my wikipedia deletionist story - the German wikipedia is among the worst there, way worse than the us-american - but it's not like I will keep an account active on a project with those awful people. So linking it isn't even all that easy.
You're not wrong, per-se.
I'm still going to ask though! We might get lucky. Want to help out?
>although there are scores of anecdotes in this thread, precisely none of them link to any examples or give enough details to find them
In the past, when I've tried to keep receipts on this sort of thing (which requires an extraordinary amount of effort, and is often only possible if you've anticipated that there would be a need to do so - since content is often deleted or archived without warning, and nobody ever enters an argument on the Internet with the expectation of talking about that specific argument years later) and actually presented evidence, I've been accused being "creepy" or various other forms of misconduct, and the argument is still not taken any more seriously. I've given up on presenting evidence of this sort of thing because the people who ask for it are not being intellectually honest, in my extensive experience. They don't care if you can actually prove what you're saying; they will ignore you anyway.
There are multiple entire websites out there criticizing Wikipedia and what they have to say tends to revolve around the editing process, specifically the social/cultural aspects. Have you attempted to research this yourself?
Are you familiar with what Larry Sanger himself had to say about the bias that has emerged in Wikipedia (https://unherd.com/newsroom/wikipedia-co-founder-i-no-longer...)?
e: another comment elsewhere on this post brought up another source: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik... . I've read a bit of it and can generally endorse what's being said there. In particular, some specific usernames are cited and I recognize most of them, which in itself is telling. Other comments here suggested that Sanger's personal views are less than scientific, to say the least. I have not looked into this personally, but I don't think this in any way negates the argument about bias. (Nor is any political camp immune to pseudoscience.)
To offer a counter-example to the many anecdotes about being gatekept(?) by veteran Wikipedia editors: I have the opposite experience.
I occasionally contribute to various topics, and in many cases experienced editors silently fixed formatting errors I made, allowing me to focus on contributing to Wikipedia without having to keep up with the best practices.
I also participated in a deletion discussion once, and - despite being inexperienced and in the minority position (keep) - the experienced editors considered my arguments and responded to them.
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.
The notability requirement is a real bane, but it also kind of makes sense when there's really insufficient manpower for the articles they already have. But then, maybe they'd have more manpower if they loosened the notability requirement.
The general notability guideline is another thing that's effectively downstream of "there's not enough editor time to keep everything up to basic standards." If Wikipedia had 10x the editor-hours it does now, notability requirements would de facto loosen, because there would be enough editor-hours to keep the extra articles useful. Seriously, editor time is the major bottleneck of Wikipedia.
It's even worse when you add a source and you get reverted for reasons quite clearly disproven in your source. I had to make a single edit three times because it got undone twice by two separate administrators. A less stubborn person would've just given up on the first baseless revert and never edited Wikipedia again.
When it finally got through, were they nice to you at least? (They'd better have been!)
And, it probably wasn't administrators, unless you specifically looked. You do sometimes have to be a bit insistent, you're quite right. If someone reverts you, it's often not personal. Ask on the talk page why they reverted, and if no one says anything for 24 hours (definitely wait this long), just try your edit (or a better one!) again.
I wrote an essay on this once that still gets used a lot on wiki (misquoted even more often). The original version of the essay had a few more tricks up its sleeve -but- if you do it this way you're not likely to get in trouble at least. And otherwise now you know someone you can ask for help.
Sounds like stackoverflow defenders. I'm another person who tried about 5-7 times over the years to do larger improvements all for it to go to waste. Minor edits many times survive but even those I stopped doing because of the sour effect of the larger ones getting denied.
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.
That's an error, because episodes can be cited directly, and the template "cite episode" exists for this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_episode
It can be seen in use for instance on the Beavis and Butt-head article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beavis_and_Butt-Head where the citation looks like this:
"Werewolves of Highland". Beavis and Butt-Head. Season 8. Episode 1. October 27, 2011. MTV.
Sounds like that might have been a copyright issue? In the UK a transcript of a show would need permission of the writers/owners to be reproduced. I can see Wikipedia would be sensible to disallow infringing works as being bad sources.
Ironically an excerpt of the script/transcript would be allowed by UK copyright - but a site with only excerpts would probably but be a good source for Wikipedia's purposes.
I've been an editor since 2004. It's getting really, really hard now. Like, it is really off-putting and no longer enjoyable.
Curious, as a longtime editor, what's gotten harder for you recently?
As a casual, very infrequent editor, I echo everyone else's complaints that it's intimidating to have your additions reverted by the old guard who seem to have an increasingly particular vision of the site.
I edited mostly a single page many years ago. It wasn't a controversial subject really, just one where there is a lot of garbage popular history and some light revisionism that made it a bit of an effort to remove unreliable sources and add some better sources. Never any issues or fights over it, but I got bored eventually and just let it be.
Recently I edited a page or two, then tried to edit more, but everything is so complex now. All the special markup and stuff to consider is really off-putting. Took me forever to figure out how to properly fix the year of death of a person and some other data I just ignored because it was too much red tape. Wish it was more simple plain text. Makes quick drive-by edits too much work.
They could maybe explain it better with some short youtube videos?
For citations you an usually delete the old stuff and then click 'Templates' to insert a new one. For "cite web" you can just enter the url and click the magnifying glass symbol and it automatically fills the rest.
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.
People say "propaganda machine" but I have yet to see much example of that. The Trumpists don't like it because it fact checks their lies but I'm not sure it's fair to call that propaganda? Any examples like a link to an article or section that you feel is propaganda?
I'll add: please edit in areas where you are an expect. Over the last 20 years I have racked up a few thoudand edits, rewrites, new articles, etc.. Don't contribute to the low effort noise everyone is screaming about. In a century an edit in transcendental number theory with a citation is going to be a lot more important than whatever the current culture war is.
I used to edit Wikipedia actively. I was was active on the conflict of interest notice board and involved in pushing back against a few self-promotional scams. The worst one involved the "binary options" industry, before it was shut down. "Better Place", a hype-based electric car startup that went bankrupt, was another.
A few years previous, most heavy promotion on Wikipedia was music-related. Then business hype dominated. Then political hype took over. Trying to push back in the "post truth" era is valuable but painful.
It was worth doing for a while. But not for too long. It's wearing.
Years ago I tried adding a weblink directing to a community, to an article about a game, where there were already weblinks to other communities, which were in no way any more official or proper than the community I linked to, but this edit never made it into the page, because someone played gatekeeper there, probably a person of the already linked communities. Since then I don't even bother editing wiki any longer. It is gatekeeping by people with their own agenda. What else I read about edit wars did not inspire confidence either.
Every time I've tried to edit Wikipedia I've been called names and bullied off the platform.
> 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.
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...
> Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.
Wise that you omit adding other credible sources that do not agree with the main editor's views. What you're describing sounds like already preserving their work, no matter if it happens to be provide info based on multiple convergent sources or not.
I've seen such bad editing lately. Basic grammar rules being missed/capitalization issues, personal opinions and hearsay cited as "fact", lack of references. Seemingly unrelated topics except in whoever made an edits eyes.
So yeah, you don't even have to be an expert. What's weird is that there IS a lot of edits by ideologues of many kind. And it doesn't have to be "foreign agents" and this Trump attack reeks so hard of yet another attempt at authoritarian control and NewSpeak. Biden gave in with the TikTok to Trumps initial games, and now it just feeds the game. We have to resist this sort of thing from below.
I wish people had a good "sniffer" for bullshit. I'm not saying I'm perfect (we all have our blind spots) but after a while you can tell when certain things are trying to put a spin on something... It's especially odious when it comes to national identities trying to put a spin or tie either themselves or their enemies to a particular view point. The worst part is it's not necessarily obvious, to a lot of people if you don't have the knowledge, or the ability to critique and ask questions.
So we need people to keep asking questions for sure, and sniffing out this sort of thing. But it has to not be "IN THE NAME OF NATIONAL SECURITY" but rather "IN THE NAME OF OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL". Otherwise you just become a front or spokesthing for a given state, and that's no better than fucking Pravda.
wikipedia means different things depending where you are. Content in English looks a lot better than browsing content in other languages like Spanish, French, Italian, ... Especially when it is about non Tech subjects in these languages, there seems to be a strong difference in quality, and the utility you get from Wikipedia varies with how many languages you speak.
My biggest beef is that any contributions volunteers make will be stolen by sama and similar scam artists & SV dweebs so they can improve their AI (and while Wikipedia is free AI which requires login/authentication and maybe even paid subscription in future).
I used to edit wikipedia until I got permanently "community banned" because of some poor choices of words and even my apologies were ignored. The site is full of people who are chronically online and like to witch hunt and destroy people's lives. That wasn't the case almost two decades ago when I started using the site, but now it's full of the type of people that passionately use reddit and bluesky and that were formerly on twitter. (It's worth noting that a "community ban" is a special type of ban that's basically a lynch mob where a bunch of people dog pile and if there's enough "consensus" you get banned, which can happen by the person proposing it simply calling forth all their friends. And this type of ban is considered "stronger" than an actual administrator ban so cannot be overturned by an administrator. It's mob violence at its finest.)
I was a very active editor who'd been using the site for a very long time, but they don't care. One major mistake and you're gone forever.
The site also has a huge bias toward "media" sources rather than actual scientific content or primary sources in general. They treat the media as vetters of the truth and ignore all of the group-think/mass delusion that is common among mainstream media where they all re-report each others stories. That causes a huge blind spot. It didn't used to be that way too, it used to be that most notable sources were books, but nowaydays with everything online and the quality of media reporting going down and down it's caused Wikipedia itself to decline in quality.
I used to encourage people to edit Wikipedia like you, no longer. The site needs a hard fork, at least for the english speaking site.
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.
Understand the sentiment. Less reasonable people that edit Wikipedia will continue to make it a hellscape for the rest. Please try to edit and create.
It’s not easy to do at all. They have extensive blacklists to reputable conservative papers, and I’ve been cussed out for trying to link things. There are a lot of topics that can’t even be discussed because the pro-left bias is too strong that any reputable source is banned, and many non-political pages which are monitored so tightly by a single individual it’s impossible to edit.
Have you tried using sources that aren't explicitly "conservative papers"? And if so, have you considered the lack of evidence found outside of overtly biased sources might indicate the position you are defending is not defensible outside of a strictly partisan perspective and worldview, and is buoyed only by other strictly partisan sources?
On many occasions, right-wing Internet acquaintances have given me a link to a story in a conservative news source; I would try to look up other coverage with a search engine, and I would find exclusively conservative sources discussing what happened, even though it was clearly verifiable fact that the the thing in question had in fact happened.
During the Rittenhouse trial, I watched trial coverage live, then evaluated what various news outlets were saying about what happened. Unironically, Fox News was objectively far more truthful and accurate than every left-wing source. I caught left-wing sources trying to push disproven and dubious narratives - in particular, the "taking an illegal firearm across state lines" bit - long after anyone had an excuse, even after the basic issues with that story had already been debunked by other left-wing sources. Shortly after the verdict dropped, Al Jazeera Plus put out an absurd, naked propaganda piece trying to paint the DA as a hero unjustly thwarted, with imagery showing complete ignorance to and/or resistance of the proven facts of the case.
(As a reminder: this is a DA who didn't check a firearm personally before pointing it at the jury, in order to try to make a ridiculous point about how Rittenhouse might possibly have been holding the weapon, while clearly having no actual idea how to hold and aim it properly. Who then made a closing statement baldly asserting falsehoods about the basics of how firearms work that had been disproved immediately prior. Who had previously made repeated, blatant attempts to violate Rittenhouse's Fifth Amendment rights and introduce evidence that had been very clearly excluded from consideration in pre-trial hearings.)
I have witnessed supposedly respected, mainstream sources (with a rarely acknowledged left-wing bias and an axe to grind) smear people I've personally met, and movements and groups that include people I personally know and care about (especially movements that have nothing to do with the traditional left-right axis but which certain leftists have decided to label as "right-wing" for their own reasons).
The bias built in to Wikipedia's "reliable sources" policy is self-reinforcing. You can't get conservative sources added even if what they're saying is provably true, or "liberal" (an absurd abuse of the term, but that's the American jargon now) sources excluded even if what they're saying is provably false, because a) the latter agree with each other; b) a new source needs vetting, which generally involves agreeing with existing sources; c) there is no objective standard for accuracy or reliability.
You present your comment as though you imagine that "sources that aren't explicitly conservative" are, thereby, not also "overtly biased". A lot of people seem to believe this, but it's not at all true. The fact that you frame this in terms of "defending positions" is also telling, for me.
See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
In the past, I have done so, and won't, again.
First, my (quite correct) edits in existing pages have been reversed within minutes. No explanation as to why (I assume because I was not "known" enough). I have heard this complaint numerous times.
Second, when I tried to create a page about a system that I had originally authored, has become a well-known, worldwide tool, managed by a large team that does not include me, the page was rejected. I think it was because I had been involved in the creation of the tool.
I decided that it wasn't worth it. I didn't get upset, but it was clear that my input wasn't wanted.
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".
The Heritage Foundation has been open about their desire to strip Wikipedians of anonymity, this is just the government putting that plan into practice:
https://slate.com/technology/2025/02/wikipedia-project-2025-...
If the HF is behind this, then Wikipedia is doomed beyond any legal defense. Back it up entirely and move it overseas.
Authoritarian regimes thrive on fatalism and despair. But they also inspire resistance. We did not have mass protests a few months ago. Our society is in deep crisis and the outcome can still swing either way.
For all the progress they’ve made in dismantling our democratic institutions, deep incompetence runs through this administration.
Our efforts should be still directed to fighting their overreach. It is not the time to retreat.
To be more clear, it's operatives of the Heritage Foundation who now work in the government putting this into place. Does anyone think Trump actually does much day to day? He often seems completely unaware of what's going on in his own government. I invite anyway to watch his evening press conferences where he's handed a bunch of Executive Orders, is told what he's signing (he has no clue), and signs it.
Their entry on Wikipedia is well worth a read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation
Kind of explains a lot in the balancing act in Trumps rise to power while trying to look like a marionette for various interests this term. They should remember Hitler's rebellion from his masters.
Trump is dumb and 80 though. But if he had been 40 and intelligent.
Vance is 40, I wonder how intelligent or not is he?
Getting really bad vibes from this. Plenty of people in power are unhappy with Wikipedia for years. So far it’s an amazing source and surprisingly neutral given the complexity of the problem. Would not want to lose it in a political fight.
This is legal communication written by a lawyer and intended to be read by lawyers.
Consistently, the first thing every lawyer has said to me when preparing for any interaction with third parties that had a legal aspect was "never volunteer information you were not explicitly asked for". Of course lawyers would practice this among themselves. The law requires him to suspect something wrong to investigate, so he states "I hereby formally suspect something wrong". If the investigation leads to a court filing, the law would then require him to submit evidence, so he will strategically decide which evidence to submit and submit it. Why would he commit in advance to what evidence he believes relevant if not required by law?
But also, if reading the letter as if written in good faith - which I find hard to do - those are all true reasons to suspect something wrong (it is common knowledge and well established that Wikipedia is a very influential source of knowledge, and that there are attempts at foreign influence), and great questions to ask to investigate whether the Foundation is making a reasonable effort to fight it if you were a regulator or auditor or other investigator, all of which have great answers already written up that prove the foundation is doing a very good job at establishing and maintaining processes to ensure the neutrality of its articles. In my headcanon, Wikipedia's lawyer responds simply with a list of URLs.
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.
Clearly people care very deeply about sources and evidence -and they're attacking things (wikipedia, various gov websites) which can be used as objective sources.
If you don't have objective sources, it's easier to lead people around by the nose -hence the attack.
Here's the root of the problem though: wikipedia isn't an objective source by its very nature. Wikipedia requires mainstream established news sources for a lot of articles that aren't academic in nature, and especially for articles about people. You cannot include information that isn't supported by corporate news articles, which means corporate news is now the arbiter of truth, and corporate news lies all the time about everything.
Wikipedia is, and always has been, the encyclopedia of the elite and billionaire narrative, and especially the left-wing narrative, which dominates nearly all corporate news groups. I say this as a far left person myself.
> Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say.
I’m one of those people you complain about. When I did deep research about DEI, I presented evidence and sources to people like you, including judges that I knew in my private life.
It seems you didn’t care, to a point that I had in my hand a document printed from a department of justice’s own website (about mothers’ own violence on their children, which is as high as men’s given the scope you decide to choose) and the person who in his public life is a judge, didn’t even bother discussing the thesis and just told me: “This document is false. You changed the figures before printing the document”.
You may say that Trump is bad for dismantling your administration, but you guys don’t care an inch about truth, evidence, sources, honesty, bad faith, or even for the number of children who are beaten to death by their mothers.
Depends on the extend of the subjects I’ve studied and the number of good faith - bad faith people I’ve met.
I literally wrote a book on one of those subjects and made it to a national news channel in two countries about it.
The cause is lost for science, people don’t respond to logic.
"given the scope you decide to choose"
By changing the scope, you changed the effect. Unless you did every statistical validation here... Yeah. That reads exactly like data manipulation. t-distribution approaches standard normal distribution, when the degree of freedom increases. That's not something that anyone should ignore and give credit to. It's the same bullshit that Donald has repeatedly tried to do, to prove himself doing the right thing, even as everything falls apart.
Caring about the truth, requires caring about the methodology, and not just the conclusions.
“Some people say.”
Elon Musk has been waging a war with Wikipedia[1] for a couple of years now, and has the ear of the president. Of those in the administration, he is the single name that really stands out as a guy with a Wikipedia beef.
Seems like he has lots to do with the topic, and it is absolutely likely that he is the one who elicited this. Recall that Musk also basically appointed his own head of the IRS (though Bessent then ousted that person and installed his own stooge).
1 - https://www.the-independent.com/tech/elon-musk-wikipedia-naz...
https://archive.is/JozhY