Wikipediocracy

Mason

I was curious to see what Encyclopædia Brittanica had to say about it.

The “key people” they list in the infobox are Elvis Costello and David Byrne.

The lead image is Devo.

Make of that what you will.

Mason

Nah, NASCAR’s probably too woke for Larry now. They don’t even let you fly confederate flags there anymore!

Mason

My guess is that if you asked Larry “hey man, these images seem pretty racist, why did you post them?”… well, he’d block you, because he has a thin skin and doesn’t tolerate being questioned. But assuming he did answer, I’d guess it would sound more like “I wanted to show the kind of garbage that th...

Mason

does its best to keep various ethnic/gender/sexual minorities happy (and often fails, though they do try). Politicians are lying... Hey, did we ever decide what to do about the c-word thing? I guess I've forgotten now that Eric Corbett doesn't hang out here anymore. You could retire it in his honor...

Mason

rnu wrote: ↑
Tue Nov 28, 2023 10:06 pm

No Ledge wrote: ↑
Tue Nov 28, 2023 9:20 pm
I'm not sure there's ever been an election where all the open seats were not filled, but, it could happen this year.
Are there any rules in place for what to do if that happens? Does it stay vacant, or is there a "special election"?

Stays vacant.

Mason

Great video. I enjoyed the homeopathy video as well. (And Paper Anvils would be a great name for a band.) So this site and WR do indeed deserve credit for identifying toxic editors and power structures on Wikipedia, but it’s worth noting that some of the most prominent Wikipedia critics on WR and he...

Mason

Why bother paying, why not just name his next kid that? It’s not like it’d be much stupider than the other names he’s come up with.

Mason

An aside from that article: In 2019 Kiva announced that they were “excited to announce the launch of Africa’s first blockchain and decentralized identity platform.”

They shuttered that in 2022.

Mason

I came across an interesting article about the microfinance non-profit Kiva. Many of the concerns raised by the microlenders seemed to parallel critiques of WMF trends, such as the tendency to use the money they raise for increasing employee rolls rather than supporting the core mission. This quote ...

Mason

I wonder if anyone is designing a tool to detect and tag sealioning.

Mason

No Ledge wrote: ↑
Mon Aug 28, 2023 12:00 pm
I too hope she has a soft landing.

Perhaps she will volunteer to help displaced Ukrainian refugees in her area.

That would seem at least as useful an activity as category-sorting, and would no doubt be educational as well.

Mason

Why would you pay to have someone influence your Wiki bio when you can have a rabidly partisan POV pusher like Andrevan https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Hunter_Biden&curid=21140283&diff=1170797368&oldid=1170793590,do it for you for free? I was going to quip “well, because Hunter’s a ...

Mason

Washington Post: Elon Musk’s X is throttling traffic to websites he dislikes The company formerly known as Twitter on Tuesday slowed the speed with which users could access links to the New York Times, Facebook and other news organizations and online competitors, a move that appeared targeted at com...

Mason

Belgium apparently has a super-powerful "right to be forgotten" law, which not only compels google to de-index the newspaper articles from search, but for the newspaper articles themselves to be deleted from the newspapers websites (hence why the above newspaper links are archived). Huh. I wonder i...

Mason

It seems that, like many other forks, Justapedia does not import from Wikipedia the list of people who created and edited the article: you are supposed to refer to the article history on Wikipedia. Thus, whenever an article is deleted on Wikipedia but kept on Justapedia, attribution disappears entir...

Mason

The Xeet thing is a hoax, but Elon seemed to suggest a tweet would be henceforth referred to as an X, which seems even dumber than a xeet.

Mason

Vigilant wrote: ↑
Tue Jul 25, 2023 4:07 pm
Hat tip to Prioryman.

That's some loaded brand adjacency.

Well, it’s not exclusively porn, but Elon did promise it would be the “everything” app.

Mason

The Garbage Scow wrote: ↑
Mon Jul 24, 2023 6:52 pm
Musk has had a bizarre obsession with the letter X for over 20 years, including trying to rebrand PayPal to X.com in 2000.

He is a very odd man.

Named his kid X something too.

Mason

On this site and on Wikipedia I used to sometimes offer advice to people who felt they’d been blocked unfairly. If I were doing so today I would suggest you: - acknowledge the concerns that led to the block (apologies aren’t necessary, just say you understand why the block occurred), and - explain h...

Mason

orangepi wrote: ↑
Thu May 25, 2023 12:56 am

…after meeting with donors at the Four Seasons Hotel Miami…

Lol. Was the landscaping business not available?

Mason

Mason, is rumored to be "a Wikipedia administrator and bureaucrat since 2011/2012 and even ran for the Arbitration Committee under the name 28bytes." The rumors are correct! I will leave it to the OP to decide for himself whether that makes me more or less likely to know what I’m talking about. Mos...

Mason

There are lots of points being discussed here, but one that I think needs to be highlighted is that if your lawyer thought sending a cease-and-desist letter to Wikipedia would help you achieve your goals regarding the article, they have committed legal malpractice and you should fire them. There are...

Mason

Can anyone contribute “helpful context” to a tweet? Could I add context to DeSantis’s “Soros-backed” Twitter rant that assures readers that he is only pointing out the connection to educate readers into possible sources of political bias and not, say, to fire up the sort of folks who like to fire up...

Mason

If you put in a ton of hours at a job or task, ask for added responsibilities, and are told “no thanks,” it’s perfectly rational to move on to something else. Doubly so if they’re not paying you. Nothing wrong with trying to fix whatever deficiencies are pointed out and trying again later (it’s what...

Mason

John Venn is trefoiling in his grave.

Mason

Bing (Yes, Bing) Just Made Search Interesting Again They've integrated the technology behind ChatGPT into their search engine. I heard about this yesterday listening to NPR in my car and now the New York Times has a story. I haven't tried it yet. If this does cause Microsoft's search engine to beco...

Mason

Well, this in interesting. It got confused as to who the VP was in 2020 since Biden was referred to as “Vice President Biden” during the debates. I tried to gently steer it away from that Alternative Fact, but the AI wasn’t having it. Q: What other vice presidents were active during this time? A: Th...

Mason

I decided to give it a try. It gave lengthy, plausible-sounding answers to most of the questions I threw it at, but it was pretty terse here: Q: Can animals safely view screensavers? A: No, it is not safe for animals to view screens I hit “refresh” and it changed its mind. A2: There is no scientific...

Mason

Wikipedia:Don't overlook legal threats (T-H-L) exists (and ought to be heeded more often), but it’s “just an essay,” so sometimes people are satisfied when the big litigious jerk gets blocked without checking whether the big litigious jerk has a point.

Mason

MrErnie wrote: ↑
Wed Jan 18, 2023 7:49 pm
…it now takes an extra click to get a link to your talk page or contribs.

I don’t mind the skin overall but the extra click is a bit annoying. It’s not like there’s no room for those links outside the menu.

Mason

It is as if he is trying to destroy Twitter. Additionally, any attempts to bypass restrictions on external links to the above prohibited social media platforms through technical or non-technical means (e.g. URL cloaking, plaintext obfuscation) is in violation of this policy. This includes, but is n...

Mason

The drama continues at a feverish pace. It is as if he is trying to destroy Twitter. https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1604531265419591681 Surely banning Instagram and Linktree links will piss off a lot of people who haven't been watching this shitshow. I’ll have to admit, I did not have Tw...

Mason

Vigilant wrote: ↑
Tue Dec 06, 2022 11:33 pm
Is it just me or is Elmo planning on running for POTUS?

Kanye. Elon. Trump.

It has been foretold.

Mason

I've been waiting for the news to figure this out. Musk’s Twitter Risks Being EU Outlaw After Staff Exodus Funny sentence If it doesn’t comply, regulators can issue strongly worded demands and fines equivalent to as much as 6% of Twitter’s annual revenue. No revenue loophole? Well, he was making ba...

Mason

A fake tweet sparked panic at Eli Lilly and may have cost Twitter millions “For $8, they’re potentially losing out on millions of dollars in ad revenue,” said Amy O’Connor, a former senior communications official at Eli Lilly who now works at a trade association. “What’s the benefit to a company … ...

Mason

In a bit of good news (in my opinion, anyway, as I think it's a good change), the RfC to put RfAs on hold after the timer ends was closed as successful . I wasn't the candidate and even I found it frustrating that SFR's RfA had extra hours tacked on at the end due to the random dice roll of crat av...

Mason

Perhaps someone with more legal expertise can explain how TNT using the checkuser tool in this case could be illegal, considering that if some other uninvolved checkuser ran the exact same checks it presumably would not be.

I can’t imagine any law would incorporate WP:INVOLVED by reference.

Mason

Dennis Brown wrote: ↑
Sat Oct 22, 2022 6:12 pm
And yes, this extremism does make the whole LGBTQ community look very bad, and reduces sympathy from those in the middle.

What?

Mason

I contend this reblocking was born of rage and fury in TheresNoTime's noggin. Something I understand all too well. "Not on my fucking watch you don't!" Yeah. That’s pretty much where I sit. I’ve read this giant sprawling nightmare of a thread and keep going back to this comment. I can completely ge...

Mason

Someone walks into a building and says “there are too many ***** people in here.”

Among those escorting them out of the building are several ***** people.

And somehow people’s reaction is something other than “well, what did you think would happen?”

Crazy times.

Mason

They’re now analyzing her past RfA opposes in the arbitration thread, and based on that, it looks like she got irritated that no one particularly noticed or cared that she consistently opposed transgender RfA candidates, so she decided to shout “pay attention to me!” in the most obnoxious way possib...

Mason

MrErnie wrote: ↑
Tue Oct 11, 2022 1:35 pm
A bit fitting that a male admin blocks a female and her an idiot.

Clearly she’s not an idiot, she’s got a Mensa userbox right there on her user page.

Mason

If there’s not a rule specifying an indefinite block for anyone whining about “cancel culture” after saying something hateful, there ought to be.

Mason

That said, people aren't mad at her for the rationale of her vote, they're mad at her for making a transphobic personal attack. Surely describing someone as Republican or even "far-right" is not as bad as describing them as "males masquerading as females". This is the point. She didn't simply say "...

Mason

I am glad to see that this is just Wikipedia shenanigans and not the usual reason a 90-something-year-old appears in a subject line.

He is only 5 years younger than Queen Elizabeth, after all.

Mason

It is a lot of the more regional US news sites. I can't remember any specific ones off the top of my head though. Ah, ok, thanks. That makes sense. I'd be unlikely to have noticed that. An (admittedly old) article about it that I found interesting: https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-st...

Mason

I assume it's merely a reference to this RFC from 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:2015_administrator_election_reform/Phase_II/RfC#C1:_Expand_discretionary_range_to_65% in which, by consensus, the RfA discretionary range was expanded from the previous 70-75% to 65-75%. Correct. Do you ...

Mason

Arishok wrote: ↑
Wed Sep 21, 2022 3:52 pm
I assume it's merely a reference to this RFC from 2015:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... ange_to_65%

in which, by consensus, the RfA discretionary range was expanded from the previous 70-75% to 65-75%.

Correct.

Mason

Yesterday, Michael Hayden, the former Director of the CIA, said that Republicans are the most "nihilistic, dangerous, and contemptible" political force in the world. In the world. It’s almost like they tried to violently overthrow the world’s most powerful democracy or something. The intersectional...

Mason

Giraffe Stapler wrote: ↑
Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:11 pm
“Platt fined Alahverdian, 400 pounds…”

Helluva comma placement.

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