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.
this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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Who hates Wikipedia:
- Tech bros
- Russia
- Israel
- Other generic fascists
what of the teachers that say not to use it?
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.
Look no further than wikipedia to provide that information haha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_pages_banned_in_Russia
Hardly unique to Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Censorship_of_Wikipedia
And hardly exhaustive, either. The "people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia" includes two high profile cases of Saudi citizens, yet there's no "Pages Banned by Saudi Arabia" when there obviously should be.
Hell, even the site's own founding members have come at Wikipedia on its own terms, with Larry Sanger reporting the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI for distributing child pornography. For some reason, I never see "Larry Sanger" listed explicitly as an enemy of Wikipedia with the frequency I see Vladimir Putin indicted.
Maybe because the list of things Larry Sanger has done against Wikipedia is much, much shorter than Putin?
State actors often pose as normal editors on wikipedia, in order to try and cover for things they do. Corporations often do the same thing, via their PR firms.
Its pretty well documented on the WP logs.
I'm not super involved, but I believe it's possible to engage with Wikipedia ethically and well as a PR firm or the like. But being honest is part one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:PR_Professionals_%26_Editing
It is possible, but very rarely done. Because 99% of a PR or state actor intel group's job is lying to the public. Because if all you needed was the truth, they wouldn't have a job.
A bunch of these state actors are western politicians and their staff/campaigns, though.
The Evil Slavic Menace isn't out there scrubbing pages for a bunch of state legislators, MPs, and judicial appointees. That's just the goons of the local political parties.
It's not even remotely isolated to "Western politicians"... I spent 4 months battling on a few articles, and it turns out, I wasted many hours with a troll farm ran by the CCP...
I've also wasted many hours on reps from the Church of Scientology, NY State Police, SCO Group, the GOP of Arkansas, and the Dem Committee in Nevada.
Any state or corporation you can think of has been trying to attack WP like this.
Correct. The Evil Slavic Menace is banning it outright, instead.
By Zachapertio - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153366379
No its true actually. Vladimir (the impaler) Putin and President Xi got together and had a secret meeting all about how Wikipedia is the greatest threat to their total dictatorship of Earth, because its the only thing keeping the American citizens so free and open minded and a place where people can go to learn about forbidden topics like Tank Girl and Winnie the Pooh. Putin got mad because he read the article about Grizzly bears and it said he'd probably die if he tried to wrestle one, so he spun up his special government botnet from his elite hacker force and activated his army of Tankie sleeper agents on Lemmy to make an attack on the Freedom of Information Act (thats a special law that Biden made to try to protect wikipedia and keep free speech safe).
this is a joke about foreign influence on Lemmy, not about Wikipedia itself. I like wikipedia
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