this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024

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Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record (www.tracingwoodgrains.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Don’t have the energy to do the due diligence here and I won’t just trust the headline because I have never heard of this source before. But I will note OP’s account seems to be a single issue account with a grudge against wikipedia.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Wouldn't be surprised if that's the person that wrote the post

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Yeah I only see one person trying to launder their grudges publicly here, and it's not David Gerard...

[+] [email protected] -7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Single-purpose shared accounts are good for security purposes, particularly if you want to expose a problematic organization whose members will stop at nothing to harass, stalk and even doxx you.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Wikipedia gets a million people saying its bullshit every week. I doubt theyll personally track you. But as I privacy nerd I understand your concerns

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Wikipedia gets a million people saying its bullshit every week. I doubt theyll personally track you.

Unfortunately, they can, and they will.

Here's an example on how they dox people they branded as "vandals":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Tirgil34

Note how the sensitive details are publicly shown in a brazen manner. In fact, that's not all yet; there are at least one instance of politically motivated hitjob which exploited exactly that kind of process.

Such a stuff won't be normally allowed elsewhere at all because of the risks of violating relevant data protection laws. However, you're only looking at the tip of the iceberg since there are credible allegations of admins involving in sexual harassment scandals along with doxxing and stalking attempts against a federal employee.

https://rdrama.net/post/215764/there-are-two-dozen-sexual-harassment

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is completely different. Wikipedia tracks users and IP’s who don’t follow their rules, as a website that anyone can edit, they need too.

That doesn’t mean they’ll track people outside of wikipedia on social media.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It's still insane. Things containing sensitive information like that should normally be restricted to users who had certain needs or ranks to do so. After all there's little to no vetting process and anyone can post libellous information against other editors, whether on as a LTA page or as a user subpage, the latter which is more prevalent than the former.

I would ask you to suspend your judgement and belief and ponder for a moment that no institutions are perfect and whether you might be making the same mistakes as defenders of Theranos or Scientology did, before the respective scandals are exposed.

Here is the so-called Anvil email, which was an abusive message sent to an alleged rule offender by a Wikipedia admin. There they specifically mentioned that the alleged offender is Jewish and then the former insulted the latter further based on that.

https://archive.ph/rkFao

https://www.logicmuseum.com/x/index.php/Chapters

As for the sexual harassment scandals, there's one thing to corroborate on the veracity.

https://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5417

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Yet more absolute garbage from anonymous substack users.

There are plenty of “alternative wikipedias”. If you want an echo chamber that spouts unreliable nonsense, go use them. Or just facebook.

does the author of this blogspam thing wiki admins are manually changing articles?

In practice, this means Gerard scanning through dozens of articles in the span of a few minutes, tearing out all information cited to the Free Beacon

Dereferencing sources would be automated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

While by Wikipedia’s nature, nobody can precisely claim to speak or act on behalf of the site as a whole, Gerard comes about as close as anyone really could. He’s been a volunteer Wikipedia administrator since 2004, has edited the site more than 200,000 times, and even served off and on as the site’s UK spokesman.

....in addition to volunteering as a Wikipedia administrator, Gerard is the system administrator and owner of the Twitter account for RationalWiki

Wikipedia ties with RationalWiki is a cause for concern

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago

Yup. Unfortunately it's far from an isolated incident. The surface is barely being scratched. This page back on Reddit has more Wikipedia scandals which you should know about.