Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney
(washingtonpost.com)880 points by coloneltcb 2 days ago
880 points by coloneltcb 2 days ago
What a contrast to the early days: 22 years ago I was simply appointed admin on the German language Wikipedia when there was simply a lack of hands doing deletions and stuff. No voting, just a show of hand a lots of trust put into people only know by what they write and discuss on this new website.
A few years of work (10k edits) and a few years of dwindling participation on my side someone noticed that quite a few of those early admins never faced a vote at all. The process had re-elections when 25 wikipedians asked for a vote, took them almost three weeks, I got that treatment as well in 2009. Indeed someone had enough time to dig through and find a discussion where I wasn't the nicest person (at the same time writing and discussing on Wikipedia help me a lot to develop a healthy social skill). Well, I didn't use the admin rights anymore so I rather resigned before someone dug even deeper ;)
For security reasons those admin rights should be time limited anyways.
In my experience (of also roughly 20 years ago), the German Wikipedia is as dysfunctional as it gets.
The primary goal of the admins seemed to be to gatekeep, in particular to keep “unencyclopedic” content out at all cost, e.g. by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one.
“Just because it’s relevant on en.wikipedia.org doesn’t mean it’s relevant over here” is a sentence I heard frequently. Keeping the number of articles down was seen as an active ideal.
For me, it was a great motivator to improve my English, and I’ve only ever looked back when the English version didn’t have a lot of information on some Germany-specific topic. Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia…
> by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one.
In the first year or so of the english Wikipedia, I was very engaged in adding content but never really tried to engage with the community. I started adding articles about my topic of interest at the time, which was New York 80s punk and hardcore bands. Soon, I had the lot of my articles deleted for "lacking relevance".
I haven't been contributing much since.
The German Wikipedia is the main reason I keep my country setting on DDG off. That way I get en.wikipedia.org results first.
> Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia
I once asked on (then) Twitter why they kept that crappy design, and got the most depressing NIMBY answers on even making the new design optional. That really killed any rest of hope I had for the German Wikipedia. Glad to hear that at least that tiny improvement made it.
Is the eV still in that renovated building near the Chinese embasy, playing cards every Wednesday near the river?
Keri Smith, a former hardcore SJW activist, has documented how she and others daily targeted people through Wikipedia edits for preparing a cancel. It's quite fascinating the extend of organization and process they used.
For instance, they would not directly edit the target's page, but start working 2 links removed from it, compromise the "friend of a friend of a friend", and then work towards the actual target and finally try to cancel the target through "association with " accusations.
Skimming this: https://www.kerismith.net/
and seeing some of the people she proudly mentions - it seems like she's just switched cults.
It reminds me a bit of campus preachers. They would go to great lengths to describe just how fallen they were before they found Jesus. By inflating how fallen they were, it made for a more dramatic, and to some people, more affirming message of the power of the Gospel. I don't doubt the people felt transformed, but they were motivated my narrative purpose as much as by factual history.
Social Justice Warrior. The acronym has been around for a long time.
It's a term for anyone from a centrist liberal to a Greenpeace activist, with the implication that having left-of-median politics and understanding race and demography as anything other than biological essentialism makes you an utter loon. It is really only used by people who would describe themselves as "anti-woke".
The person he's referencing, specifically, got really pilled by evangelical Christianity and believes that anyone advocating for liberal causes has created a religion out of nebulous cultural values, unmoored from god. She blames the "cult of SJW" for the kind of character assassination she claims to have done, that it was the force of rootless bolshevism that was responsible for her supposedly destroying lives and careers by making up(?) relationships and cultural crimes on whole webs of Wikipedia articles.
Wikipedia isn't immune to influence campaigns - honestly, no open platform is - but the key difference is how seriously the community takes it. The amount of volunteer effort that goes into investigating sockpuppets, enforcing sourcing standards, and maintaining some kind of neutrality is incredible when you step back and think about it.
Neutrality? I’ve never seen an English language wikipedia article on a politically controversial topic that wasn’t the DC establishment/State Dept official take.
They listed Greyzone as an unreputable new source because it’s pro-Palestinian. When you Google the usernames of those who voted to ban them pro Israeli think tanks from DC come up. Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics. If you’re lucky you can find the real contours of an issue by seeing who’s been censored and silenced out of the article on the Talk page.
As a long-term editor, this is pretty off base. The discussion [1] that led to Grayzone being deprecated had almost nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. Meanwhile most Israel/Palestine articles are driven by Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and similar sources, while many Jewish sources (ADL, Jewish Chronicle, NGO Monitor, etc) are banned or restricted.
One example of a heavily debated neutrality issue was the opening paragraph of the Zionism article, which ended up like this. Surely noone would call this remotely pro-Israel? "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...
> Wikipedia is a joke when it comes to politics.
What isn't a joke when it comes to politics? The only way to be informed about politics I have found is to regularly read news from several different media sites paying careful attention when they talk about the same issue. This way you learn their biases and how to interpret their news articles, you get the ability to guess what really happens, not just their takes on it.
They spent basically two years rejecting the renaming of "Israel-Hamas war" into "Gaza war" (it has now been renamed) even though the full scope of the war was apparent after just a few months. It was very important to maintain the narrative that the only victims were Hamas. They protected the page so you couldn't request a rename without being a verified user.
The Portuguese Wikipedia does not allow the existence of details on corruption allegations against Portuguese or Brazilian politicians.
There are moderators who take care of cleaning those up, then starting harassment against users who have posted these things.
I've seen one particular page, when a corruption allegation was blown up against a politically connected individual, be set up for permanent deletion (the only way to remove a page so it can't be remade).
They have all the time in the world and its clearly a full time job for them to do this, so its very hard to deal with as an individual editor. Hence the result has been that the Portuguese wikipedia has very little information on the corruption of Portuguese politicians, while the English language is full of it.
I agree. The pages on Brazilian politics are often grotesque propaganda. There was even a famous case in which a slanderous and fraudulent edit on two journalists' pages was traced back to an IP address in Dilma's Presidential Palace (Dilma was Lula's hand-picked successor).
On Wikipedia people like Icewhiz are called "long-term abusers", and there's a public list with more than a hundred of them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LTA.
That list is fascinating. Like the obscure Canadian illustrator [1] who for a decade has been repeatedly trying to put herself into Wikipedia despite being told she's a "non-notable" artist.
I'm frankly amazed that enough people have the time to track this nonsense and stamp it out that it ends up being self-correcting. It's not just about time, either; chasing bad edits and prosecuting bad users must be a huge chore in terms of the sheer amount of work needed. I always find it amazing how horrible the tools are (like how almost anything, including having discussions, is done by editing pages; how can anyone have a discussion in such a disorganized way?), which surely must be a hindrance to productivity or to the ability to detect and deal with constant abuse. But seemingly it works. Maybe there are better tools that pro-level admins know about?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Anan...
There are a whole bunch of little utilities like browser extensions and bookmarklets and even an entire in-house cloud infrastructure that is used for hosting various kinds of bots and web-based tools for automating workflows. It's all very ad-hoc, crude and not very well organized or publicized. There have been a few efforts over the years to create a repository for all of the little tools to help with exposure and some level of vetting for security risks. I'm not sure any of those projects were ever successful (or even made it past the planning stage) but there has been some appetite for improving that ecosystem.
It's going to be a Achilles heel for Wikipedia one day, mark my words. Those LTA pages often contains a lot of personal information which would violate GDPR in Europe, at least based on what I've heard from NOYB so far. Some editors have expressed their concerns about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Long-term_abuse...?
On Wikipedia, every edit can be hidden so that even admins can't access it.[1]
Therefore, if legal problems arise with these pages, they probably will just delete the legally problematic info and hide every edit done before.
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.
Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a source, so "reliable" here has to mean "reliably presenting a full range of notable sources". No editor should be saying you can rely on claims found in Wikipedia, except in the sense of relying that the claims are in the sources.
(Except the claim as stated isn't always in the source anyway. Best to check.)
You're saying it yourself: it's a target of influence campaigns. The Wikimedia Foundation ìs not a source of them itself.
The non-profit public benefit service they provide is the openly editable encyclopaedia wiki, not its contents or its editors. The same safe harbour provisions as with other content hosters should (and need to) apply as with YouTube hosting questionable videos.
There are little behavioural nuances in your writing or the timezones/subjects in which you edit. Using multiple accounts is mostly forbidden by Wikipedia policy, unlike most websites, so just proving the link can be enough.
Icewhiz is a bad example because a lot of the evidence is non-public now (there's a cabal of CheckUsers approved by the Wikimedia Foundation who deal non-public cases). A simpler one is Lieutenant of Melkor/CaradhrasAiguo. Lieutenant of Melkor was banned in 2014, CaradhrasAiguo was made in 2015, and in 2020 someone linked the two accounts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...
> Editor interaction tool shows 2691 common pages. This is because both have been AWB power users in several same topic areas. However, there are numerous specific commonalities with extreme detail related to American cities, Chinese cities, weather templates and airports.
> Both used navigational popups to revert edits which resulted in a non-standard date format in the edit summary.
> LoM created many US city weatherbox templates. CA has been the only editor to do major updates in many of them.
> Both have done major work with pushpins related to Chinese maps. 'Pushpin' is found in many edit summaries of both editors.
> Both often removed bold text from non-English words. Both used edit-summaries with "debold" which I don't think is a real word.
> Both updated snow days and precipitation days in US city infoboxes with almost identical edit summaries.
> Both have an interest in classical music. CTRL+F for Beethoven, Mozart or Chopin in the editor interaction tool.
They're also both named after Lord of the Rings characters. "Caradhras" is a mountain, "Melkor" was the most powerful Valar and later went by the name "Morgoth". Sauron, the antagonist of LotR, was his lieutenant.
Wikipedia has been captured by special interests.
I recently watched The Silence of the Lambs, an Academy Award winning movie from the early 90s. Afterward, I skimmed the Wikipedia article to see if I missed any plot details.
There is a whole section on how the movie is considered transphobic by some nobodies, how the director defends that it isn't, blah blah blah. Having just watched the film, the thought didn't even enter my mind. I realized that the entire section is irrelevant to someone seeking information about the movie and at its worst, an opinion piece or cleverly disguised political shit-stirring.
Wikipedia is full of stuff like this. As a comparison I checked a 'real' encyclopedia (with editors) and of course not a mention of this, just the facts. Any attempt to delete irrelevant stuff from Wikipedia is closely guarded by self-appointed article gatekeepers because it has 'sources'.
That doesn't have anything to do with special interests.
Literally nearly every Wikipedia page for a fictional work or creator will have a section on "controversies" or similar, if there have been any. Regardless of which political direction they go in. If it's been covered in the media or a book or whatever, it tends to be included.
This is a good thing. It helps situate everything in a broader cultural context. When I look something up on Wikipedia, I want to know these things. It's not irrelevant and it's not an opinion piece.
It's not like the articles takes sides. They just objectively describe the controversies which are real objective things which exist.
I find it curious that you seem to want to be shielded from the existence of these controversies. Nobody is forcing you to read them. But many people do genuinely find them useful and informative.
The problem is controversies can be embellished. In this case, the controversy focused on a minor detail among hundreds of others in a nearly two hour long film.
Is there guidance on what makes a controversy 'notable', or can anything be listed there? E.g. "Nobody blogger and her Twitter army were upset about $thing" - does that qualify? Nearly anything can be controversial, or have fabricated controversies. You see this a lot on political articles.
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.
> I don't think there's any website that has successfully navigated that minefield as well as Wikipedia.
I don't believe this is the case, the Israeli/Palestine are restricted to long-time contributors, so the articles are either messy and unmaintained due to lack of editors, or worse, edited only by members of influence campaigns who have scared away everyone else
I am not sure if I agree with the statement "the only reason we know about them is because Wikipedia fights them". I am sure there are admins and accounts on wikipedia who work hard to protect the sites integrity. However, I know a lot of the misinformation on wikipedia pages, specific to the Middle East were uncovered by organizations outside of the site and with quotes of the content that have found their way to the site, so in those cases, the internal checks and balances of wikipedia didn't work.
Wikipedia is the best source of humanities "common knowledge". Yes there are users that abuse the system to push their own point of view. Many articles in Wikipedia have improved tremendously over the years; many times it is not unusual for an article to have over a hundred references. It gives you all the info you want to understand the subject before you delve further through books. Now for politics I can see the problem. Even on a well behaved site like HN you can get polarized views. Just say Israel is committing genocide or ethnic cleansing and you see the reaction. Ditto for Ukraine and now Trumpism. So yes there are pages that reflect views. Take them as such. Another advantage of Wikipedia is that many references are pushed to archive.org and saved.
"DEAR AMERICAN FRIENDS IN THE ADMINISTRATION KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THE WIKIPEDIA"
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...
There are counterexamples where this has failed/continues to fail, the gamergate article is famously non-neutral, only accepting primary sources from journalists directly involved in the controversy. This is rather than true secondary sources with less extreme and biased views, like is supposed to be the rules there. You can switch from the english one to other languages and get completely different content with very balanced point of views because the other languages weren't controlled by the influence campaign.
So, is it better than reddit? I agree, probably. That bar doesn't seem very high though.
Part of the issue with gamergate discussion is that there's a lot of vapid perspectives along the lines of "it's just video game journalism who cares" which allows an infinite amount of bad behavior, dishonesty and manipulation in the name of an abstract greater good. I believe it was used as a prototype for future wikipedia manipulation for "more important" topics.
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.
> Q1: Can I use a particular article as a source? > A1: What sources can be used in Wikipedia is governed by our reliable sources guideline, which requires "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". If you have a question about whether or not a particular source meets this policy, a good place to ask is the Reliable sources noticeboard.
> 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?
The infamous "Philip Cross" always comes to mind.
Did you read this post?
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
To me those links you provided, indicate a lot, of what is wrong for me with wikipedia.
Because it is extremely hard to figure out what is going on. Lots of mysterious abbreviations. Unclear timeline.
I still don't really know it, it seems the scandal is, that he had a sockpuppet account? And there is only "private" evidence (meaning not public)?
"The Arbitration Committee has determined through private evidence, including evidence from the checkuser tool, that Eostrix (talk · contribs) (a current RfA candidate) is a sockpuppet of Icewhiz (talk · contribs). Accordingly, the Committee has resolved that Eostrix be indefinitely blocked."
So having a sockpuppet account is the reason for indefinite ban? Or that in combination with edits he made? Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic. And this is what prevented me since the beginning to participate in Wikipedia. I always got this impression. I made some edits here and there, but I think was mostly reverted/deleted/ignored - but no idea, I never felt like making the investment to really dive into it - and that seems required to contribute. Casual contribution seems pointless - and they likely miss out a lot through this.
"But the only reason you know about them is because Wikipedia openly fights them instead of covering them up."
So it seems good if wikipedia is more open - but from this story I just take "private evidence" with me and lots of questions about the whole process.
"Really, really hard to figure out for someone just having a quick look into the topic."
Sometimes things are genuinely complicated. If you want to understand the hardest, most elaborate forms of Wikipedia community management you're going to need to work really hard at figuring out what's going on.
Community dynamics at this scale, and with this level of bad actors, are not something that can be explained in a few paragraphs.
Thank you.
More and more, especially in engineering, I am in contact with people who just want everything to be easy to understand in TikTok length video clips or short posts.
Some things are hard to understand, dynamic systems especially, black or white answers do not exist.
(Sorry for the slightly off-topic/meta rant. This hit a nerve by me.)
Oh in general for sure, but my first (attempted?) edit for Wikipedia was 20 years ago so I am not a completely newb.
And this is kind of like a court decision.
But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english. Which makes it clear (usually). But in wikipedia to understand a indefinite ban, I have to understand global wiki community dynamics first? I am a bit reminded of Kafka - The Trial.
Is this the start of the shakedown by Trump to start allowing misinformation?
Fascists hate knowledge, as is made apparent by Trump, Musk and co's repeated claims that Wikipedia is "radical-left woke DEI propaganda". I can only hope Wikimedia considers moving the bulk of their servers and organization to outside of the US before it is stolen by the evil bunch.
A "NOBUS" weapon. Any system (country/gov/para-...) needs the right 'tools' for people-manipulation and people-programming. And such weapons should not be allowed to be used against 'us'. Kinda like devices that must accept (and malfunction) but not cause interference.
So, for a "let people speak their mind - don't control information" the Trump side quickly goes to universities must teach only what 'WE' want, Wikipedia must mention only what 'WE' like. Hilarious if not pathetic and dangerous (very-very 1984-ish...)
Side-note: it has since amused me but apparently it's not often told/at all.. the absolute propaganda tool for Russia/Soviet was "Pravda" (the "Truth"). Imagine my amusement when Trump created "Truth Social". You can't make that shit up....
Now, as I've said before, I live in the EU and don't vote in the US, so you folks decide, and then we all get to 'share' the experience (since I do have some/plenty of SP500 and similar instruments).
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.
When you take a step back and look at what is happening as a whole, it's definitely not looking good.
I was going to start listing examples but that's not the point now. And even if something specific is undone weeks after because of outcry it's still a steady two steps forward, one step back, progression in a nasty direction.
I've read some books, seen some documentaries, learned some history. What's happening is very obvious and anyone who doesn't also see it is either ignorant or in denial.
The straightforward answer is that those supporting the autocratic authoritarianism want autocratic authoritarianism. They've been primed with decades of anti-American grievance politics condemning our distributed societal institutions as being foreign attackers, and they crave the simplicity of some big man with a big stick to make the complex world go away. They've also been primed to believe that they are supporting "freedom" (even though it never plays out that way in practice), so the more these actions reek of autocratic authoritarianism the more aggressive they get in their rationalizations.
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.
If you think of authoritarianism as more of a "spread" and not as a black-or-white thing, you can see where the problems with "Trumpism" are.
Using the terms of The Economist's "democracy index", I see the United States under Trump 2.0 as a denigrated "flawed democracy". There is even some danger of the United States backsliding towards a "hybrid regime". Hybrid regimes combine some aspects of electoral democracy with some aspects of authoritarianism. Prominent examples of hybrid regimes include Turkey and El Salvador.
Maybe we won't get that far -- strong federalism will help here. But while The Economist has ranked the United States as a borderline "flawed democracy" for the last several years, I suspect 2025's rankings will be considerably lower. My "gut feel" is that the United States could end up ranked close to present-day Hungary, or Poland under PiS. In both cases from what I remember, democracy still was present, but considerable damage was done via institutional attacks on the press and the universities. A US attorney general arresting judges for what seems like a minor dispute (but one involving migrants) seems like a pretty big flag that some degree of authoritarianism has taken hold. As is the erosion of due process involving immigrants.
Long run, I think this institutional damage being done by Trump is the most concerning aspect of Trump 2.0. Trump is actively damaging future engines of American growth (research science and universities). My guess, too, is that the anti-immigrant hostility might damage the previous paradigm where many of the brightest in the world came to America for both research and careers. There is a significant core of American voters that supports this stuff; the most vocal of this core in fact cheer on the arrest of judges and actively attack technologies where the conspiracies overwhelm the facts. (Witness the recent push of a few states to actually restrict mRNA vaccines for... reasons? Nothing solid that I can think of.) I do not think that this element will go away after Trump moves on.
Maybe.
I agree there is damage to US democracy but the root causes are more complex than just Trump. I also don't think anything Trump is doing is irreversible. This too shall pass. The more interesting question is what happens next. We seem to be more and more in a situation where we have two camps who are essentially saying democracy is only happening if/when my camp wins. That can't be democracy.
Due process re: US immigration has been eroding since 9/11. Public trust in government has been eroding in the US and other places. Social media and the pandemic are at least two factors I can identify.
With all the FUD there's probably still no better place in the world to start a new business. Where would you go? China? Really no comparison at all between the US and Poland or Hungary, the latter have barely gotten out of eastern europe/USSR. I'm not seeing any H1B or green card holders seeking other/better options or for that matter, US citizens seeking to immigrate somewhere better.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/07/silicon-valley-is-so-domin...
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.
Conservatives are the most prominent and dangerous de-bankers. It is well known that Mormons have a lot of power the payment processor world, and censor content they find offensive to their religion, using concerns about fraud and chargebacks as mere convenient excuses.
A systematic effort to dismantle the federal government bypassing the legislature entirely, replacing federal employees with people who pledge loyalty to the president over the constitution, firing anybody who would hold him accountable, undermining the separation of powers in favor of an all powerful executive who treats executive orders as law, attacking media outlets and judges they disagree with and threatening to either remove their access to the White House press room or revoke their license or fire them, deporting people without due process, threatening to invade Greenland, threatening to withhold congressionally approved funding as a cudgel, and invoking the friggin Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in a time of peace is not “pushing back a little”.
But if you haven’t realized that yet it’s obvious you never will till it’s too late and sure, maybe that’s harsh to say but as trump himself said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters” because that’s precisely how much y’all care what he does. Gimme your downvotes but don’t pretend you’re standing on moral high ground, you’d justify anything he does.
The whole anti-DEI sweep across the government where people who don’t remove “let’s treat people nice” posters risk getting fired and attacking people using the office of the president is so obviously deplatforming and censorship that your criticism of democrats is laughable. When’s the last time Biden threatened to revoke Fox News license? Republicans even a tiny bit critical of Trump get exiled for daring to step out of line. You don’t hate censorship and deplatforming, you love it, can’t get enough of it, you just hate it when it happens to people you like.
Consider the illegal immigration question. Tens of millions of people are in the country, knowingly in violation of the law. Many foreign criminal gangs are operating in the country. Yet the federal government was prevented from even constructing a simple wall to stop the situation getting worse. Not only that, but other authorities in the country are even declaring “sanctuary cities”, openly contravening the efforts of federal law enforcement. Latest thing we hear is district judges harbouring illegal immigrant gang members in their home. We are at a point of complete absurdity. So, yes, invoking the “Alien Enemies” act is quite reasonable, given the circumstances. We are not starting from a point of normality.
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.
This feels like a decent list. I'm not an American but some of these processes seem to be happening in other places.
1. Is all of us, on the "right" or the "left". Let's not do this.
2. Here you could say maybe the government is doing a little. But I would still say most of the lies and conspiracies that are reverberating in our society are not originating from there. This is like 95% on all of us (or social media). 5% you can maybe blame Trump.
3. I don't really see this happening yet.
4. I would say the "left" has been demonizing the right very effectively. But sure, goes both ways. This just seems to be standard for political debate today (it's the end of the world if those guys get power). I think it's mostly up to us to push back against this. So if you're a democrat push back against casting Trump as a dictator (I don't think he is) and if you're a republican push back against all this "stop the steal" and "lock her up" whatever nonsense.
5. Not happening IMO.
6. I guess Trump is blaming illegal immigrants for the rise in crime. I don't think is is a perfect match to the intention here. America is so multi-cultural/diverse anyways so this tactic doesn't really work.
7. Trump sort of does this but not really to the extent that I think the author of the list meant. So far it seems there's no fear from voicing dissent. Musk went ballistic on Navarro calling him a moron and is critical of Trumps tariffs. Many other republicans are critical. This is more of a kindergarden than authoritarianism.
8. Not happening. Would be very worrying if we get there.
9. Not happening. We had large rallies before the election but you don't see the sort of things you might see in Iran or Turkey. Again this would be a worrying sign if we get here.
10. Also not happening. You see universities fighting back against Trump. you see courts. you see states. you see people. If anything it seems people feel like they have a lot of power.
Well seems the war on truth has started. There is a 1984 quote about history that escapes me now.
The shoe in this case (as with numerous others in recent months) fits exceeding well.
Reality is shifting, rapidly; HN mod policies should adjust accordingly.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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):
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.
This is not a matter of whether you watch Fox News or not.
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.
> 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.
Are you assuming bias/opinion is one-dimensional and the "median American" stands for the Truth?
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).
"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone."
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.
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 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.
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.
NB: If you have substantiated concerns, the correct course is to email mods. They are responsive to this. <hn@ycombinator.com>
The problem with in-thread accusations isn't so much the lack of legitimacy but the deletrious effect on discussion quality, which is fragile at best:
On shilling generally: <https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=true&page=0&dateR...>
On HN's fragility: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23047709>
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.
As a start you can look at the following page.
Saw this on Twitter a while ago:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
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...
10 seconds on Google:
https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically...
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.
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.