Friday, February 27, 2015

The best citations

 
The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely On Wikipedia

October 27, 2011 by Mark E. Moran
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/education/2010/march/The-Top-10-Reasons-Students-Cannot-Cite-or-Rely-on-Wikipedia.html 
http://boycott-wikipedia.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-top-10-reasons-students-cannot-cite.html

9. You especially can’t rely on something when you don’t even know who wrote it.
8.  The contributor with an agenda often prevails.
In theory, the intellectual sparring at the heart of Wikipedia's group editing process results in a consensus that removes unreliable contributions and edits. But often the contributor who “wins” is not the one with the soundest information, but rather the one with the strongest agenda.
7. Administrators on Wikipedia have the power to delete or disallow comments or articles they disagree with and support the viewpoints they approve.
6. Sometimes “vandals” create malicious entries that go uncorrected for months.
2. Accurate contributors can be silenced.

Invasion of the troll armies: from Russian Trump supporters to Turkish state stooges 
 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/nov/06/troll-armies-social-media-trump-russian

Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftC_t6npi0k
 -Real encyclopedia must be written by experts.
-Only way to solve Wikipedia inaccuracy is make editors write under their real name.
-Early 20th century was The Progressive Era of the United States.  Indians lost most of their land in this period. Massacres organised for the purpose of  taking their land. But nothing mentioned about this in Wikipedia.
-Wikipedia becomes the first and last source of knowledge for many students.


The Truth According to Wikipedia
 -Wikipedia is crowd version of truthiness.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMSinyx_Ab0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmjWVZby6aI


Keen says that without expert gatekeepers to discern what actual facts are, the danger exists that the wider community may simply invent its own perceived truths.

On the moral bankruptcy of Wikipedia’s anonymous administration
http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/09/02/on-the-moral-bankruptcy-of-wikipedias-anonymous-administration/

 Larry Sanger
Why should anyone trust the decisions of anonymous Wikipedia administrators? They could easily be personally biased, based on ignorance, or otherwise worthless. If someone writes lies about you, there is no way you can name and shame the liar, or at least the Wikipedia admin who permits the lie. Instead, you have to play the stupid little Wikipedia game on its own turf. You can’t go to the real world and say, “Look, so-and-so is abusing his authority. This has to stop.” In this way, by remaining anonymous, Wikipedia’s decisionmakers insulate themselves from the real-world responsibility that journalists routinely bear for their statements and publishing decisions. If you were a Wikipedia administrator, wouldn’t you feel absolutely bound to make your identity known? Wouldn’t you feel cowardly, craven, to be standing in judgment over all manner of important editorial issues and yet hiding behind anonymity? I know I would. Why shouldn’t we hold Wikipedia responsible for making its administrators’ identities known? A Wikipedia administrator who refuses to reveal his or her identity is morally bankrupt, because unaccountable authority is morally bankrupt. Members of democratic societies are supposed to know this.

Wikipedia, Paid Contributors and Propaganda
by Miles Mathis
http://boycott-wikipedia.blogspot.com/2016/02/wikipedia-paid-contributors-and_24.html

It would be so much better for everyone if Wikipedia just admitted the truth: it was created by the government and is written in full by government operatives of one sort or another.


Government Trolls Are Using "Psychology-Based Influence Techniques" On YouTube, Facebook
https://www.gunsgrubandgold.com/archive/index.php?t-5089.html
Tuatha De Danann
http://boycott-wikipedia.blogspot.com/2016/02/government-trolls-are-using-psychology.html

Have you ever come across someone on the Internet that you suspected was a paid government troll? Well, there is a very good chance that you were not imagining things. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have solid proof that paid government trolls are using psychology-based influence techniques; on social media websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Beyond vandalism: Wikipedia trolls  

core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11887690.pdf 

http://boycott-wikipedia.blogspot.com/2016/02/beyond-vandalism-wikipedia-trolls_28.html 

4.1. Trolls’ behaviour (what do they do?) 

1.Trolls are engaged in intentional, repetitive, and harmful actions;
2.Their activities largely violate Wikipedia policies;
3.They are active not only on the encyclopaedic part of Wikipedia (e.g. writing and editing articles), but have high interest and destructive involvement within the Wikipedia community (e.g. discus‐ sion about policies, and intensive interactions with other users and sysops);
4. They work in isolation under hidden virtual identities.

Biases of Wikipedia – A Case History
http://ahealedplanet.net/wikimass.htm    By Wade Frazier
http://boycott-wikipedia.blogspot.com/2016/02/v-behaviorurldefaultvmlo.html

I found Wikipedia to often be a good source of information, but I also noticed a disturbing bias that mirrored the Euro-Anglo-American-centric bias that has dogged the West for centuries.  In late 2007, I read a Wikipedia article that referred to a list of massacres.  I studied that subject matter for many years, and was immediately stuck by the list’s overwhelming bias.  History’s greatest genocide was what the Spanish invasions inflicted on the Western Hemisphere’s natives during the 16th century.  That genocide was punctuated early and often by massive slaughters, usually as a way of establishing political control.  In that list, there was not one mention of any of those slaughters.  In addition, the English version of Wikipedia is obviously dominated by Americans (with the British also well represented), and when the Indian genocide began happening on what became American soil, the massacre list’s bias was even more evident...In addition, many massacres on that list were wartime slaughters, particularly World War II slaughters such as the Katyn massacre, perpetrated by the Soviets.  American slaughters of civilians during World War II were conspicuously absent.
...While some edits were understandable, they were obviously made by white people who began framing the European/American massacres of Indians as somehow justified, or that the person in charge of the slaughters disobeyed orders to do so (which was a strained interpretation of the events), to provide “context...Somewhat surprisingly, among the worst offenders were Wikipedia's administrators...This situation of Wikipedia’s bias in favor of the exterminators, while the exterminated receive passing mention, if at all, is typical in the West.  Today’s genocide in Iraq, to seize control over the world’s hydrocarbon deposits, is another typical instance of the West’s murderous, collective egocentrism.
 

Wikipedia, the error-ridden encyclopaedia, has become a dangerous tool

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1146029/Wicked-Pedia-Millions-trust-word-But-Wikipedia-error-ridden-encyclopaedia-dangerous-tool.html

By Jonathan Margolis           15 February 2009
http://boycott-wikipedia.blogspot.com/2016/02/wicked-pedia-millions-trust-its-every.html
Wikipedia has become a dangerous tool for lazy students, spiteful cranks and truth-twisting politicians.


Wikipedia is a US Gov't Fraud -
How US Agents Can Embed in Wikipedia, Plant Propaganda,
Delete Facts, Deceive and Attack Citizens - Wikipedia and the CIA

http://www.dr-les-sachs.be/wikipedia-us-govt-fraud.html
http://boycott-wikipedia.blogspot.com/2016/02/wikipedia-is-us-govt-fraud.html

These allegations about Wikpedia as a tool of CIA and US criminal corporations, announced long ago to the world by Dr Sachs, are now even more fully PROVEN by new large-scale research announced by Wired News, and also on Alex Jones' Prison Planet website.What we are facing, is that Wikipedia may already be the ultimate Trojan horse of US government propaganda and intelligence operations. Via this one overwhelmingly dominant website, the thousands of nameless agents at CIA and NSA headquarters, can now deceive and defraud millions of US citizens and much of the rest of the world as well. These agents can smear and attack those who challenge the government; they can easily launch lies and propaganda on this powerful web forum that can falsify anything, and undermine almost anyone...So when you do an internet search, often what you find among your "Top 10" search results, are several results from Wikipedia, and then several results from Answers.com (which basically repeat Wikipedia). Most people will never get beyond these entries, and thus the US intelligence and propaganda agencies already control what many people read on the internet...Does this mean that most of Wikipedia is written by the government, or supervised by it? No, not at all. A lot of Wikipedia, most of it in fact, the CIA guys don't care about. Indeed, it was part of the genius of Wikipedia that they could enroll millions of people in helping to create this CIA-backed vehicle. It is much more powerful and legitimate-seeming, if people get used to looking things up on Wikipedia, if they go there to read helpful things about Beethoven or Tibetan rugs. Wikipedia's power also derives from the short attention span and laziness of the average person. To get an impression of something or someone, people jump on the internet and google or search. Then, for their quick initial view of a person or topic, they often jump onto Wikipedia. If Wikipedia smears someone, that person is pretty well smeared, factual or not, and people usually will not investigate any further.

Wikipedia is also the direct tool for controlling the world's corporate media employees - the so-called "journalists" - who base their articles now, largely on what they themselves read on Wikipedia, and then they pompously intone, "According to Wikipedia . . . ", as if it were somehow very clever of these "journalists" to consult Wikipedia at the top of their Google-search.

Journalists instinctively feel, that Wikipedia is the tool of the US government and the big corporations, and thus that they can follow Wikipedia whenever a Wikipedia article is supporting the US-corporate establishment.

The journalists then publish shoddy, corrupt and outright false "news articles", which are based on Wikipedia as a source, and then Wikipedia can then use these "major news media" articles as new "authentic sources" for Wikipedia. It is a perfect circle of propaganda corruption, managed by the US intelligence agencies. Wikipedia is the dream of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels come true. - Worldwide control of what people read and think, via one website under US government control...Like much of America's CIA-backed operations since the 1970s, Wikipedia does its work under the friendly face of a "non-profit foundation". In fact, Wikipedia is one of those organizations that deserves to be sued and shut down immediately, it's such a monstrous fraud and deception today, such an invitation to government mind control in the future. Who knows the number of people whom it has already slandered and harmed amid those 1-million-plus CIA-backed Wikipedia web pages. Even just in general commercial terms, Wikipedia is a totally illegal monopoly as well as a US-government backed fraud. It's keeping legitimate providers of information from being more successful, as well as supporting criminals tied to the US regime. - But US lawyers don't dare to touch the Wikipedia monster, and the US judges won't let them touch it. It's at the core of US "national security", the US attempt to be dictator over the whole world.

10 Underhanded Ways Governments Use The Modern Media

Criticism of Wikipedia
User:LatinoMuslim/Wikipedia Boycott Campaign
Web brigades 

Wikipedia: Pseudo- encyclopedia of the lie, censorship and misinformation at Amazon.com
Wikipedia: Pseudo- encyclopedia of the lie, censorship and misinformation

Wikipedia: Pseudo- encyclopedia of the lie, censorship and misinformation


Wikipedia is Jew Biased
wikipediareview.com
Boycott Wikipedia.Do not USE

wikipediabias.com
Ban Wikipedia
Why Wikipedia Sucks

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Up to six in ten articles on Wikipedia contain factual errors

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2131458/Up-articles-Wikipedia-contain-factual-errors.html

Beyond vandalism: Wikipedia trolls

Shachaf, P., & Hara, N. (2010) Journal of Information Science, 36(3), 357‐370.
core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11887690.pdf
Pnina Shachaf and Noriko Hara
School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA
Abstract.
Research on trolls is scarce, but their activities challenge online communities; one of the main challenges of the Wikipedia community is to fight against vandalism and trolls.
This study identifies Wikipedia trolls’ behaviours and motivations, and compares and contrasts hackers with trolls; it extends our knowledge about this type of vandalism and concludes that Wikipedia trolls are one type of hacker. This study reports that boredom, attention seeking, and revenge motivate trolls; they regard Wikipedia as an entertainment venue, and find pleasure from causing damage to the community and other people. Findings also suggest that trolls’ behaviours are characterized as repetitive, intentional, and harmful actions that are undertaken in isolation and under hidden virtual identities, involving violations of Wikipedia policies, and consisting of destructive participation in the community.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Impact, Characteristics, and Detection of Wikipedia Hoaxes

Disinformation on the Web: Impact, Characteristics, and Detection of Wikipedia Hoaxes

Robert West
Jure Leskovec
Srijan Kumar
University of Maryland
Stanford University
Stanford University
srijan@cs.umd.edu
west@cs.stanford.edu
jure@cs.stanford.edu

ABSTRACT
Wikipedia is a major source of information for many people. How- ever, false information on Wikipedia raises concerns about its cred- ibility. One way in which false information may be presented on Wikipedia is in the form of hoax articles, i.e., articles containing fabricated facts about nonexistent entities or events. In this paper we study false information on Wikipedia by focusing on the hoax articles that have been created throughout its history. We make several contributions. First, we assess the real-world impact of hoax articles by measuring how long they survive before being de- bunked, how many pageviews they receive, and how heavily they are referred to by documents on the Web. We find that, while most hoaxes are detected quickly and have little impact on Wikipedia, a small number of hoaxes survive long and are well cited across the Web.

Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past

http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/1/117.full

  1. Roy Rosenzweig, Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University and director of the Center for History and New Media
History is a deeply individualistic craft. The singly authored work is the standard for the profession; only about 6 percent of the more than 32,000 scholarly works indexed since 2000 in this journal's comprehensive bibliographic guide, “Recent Scholarship,” have more than one author. Works with several authors—common in the sciences—are even harder to find. Fewer than 500 (less than 2 percent) have three or more authors.1
Historical scholarship is also characterized by possessive individualism. Good professional practice (and avoiding charges of plagiarism) requires us to attribute ideas and words to specific historians—we are taught to speak of “Richard Hofstadter's status anxiety interpretation of Progressivism.”2 And if we use more than a limited number of words from Hofstadter, we need to send a check to his estate. To mingle Hofstadter's prose with your own and publish it would violate both copyright and professional norms.
A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture. 

Censorship (and Propaganda) at Wikipedia




As is by now well-known, Wikipedia presents itself as an online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, and whose entries anyone can edit. The idea is that people who are experts in their field will contribute articles, suitably augmented by others who are equally knowledgeable. This is a nice idea but in practice Wikipedia is unreliable, because anyone can edit articles, and in many cases the main aim of those editing articles is not to present the truth but rather a biassed interpretation. Wikipedia has no effective defense against this (especially since its privileged editors are among the worst offenders) and is thus unreliable.
This flaw in Wikipedia manifests itself most often in articles dealing with history or contemporary events, in particular those relating to World War II and its aftermath, and to the events of September 11, 2001, and their consequences. There are people who are determined that certain facts should not receive publicity, and whenever an "unapproved" fact appears on Wikipedia some editor will come along and remove it. In fact there seem to be teams of such trolls, perhaps paid to do their work of censorship and their presentation of particular interpretations of history which their masters want to be the public "truth". Although this falsification occurs mainly in connection with historical articles, there is no guarantee that it does not occur in non-historical articles also, such as those dealing with medicine, psychiatry or pharmacy. Because of this lack of defense against censorship and misrepresentation by determined bands of trolls, Wikipedia is not to be trusted.

Wikipedia, Paid Contributors and Propaganda

by Miles Mathis
http://milesmathis.com/wiki2.pdf

First published February 28, 2014

I first noticed today a call for comments at Wikipedia concerning disclosure of paid editing. I won’t bother commenting at Wikipedia on this, since I know the whole thing is a diversion, but I will comment on it here. I say I know the whole thing is a diversion because I know they aren’t interested in my opinion, or yours, either. They want you to think they are interested in your comments, since that appears to give you some input and some power, but that power is illusory.