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

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.

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 https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/hoax-www16.pdf

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

http://www.serendipity.li/cda/censorship_at_wikipedia.htm     

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.

Government Trolls Are Using "Psychology-Based Influence Techniques" On YouTube, Facebook

https://www.gunsgrubandgold.com/archive/index.php?t-5089.html

Tuatha De Danann

07-02-2015, 06:36 PM

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog (http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/government-trolls-are-using-psychology-based-influence-techniques-on-youtube-facebook-and-twitter),
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.

The 15 Weirdest Wikipedia Pages Edited From Congressional IP

http://mentalfloss.com/article/58040/15-weirdest-wikipedia-pages-edited-congressional-ip-addresses

U.S. Govt. Editing Wikipedia to Smear Independent Media Personalities?

http://www.infowars.com/u-s-govt-editing-wikipedia-to-smear-independent-media-personalities/http://www.infowars.com/u-s-govt-editing-wikipedia-to-smear-independent-media-personalities/

Someone Using A US Senate IP Address Edits Wiki Entry To Change Ed Snowden From 'Dissident' To 'Traitor'

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130805/06584924064/someone-using-us-senate-ip-address-edits-wiki-entry-to-change-ed-snowden-dissident-to-traitor.shtml

Knowledge is power: why is the Russian government editing Wikipedia?

6 August 2014

http://calvertjournal.com/comment/show/2967/wikipedia-russian-government-edits

After edits to Wikipedia articles related to the conflict in Ukraine have been traced to the Russian government, Olga Zeveleva unpicks this latest twist in Russia's information wars

On the moral bankruptcy of Wikipedia’s anonymous administration

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

Мy Larry Sanger (see also Wikipedia’s forgotten creator )

I announced, named, and launched Wikipedia way back in January of 2001. My originating role in the project was acknowledged by Jimmy Wales later on in 2001, when he wrote, “Larry had the idea to use wiki software…” Virtually all of the news articles about the project before 2005 identified me as one of the two founders of the project, as did the project’s first three press releases, all of them approved by Jimmy, of course. I managed it as “instigator” and “chief organizer” for the project’s seminal first 14 months. To give you an idea of what role I had in the project, Jimmy declared, a few weeks before I left the project, that I was “the final arbiter of all Wikipedia functionality.”

Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words)

http://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia-in-their-own-words/

11.2.2011
The New York Times piece on Wikipedia’s gender gap has given rise to dozens of great online conversations about why so few women edit Wikipedia. I’ve been reading ALL of it, because I believe we need to understand the origins of our gender gap before we can solve it. And the people talking –on science sites and in online communities and on historian’s blogs— are exactly the ones we should be listening to, because they’re all basically one degree of separation from us already, just by virtue of caring enough to talk about the problem.

Jimmy Wales used porn site money to launch Wikipedia, then edited his own entries to try to hide his links to porn industry

http://www.naturalnews.com/049355_Wikipedia_pornography_Jimmy_Wales.html

April 09, 2015 by: J. D. Heyes

(NaturalNews) The "online encyclopedia" known as Wikipedia has a problem with accuracy, bias and misinformation, which is bad enough -- but one of its co-founders, Jimmy Wales, may also have ties to the porn industry.

Wikipedia bans 381 accounts for secretly promoting brands

01 September 15 by Daniel Culpan

    http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-09/01/wikipedia-sockpuppet-account-extortion
At least 381 editors of Wikipedia's English-language site have been banned after it was discovered that they were being paid to create and edit "promotional articles".

The extortion scam, announced on the site's administrator board, was uncovered after an investigation into the accounts, which were found to be flooding the website with bogus paid-for articles, promoting companies and their products.

Beyond vandalism: Wikipedia trolls

https://core.ac.uk/download/files/418/11887690.pdf

Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.407.688&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Sabine Niederer

new media & society XX(X) 1–19 © The Author(s) 2010

Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1461444810365297 http://nms.sagepub.com

University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

José van Dijck

University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Abstract

Wikipedia is often considered as an example of ‘collaborative knowledge’. Researchers have contested the value ofWikipedia content on various accounts. Some have disputed the ability of anonymous amateurs to produce quality information, while others have contested Wikipedia’s claim to accuracy and neutrality. Even if these concerns about Wikipedia as an encyclopaedic genre are relevant, they misguidedly focus on human agents only.Wikipedia’s advance is not only enabled by its human resources,but is equally defined by the technological tools and managerial dynamics that structure and maintain its content.This article analyzes the sociotechnical system – the intricate collaboration between human users and automated content agents – that defines Wikipedia as a knowledge instrument.

Biases of Wikipedia – A Case History

http://ahealedplanet.net/wikimass.htm

By Wade Frazier

February 24, 2008 (slightly revised, with latest revision in December 2010)

Introduction

Our Massacre List Additions

Conclusion

Footnote

Introduction

Several Wikipedia articles have linked to my website over the years, and I have contributed myself a few times.  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 16^th 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. 

Stop giving Wikipedia money

4 Dec, 2014

http://newslines.org/blog/stop-giving-wikipedia-money/

On a routine visit to Wikipedia today I was greeted with a huge fundraising banner that covered half of the page. Really, click the link to see how huge that thing was.

Examples of Bias in Wikipedia

http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia

This list covers a wide range of bias in the English Wikipedia website. Although Wikipedia claims to have credibility because anyone can edit it, in fact the website represents the viewpoint of its most strident and persistent editors. It is also heavily influenced by paid public relations professionals who do not disclose their conflicts of interest. This list together with the sublists linked below provide a wide variety of examples of the resulting bias. 

Wicked-Pedia! Millions trust its every word. But 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

Did you know that Gordon Ramsay is a pigeon fancier on the quiet, whose birds have won several prizes? Or that Simon Cowell has a parrot called Piers? Or that Israel has secretly developed a 'death ray' that kills only non-Jews?

Of course you don't, because I just made all these 'facts' up. Yet if I wanted, whether for a joke or for malicious, political reasons, to make them public and watch them seep insidiously into the public consciousness, I would know exactly what to do.

A few years ago my choices would have been to stand up at Speakers' Corner in London and rant, or to write on a lavatory wall. But all I'd need today would be to fire up my computer and go to Wikipedia on the internet and type away.

Wikipedia has become a dangerous tool for lazy students, spiteful cranks and truth-twisting politicians

Why other people really hate Wikipedia administrators as well

Why I really hate Wikipedia administrators

August 26, 2009 at 2:40
http://g-liu.com/blog/2009/08/why-i-really-hate-wikipedia-administrators/ 

This post is part of a three-part series on the grievous deficiencies of Wikipedia administrators.

Wikipedia administrators have turned Wikipedia into an online totalitarian regime, and no one is doing a darn thing about it.

Wikipedia is a US Gov't Fraud

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

Now Proven by Research on Wired News! - see just below

http://www.dr-les-sachs.be/wikipedia-us-govt-fraud.html

This article by Dr Les Sachs (Dr Leslie Sachs) was originally published on the "Banned in America" weblog, and on other locations on the internet, on 15 April 2006. Recently this was yet another article banned by US illegal court orders against Google that were requested by President Bush's friend, the racist and terrorist author Patricia Cornwell.

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.

10 Things I Hate About Wikipedia

http://www.yalelawtech.org/uncategorized/10-things-i-hate-about-wikipedia/

On October 31, 2011,  by Sam H

Ahh Wikipedia. It’s hard to imagine life without immediate access to understandable answers to the world’s toughest questions. Why is the sky blue? Why is grass green? What is the meaning of life?

(Warning: gratuitous Wikipedia links continue below)

Many of us depend on Wikipedia for all aspects of work and play but, admittedly, it has its flaws. Still, Wikipedia manages to be one of the most visited sites year after year. What keeps us coming back? Is it an addiction to an ever-growing content base and cordial user community? Perhaps a primal urge to voraciously consume and produce knowledge?

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 

Wikipedia provides Internet users with millions of articles on a broad range of topics, and commonly ranks first in search engines. But its reliability and credibility fall well short of the standards for a school paper. According to Wikipedia itself, “[W]hile some articles are of the highest quality of scholarship, others are admittedly complete rubbish. … use [Wikipedia] with an informed understanding of what it is and what it isn't.”

To help you develop such an understanding, we present 10 reasons you can't rely on information in Wikipedia.

10. You must never fully rely on any one source for important information.
Everyone makes mistakes. All scholarly journals and newspapers contain “corrections” sections in which they acknowledge errors in their prior work. And even the most neutral writer is sometimes guilty of not being fully objective. Thus, you must take a skeptical approach to everything you read.

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

Governments all over the world are manipulating social media for their own ends. That’s where the digital footsoldiers come in – smearing opponents, spreading disinformation and posting fake texts for ‘pocket money.

Leo Benedictus

Sunday 6 November 2016 14.00 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 21 February 2017 17.10 GMT

We don’t know who they are, or what their mission is. We only know that there are thousands of them out there, pretending to be us. They may be at home, or in special offices, or sitting beside you on the train. They use social media, and write blogs and comments. Some of them may visit the bottom of this article.

You can hire your own troll army if you have the cash. In 2011 the PR firm Bell Pottinger told undercover journalists that they could “create and maintain third-party blogs”, and spruce up Wikipedia profiles and Google search rankings. Indeed marketing has a rich history of so-called “astroturfing”, which is laying down fake grassroots. Take Forest, “the voice and friend of the smoker”, which at least admits in nearly invisible small print that it is paid for by the tobacco industry.

Now, however, manipulating social media has become part of the business of government. It may yet influence how governments are formed. Recent reports suggest that many of Donald Trump’s most fervent online supporters are not themselves Americans, but Russians being paid by their government to help him win. One told Samantha Bee that she pretends to be a housewife from Nebraska. Why she would confess it now is unexplained, but when you look around it begins to feel like everybody does it. It’s just that no two countries’ methods are the same.

China

The existence of the wumao dang or “50 Cent Party” is not a secret in China, but then it is hard to employ up to two million people secretly. Even the state-owned Global Times reported with approval on the practice in 2010, citing Changsha’s party office as the source of the name after it paid a team of commenters 600 yuan a month in 2004, plus half a yuan – hence “50 cent” – for each glowing post they made.

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Since then, paying stooges to praise your work online has become about as routine for local government in China as hiring traffic wardens. A recent study at Harvard University found that the Chinese authorities were placing 448m phony comments on the internet each year. In an analysis of 43,800 pro-regime comments, the researchers concluded that 99.3% of them were made by civil servants from a wide variety of government departments. The postings tended to come in bursts at testing times, such as during protests or party meetings.

Interestingly, few of the comments qualify as trolling, in the strict sense. Rather than attacking unbelievers, they focus on swamping the doubters with a flood of positive messages, or cleverly diverting the conversation. As with any job, some practitioners are laughably bad at it. In January 2014, quartz.com found many stooges simply cutting and pasting a suggested question into an online discussion with a party secretary in Ganzhou. “It seems like taxis are far more orderly than in past years,” they all wanted to tell him.

Two years before, however, Ai Weiwei interviewed an anonymous 26-year-old with very sophisticated methods. The young man, whose own family knew nothing of his work, estimated that 10-20% of the comments he saw were left by the 50 Cent Party. He described creating several identities in one forum, and structuring arguments between them so that the most authoritative voice could ultimately settle matters in the government’s favour. Another tactic was to be deliberately provocative, and thus draw public anger on to himself and away from the authorities. “Sometimes I feel like I have a split personality,” he said. “I wouldn’t say I like it or hate it. It’s just a bit more to do each day. A bit more pocket money each month, that’s all.”

Estimated troops Between 300,000 and 2m people, many part-time.

Favourite subjects Excellent local facilities, why democracy doesn’t work, Taiwan.

Russia

Long before Donald Trump met Twitter, Russia was famous for its troll factories – outside Russia, anyway. Allegations of covert propagandists invading chatrooms go back as far as 2003, and in 2012 the Kremlin-backed youth movement Nashi was revealed to be paying people to comment on blogs. However most of what we know now comes from a series of leaks in 2013 and 2014, most concerning a St Petersburg company called Internet Research Agency, then just “Internet Research”. It is believed to be one of several firms where trolls are trained and paid to smear Putin’s opponents both at home and internationally.

According to internal documents released by a group of hackers in 2013, Internet Research Agency employed more than 600 people across Russia, and had an implied annual budget of $10m – half of which was paid out in cash. Employees were expected to post on news articles 50 times a day. Those who wrote blogs had to maintain six Facebook accounts and publish at least three posts daily. On Twitter, they had to have at least 10 accounts, on which they would tweet 50 times. All had targets for the number of followers and the level of engagement they had to reach.

Later, an investigator called Lyudmila Savchuk went undercover at the company and afterwards published her experiences. These included smearing the character of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in the days following his murder, and promoting the theory that he was killed by his own friends, rather than by friends of Putin. “I felt the bullets between my own shoulders,” Savchuk said. “I was so upset that I almost gave myself away. But I was 007. I fulfilled my task.” When a Finnish reporter called Jessikka Aro wrote about Internet Research in 2014, she herself became the target of a frightening campaign of threats and smears.

As you might expect, many Russian trolls lack a certain polish when posting in English. “I think the whole world is realizing what will be with Ukraine, and only US keep on fuck around because of their great plans are doomed to failure,” one Internet Research employee wrote on a forum. Indeed the Guardian’s own moderators have begun to notice regular clues, especially on articles about Ukraine. “We can look at the suspicious tone of certain users, combined with the date they signed up, the time they post and the subjects they post on,” says one senior moderator. “Zealous pro-separatist comments in broken English claiming to be from western counties are very common.”

Estimated troops Several thousand.

Favourite subjects Putin and Trump being great, the opposition being corrupt, the Nato conspiracy against Russia, the effeminacy of Barack Obama.

Israel

There’s been an Israeli public relations war for about as long as there’s been an Israel. In Hebrew it’s called “hasbara”, literally meaning “explanation”, and it involves trying to improve the world’s opinion of the country and its causes. Accordingly there are around 350 official Israeli online channels, covering the full range of social media. For instance, besides its well-known Twitter accounts in English, Hebrew and Arabic, the Israeli Defence Force even has its own Pinterest page, featuring photo collections with themes such as “Soldiers’ Stories” and “IDF Style”.

In 2013, the Israeli government revealed that it would also recruit “covert units” however. These would be staffed by a mixture of international supporters and domestic students, whose high intelligence, low income and familiarity with social media make them generally well suited to professional trolling. “We need a unified effort to explain why we have a legal right to be here in Israel,” the Knesset member Dov Lipman told the Jerusalem Post. “That is key to defeat the movements pushing to boycott, divest and sanction Israel.” Those who signed up would get quick access to government information, and leaders of student groups would also be awarded scholarships.

Sure enough, during the war in Gaza the following summer, a student group called Israel Under Fire emerged as one of many voices promoting the Israeli side of the story. “We counter Palestinian propaganda and explain the Israeli perspective,” the group’s leader, Yarden Ben-Yosef, said. “Social media is another place where the war goes on. This is another way to tell our story.” We do not know whether Israel Under Fire was itself one of these covert units, or whether Ben-Yosef got a scholarship. The group’s Facebook Page is still active today.

Estimated troops Low thousands.

Favourite subjects Palestinian brainwashing, friendliness of Israeli troops, justifiedness of Israeli force.

Ukraine

If Russia has a troll army, why shouldn’t Ukraine? With this logic, last February, the country’s new Information Policy Ministry announced the launch of its own i-army, based at i-army.org, with plans to challenge the enemy version of events on social media. “I already said more than once that we should effectively combat Russian bots and fake information,” Ukraine’s information policy minister Yuriy Stets said. “I think this project will give us many volunteers who are ready to disseminate truthful information and expose fake reports from Russia.”

It is not clear how many Ukrainians or Ukraine supporters have yet taken up the cause. The i-army.org site itself, where volunteers can join, is certainly not very appealing to outsiders. It is a crazed and relentless jumble of unflattering stories about Russia – from details about the MH17 air crash, to doping by its athletes, to unsubstantiated allegations from the western media that Putin is a paedophile. “Do not let yourself be deceived – spread the truth!” the site says, rousingly.

More obvious signs of life can be found on the i-army’s Twitter page. This is very active, with 12,800 followers, which isn’t bad, and retweets regularly runs into dozens or hundreds. Clearly some of its followers have been arguing Ukraine’s case online, but the tweets themselves are not very persuasive, offering photographs of captured Russian military hardware, dry political statements and sudden comic memes about Russia’s federal reserves, for example.

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The account’s wallpaper perhaps tells you everything you need to know about the Information Policy Ministry – or the “Ministry of Truth”, as some Ukrainian wags prefer. It depicts a group of noble white knights carrying the ministry’s logo into battle against, literally, an army of fantastical trolls (who rather incongruously carry the logos of RT television and Russia 24). No matter how sympathetic one might feel towards the Ukrainian cause, it is hard not to feel that this particular region of the conflict needs a lighter touch.

Estimated troops A few hundred.

Favourite subjects Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia.

UK

The so-called “Twitter Troops” of the 77th Brigade were somewhat misunderstood by the media when the new army unit was created last year. In fact social media was just one example of many non-military skills that the specialist soldiers were intended to bring to the army. And in any case, the MoD informs me, it would not be a soldier’s job to launch a disinformation campaign on the battlefield, even if they had the time.

You don’t hear much about JTRIG in Britain, however, and they do just this kind of thing. Indeed the very existence of the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group was a national secret until documents from Edward Snowden were published by Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman in 2014. And they reveal a very busy group of people, whose work within GCHQ was intended to help everyone from the police and MI5 to the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Bank of England.

Some of JTRIG’s tactics, such as hacking into websites and setting up sexual “honeypot” stings, sound more or less like conventional spying. Others were carefully designed to manipulate and deceive. In the words of the leaked document, these included “Uploading YouTube videos containing persuasive messages; establishing online aliases with Facebook and Twitter accounts, blogs and forum memberships … sending spoof emails and text messages as well as providing spoof online resources; and setting up spoof trade sites.”

Some of this sounds reasonable, and frankly welcome, such as disrupting the online activities of terrorists or child abusers. Indeed, if it still exists, JTRIG seems to target specific groups or individuals, rather than trying to influence public opinion. Which groups, however, and who chooses them, might be a legitimate concern. The document mentions the English Defence League, for example, whose members were no doubt not happy to be included. For its part, GCHQ will only say that all its work is legal.

Estimated troops A few dozen.

Favourite subjects Sex, drugs, not travelling to Syria please.

North Korea, South Korea

Most North Koreans’ experience of social media is none at all, unless they have been given an illicit glimpse by a foreigner or a government official. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all officially blocked, just in case. Domestically, there is thus no online opinion for the regime to bother about controlling. (Unless they launch their own version of Facebook, as some believe they plan to.) Across the border, however, just about all South Koreans have smartphones, KakaoTalk and the fastest internet in the world. They also have about 200 North Korean trolls to contend with, according to a report published by a South Korean think-tank, the Police Policy Institute, in 2013. In total the report estimated that North Korean agents had posted 41,373 pieces of propaganda in 2012. (That’s about one every two days per agent, which is hardly Stakhanovite.)

Given the extreme strangeness of the regime in Pyongyang, it is easy to presume that they would not know how to talk to a sophisticated southern audience. In fact their approach, as revealed in the report, is rather clever. Instead of hammering people with outlandish and unconvincing Juche propaganda in the usual North Korean way, Pyongyang’s trolls focus on areas that are still debated in the south – such as whether to give southerners access to sites (currently blocked) that praise the northern regime. Aware that recently started accounts with little background often arouse suspicion, northern agents also tend to work behind identities stolen from real southern users.

Clearly the problem has been serious enough for South Korea to react, and indeed to overreact. For years the country’s National Intelligence Service has been routinely posting messages of its own to attack those coming from the north, and at times these have allegedly strayed into attacks on South Korea’s own opposition parties. Last year the country’s former intelligence chief Won Sei-hoon was convicted of trying to influence the outcome of the 2012 presidential election in favour of the incumbent Park Geun-hye. A retrial has since been ordered, but in the original Won was alleged to be running a team of nine agents who used at least 658 Twitter identities to post many thousands of messages to discredit the north – and also, in the case of 274,800 messages, to smear President Park’s opponents, who were described as, among other things, “leftist followers of North Korea”.

Estimated troops 200 (north) 9 (south).

Favourite subject Whether North Korea is a) paradise b) paranoid.

Turkey

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President Erdoğan was taught a lesson by the Gezi Park protests of 2013. Not, unfortunately, that Turks should be allowed to live more freely, but that he should take control of social media, with which they had organised themselves against him. By the end of the summer, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had begun recruiting a team of 6,000 social media operatives. “We aim at developing a positive political language which we are teaching to our volunteers,” a party official told the Wall Street Journal at the time. “And when the opposing camp spreads disinformation about the party, we correct them with valid information, always using positive language.” But not always being open about it. When asked to name some of the people who would be correcting this misinformation, the official declined.

Sadly for Erdoğan and the AKP, their new army of volunteers proved overenthusiastic and, let’s say, under-subtle. In the months that followed it became common for those who even mildly criticised the government to be showered with far from positive remarks. Often the abuse arrived in bursts, from people with not very convincing profiles, making accusations that were not only bizarre but bizarrely similar. For instance when the journalist Emre Kizilkaya criticised the government’s handling of a hostage negotiation in October, he found himself repeatedly accused of “Zionism”.

At times the “AK Trolls”, as they became known, spread false stories. In July 2014, it was reported that they started a fake Twitter account supposedly from the musician Erkan Ogur, used it to tweet controversial comments about the state intelligence services, then complained about “his” tweets to the AKP authorities in Sakarya, who promptly cancelled Ogur’s forthcoming concert there. Later, Erdoğan’s own daughter Sumeyye was apparently recorded asking one of his advisers for help from “our trolls”. When recordings allegedly showing Erdoğan’s own corruption began to spread on Twitter in the spring of 2014, he simply (but not very effectively) shut Twitter down.

Perhaps aware that this Putinesque farce wasn’t making the AKP more popular, the party changed tack just before the general elections last spring, launching the New Turkey Digital Office, which would henceforth dish out more conventional online propaganda. “All of our accounts will be officially announced,” spokesman Besir Atalay told the Turkish media. “Our messages will be determined at the party headquarters. None of the other accounts would be related to us, including those ones [the trolls].” Nevertheless the AKP lost its majority in the elections. Then regained it in new elections later in the year.

Estimated troops Formerly 6,000, probably still 6,000.

Favourite subjects Standing up to the Kurds, standing up to Russia, standing up to Arabs, standing up to Israel …