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

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Who hates Wikipedia:

      Russia

      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.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 months ago

        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.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      1·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, there’s kind of a Poe’s Law situation.

      A lot of the sincere tankies, though, at least want to talk about what they’re into, and have elaborate reasons why it’s all true. The low-effort “I can’t even be bothered to try to mount a defense, I just wanted to say Wikipedia is doxing its users and kowtowing to fascist governments, and now that I’ve said it my task is done” behavior is a little more indicative of a disingenuous propaganda account in my experience.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 months ago

        elaborate reasons why it’s all true

        Usually it’s “just read these 10 hundred-year-old books” that they absolutely have not read.

        And if you ask them to make a point from those books, they can’t. Apparently they’re only comprehensible as a whole.

    • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I am pretty convinced that .ml is legitimately used as a Russian troll training ground before they get promoted to Facebook and reddit.

      • dx1@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        Meanwhile, at .ml:

        Since Pi is infinite and non-repeating, would that mean any finite sequence of non-repeating numbers should appear somewhere in Pi?

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          1·
          2 months ago

          That’s actually a really good way to illustrate what is wrong with lemmy.ml.

          On math stack exchange:

          Let me summarize the things that have been said which are true and add one more thing.

          1. 𝜋 is not known to have this property, but it is expected to be true.
          2. This property does not follow from the fact that the decimal expansion of 𝜋 is infinite and does not repeat.

          On lemmy.ml:

          0.101001000100001000001 . . .

          I’m infinite and non-repeating. Can you find a 2 in me?

          You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere

          Why couldn’t you?

          Because you’d need to search through an infinite number of digits (unless you have access to the original formula)

          And:

          Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi

          And:

          Yes.

          And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.

          All heavily upvoted.

  • Shelbyeileen@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    I do the research and script writing for a documentary company. In 2023, I noticed that the pages of serial killers I’d been researching, started mentioning political affiliation in the top paragraph… but they all said Democrat (or socialst, communist sympathizer, anti-fascist, etc). Then, one of the murderers I was researching, who was literally a Republican politician who killed his wife , said Democrat and I had a team investigate. It got corrected, but we have no idea if it was one person or a group that changed the pages. Someone out there wants murderers to be associated with democrats.

  • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Interesting all this WP news I’m hearing today. Last week I downloaded the entirety of Wikipedia. Anyone can do it, the base archive (no pictures) is only about 25G, although the torrent is slow AF, took me… almost 2 weeks to download it.

    I did this because I feel like this might be the last chance to get a version of it that has any vestige of the old order in it, the old order being “trying to stick to ideals and express truth rather than rewriting history to the fascists’ specifications.”

    I’d love to be wrong, but if I’m not, I feel like it will potentially be a good reference in the future if needed.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      1·
      2 months ago

      This is in the news because Wikipedia is refusing to rewrite history to the fascists’ specifications.

      https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrdydkypv7o

      It’s possible that India will succeed at eroding by a little bit Wikipedia’s resistance to having things rewritten because of various powerful people demanding it. But, if you’re looking for an organization that’s resistant against those demands, I don’t think you will be able to find one that is anywhere near the equal of Wikipedia in terms of the scale at which it operates combined with the resistance it puts up when people do this.

  • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    On lemmy, this is far more likely to be some weird tankie shit about western propaganda. Though it is definitely noteworthy that the far right and far left seem to push a lot of the same misinformation on here.

    Also, in general lemmy trolls are super easy to spot because they don’t do anything else. All they do is whine about democrats or post Russian propaganda and never engage on any other topics.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      0·
      2 months ago

      Yeah horseshoe theory is an actual thing and it shows hard here on Lemmy. Same lies, same taxticts, different extremists.

        • M137@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 months ago

          I seriously don’t understand this kind of reaction to being corrected about mistakes. All it does is show everyone that you’re even dumber than previously shown via the mistake and makes it obvious you don’t care to learn anything from it so you’ll continue being just as dumb.
          Learn from it instead and thank them for teaching you something.
          But you’re clearly not mentally grown and/or smart enough to not react like a 5-year-old to someone pointing out you’ve made a mistake. And it’s hilarious that you don’t realize how childish and dumb you make it clear you are by this kind of reaction and choosing to show it with a reply.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    01·
    2 months ago

    Wikipedia is just another website run by some privileged dickheads and their mods.

    I’m not bothering to argue whether it’s better or worse than other websites.

    But only a fool would trust it or believe that it’s inherently “good”.

  • OccamsRazer@lemmy.world
    01·
    2 months ago

    As long as people keep in mind what Wikipedia is, there should be no issue. There’s a reason teachers never allow it as a source, but it is great as an introduction to any topic, from which point you can further your own research.

  • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
    01·
    2 months ago

    This unactionable vaguepost is what suffices as a YSK?

    Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK

    Why should I know this, OP?