He generally shows most of the signs of the misinformation accounts:
- Wants to repeatedly tell basically the same narrative and nothing else
- Narrative is fundamentally false
- Not interested in any kind of conversation or in learning that what he’s posting is backwards from the values he claims to profess
I also suspect that it’s not a coincidence that this is happening just as the Elon Musks of the world are ramping up attacks on Wikipedia, specially because it is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others, and tends to fight back legally if someone tries to interfere with the free speech or safety of its editors.
Anyway, YSK. I reported him as misinformation, but who knows if that will lead to any result.
Edit: Number of people real salty that I’m talking about this: Lots
Who hates Wikipedia:
Is this even true? Has any Russian state official or organization indicated they give two shits about an English-centric US-hosted online encyclopedia? Ditto Israel.
Feels like every time I read a “bad actors on the internet” story, I get someone in the comments insisting a foreign intelligence officer is secretly pulling all the strings. As though American propagandists and industrial scale media magnets aren’t willing or capable of doing the job themselves.
State actors often pose as normal editors on wikipedia, in order to try and cover for things they do. Corporations often do the same thing, via their PR firms.
Its pretty well documented on the WP logs.
A bunch of these state actors are western politicians and their staff/campaigns, though.
The Evil Slavic Menace isn’t out there scrubbing pages for a bunch of state legislators, MPs, and judicial appointees. That’s just the goons of the local political parties.
Correct. The Evil Slavic Menace is banning it outright, instead.
By Zachapertio - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153366379
Look no further than wikipedia to provide that information haha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_pages_banned_in_Russia
Hardly unique to Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Censorship_of_Wikipedia
And hardly exhaustive, either. The “people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia” includes two high profile cases of Saudi citizens, yet there’s no “Pages Banned by Saudi Arabia” when there obviously should be.
Hell, even the site’s own founding members have come at Wikipedia on its own terms, with Larry Sanger reporting the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI for distributing child pornography. For some reason, I never see “Larry Sanger” listed explicitly as an enemy of Wikipedia with the frequency I see Vladimir Putin indicted.
I mistakenly replied to the wrong post (I was in a hurry). There is a fork of Wikipedia that is “Kremlin friendly” called Ruwiki.
what of the teachers that say not to use it?
They don’t actually hate Wikipedia. They hold that it’s not a primary source for things that require citation, and that it’s not a great textbook.
Reading the Wikipedia page for optics is a bad way to learn optics.
It’s also difficult to cite as a source because you can’t actually specify who you’re citing, which is why Wikipedia, for research purposes, is a great way to get a quality overview and the terms you need, and then jump to its sources for more context and primary sources as you need them.
Encyclopedias in general are overviews or summaries of what they reference. Teachers would typically like you to reference something that isn’t a summary or overview when writing one, sincenthat what most of those reports are.