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Heywood_Floyd OP wrote

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belisarius9 wrote

Nope. I have one or two unsigned comments on talk pages on wikipedia, no account there, none of the changes I've recommended have ever been made, I avoid even attempting to edit wikipedia because I do realize it's run based on clique-y bullshit and I know whoever gets to a page first basically runs roughshod over anyone who tries to correct things. Wikipedians being clique-y grad students is certainly an argument I can get behind, although fun fact, a number of the editors with the most activity work directly for the US government, with a few of them having open ties to the NSA if I remember correctly. And that's not even mentioning the 8chan guy! There are reasonable critiques of Wikipedia, I just haven't seen them come from random conspiracy theorist's blogs, ya know?

encyclopedia industry

Oh no, some massive capitalist publisher has been hurt by a free alternative. I am crying, I promise. I'd love to see more proper academics doing wikipedia articles, but most encyclopedias largely weren't written by academics, most of the old encyclopedia articles were still just garbage overviews written by lay people, so it's kind of a wash in my opinion. I would not love having to buy in to access a lesser amount of articles that aren't going to be substantially higher quality. I can't say I particularly miss traditional encyclopedias.

They are being judged by the standards of their own program, which is to include everything. They fail at that too.

Two things. This sounds an awful lot like having your cake and eating it too - I can critique them for not being what I want, and I can critique them for not being enough like what I don't want! Secondly, the point of an open encyclopedia is that individuals add things. The fact that someone can grab some random 100 odd years since dead bank robber nobody's heard of isn't evidence wikipedia is failing at it's own mission, it's evidence that nobody who has heard of that person is working on wikipedia. It's a subtle nuance, but it is there. I will say, if nobody cares enough for random bank robber to add him, he probably isn't all that important.

Nobody should give the Wikimedia Foundation a dime.

Fortunately I don't, and I don't advocate in their favor, at least when the critiques of them are reasonable. But then, I will admit I am essentially a freeloader in most projects.

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Heywood_Floyd OP wrote

**Wikipedians being clique-y grad students is certainly an argument I can get behind, although fun fact, a number of the editors with the most activity work directly for the US government, with a few of them having open ties to the NSA if I remember correctly. And that's not even mentioning the 8chan guy! **

Could you give us a source for these claims? This wouldn't just be people like MONGO (ex-Federal Forest Ranger, then DSA guy)? We know all about him.

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Heywood_Floyd OP wrote

".....Apparently Azov have been neo-Nazis since 1991? How they could be I don't know, when the group was only formed in 2014, but I will say the only people I can imagine who are worse than Nazis are time traveling Nazis, so they must a decent target for the author....."

On October 16, 1991 a party called the "Social-National Party of Ukraine" was founded in what was still the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Their "Latin I through a Latin N" insignia standing for the "Ideal of the Nation" was concocted around that time as a swastika replacement because the SNP-U was a hard-core Nationalist party with neo-Fascist politics. It had an underground existence until 1992, was registered as a political body in 1995. It was disbanded in 2004, replaced with the now well-known Svoboda Party, but there was the Social-National Assembly (f. 2008) that used the "Ideal of the Nation", and just like the SNP-U it used the same I-N wolfsangle symbol on a yellow field. Spinoff or dissidents from the SNP-U keeping the old flag, but this group birthed the Azov Battalion (now a "Special Operations Detachment") and the defunct "Patriot of Ukraine" paramilitary group. In any case the Azov patch is the I-N wolfsangel, the Nazi Sonnenrad ("sun wheel"), and a breaking surf wave, symbolizing that they will break over their opponents like the ocean on a rock. To me it's all one giant rightwing organization using various party formations to hide who they really are, the same damn neo-Nazis from the end of the USSR. And the US is now backing these hooligans.

https://reportingradicalism.org/en/hate-symbols/movements/nazi-symbols/wolfsangel

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