Displaying items by tag: wikipedia http://www.fudzilla.com Tue, 27 Sep 2016 11:12:58 +0200 MYOB en-gb Wikipedia has become 20th century bureaucracy http://www.fudzilla.com/news/40552-wikipedia-has-become-20th-century-bureaucracy http://www.fudzilla.com/news/40552-wikipedia-has-become-20th-century-bureaucracy Wikipedia has become 20th century bureaucracy


Rule by an elite few

Wikipedia has degenerated into a 20th century corporate bureaucracy run by an elite few and lost site of its early egalitarian ideals, according to a new report.

According to a new paper published in the journal Future Internet, Wikipedia might have started out with the right idea but as it has evolved it has become a deeply unpleasant social heirarchical organisation dedicated to the furthering the egos of a small number of people.

Indiana University undergraduates Bradi Heaberlin and Simon DeDeo decided to examine the emergence of social hierarchy and online behavioral norms among the editors of Wikipedia. They examined 15 years of Wikipedia data, involving tens of thousands of individuals, from 2001 to 2015. Their conclusion was that it was exactly like a university system, or like General Electric, or AT&T.

“Every single action that anybody ever did has been tagged to the second. The resolution of that data is so good, we are like gods. We can look at that system now, we can fast forward, we can rewind.”

This makes it possible to track how complicated abstract ideas like honesty, fairness, and authority emerge and evolve in a community like Wikipedia, in much the same way financial analysts track prices and monetary flow.

Wikipedia obeys the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” where a few people hold sway. German sociologist Robert Michels coined the phrase in 1911, while studying Italian political parties, and it led him to conclude that democracy was doomed. 

“You start with a decentralized democratic system, but over time you get the emergence of a leadership class with privileged access to information and social networks. Their interests begin to diverge from the rest of the group. They no longer have the same needs and goals. So not only do they come to gain the most power within the system, but they may use it in ways that conflict with the needs of everybody else.”

He and Heaberlin found that the same is true of Wikipedia. The core norms governing the community were created by roughly 100 users—but the community now numbers about 30,000.

This mirrors a previous report in Physical Review by physicists at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. It found a fairly small number of Wikipedia editors exert too influence on the site and this is getting worse over time.

Effectively this means that knowledge is defined by those who know nothing, but are interested in furthering their own agenda. For example. Fudzilla is not an Internet magazine according to Wikipedia.Despite numerous quotes from Fudzilla through-out Wikipedia, two people decided that a magazine with a huge number of hits, loyal readers, with a history of breaking stories was "not notiable." The editor who made that decision admitted he knew nothing about tech reporting but found another editor to take down Fudzilla's entry in record time. However Fudzilla's less conspicious rivals are allowed pages.

DeDeo and Heaberlin’s analysis predicts that editing inequality is increasing over time as a result the growth of Wikipedia is slowing down, and our observation indicates that this will continue unless something is done about it. 

Their analysis demonstrates that Wikipedia is conservative and preserves those aspects that worked early on. As the community added new members and grew rapidly, 89 percent of the core norms stayed the same. Nobody ever overthrows an existing norm, and nobody creates a new norm that becomes as dominant as the original core norms. If a particular norm was important in 2001, chances are it was still important in 2015.

Over time, these four central communities become increasingly separate and interact with each other less and less. In a complex network, this is known as decoupling.

There are no  attempts to resolve conflicts. Instead, you get the emergence of tribalism. For some Wikipedia users, the most important aspect of the community is collaboration and mutual respect. Others value providing verifiable neutral information, or view Wikipedia as kind of a “Noah’s ark” repository of information should civilization collapse. Those obsessed with content policy may think the most important aspect of Wikipedia is that it is open and shared freely.

 

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edfu777 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com (Nick Farrell) News Thu, 28 Apr 2016 11:52:50 +0200
Wikipedia editors try to kill Fudzilla again http://www.fudzilla.com/news/40112-wikipedia-editors-try-to-kill-fudzilla-again http://www.fudzilla.com/news/40112-wikipedia-editors-try-to-kill-fudzilla-again Wikipedia editors try to kill Fudzilla again


Apparently can't find us on Google

Wikipedia editors are trying to delete the modest Fudzilla entry on the basis that it is not famous enough or has enough links on Google.

This is the second time that Wikipedia has attempted to wipe Fudzilla from its pages. The last time was in 2009. At the time we did not have the number of hits, or the industry connections that we do now so we let it slide.

Then on our ninth birthday we thought “we have been around long enough... lots of magazines recognise us so we will have another crack at it.” It was written by an outsider who only wrote a paragraph and we had links to show it was all true so we thought it would be ok.

It had only been up for a couple of hours when a Wikipedia editor called Dennis Brown said that the entry failed to pass WP:GNG. Apparently this person did some searching and could not find Fudzilla “of any use.”

“Not a comment on the site itself, but it hasn't generated enough coverage in independent, reliable sources to pass the criteria for inclusion,” Brown said.

 

This is jolly odd that Google took 0.54 seconds to find 338,000 results. Fudzilla has written 40,000 news stories in its nine years and has been linked by shedloads of different magazines.

For the record Wackypedia does allow a big entry from Daily Tech, the Inquirer (after the original team left) and several other technology magazines which are on a par with us.  Meanwhile to make its case some Wackpedia editors have gone through Fudzilla references on the site and marked them "rumour site find an alternative source."   It is fairly clear that Fudzilla has angered someone on the wackypedia editorial team.

The deletion is still up for debate so if Fudzilla fans would like to tell Wikipedia to sling its hook here is the link.

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edfu777 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com (Nick Farrell) News Thu, 03 Mar 2016 10:58:16 +0100
Wales wants Apple to stop selling iPhones in UK http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/39175-wales-wants-apple-to-stop-selling-iphones-in-uk http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/39175-wales-wants-apple-to-stop-selling-iphones-in-uk Wales wants Apple to stop selling iPhones in UK


Scotland does not care

Wackypedia leader Jimmy Wales has suggested that Apple should stop selling its popular iPhone line in the UK

Jimmy Wales, who set up the online encyclopaedia in 2001, said the draft Investigatory Powers Bill was “stupid” and he would like to see Apple refuse to sell iPhone in UK if government bans end-to-end encryption.  It is not often that we agree completely with him, although probably for different reasons.

iPhones include a messaging programme called iMessage which would likely fall under the provisions in the bill banning “strong” end-to-end encryption of messages.

The proposed law, to be published in its full draft from on Wednesday by the Home Secretary Theresa May, will mandate internet and technology companies to hand over communications data on request.

This means that encryption on communications would in theory have to be breakable by those firms in some way.

Apple currently says it could not give iMessage data to authorities even if it wanted to, because of the strong encryption it uses on the service. It has already made this legal argument to authorities in the United States.

The law is completely daft and so easy to get around. Wales appears to think that the country will suffer if Apple does not operate there. In fact the opposite applies. Apple pays very little tax in the UK so money spend on Apple products is a loss to the UK economy.

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edfu777 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com (Nick Farrell) Mobiles Wed, 04 Nov 2015 14:05:19 +0100
Wikipedia editors turn to blackmail http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38635-wikipedia-editors-turn-to-blackmail http://www.fudzilla.com/news/38635-wikipedia-editors-turn-to-blackmail Wikipedia editors turn to blackmail


"Not notable" tools

It was only a matter of time, but the editors at Wikipedia have let all that power go to their heads and started blackmailing people.

For years now editors at Wackypedia have satisfied themselves with making people they did not like "disappear" from the online encyclopaedia claiming they were not notable enough. While their favourite porn stars received full entries, people they did not like, such as Mike Magee and the Everywhere Girl, none of whom took their clothes off, had their entries purged.

Now it seems a group of editors have started contacting small businesses and celebrities, and telling them that if they do not pay up, their entries will be edited to oblivion.

The victims were asked for hundreds of pounds to "protect" or update online pages about their businesses.

The trick is to use the same excuse about a "lack of notability" to threaten a person that their entry will be deleted. However, they offer to use their powers as an editor to keep the page up.

Victims include a wedding photographer in Dorset, a high-end jewellery shop in Shoreditch, east London and a former Britain's Got Talent contestant.

Among them was British holiday company Quality Villas, based in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.

Someone he believed to be from or on behalf of Wikipedia contacted Dan Thompson, the general manager a few days after he set up a page about the company.
Wackypedia insists that the fraudsters were a "coordinated group" and it has purged 381 "sock puppet" accounts and 210 articles created by them.

Wikipedia Foundation members Ed Erhart and Juliet Barbara wrote in a blog post: "Neutrality is key to ensuring Wikipedia's quality. Although it does not happen often, undisclosed paid advocacy editing may represent a serious conflict of interest and could compromise the quality of content on Wikipedia.

"The practice is in conflict with a number of English Wikipedia's policies, including neutrality and conflict of interest, and is a violation of the Wikimedia Foundation's terms of use."

However, some of the problems are caused by those same rules that protect a group of editors with chips on their shoulders who are allowed to control pages over which they have no knowledge.

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edfu777 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com (Nick Farrell) News Thu, 03 Sep 2015 11:14:22 +0200
Wackpedia finally purges Indian conman http://www.fudzilla.com/news/37360-wackpedia-finally-purges-indian-conman http://www.fudzilla.com/news/37360-wackpedia-finally-purges-indian-conman Wackpedia finally purges Indian conman


Perfect Admin drove readers to worthless degree site

Wikipedia, whose admins are famous for making people they don't like disappear, have had to cull one of their own number.

The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, has decided that Wifione manipulated the Wikipedia site of an unaccredited business school in India by deleting links to numerous media reports alleging it scammed students into paying hefty sums for worthless degrees.

For four years, that Wikipedia page was a primary marketing tool of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), which at one time boasted a network of 18 branches and tens of thousands of students. It lured students with the promise of an MBA and partnerships with international universities in the United States and Europe.

However last September, the High Court of Delhi ruled that those promises were misleading and that IIPM was not accredited to confer any degrees.

The problem is that the Wifione account, which the Arbitration Committee has now banned indefinitely from editing the site, had been active since 2009 editing the online encyclopaedia in its own image.

The account sounded like a good Wackpedia admin. It offered to do administrative donkey work, said the right things about how inspiring 'the project' is and was unfailingly polite."

Once the account was an administrator it was assumed to be one of the good guys. As anyone who has had any dealings with Wackpedia will tell you, their word is law and if they tell you that Mike Magee does not exist, or can't be an expert on Intel and Tantra, than it must be true. If the Everywhere Girl is popular everywhere but they have not heard about it, then she must be deleted.

The only difficulty was that Wifione's primary purpose from that point appeared to be to monitor IIPM's Wikipedia page. If criticism of the business school appeared, Wifione would use its influence to remove it.

Even after it was revealed as a total scam, Wikipedia believed its administrator be perfect and continued to mislead its readers.

"My parents re-mortgaged their farm to pay for this degree," one former student was quoted as saying. "I'm just too scared to tell them it was a fraud. It's better they just think I have an MBA. It would break their heart."

Many of the articles Wifione removed from IIPM's Wikipedia page were from Careers360. In 2011, another magazine, The Caravan, interviewed the site and published a highly critical investigation. The link to this, too, was removed from the Wikipedia page.

Reporters who investigated the site and exposed it were attacked on Wikipedia. For example one hack was falsely accused of losing libel cases. The Wikipedia page also now emphasized a link, praising IIPM, to a newspaper called The Pioneer. It turned out the article in the link was an advertorial (paid content designed to look like a news story).

The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee believes Wifione was at one time operating over 60 so-called "sock-puppet" accounts, fake users run by the same person that can be used to out-vote rival editors who want to make a change. Members even found evidence of two sock-puppet accounts threatening editors with violence if they didn't back off, according to a Wikipedia editor.

So while Wikipedia could not get its act together to take on the problem, poor students from rural areas of India, where Wikipedia was often the only source of information they could use to research which business school to attend were losing their farms.

In 2013, IIPM got an unexpected boost for its page. A new initiative launched by Jimmy Wales's Wikimedia Foundation offered free access to Wikipedia from mobile phones. The program, Wikipedia Zero, launched in India and other parts of the developing world, including Thailand, Myanmar, Morocco, Ghana and Malaysia.

Of course Wikimedia Foundation is apologetic but won't be offering compensation. After it all it was not its fault that its editorial system was designed to defend their admins what ever the cost and that because of the system it created, it allowed the scam to go for years.

Fortunately for Wackpedia, this happened in India, if it happened in the US it would be facing class actions and be made to think about its choices. But what are a few Indians who are too poor to sue eh?

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edfu777 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com (Nick Farrell) News Thu, 26 Mar 2015 10:31:12 +0100
US cops censor Wikipedia http://www.fudzilla.com/news/37271-us-cops-censor-wikipedia http://www.fudzilla.com/news/37271-us-cops-censor-wikipedia US cops censor Wikipedia


We don’t beat people up or shoot black people

The New York Police department has a clever way of making sure its story gets across on Wikipedia – it edits the site until it says what it wants.

New York Police Department’s computers at its 1 Police Plaza headquarters were used to alter Wikipedia pages containing details of alleged police brutality.

The coppers edited and attempted to delete Wikipedia entries for several well-known police victims including entries for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. Capital identified 85 NYPD addresses that have edited Wikipedia, although it is unclear how many users were involved, as computers on the NYPD network can operate on the department’s range of IP addresses.

NYPD IP addresses have also been used to edit entries on stop-and-frisk, NYPD scandals, and prominent figures in the city’s political and police leadership.

For example on December 3, after a Staten Island grand jury ruled not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, a user on the 1 Police Plaza network made multiple edits, visible here and here, to the “Death of Eric Garner” Wikipedia entry.

Lines like “Garner raised both his arms in the air” was changed to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke. “Push Garner's face into the sidewalk” was changed to “push Garner's head down into the sidewalk. Use of the chokehold has been prohibited” was changed to “Use of the chokehold is legal, but has been prohibited.”

The word “chokehold” was replaced twice, once to “chokehold or headlock,” and once to “respiratory distress.”

The NYPD is apparently investigating the claim that its officers are now trying to re-write history, but we would not hold our breath on this one.

 

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edfu777 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com (Nick Farrell) News Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:06:23 +0100
Wikipedia crippled by a lack of women http://www.fudzilla.com/news/35632-wikipedia-crippled-by-a-lack-of-women http://www.fudzilla.com/news/35632-wikipedia-crippled-by-a-lack-of-women

Edited by boys who know nothing

Wikipedia’s problem is finally being realised, it teams of editors are “young white western males with a slight personality defect” and there are simply not enough women working at the place. Guardian feature writer Anne Perkins said that Wikipedia’s editors are single and childless and most of them are actually small boys who are getting bullied at school.

A recent survey of Wikipedians showed that the average age of them 25.22 years, young enough to know nothing but old enough to think they are gods gift to intellect. Half of the respondents are younger than 22 years. The most frequent age that can be observed within the respondents is 18 years. So that means a quarter of them are younger than 18 years old and another quarter are between 18 and 22, a further 25 quarter are between 22 and 30. Only the last quarter are between the ages of 30 and 85 years old which is the age you actually know anything.

Contributors show a substantially larger share of males than readers. Among respondents only 12.64 per cent of contributors are female. Wikipedia acknowledges that it suffers from a lack of women editors however it has been unable to do anything about it and in 2013 any attempt within Wikipedia was abandoned.

As a result if you compare the coverage of female porn stars, where a page that went up first in 2004 has been edited over 3,000 times by more than a hundred volunteers determined to make it as copiously referenced as possible with that of a page about women writers you see the effect of the gender and age bias.

However it is not an issue about women and technology. Women have come to outnumber men in some social media domains. They use social network sites such as Facebook more often and more actively than men and female users predominate on Twitter, Yelp, and the online pinboard Pinterest.

Men hang out in Reddit, a social news website known for its sometimes-misogynistic content and LinkedIn has attracted almost twice as many males as females. LinkedIn claims that this is because men are better at professional networking than women.  What is more likely is that women do not hang out in places where there are a higher percentage of men being misogynistic socially retarded tossers – which is why they ignore Wikipedia in droves.

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edfu777 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com (Nick Farrell) News Fri, 29 Aug 2014 12:06:30 +0200
Wikipedia is revolting http://www.fudzilla.com/news/35567-wikipedia-is-revolting http://www.fudzilla.com/news/35567-wikipedia-is-revolting

Donations causing splits

The Wikipedia Foundation is finding itself dealing with a revolt of its German editors who are furious at the introduction of the Media Viewer software to the German Wikipedia.

A community of editors that work on that version voted to disable it in what could be a deeper and widening rift between the offices in San Francisco and the global community wikipedia.

According to Wikipediocracy the happy days where the Foundation worked well with its foreign editors is starting to come to an end.

For a while now people have been complaining that there was a steep learning curve needed to add content. So the WMF began using its newly donated millions to create a method and eventually introducing the Visual Editor (VE).

The software was buggy, causing all sorts of problems to pages it was used on. The editor was also unable to add or edit the many templates found on almost every Wikipedia article. With the sort of management, flare that Wackypedia displays at times it imposed VE on the volunteer against its will.

While everyone was screaming to switch the programme off, Wackypedia management was digging in its toes.

Then a Wikipedia admin changed the javascript file for the site to override the developers, and only then did the developers finally back down and make it an opt-in tool. It seemed, for a time, that the WMF had given up on forcing people to do things until it developed another new feature to prevent the community from overriding them in the future called “superprotection”.

The Germans revolted and a German administrator edited the javascript file for the site in order to disable the feature. A WMF representative reverted the change and there was an edit war.

This time the “superprotection” extension was added to prevent the administrators from editing the interface page. This was bypassed by deleting the page and creating a new one with their preferred version. The developers in San Francisco scrambled to fix the extension to prevent deletion as well, and so finally their preferred version stands.

This sent the Germans nuts particularly after their technical department head Erik Möller was blocked.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales’s page said that Wikipedia needs software improvements badly and those who objected were the problem.

However, there is another issue here. The Foundation has a miserable cost/ benefit ratio and for years now has spent millions on software development without producing anything that actually works. The feeling is that the whole operation is held together with the goodwill of its volunteers and the more stupid Foundation managers are seriously hacking them off.

 

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edfu777 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com (Nick Farrell) News Fri, 22 Aug 2014 13:03:55 +0200
Wikipedia told to “forget” historical information http://www.fudzilla.com/news/35451-wikipedia-told-to-%E2%80%9Cforget%E2%80%9D-historical-information http://www.fudzilla.com/news/35451-wikipedia-told-to-%E2%80%9Cforget%E2%80%9D-historical-information



It is everyone’s right

It appears that the EU’s well-meaning right to be forgotten is being used by those who want to re-write history without them.

Geoff Brigham, General Counsel for the the Wikimedia Foundation said he had been getting notes saying that certain links to Wikipedia content would no longer appear in search results served to people in Europe. Among the articles removed from search results are an image of a young man playing a guitar, a page about the former criminal Gerry Hutch, anda page about the Italian gangster Renato Vallanzasca.

As of July 18, Google has received more than 91,000 removal requests involving more than 328,000 links; of these, more than half of the URLs processed have been removed. More than fifty of these links were to content on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia said that the WMF has created a dedicated page where we will be posting notices about attempts to remove links to Wikimedia under this authority. The Wikimedia projects provide informational, educational, and historic value to the world. Their content should not be hidden from Internet users seeking truthful and relevant information.

Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales said the EU’s “right to be forgotten” laws where being used to censor history.

“History is a human right and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another,” he said. “I’ve been in the public eye for quite some time. Some people say good things, some people say bad things … that’s history, and I would never use any kind of legal process like to try to suppress it.”

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edfu777 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com (Nick Farrell) News Thu, 07 Aug 2014 12:15:28 +0200
Wikipedia boss invests in The People's Operator http://www.fudzilla.com/news/33720-wikipedia-boss-invests-in-the-peoples-operator http://www.fudzilla.com/news/33720-wikipedia-boss-invests-in-the-peoples-operator



Wants to export the idea to the US

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has made a "substantial" investment in The People's Operator (TPO). TPO is a London-based mobile provider that pays 10 percent of revenue to good causes. Wales thinks the idea has legs and wants to take the idea to the United States and other markets.

In a statement, Wales said TPO had pulled off the difficult feat of creating an inspirational business that had solid commercial foundations. He said that while the idea was to generate massive sums of money for good causes the numbers and looked at the business model all worked.

TPO is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which means it relies on an existing operator's network. In the UK this is EE, the British joint venture between France's Orange and Deutsche Telekom. It launched a pay-as-you-go operation in November 2012 and followed in April 2013 with a contract offering unlimited voice, mobile and data for 14.99 pounds ($24.61) a month. Ten percent of revenue is directed to any good cause chosen by the customer and the company pledges to pay 25 percent of its profits to charity.

None of that is relevant as the company is unprofitable. However, it does not spend huge sums on marketing and relies on word-of-mouth and promotion by the organizations it helps. Wales said he would help TPO expand internationally, starting with the United States. He will be co-chairman of the company.

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edfu777 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com (Nick Farrell) News Wed, 22 Jan 2014 08:14:41 +0100
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