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Comment by nwah1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused as to why this is newsworthy? Are we operating on the assumption that the 303 more prolific wikipedians are somehow all without a personal ideology?

If the rules he's using are being followed correctly, and if the information he is posting is well-sourced, then your only other course of action would be to petition to change wikipedia's rules.

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Us internet denizens got upset when librarians complained that Wikipedia was inaccurate compared to encyclopedias. We celebrated the "new information economy" of crowdsourcing and open-access information. I think this crowd should be incredibly concerned to hear that there's clear propaganda and power wars on these websites. It's very newsworthy.

> If the rules he's using are being followed correctly, and if the information he is posting is well-sourced, then your only other course of action would be to petition to change wikipedia's rules.

He's removing well-sourced information that's counter to his claims.

There's a clear conflict of interest which Wikipedia is refusing to act on.

I feel like we're missing the context here. Why is wikipedia ignoring it?

That's a mystery to me too. Initially when the complaints were made on Twitter (by some of Cross' targets), Jimmy Wales dismissed them, asking for diffs. Now that we've provided diffs and shown the scale of his efforts and the clear conflict of interest, we've heard nothing more. We're hoping the more exposure this story gets the more pressure it will put on them to act. But so far it's not looking hopeful. See how one editor was shut down when he tried to raise the issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:KalHolmann

I suspect Jimmy Wales and his associates are keeping mum because they realize this is because of a fundamental (perhaps intractable) weakness of the Wikipedia platform — NPOV is an impossible standard to maintain without a highly active network of trusted reviewers under a central authority. Even then, many small changes over a long period are a viable attack vector.

The admin who summarily closed the conflict-of-interest report explains his motivation as follows:

« You can't amass 130,000 edits, as Philip Cross has, without being reasonably committed to Wikipedia. You'd be noticed if you were an agenda account with that many edits. And being attacked by RT and George Galloway is a reasonably reliable indicator that you are doing something right. »

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:JzG )

This doesn't inspire much confidence in me, because obviously it _has_ been widely noticed that "Philip Cross" is an agenda account (and it seems it was noticed already almost a decade ago: http://neilclark66.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/wally-of-week-phil... )

Wow, that admin is a git. He should read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

>And being attacked by RT and George Galloway is a reasonably reliable indicator that you are doing something right

That is an absolutely astonishing statement and IMO something you should immediately lose admin privileges for making. I have no love for RT or for Syria sympathizers, but to defend someone's edits on the mere basis that they are opposed by those groups is completely unacceptable.

> Are we operating on the assumption that the 303 more prolific wikipedians are somehow all without a personal ideology?

Absent evidence, yes. Are you operating on the assumption that wrongdoing is only actionable if everyone else is proven innocent?

Have you read the article? Well-sourced information is being removed and badly-sourced information added, and that's only the beginning.

If the rules he's using are being followed correctly, and if the information he is posting is well-sourced, then your only other course of action would be to petition to change wikipedia's rules.

"Well-sourced" is not the only criterion. I could edit a page, citing credible sources, and still distort it by including implicit, one-sided interpretations of those sources results/contents.

Also, if the rules do not have, in short, "be objective", then yes, we should petition to change wikipedia's rules.

> I could edit a page, citing credible sources, and still distort it by including implicit, one-sided interpretations of those sources results/contents.

As an example of this, at a certain point John Perry Barlow was indicated as being against net neutrality. The source for the claim was his declaration of independence of the cyberspace because it claimed he didn't want government intervention in the net. As far as I know, this isn't "being against net neutrality" and I never read anything by JPB advocating against it.

So yes, someone can always cite something and twist its meaning to fit a particular agenda.

“Telecom regulations give a lot of leverage to organizations whether governmental or corporate to close down the right to know. My long experience says as soon as you give government the authority to impose regulations on the Internet you are doing something to frustrate the right to know. People tend to presume on theoretical grounds a little right minded regulation will help people build beneficial architectures and organizations. I do not think there is anything to support that theory. Every time I have seen any sort of regulation of the Internet the results have been mayhem. Declaring the Internet and the telephone network to be the same thing is like declaring a Buick and a symphony to be the same thing because they both make noise.”

- John Perry Barlow

http://calinnovates.org/category/issues/platform-access/net-...

It's interesting that the passage you quoted is not itself sourced in the link you gave. I tried looking for that same passage on Google and came out empty handed (except for the site you linked to).

Do you have a first-party source for that? I would like to see it in its original context.

I think one of the arguments is this isn’t an individual but a group or agency with an agenda and resources to bend Wikipedia to a specific narrative.

A group is made of individuals. They would normally have one account per person. Multiple accounts per person is more likely than multiple people per account.

Bending wikipedia has been going on for ages, not even counting the paid editing that you seem to presume. The famous example, where Jimmy Wales had to step in, was pedophiles putting a positive spin on their sort of activity. A much tamer example is feral cats; the article minimizes any harm (wildlife loss, contamination, etc.) due to the people obsessed with the subject matter.

Most controversial subjects on wikipedia get a positive spin. It's simply a matter of who is most obsessed with the subject matter.

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