I wish the Russians luck in trying to send thousands of circulars about it in different languages to the thousands of volunteer Wiki editors. It leaves me with two reflections on this news, either the news is fake or the Russians are more idiotic than expected.
In any war, the first which die us the truth. In general, it is not easy to get reliable news about political events, the least reliable being those of the country’s own media. They say that we live in the information age, but although the internet provides the whole of human knowledge, it is lost among fake news by interested groups, memes, flat earther blogs and cat videos. Yes, the information exists, but to know the truth it is always necessary to contrast any news, through many different sources, one of them is the WikiI, not for current news, but to read the historical facts and backgrounds of a conflict… This can be a clue to better understand a piece of news and see if it can be real or one of the many hoaxes.
I came here to say 'Fuck Russia’s Govt"
and that I feel bad for the Russian people.
Removed by mod
Every Western country government helped cause the rapid climate change emergency we’re in, so screw them, and especially the oil companies that spread lies about the severity of rapid climate change for decades. EDIT: Same for China’s government, Russia’s government, etc. Anyone still using fossil fuels, really.
I bet that if it was the US asking Wikipedia to edit articles the media wouldn’t use the word “demand” or attribute it to the whole US. A likely headline would be: “email shows US official asked Wikipedia to censor ‘misinformation’”.
The solution is real simple, don’t turn to wikipedia on matters that are politically charged. Get your news from a news outlet, instead of expecting that a crowdsourced online encyclopaedia might be up on current events.
There’s tradeoffs involved. Even when a journalist is doing a good job, they may have an editor butcher the article to suit a specific narrative (source: i have journalist friends). And most times, news outlets refuse to publish sources: even on the web, it’s rare to find an article that has actual links to more detailed information.
Wikipedia’s strength is transparency:
- a lot of information is conflicting but the sources are linked to make yourself an opinion which you deem more reliable ; biased information is usually presented as such (“that person/organization claimed that…”)
- a lot of information is missing due to sources not filling the admissibility criteria but more information can generally be found in the debate section
Overall, there are great articles out there on any medium. But on average, i’d choose a wikipedia article over any other media any day of the week :)
Actually, so would I for almost everything - except journalism. Why? because wikipedia was never intended to be used that way. Reading news there is like searching for a palimpsest on a roll of recycled toilet paper. Sure, it could be there, but why would you ever think to look there for it?
Wikipedia has a big part to play, but this kind of thing just brings the information war right up onto the pages of what is arguably the best reference we have.
Curation suggests that we should protect it from becoming involved in an ideological tug of war lest it be damaged in the process.
I disagree. Wikipedia has historically been a good source for gathering information about an evolving event. It should of course be taken with a grain of salt, but when you have gobs of editors reviewing and revising, misinformation tends to get weeded out pretty quickly.
Do not discount the power of sleepless obsessives. The volunteers at Wikipedia are compulsive about the rules. Facebook needs to hire them to fact check.
Or we could just not have Facebook™ fact checkers at all. Wtf?
Because that be inconvenient for you?
No because Mark Zuckerburg obviously shouldn’t be the one to decide what is and isn’t true. Of course.
Close, from the article-
The Russian media censorship agency Roskomnadzor demanded the volunteer-run online encyclopedia take down any information on the invasion that is “misinforming” Russians, according to a statement.
