So, recently I’ve been reading a lot into China mostly, and a bit of North Korea, and I have found some Wikipedia articles that literally use fake news as sources or similar stuff, I really appreciate Wikipedia as a whole but I think that it has some flaws in certain areas, it would be cool if we could all fix those in a way that gets approved so that we help fight against misinformation.

I know that @dessalines@lemmy.ml has a GitHub repository full with articles and news that can be used to discredit these, and while I think it will be super useful to this cause and in general, not everyone is going to go through that or is going to even find it, whereas Wikipedia draws a lot of visits.

I know that Wikipedia has a bad reputation and all, but I think that if we do it good there’s no way they can prohibit the edits.

I think starting here would be a good way to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_trim_our_hair_in_accordance_with_the_socialist_lifestyle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beard_and_haircut_laws_by_country#North_Korea

  • CriticalResist8A
    111·
    4 years ago

    You are probably better off using prolewiki.org. Our article on Wikipedia (which is far, far from done because there’s just so much to write about) tries to explain the inherent problem to their system: https://prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia.

    There’s a very big racist and harassing nature to Wikipedia editors that I didn’t even get into yet in that prolewiki article.

    However I don’t want to be defeatist, and claim that what you’re proposing is not a worthwhile time investment.

    • Amorphous
      7·
      4 years ago

      Sure, certainly it’s better to use communist sites for our own purposes, but the point of making Wikipedia suck less is to start to erode away at the pervasive propaganda the “apolitical” folks absorb.

      • CriticalResist8A
        91·
        4 years ago

        Yeah but I doubt the editors and admins are gonna let you. Usually your edit gets reverted about 30 minutes later and they twist some rule they have to justify it. Then if you want to contest their decision and go through the process they’ll often gang up on you and harass you until you either drop it, or you lose patience and they ban you. https://medium.com/@kamy1/racist-wikipedia-da005c564d13

        And if you want to have an impact you need to target the high-traffic articles, which are definitely monitored a lot more. I’m not sure how often Let’s trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle is visited, but if we can infer anything from the edit history it’s that it’s an old article that sees sporadic edits. It saw 1 minor edit in 2018 and only one big edit cluster in 2020. So probably not a very visited article.

        In which case it would pay to try and pass an edit and see what sticks and what doesn’t, how soon it gets edited, who reverts the edit, stuff like that. And see if there are pages where it’s easier to edit than others.

        The grayzone article above in fact follows another one, where they explained how they came to be banned as a source from Wikipedia. That means if someone tries to cite the grayzone (or other anti-imperialist websites), their edits will get reverted instantly and you may get banned. They purposely keep the rules obscure and the website difficult to use so that it gives administrators ammunition against new editors. If you don’t know there are banned sources that’s strike one. If you don’t know they’ve opened an inquiry against you and can’t defend yourself, that’s strike two. If the administrators then determine you’re a troll because you have like one edit, it’s adding a banned source, and you don’t even know you’re in trial, that’s strike three and they’re banning you from editing wikipedia.

        I distinctly remember a scandal around 10 years ago where some admins would even hold your edits hostage, asking for payment in exchange for letting them through. I’ve been trying to find it again to include it on prolewiki.

        Personally I just installed an addon that lets me remove it from search results (and also the cancerous pinterest results) and my experience has been just as good as before. It also allows me to find more trustworthy sources – did you know 1 in 6 science articles on wikipedia are wrong in some way? I’d rather go on mayo clinic to understand a disease than wikipedia.

        • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
          2·
          4 years ago

          I was aware of the political biases of Wikipedia, but I didn’t know it also had issues with racism, sexism, etc. Thanks for bring that to my attention.

    • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
      2·
      4 years ago

      Honestly, Wikipedia seems like the worst place to try to get political information no matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on. I pretty much only use it as a starting point for STEM topics, where I haven’t seen much deviation from objectivity thankfully. It does have mistakes though so obviously people should look at the sources, I prefer to just use it to find the sources.