https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comm ... n/itdrx51/
https://np.reddit.com/r/firstworldprobl ... or_delete/
https://old.reddit.com/r/deletionism/co ... or_delete/
A drama has erupted on Wikipedia on a biographical article about a hacker known for being associated with Anonymous™.
There they argue on whether to remove/censor big parts of passages, especially about the fact that he hacked Chinese nuclear and space systems since they think that a biggest Taiwanese newspaper is "marginally reliable". Geographical bias at its finest.
There was a sole defending IP editor with an open proxy range and either turned rogue or was hijacked by a vandal before they could reach some kind of resolution. Before that it appeared at Wikipedia's administrator noticeboard for a time. Tensions were very high.
Quotes of note.
IP editor:
An editor who wants removal:Except that, now the zeal looks no different that (name censored)'s as it starts to disrupt the narrative story flow of the article, like this, especially the latter of the cause-and-effect aspects. This is fast degenerating into additionism/retentionism vs removalism which had happened perennially in this site as a whole, which to the best of my understanding has contributed to low editorial retention. From time to time absolutist rationales and stances to justify deletion/noninclusion of contents and even whole pages, which had sometimes contributed to Systemic bias; one of the long string of latest examples being Donna Strickland. It's easy to just sit down at couch and say "I don't know anything of that or that or that, let's delete it!" about local people, politics, economics, religion, events, science, arts, literature, film, theater, food and drinking/restaurants, geography, astronomy, dance, music, sports, education and whatever all around the globe". It's also easy to remove "unimportant or irrelevant" information because of lack of familiarity or disinterest due to cultural differences. While you here might want a simplistic presentation, others like readers might want Wikipedia to be detailed and be like a Wiki rabbit hole. To the best of my understanding, the German Wikipedia underwent similar craze and as a result lost financial donors and contributors due to "purging trolls" activity. Because of that their publications has regularly linked to English Wiki instead of their native version. Note that I'm not advocating for an radically unrestricted of anything into this encyclopedia because some may violate copyright laws or otherwise misinformation, but it's no good either if you take the other side to the extreme. With the help of this word counter which I copied and pasted the text from the original version (before name censored removal), the word count stands at 1,321 words (including the section titles). This is far short of 6,000 to 10,000 words described in WP:SIZESPLIT which takes between 30 and 40 minutes to read at average speed. In the end additionism/retentionism vs removalism is a zero sum game which not playing would be wise. One possible middle ground is to use only reliable sources with Taiwan News, VICE and Heise as a minimum in terms of reputation and/or reliability, and move on after that.
Another:I agree with (name censored) The article is in a pretty bad state, with a rather large amount of unencyclopaedic and crufty content that should be removed. Unfortunately, with the IP editor's preference for long paragraphs that say very little ([274]), repeated baiting attempts directed at me ([275], [276], [277]), and their recent restoration of content crufty material because it "disrupted the story flow" ([278]), I am not alone in being extremely hesitant to try and make any improvements to the article at present. I fear that without some sort of intervention, frustration will drive otherwise productive and good faith editors away from the article in the form of "Let the Wookiee win"
IP editor (again):Hi, the editor whose edits were challenged here. Wanted to point out that when the discussion about my edits was started, the IP editor mentioned but didnt tag me. When another put a notice on my talk page to tell me about the discussion, the IP editor removed it. diff 1, diff 2 Also wanna mention that the Taiwan News RfC was never closed, but by my count the survey had 7 votes for "Generally reliable", 9 votes for "Marginally reliable or unclear", and 1 vote for "Generally unreliable and too partisan for factual reporting". I didnt know about the RfC when I challenged the source, just that it wasnt WP:RSP, but the IP editor has been saying the RfC decided Taiwan News is "quite reliable" and I dunno where that came from. For my edits, I did it in three parts because they needed three different edit summaries and because I wanted to wait and look at the article more before removing the biggest chunk. I havent edited the page since my edits were challenged.
Passerby:(name censored) had by now told me and others to go to a multitude of other wikis catering for intricate/narrative style of presentation. There's a huge problem with the notion; speaking from reader's perspectives, if you want to learn about a subject you don't know or otherwise obscure to you, would you prefer them to be presented at one stop in a trusted encyclopedia rather than going site-by-site? Because here's one thing; by hopping through different sites there's also a security risk because presently browser exploits like remote code execution are all too prevalent and even "legitimate source sites" can one day fall victim to such attack. As an example Over 47,000 Malicious WordPress Plugins Are Active on Nearly 25,000 Websites. Scan it with Malwarebytes, Virustotal or anything you can, but most of the time they don't catch zero-day attacks until it's late. Almost all the policies that we cite here are formed during the 00s or 10s, when these aren't so prevalent. English Wikipedia ultimately is among the top sites visited on the Internet and it looks so much like putting too many eggs in one place since the shutdown of Google Knol.
After all, it's going straight into the dead end per the Poe's law if we harangue on what constitutes "improvement" or "unencyclopaedic", so as (name censored) claimed the problems now involve conduct issues here are a couple of questions for her, although (name censored) can answer as well:
If you can remember, what caused you to come to the article for the first time? It'd be helpful if you describe your feelings back then. Most importantly, you insisted on wanting to work on and improve the article, so what was your end goal? Let's do a thought experiment where suddenly you are the only active editor in Wikipedia while on that page. Imagine that Thanos had been resurrected and snaps everyone except you. More realistically, the sham referendums at occupied areas in Ukraine went through and Putin uses it as a justification ("threatening Russia's territorial integrity") to fire a tactical nuke at the Black Sea. Maybe Putin's crazier than we thought and sent the kiloton against Ivano-Frankivsk, Izmail, Lozova, Irshava Berdiansk, Tokmak, you name it. Instead of cowing the world NATO intervenes and destroy Russian positions throughout occupied areas resulting in a formal declaration of war by RU. A malfunctioning early warning radar falsely reported incoming missiles but there's no Stanislav Petrov this time. San Francisco is hit with a Bulava MIRV, as does New York City, Washington DC, London, Belfast, Edinburgh, Manchester, Moscow, St Petersburg, Vladivostok, Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and so many other cities, knocking off the Internet for good. You survived, hiding in a bunker or something. It turns out that you have a complete dump in a hard drive and deciding to edit that a bit to present to leftover future generations. What would that be for this page? To answer the question, put the page source in personal sandbox or rather WP:SANDBOX, edit it as if you're the only one doing that, and put the sandbox diff link of your finished work back here. For reference, this is my answer.
im14andthisisdeep:Around 7,000 words of discussion or 18 pages in a letter-sized document with Arial font 11. Wow. I am fascinated by this talk page treatises. I am sure there are editors who would gladly analyze this discussion to determine a summary and render a resolution. But most editors would walk away in an instant though. I have to mention that you guys still are midway of reaching the 14,000 level of an epic by (name censored). Cheers!
Now they're itching to remove it.Ultimately the best of both worlds would be forking. I think that Meta-Wiki had said somewhere that alternative namespaces could serve fit for the purpose; even though Simple English Wikipedia, which is so ideal for reductionists/minimalists, is so underutilized.
Most of the time y'all will take an inch for a mile, while the clash of synergistic currents continues unabated. Seen it a hundred times. Here's a two cent prognosis. Take an example. (name censored) took reductionism/minimalism to the extreme like it's like Icarus going to the sun, so much that they finally had enough of him. He has the template on his page that "he reserves the right to screw up", but that doesn't do much. More recent would be the (name censored) controversy; not really addition/reductionism related, but ya'll came very close to imploding. It's a miracle that most of the world were too enmeshed of the protests in Hong Kong; otherwise there'd be a few, if not hundreds, of forks now, rather than a monolith monopoly took for granted, or so many eggs in a basket. Tides are forever, but sandcastles aren't.
AfD stands for Articles for Deletion. The hacker in question had touched Russian database systems, North Korean website, TV set top boxes and Iranian website for just over half a decade. r/maliciouscompliance anyone?I was actually just looking at that. I think that because of the 2016 Motherboard article, 2018 BBC news piece, and the 2020 IranWire interview we just barely squeak over the GNG line. But it's super marginal, and I could also see an AfD deleting the article anyway.
The defending editor also made the following comment, thought you might like to know as well:
An essay against "crying BLP!"One last thing. The word "contentious" which is the first word of BLP warning mantra is up to question in terms of definition, so I'll defer to the essay Wikipedia:Contentious instead. As it goes, Perhaps recognising that articles are the sum of their parts is a valid course of action. Editors should view the "contentious claim" quite aside from the person whom it is attached to, and ask frankly whether they would have a problem with that edit being about their favourite (or least favourite) person in the world, without high quality reliable sourcing, as if "he leered at a cat" is equivalent to "the sky is blue" or "Paris is the capital of France".
Within the subject's associated subculture or the topical circle, hacking acts are seen as if they are like doing making arts or musics; even more so for hacktivists, a portmanteau for hacker and activist, unlike in others such as scientists, musicians, aviators, actors, elected officials in US and so on where "good character" of them is normally expected upon by readers and instead be seen as a abhorred stain of their career. There's a modicum of "every snowflake is unique" and pulling a one size fits all is sometimes the wrong approach just to put it. What's been discussed here can be said as mostly "penumbral issue". Within the topical field in general if you want an example of a more clear-cut BLP violation, that would be the claims of "faking a hack", or that they molested a girl, or revealing their real identity. Unless there is absolutely reliable source like BBC, the very latter should be subjected to the strict letters of BLP. To paraphrase (name censored), there is being cautious, and there is being unduly overcautious. Wikipedia risks losing credibility with the general public if we are not giving information about certain topics based on vague or exaggerated concerns.
Upon delving further it turns out that it's often easy to mistake something as a coatrack. As it goes, it would be reasonable to include brief information of the background behind a key detail, even if the background has no direct relevance to the article's topic, as long as such information is used sparingly and does not provide any more explanation than a reasonably knowledgeable reader would require. An article on the anatomical feature Adam's apple could explain that the term arose from the biblical character Adam; a regurgitation of the Book of Genesis, or an outline of the full story of original sin would not be necessary. Material that is supported by a reliable, published source whose topic is directly related to the topic of the article, is not using the article as a coatrack. Ultimately the passage about (name censored) is an explainer that (name censored - article subject) had different ambitions, only to be affected by the war in Ukraine and shooting down of a plane. This is as long as Bieber didn't get sucked into Weinstein-level scandals to the effect of tarnishing anything else that have his name, in that case they can simply be re-removed, but until then it's mere WP:CRYSTALBALL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... %22BLP!%22
The hacker in question which is the topic of the Wikipedia entry, had touched Russian database systems, North Korean website, TV set top boxes and Iranian website for just over half a decade. Meanwhile, the arguments has since devolved into a series of editorial disruptions, resulting in page locks and user blocks. Other concerned people had even filed a "sockpuppet investigation" against the remover, which was firstly said to be a "suspected abuser" receiving a brief block before being overturned and exonerated, although the possibility of "meatpuppetry" remains.
Most of the texts regarding his latter activity in the biographical article were cited by sources with high regional reputation such as Taiwan News but those were neverthelessly removed even though a 2021 discussion Reliable Sources noticeboard established it as "marginally reliable", providing the possibility of being used as long as inline citations are involved. What they've done had the effect of worsening systematic biases as well.
It has since spilled over into several articles with the goalpost shifted to "notability", something well-known for being easily subjected to the eyes of any beholder:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1117020972
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1117020325
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1117019566
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1117018785
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1117017808
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1117017321
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1117017092
Prior to these, according to xtools, the editor making out of the blue removals has an unusual single topic interest on Wikileaks and Julian Assange, known pro-Russian "fellow travellers". Finally it's very interesting that this came out recently:
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-s ... formation/
Anyway, for all I know he could be totally unaware of this whole situation. That may be a naive statement on my part, but for now at least, I guess I don't see the harm in our having a thread on it.