the_dunk_tank

Then I guess we're stuck with Wikipedia as an anti-communist weapon because once the rules-lawyering culture was set around the late 00s, it left the door wide open for government agents who can afford to memorize and eventually expand upon Wikipedia's byzantine rules and bylaws. It would be interesting to see whether the non-English Wikipedias have the same rules-lawyering culture although linking Spanish Wikipedia articles to English-speakers isn't going to work for obvious reasons.

I'm just extremely jaded about Wikipedia at this point having been enthusiastic about it during the late 00s. As soon as we even attempt to correct some article, they will reflexively throw some bullshit rules violation that's complete bullshit even by rules-lawyering standards and when we go "aktually, this is a bullshit rules violation even by rules-lawyering standards good sir," they'll throw the real rules violation that we would have to fight over. Now don't get me wrong, it can be done, but it's going to take an extraordinary amount of effort to memorize those rules and bylaws and know the major edit wars and administrative decisions which those rules and bylaws were invoked. We would also have to know how Wikipedia functions as an administrative body as well as suck up to some poweruser or admin because just like real life, a lot of law violations and bureaucratic red tape get overlooked if you know the right people. In short, we would have to become some bureaucratic lawyer, which makes sense why feds have infiltrated Wikipedia since feds are already government bureaucrats irl.

Here's a Wired article about the Herculean effort an editor had to take to undo the deception peddled by cryptofascists on articles related to WWII. She spend half a year fighting against some Aussie cryptofascist over an article about some shitty Nazi medal. She essentially won because she knew to play the rules-lawyering game and for not being a lying cryptofascist. But going up against the NATO consensus is far more difficult than streamrolling a bunch of loser cryptofascists. Just look at the list of reliable sources. RFA and VOA both get listed as reliable sources.

Here's some of the discussion on whether to consider RFA as reliable sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_391#Radio_Free_Asia

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_329#Reliability_of_Radio_Free_Asia

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_313#Views_on_International_Campaign_for_Tibet,_UNESCO,_Tibet_Post_International/The_Tibet_Post,_Tibet_Watch,_Unrepresented_Nations_and_Peoples_Organization,_Free_Tibet,_Radio_Free_Asia

At bare minimum, we would have to speak Wikipedian, which means we would have memorize everything here as well as know when to invoke them:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simplified_ruleset

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Principles

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_difference_between_policies,_guidelines_and_essays

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_policies

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_guidelines

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Essays

And this is just the front face of Wikipedia. Like government institutions, there's the law and SOP, and there's how things are really done. I do not know which policies and guidelines are de facto ignored and which essays are de facto enforced.

teachers always had the angle that wikipedia is bad because the mere rabble editing it don't have staid institutional reputation behind them. it was always obvious to everyone else, though, that wikipedia does a fine job of interpreting the sources. wikipedia is consistently useful as an aggregator of mainstream sources

the only way to attack it I think is with vandalism. add incorrect information like slightly wrong dates, wrong distances to astronomical objects, and wrong molecular weights of chemicals; mix up physics theorems with subtly-incorrect contrapositives; replace working code with pseudocode that doesn't quite handle the edge cases. make people as frustrated with wikipedia as they are with quora! then wikipedia will become irrelevant.

it won't change all of the liberalism that wikipedia was collecting in the first place, but

• it'll be harder to find anything at all so people will trust their lived experience more
• it'll be on more equal footing with weird fringe stuff in search results instead of being woven into a whole authoritative-sounding encyclopedic narrative
• it won't be laundered through wikipedia's "community consensus" on reliable sources

death to wikipedia