We honestly need to end the myth that Wikipedia is some impenetrable white tower. It can and has been infiltrated by corporate and political groups, and even creative vandals.
It’s the most valuable digital property in the world. You think people break into the Louvre but can’t touch Wikipedia?
Yep like how North Face replaced photos of many pages with photos that had people wearing their products in it. And this is probably just the tip of the iceberg, there must be plenty of stuff that hasn’t been caught yet.
Wow. Do you have a link for that?
In 2019, The North Face faced consumer backlash and apologized after its marketing agency surreptitiously added photos featuring its apparel to Wikipedia articles on popular outdoor destinations.
The North Face - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Face
Edit: they also sent a cease & desist to The South Butt a decade before that
TIL about the South Butt.
Organized groups hire people to edit wiki pages, you can even spot them coaching each other on the talk section. Monied interests especially, but also history is under fire.
Revisionists are rife, every monster from history is seemingly being rehabilitated, for at least 15 years. Feudalism has pr firms now too, it was great! No perversion of reality is too obvious that the sheep will not mindlessly take it as fact.
Technical subjects’ articles utility depends on who wrote it, a share of them are showing off their learnings using technical words 95 percent or more will not fully grasp, while other entries are in common terms andd fully understandable.
Wikipedia is a great resource, but not infallible, or a reliable source in itself, although it’s listed sources could well be reliable sources.
Although manipulating the sources cited is a great way to manipulate Wikipedia. You have to recruit 10-40 people to act as a group of editors to manufacture concensus across topics. Or you can just create a website or series of press releases.
“Hey, this small-town museum has an article about a historical event. It must be true. Link it at the bottom.” Or “well, this local newspaper article says it is happened, so into the article it goes.”
Even more effective, especially for political groups, is just publish dozens of supportive articles, while miring competing articles in edit wars and the bureaucracy that comes with it. For sources, just cite expert books that are favorable. It’s not easy, but hiring or recruiting 10-40 editors is trivial for political entities.
So that explains why some entries on companies don’t mention about their unscrupulous history.
People need to stop treating it like a source, one stop shopping for info, like copypasting AI search results.
Both of them require the reader to dig further into the information to find corroborating information and also to attempt to look for any information objectively critical of the result; and definitely check the source, hopefully being something reliable and objective as possible.
This topic has come up a lot (not least from Cory Doctorow). The fact that the rich are both so fragile and so un-creative is why they love AI, especially the sycophantic variants. They can’t handle someone saying no to them or, apparently, an accurate description of the past that isn’t completely flattering to them. Let them work in food services, lol.
Let them work in food services, lol.
Fuck that. We do actual work. They’ll just slow us down.
Eat the rich is what I think they meant
Eat the Reich.
Isn’t there a way to lock Wikipedia articles so they can’t be edited by just anyone?
Pages can be protected in various ways
They’re all publicly viewable edits aren’t they? Revert them and ban the IP ranges they come from? I thought that was the standard practice for abuse of Wikipedia?
The problem lies in noticing them in the first place. If you make a thousand legit edits to various articles and then make some slight changes on some rich clients page chances are nobody will register this. Then again we’re on the internet so there’s always at least one guy who’d hyperfocus on monitoring something like this. The hero we need.
The rich are the problem, something needs to be done about them. I’m hungry.
Edit- ugh, embarrassing misspelling left up too long.
