The triumph of truth 
Carew-Reid, Stephen.
Perth, W. A. : The Weekend News, 1996-2004. 

LOCATION CALL NO STATUS NOTE MESSAGE
 3rd Floor Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR  Volume 1: Introductory Volume, 2nd edition    NOT FOR LOAN  
 2nd Floor Heritage Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR  Volume 1: Introductory Volume, 2nd edition    FOR USE IN STATE LIBRARY  REQUEST RETRIEVAL
 3rd Floor Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR  Volume Two 2nd ed.    NOT FOR LOAN
Author Carew-Reid, Stephen.
Title The triumph of truth / by Stephen Carew-Reid.
Published/Produced Perth, W. A. : The Weekend News, 1996-2004.



​https://catalogue.slwa.wa.gov.au/search~S2/?searchtype=X&searcharg=triumph+of+truth+by+stephen+carew+reid+&searchscope=2&sortdropdown=-&SORT=DZ&extended=0&SUBMIT=Search&searchlimits=&searchorigarg=Xtriumph+of+truth%26SORT%3DD

LOCATION CALL NO STATUS NOTE MESSAGE
 3rd Floor Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR Volume 1: Introductory Volume, 2nd edition    NOT FOR LOAN  
 2nd Floor Heritage Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR Volume 1: Introductory Volume, 2nd edition    FOR USE IN STATE LIBRARY  REQUEST RETRIEVAL
 3rd Floor Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR Volume Two 2nd ed.    NOT FOR LOAN  
 2nd Floor Heritage Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR Volume Two, Edition Two    FOR USE IN STATE LIBRARY  REQUEST RETRIEVAL
 3rd Floor Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR Volume Two, Edition Three (Part A)    NOT FOR LOAN  
 3rd Floor Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR Volume Two, Edition Three (Part B)    NOT FOR LOAN  
 3rd Floor Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR Volume Three    NOT FOR LOAN  
 3rd Floor Stack  Q 364.1323 CAR Volume Four, Part A, Second Edition    NOT FOR LOAN

Details

Call Number Q 364.1323 CAR
Cover title Triumph of truth : who's watching the watchers?
Description v. <1-4> : ill., ports., facsims. ; 30 cm.
Notes Typescript (Photocopy)
Volume 1: Introductory Volume, 2nd edition (1996) -- Volume Two 2nd ed./Edition Two (1999) -- Volume Two, Edition Three: Part A (1999) -- Volume Two, Edition Three: Part B (1999) -- Volume Three (2001) -- Volume Four: Part A, Second Edition (2004).
Other publishing history: Vol. One, Introductory Volume, First Edition published in 1996, Volume Two, Edition One published in 1998. Volume 4, First edition published in 2002, Volume 4, Edition Two (Parts A, B, C, D & E) published in 2004.
Subjects Carew-Reid, Stephen.
Political corruption -- Western Australia.
Misconduct in office -- Western Australia.
Corporations -- Corrupt practices -- Western Australia.
Police corruption -- Western Australia.
Western Australia -- Moral conditions.Type your paragraph here.

​ Jimmy Wales appearing as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees at Wikimania 2007

Beijing, China   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing
Beijing (/ˌbeɪˈdʒɪŋ/ BAY-JING, nonstandard /ˌbeɪˈʒɪŋ/ BAY-ZHING;[10][11] Mandarin pronunciation: [pèi.tɕíŋ], alternatively romanized as Peking (/ˌpiːˈkɪŋ/ PEE-KING)[11], is the capital of the People's Republic of China, the world's third most populous city proper, and most populous capital city. The city, located in northern China, is governed as a municipality under the direct administration of central government with 16 urban, suburban, and rural districts.  Beijing Municipality is surrounded by Hebei Province with the exception of neighboring Tianjin Municipality to the southeast; together the three divisions form the Jingjinjimetropolitan region and the national capital region of China.

PRISM has been largely forgotten in the wake of more recent NSA/CIA scandals
PRISM has been largely forgotten in the wake of more recent NSA/CIA scandals, but at the time of its exposure, 
Facebook and Google were in the process of creating secure portals to allow the NSA to more easily access their data, 
and it’s absurd to think they halted that project because of a silly leak. The Snowden revelations managed to change 
precisely nothing about how Americans interact with the security state, except to erode the expectation of privacy we 
once had. A browser plugin, back doored to the NSA, tracking one’s un-American activities, is the setup for the worst 
kind of Minority-Report-esque pre-crime detention. And thanks to the same National Defense Authorization Act that 
allowed the Pentagon to turn its venerable propaganda apparatus on American citizens, the security state can detain us 
indefinitely without a warrant should the mood strike - even mow us down like dogs in our homes if it doesn’t like our
web history.
NewsGuard itself is supposedly staffed by “real journalists” as opposed to the algorithm that protects us from 
conspiracy theories on YouTube, and it has already been exposed as hopelessly corrupt. Those in the 
mainstream media who’ve heard of NewsGuard were perplexed by its rating of Fox News as “trustworthy,” 
believing a right-leaning network could not possibly rate the coveted green checkmark. All was made clear 
when Fox broadcast a puff piece hailing NewsGuard as the “killer app” that would save journalism - a clip 
NewsGuard immediately added to the list of "endorsements" on their website. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
This corruption became even clearer when NewsGuard was persuaded to change its “untrustworthy” rating 
of the Daily Mail, the British tabloid which was also the first mainstream news source to be declared untrustworthy 
by just a handful of editors on Wikipedia. The Mail, for all its flaws - and there are many - has more traffic than 
any other online news outlet (not counting aggregators like Drudge). When an anonymous Mail editor wrote a 
polite point by point refutation and sent it to NewsGuard, their rating was changed to green, ensuring the Mail 
would not publish a scathing attack on the noble censor - which could have smothered it in its cradle - while 
also making the plugin look eminently reasonable (see, they do change their ratings if they’re wrong!). 
Everybody wins! MintPress, of course, tried the same thing months ago, only to be ignored and vilified.
Breitbart, miffed after being slighted by the NewsGuard team despite their diligent cheer leading for every 
neocon regime-change operation, compiled a telling list of proven hoaxes the extension has approved. 
More than anything else, the list highlights the obvious perils of a blacklist - scare stories like the 
Washington Post’s infamous “Russia hacked Vermont utilities” are never properly retracted because they’re
designed to percolate in the reader’s subconscious so the next time they read about Russian malfeasance 
they’re more favorably inclined toward the idea. Facts are stupid things that merely get in the way of a good 
narrative. In the same way, a story published on Breitbart or RT - even if it came from ur-Reliable Source 
the Associated Press - gets the scarlet shield of shame through guilt by association. NewsGuard is laughably,
irredeemably flawed, and no intelligent person would ever download it.
 
Helen of desTroy live on INN World Report w/Tom Kiely - 2 Apr 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tiqg2ZCORyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUSA2mGJLRU
Helen of Destroy: Published on Apr 9, 2019
NATO was founded 70 years ago to "contain" communism as embodied in the Soviet Union. This means it has lived nearly 30 years past its expiration date. Without an enemy to keep it in check, NATO has metastasized in a way that would turn any cancerous tumor green with envy, growing with leaps and bounds even as its raison d'être faded into memory. It now contains more than twice as many countries as it did when formed, some of which abut Russia's borders, and seems to exist for the sole purpose of provoking Russia - and extorting tribute payments from its component countries, with a hint that something nasty could befall them should they fail to cough up 2% of GDP. Anyone who smirks at this suggestion need only research Operation Gladio - the real mission NATO covered for, which continues to this day. Any countries that got out of line - leaning a little too far to the left, say, or (in more recent years) calling out the war crimes of one particular non-NATO US ally - might suddenly find themselves victim of a terror attack (spoiler alert: there's no "might" here - it never fails). "That's a nice country you got dere - would be a shame if anything happened to it..." related: https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-its-... if you like this video, please SHARE it & SUBSCRIBE. YouTube is actively suppressing this channel - watch view counts go backwards before your very eyes - & if we leave it up to them no one will ever see this material. wouldn't want that on your conscience, would you?! at least share it to jab a pointy stick in the Polyphemus-eye of Google. because if they hate me enough to sit on my channel i'm clearly doing something right. also subscribe on bitchute for the inevitable day this channel is memory-holed: helenofdestroy. & for MOAR, MOAR, ALWAYS MOAR go to helenofdestroy.com
Category: People & Blogs

False Flag Weekly News 8 March 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUzCcMy3AnA
Helen of Destroy: Published on Mar 31, 2019
(this is a mirror of my first guest appearance on Kevin Barrett's False Flag Weekly News. NoLiesRadio lost its YouTube channel after telling too much truth, so the only place their videos are currently available is Vimeo, which no one uses. original description follows:) False Flag Weekly News is a weekly investigative news program that covers extremely controversial subjects. We want to remind our viewers that “Questioning” of Official Government or Mainstream Media Stories Is Not Hate Speech, nor is it Fake News, it is Free Speech that is protected by the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution. Supreme Court unanimously reaffirms: There is no ‘hate speech’ exception to the First Amendment washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/06/19/supreme-court-unanimously-reaffirms-there-is-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/ The False Flag Weekly News anchored by Dr. Kevin Barrett and Prof. Tony Hall looks behind the headlines and main stream media stories to get at what’s really going on in the world. From violations of international law to initiating WWIII, you don’t want to miss what they and their guests have to say about the stories behind the stories. Today's Guest Host: Helen Buyniski Click here for today's news story links: noliesradio.org/archives/163051
Category: People & Blogs

The story behind Jar’Edo Wens, the longest-running hoax in Wikipedia history

Internet Culture
By Caitlin Dewey April 15, 2015

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/04/15/the-great-wikipedia-hoax/?utm_term=.bea8861ce6c7

​​Jar’Edo Wens is an Australian aboriginal deity, the god of “physical might” and “earthly knowledge.” He’s been name-dropped in books. Carved into rocks.

And, as of March, conclusively debunked.

There is no such figure, it turns out, in aboriginal mythology; instead, Jar’Edo Wens was a blatant prank, a bald invention, dropped into Wikipedia nine years ago by some unknown and anonymous Australian. By the time editors found Jar’Edo Wens, he had leaked off Wikipedia and onto the wider Internet.

He had also broken every other Wikipedia hoaxing record. At nine years, nine months and three long days, Jar’Edo Wens is the longest-lived hoax found on the free encyclopedia yet. 

Ask any diehard Wikipedian about hoaxes, of course, and they’ll call them a natural byproduct of the Wikipedia project: Since the day the open-sourced encyclopedia opened for business in 2001, pranksters, vandals and other saboteurs have done their best to disrupt it.

[Beyonce fans wrecked Beck’s Wikipedia page after the Grammys]

But in the past year, Wikipedia hoaxes appear to have grown far more frequent — or at least far more visible. Editors have uncovered 33 major hoaxes since January, including several about fake bands and fake political parties. Of Wikipedia’s 16 most egregious hoaxes, 15 were discovered in the past six months. There’s no telling, of course, exactly how many hoaxes we simply haven’t yet dug up.

There’s a lot of nonsense on Wikipedia that gets papered over,” sums Gregory Kohs, a former editor and prominent Wikipedia critic. “Wikipedia is very good at catching obvious vandalism, like swearing and caps-lock. But non-obvious vandalism?” — not so much, he says.

To understand how misinformation spreads on Wikipedia, you must first understand how the site works. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, of course: More than 130,000 readers have done so in the past 30 days. But because wide-open editing is an obvious recipe for disaster, the site is undergirded by a vast volunteer bureaucracy. These editors and administrators aren’t paid, and they aren’t technically affiliated with Wikipedia or Wikimedia, the aloof nonprofit that oversees the site. But whether because they believe in Wikipedia’s mission or they like the power or they’re bored, they spend hours policing the site’s new changes, checking links and tweaking grammar and arguing on internal message boards.

Their success rate, by all accounts, is a pretty high one; in a recent interview with “60 Minutes,” Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales boasted that he no longer saw vandalism as much of a problem. And yet, critics like Kohs and his colleagues at the Wikipedia watchdog Wikipediocracy maintain that there are untold errors that editors don’t even know about, let alone fix.

[Men’s rights activists: A feminist conspiracy is ruining Wikipedia]

On Monday night, Kohs wrapped up an experiment in which he inserted outlandish errors into 31 articles and tracked whether editors ever found them. After more than two months, half of his hoaxes still had not been found — and those included errors on high-profile pages, like “Mediterranean climate” and “inflammation.” (By his estimate, more than 100,000 people have now seen the claim that volcanic rock produced by the human body causes inflammation pain.)

And there are more unchecked hoaxes where those came from. Editors only recently caught a six-year-old article about the “Pax Romana,” an entirely fictitious Nazi program. Likewise “Elaine de Francias,” the invented illegitimate daughter of Henry II of France. And the obvious, eight-year-old hoax of “Don Meme,” a Mexican guru who materializes at parties and mentors hipster bands.

 

Googling “Don Meme” turns up this YouTube video. That cartoon indicates the poster is trolling. (YouTube)

 

Just this week, the librarian and writer Jessamyn West uncovered the origins of a long-running urban legend involving neckbeards, Louisa May Alcott and Henry Thoreau: The story was invented in a Wikipedia article eight years ago.

“I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it’s not fair to say Wikipedia is ‘self-correcting,’” Kohs said.

There is, surprisingly, not much data to conclusively confirm or deny this. While Wikipedia’s accuracy has been a favorite subject of study for Internet-minded academics, the usual methodology compares articles from an authoritative reference work with their Wikipedia equivalents. Since the Encyclopedia Britannica doesn’t have articles on Jar’Edo Wens or Don Meme or Elaine de Francias, most studies that have trumpeted Wikipedia’s accuracy haven’t accounted for intentional hoaxes.

According to Wikipedia’s own, self-admittedly spotty records, once a hoax crosses the one-year mark, it can be expected to survive for another three years.

Chasing Jar’Edo Wens

No one knows who started the Jar’Edo Wens hoax, but I have one (admittedly spotty) guess. On May 29, 2005, an anonymous editor created that page, and another page, from an Australian IP address. The editor never returned to Wikipedia, but a pseudonymous, Melbourne-based avant-garde writer did refer to the “god” on a message board in 2009. The editor’s pseudonym, like Jar’Edo Wens, was an odd amalgamation of a first and last name. The editor hasn’t posted on that alias since 2012, but my money’s on him all the same.

It’s easier to see the Wikipedians who came after: Wikipedia logs every change to every article page on a tab called “history,” just as it logs discussion of every article on the so-called “talk” page. Editors didn’t stop by Jar’Edo Wens’s page too frequently — it was, after all, pretty obscure — but someone did make a quick grammar fix in 2006, and someone flagged the page for lacking sources three years later.


A mask carving of “Jar’Edo Wens” by the French artist Noyo. ( DeviantArt /Creative Commons 3.0)

 

In November 2014, an anonymous user tagged the page as a possible hoax: “Not found in several [reliable sources] on Aboriginal religion,” the user noted. The page still wasn’t immediately taken down; it’s Wikipedia policy to debate articles, sometimes at great length, before deleting them.

“Lacked sources for almost a decade,” one editor argued.

“The letters D, J, O and S are not used in the Arrente [Aboriginal] language,” another said.

On March 3, prompted by a Wikipediocracy post that made fun of the long deletion process, veteran Wikipedia administrator Ira Matetsky deleted the “blatant and indisputable hoax,” calling it an “embarrassment.”

And yet Matetsky, like many of his fellow Wikipedians, counts the incident less as a loss than as a win. In the end, the system worked; the hoax was deleted. The growing number of hoaxes could suggest that Wikipedians are getting better at uncovering them.

“Wikipedia is uniquely vulnerable to deliberate mistakes,” Matetsky said. “But Wikipedia is also uniquely gifted at its ability to fix misinformation.”

Dozens of sophisticated, automated programs crawl the encyclopedia and delete vandalism, according to an evolving (and overwhelmingly accurate) algorithm. On top of those bots are the editors themselves, many of whom keep an eye on controversial articles or watch for suspicious additions to the “new page” feed.

Wikipedia’s “New Pages” feed, where editors can watch for hoaxes and vandals in real time. (Wikipedia)

As of this writing, there were 5,476 unreviewed pages in the English Wikipedia, the oldest of which had been around 111 days. I spotted a probable hoax — an unsourced article on an otherwise un-Googleable “new world religion” — within minutes of loading the page.

It’s not perfect, exactly. But Matetsky points out that newspapers and books and GPS systems also make minor errors every day.

“The question is not whether Wikipedia is more or less reliable than a day at the New York Public Library,” Matetsky said. “The question is whether Wikipedia is more or less reliable than whatever other results top Google search.”

When there are no other Google results, of course, it’s hard to call either way. Or worse: When the other results spring from a Wikipedia error, a phenomenon named “citogenesis” by the Web comic xkcd. For years, the Internet record has claimed that “chicken azid” is another term for the dish “chicken korma,” and that Amelia Bedelia was inspired by a Cameroonian maid.

Even Jar’Edo Wens managed the leap from Wikipedia fiction to something approaching reality: The fake god is name-checked in a book about atheism and the falseness of religion — which is pretty ironic, considering.

Wikipedia’s big problem

But even given the growing awareness of hoaxes, what’s a Wikipedian to do? There are 4.8 million pages on the site’s English version, but only 12,000 veteran editors. That works out to roughly 400 pages per volunteer — far more than at any other time in the site’s history.

“Wikipedia could acknowledge that by now it contains hundreds of thousands of articles on marginal topics that its volunteer system is simply unable to curate responsibly,” said Andreas Kolbe, another contributor to the watchdog site Wikipediocracy. Instead, he says, the Wikimedia Foundation has taken an alternate approach: Dismiss each hoax as a one-off deception, and “lament how terrible it is that someone abused their trust.”

Reformers, both within and outside the site, insist there are other ways. You hear frequent references to a feature called “pending changes,” which was promised by Wikimedia in 2010 and again in 2012. The feature would hold new edits in a queue until an experienced editor could review them. On German Wikipedia, where “pending changes” has long been the norm, that little speed bump seems to work quite well.

Wikipedians have proposed other reforms, too. The Wikimedia Foundation is funding research into more robust bots that could score the quality of site revisions and refer bad edits to volunteers for review. Another proposed bot would crawl the site and parse suspicious passages into questions, which editors could quickly research and either reject or approve.

[The bot that made Swedish Wikipedia the second largest in the world]

Still, none of this changes the numbers problem at the core of Wikipedia. The site’s editor base has atrophied since 2007, and today’s editors are largely young, white, Western men. It’s no coincidence that, in Kohs’s vandalism experiment, an error on an obscure New York canal was corrected, while lies about Ecuadorian customs, Indian legends and Japanese history were not. Likewise the Wiki-troll Jagged85, who meddled with articles about Islamic history for years; it was only when he messed with a video game page that he finally got kicked off.
“If the Jar’Edo Wens hoax had been about Greek or Roman or Norse mythology, it would’ve been found faster,” Matetsky admits. “If we had more indigenous Australian editors, it would’ve been picked up and fixed.”

And yet, there’s some suggestion that even that wouldn’t have helped, that even snazzy new initiatives and more moderators couldn’t save the Internet from itself. For years, a group of interested editors waged an organized campaign to improve articles about indigenous Australians, including a page on “Aboriginal deities” that listed Jar’Edo Wens.
They added a photo and changed the page title. They grouped the deities under regional headings. Gradually, the campaign broke up, all without anyone noticing the invented aboriginal spirit: god of earthly knowledge — and its inevitable limits.

Liked that? Try these:
Gamergate, Wikipedia and the limits of ‘human knowledge’
The science of Wikipedia controversy
The 15 worst Internet hoaxes of 2014​

Melbourne, Australia  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne
Melbourne (/ˈmɛlbərn/  MEL-bərn) is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia and Oceania.  Its name refers to an urban agglomeration of 9,992.5 km2 (3,858.1 sq mi),  comprising a metropolitan area with 31 municipalities, and is also the common name for its city centre. The city occupies much of the coastline of Port Phillip bay and spreads into the hinterlands towards the Dandenong and Macedon ranges, Mornington Peninsula and Yarra Valley. It has a population of approximately 5 million (19% of the population of Australia), and its inhabitants are referred to as "Melburnians".

Corruption in Wikiland? Paid PR scandal erupts at Wikipedia
https://www.cnet.com/news/corruption-in-wikiland-paid-pr-scandal-erupts-at-wikipedia/
A Wikipedia trustee and a Wikipedian In Residence have been editing the online encyclopedia on behalf of PR clients. Add the discovery of an SEO business run on the side, and this tempest is out of its teapot.
BY VIOLET BLUESEPTEMBER 18, 2012
Concerned Wikipedians raised the alarm Monday that two trusted men -- one a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK, the other a respected Wikipedian In Residence -- are allegedly editing Wikipedia pages and facilitating front-page placement for their pay-for-play, publicity-seeking clients.

Jimmy Wales is not pleased.
It began this week when an interesting discussion started on the DYK ("Did You Know") discussion page.
Roger Bamkin, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation UK, whose LinkedIn page describes him as a high-return-earning PR consultant, appeared to be using Wikipedia's main page "Did You Know" feature and the resources of Wikipedia's GLAM WikiProject (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) initiative to pimp his client's project.

Bamkin's current client is the country of Gibraltar.
In August, Gibraltar was featured as a Wikipedia DYK front page feature an astonishing seventeen times - that's an unusual frequency of every 2-3 days.
Other than the Olympics, it is the only repeated topic throughout the month.
The "Did You Know" section on Wikipedia's Main Page publicizes new or expanded articles - the publicity viewership on Wikipedia's front page is estimated in the hundreds of millions per month.

Wales: "wildly inappropriate"
When Wikipedia's founder was told about Bamkin's client in relation to Wikimedia UK, Jimmy Wales wrote:
It is wildly inappropriate for a board member of a chapter, or anyone else in an official role of any kind in a charity associated with Wikipedia, to take payment from customers in exchange for securing favorable placement on the front page of Wikipedia or anywhere else. - Jimbo Wales (talk) 00:54, 17 September 2012 (UTC)
At the same time Bamkin's consulting work as a representative of Wikimedia Foundation reared its ugly head, Wikipedia community members exposed the SEO-focused, PR-strategy Wikipedia page editing business run by respected GLAM editor Max Klein.
Both Klein and Bamkin are "Wikipedians In Residence," a role held by Wikipedia editors in high esteem who liaison with galleries, libraries, archives and museums to facilitate information between the organizations and Wikipedia community editors.
Wikipedians In Residence are not allowed to operate if there are conflicts of interest and are not allowed to edit the pages of the organization they liaison with.
Maximillion Klein runs a consulting business called "untrikiwiki" whose self-description explains:
A positive Wikipedia article is invaluable SEO: it's almost guaranteed to be a top three Google hit. Surprisingly this benefit of writing for Wikipedia is underutilized, but relates exactly the lack of true expertise in the field. ... WE HAVE THE EXPERTISE NEEDED to navigate the complex maze surrounding 'conflict of interest' editing on Wikipedia. With more than eight years of experience, over 10,000 edits, and countless community connections we offer holistic Wikipedia services.
When the concerned Wikipedia editors asked Jimmy Wales about untrikiwiki (in the thread about Roger Bamkin) Wales commented:
I was unaware of this case, and haven't had time to look into it. If what you say is accurate, then of course I'm extremely unhappy about it. It's disgusting.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 00:54, 17 September 2012
No specific Wikimedia UK policy on "paid editing"
At this time, there is no Wikimedia UK policy against "paid editing" for Wikipedia pages, though Jimmy Wales has said that paid editing is against Wikipedia values and policy.
However, there's no doubt that the lack of a clear policy casts a shadow over the public's perception of Wikipedia's ethical standing.
If PR editing from Wikipedia's representatives -- paid or not -- were to be openly tolerated, Wikipedia's reputation will most certainly be harmed in a way that is different from the harm done from vandalism or covert PR editing.
In the case of Roger Bamkin, a director of Wikimedia UK is advertising himself, as a Wikimedia UK director, for paid consultancy jobs, and directs and engages in editing on Wikipedia in the service of his personal client.

Roger Bamkin's Experience 
Consultant Victuallers Ltd May 2012 - Present (5 months) 
I've been involved with QRpedia and Monmouthpedia which have delivered > £2m paybeack on £50K investment.
Bamkin's formal Declaration of Interests for Wikimedia UK states there is no conflict of interest (COI) with his role, access to Wikipedia resources and contract with Gibraltar as there is no official relationship between Gibraltar and Wikimedia UK.
But to the outside eye this might appear as a financial conflict of interest among the people who are handling the money donated to support Wikipedia. Not to mention how unfair it is.
You may be wondering how the country of Gibraltar ended up in the middle of a Wikipedia PR editing scandal. To answer that question, we can visit Wikipedia.
Monmouthpedia is a Wikipedia project that links Wikipedia and the town of Monmouth in South Wales by the use of smartphone scannable QR codes.
As the story is told, the idea for Monmouthpedia came when Roger Bamkin and Steve Virgin (former Wikimedia UK board member, current PR consultant and Bamkin's business partner) gave a TEDx talk about their Wikipedia QR-code project QRpedia. From the audience, Wikipedia editor Steve Cummings (also Bamkin's business partner) suggested they "do a whole town."

Wales Online wrote:
He [Bamkin] picked Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, as his next project after being flooded with invitations from places around the world hoping to be the second Wikipedia town.
Enter Gibraltarpedia. In a feature yesterday, BBC News explained Gibraltarpedia as the way in which Gibraltar is using QR codes and Wikipedia to target and attract tourists.
While not as straightforward as untrikiwiki's open offer to navigate tricky Wikipedia conflict of interest rules as a service for for paying clients, Gibraltarpedia may be a cool idea but it still comes off as little more than free advertising for tourism - setting up a walled garden of articles all with an eye to promoting tourism - and potential investment - in Gibraltar.
Seventeen features on Wikipedia's front page in one month is in equal measures strangely admirable, somewhat saddening and completely worrying.

From a 2009 statement by Jimmy Wales:
It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc. I will personally block any cases that I am shown. (...)
(...) Would we block a good editor if we found out after the fact is a very different question. We have traditions of forgiveness and working with people to improve their behavior and ours whenever we can - things are never so simple. Of course it is possible to imagine a situation where someone can and should be forgiven... because that's very common.
That's not the same as saying that it would ever be ok, as a matter of policy. Just imagine the disaster for our reputation.
I think many people would consider the idea of "Did You Know" - and Wikipedia's front page - being successfully used in a for-profit commercial venture by any entity to be harmful to Wikipedia, reputation or otherwise. 
But then again, Wikipedia and alleged conflicts of interest are not known to be handled with practicality - or clarity. Just ask Philip Roth.
Google Play: We've cracked down on bad apps: Google says it rejected at least 55 percent more app submissions in 2018.
The best meal kit delivery services: Are you an enthusiastic cook with not enough time? These services can help.

The Wikipedia Fund Raising went from around $2 million in 2007 to $82 million in 2016​

Where truth dies online…
http://wikipediawehaveaproblem.com/2014/05/where-truth-dies-online/

May 2, 2014 wwhp activism, online harassment, Wikipedia
Spiked online just published a broad review of the unaccountability issue on Wikipedia. Much of it is not new, but I was happy to see Wikipedia’s influence being understood as a method of manipulation for influencing public opinion, and if abused properly an essential tool in propaganda.
 By controlling Wikipedia they could set the media agenda, shape public opinion and even influence court proceedings in Italy where there has now been one trial and two appeals. Italian jurors are encouraged to read widely and do their own research – the polar opposite of the UK system – and this makes trials vulnerable to interference from outside the court. 

Wikipedia: Where truth goes to die.
Wikipedia: where truth dies online
Run by cliquish, censorious editors and open to pranks and vandalism, Wikipedia is worthless and damaging.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2014/04/29/wikipedia-where-truth-dies-online/#.U2PbEK1dWFd

NIGEL SCOTT
29th April 2014

A man knocks at your door. You answer and he tells you he is an encyclopaedia salesman.
‘I have the largest and most comprehensive encyclopaedia the world has ever seen’, he says.
‘Tell me about it!
Wikipedia is worthless and damaging.

NIGEL SCOTT
29th April 2014
TopicsSCIENCE & TECH

A man knocks at your door. You answer and he tells you he is an encyclopaedia salesman.
‘I have the largest and most comprehensive encyclopaedia the world has ever seen’, he says.
‘Tell me about it!’
‘It has more editors and more entries than any other encyclopaedia ever. Most of the contributors are anonymous and no entry is ever finished. It is constantly changing. Any entry may be different each time you go back to it. Celebrities and companies pay PR agencies to edit entries. Controversial topics are often the subject of edit wars that can go on for years and involve scores of editors. Pranksters and jokers may change entries and insert bogus facts. Whole entries about events that never happened may be created. Other entries will disappear without notice. Experts may be banned from editing subjects that they are leading authorities on, because they are cited as primary sources. University academics and teachers warn their students to exercise extreme caution when using it. Nothing in it can be relied on. You will never know whether anything you read in it is true or not. Are you interested?’

‘I’ll think about it’, you say, and close the door.

News that civil servants in Whitehall hacked the Wikipedia entry for the Hillsborough disaster and inserted gratuitous insults about the men and women who died in the worst football-ground disaster in British history was greeted with predictable anger last week. This anger was directed at the anonymous vandals who posted the edits, rather than the organisation and website that facilitated the defamation. But, it must be said, Wikipedia is not blameless in this. It allows misinformation to flourish and provides it with a cloak of respectability. It is under-resourced and is unable to police itself adequately.

Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger but was predated by an earlier Wales/Sanger project, Nupedia, also a free online encyclopaedia, but one that was written and peer-reviewed by experts. In its three-year life, Nupedia only produced 25 articles, with a further 74 in progress when it was shut down. The lesson learned from the Nupedia experiment was that this protracted process with meagre output would never produce a comprehensive and up-to-date online encyclopaedia. The experts and peer reviews would have to go. Wikipedia would take over where Nupedia left off and would be a free for all for anyone and everyone who wanted to edit it. Quality would have to give way to quantity so a complicated system of checks and balances evolved, intended to ensure accuracy and accountability, though, despite the best intentions of its founders, this has never really been achieved.

Wikipedia has been a massive success but has always had immense flaws, the greatest one being that nothing it publishes can be trusted. This, you might think, is a pretty big flaw. There are over 21million editors with varying degrees of competence and honesty. Rogue editors abound and do not restrict themselves to supposedly controversial topics, as the recently discovered Hillsborough example demonstrates.

Attempts to tighten up procedures by introducing more arcane and complicated editing processes and rules have themselves been criticised. Kat Walsh, a chair of the Wikimedia foundation, said ‘It was easier when I joined in 2004… Everything was a little less complicated…. It’s harder and harder for new [Wikipedia editors] to adjust.’

Wikipedia itself helpfully publishes a page of notable hoaxes that have littered its past decade. In 2007, the Sun alleged that Labour MP Chuka Umunna edited his own page. Umunna denied this but conceded that one of his campaign team may have set up the page. In 2013, the London Evening Standard further alleged that an edit to Umunna’s Wikipedia page was made in 2008 on a computer located at the law firm where he worked. Once again, Umunna repeated that he ‘could not recall’ editing the page. Umunna is not the only politician who has been accused of organising his or her own page edits. It would be easier to find a politician who has not done so.

But politicians are easy targets. Organisations are no better. Last year Wiki-PR, a company that was set up specifically to offer page editing for commercial clients, was issued with a cease-and-desist letter by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wiki-PR employed 45 staff who edited pages using ‘sock puppet’ (fake) accounts and advertised its services online. Sock puppets are a big problem for Wikipedia because so many of its editors are anonymous. This makes it almost impossible to verify bona fide users. Wikipedia literally has no idea who many of its editors are.

Another embarrassment for Wikipedia was the recent revelation that a hoax page had survived for five years and had won several awards. The ‘Bicholim conflict’ entry was a detailed but fictitious account of a war in Indian Goa that never took place. It was rated as one of Wikipedia’s top pages and received a quality award that only one per cent of all Wikipedia articles achieve.

Wikipedia exposed: Bullying and harassment tactics of activist editors in a wiki war- a case study

https://www.sott.net/article/276298-Wikipedia-exposed-Bullying-and-harassment-tactics-of-activist-editors-in-a-wiki-war-a-case-study 

Rome Viharo
Wikipediawehaveaproblem.com
Sat, 21 Dec 2013 21:54 UTC 

 Introduction 

According to a tiny handful of Wikipedia editors and admins, I'm the engineer of a vast and co-ordinated global social media experiment for creating conflict. I'm a 'fringe' promoter, a conspiracy theorist, a charlatan for 'pseudoscience' and hold 'views' outside the mainstream. I'm also a well known internet troll with an anti-social personality disorder and am borderline autistic, a ringleader for countless sock puppets and in bed with PR agencies as well as just being plain old incompetent. According to them, as colorful as such a description it is, I'm just that sort of 'peculiar person'. This description of me was then used to get admins on Wikipedia to ban me indefinitely from the platform in addition to further off Wikipedia site harassment. 

I'm not that interesting of a person to get this much scrutiny. I am a casualty of a 'wiki' war. The article I was editing is not even something controversial, it was not an article about Israel/Palestine, Islam, Jesus or JFK conspiracy theories. I was simply editing a biography of a living person - a notable individual who has as many detractors as he does supporters. 

If this reads to you like another case of online harassment, it is. If you think that Wikipedia must have clear policies and guidelines against this sort of thing - they do. If you think admins should guard and protect against this from happening - they didn't. 

Please don't think however that I take this as a victim or just a disgruntled editor who lost his voice. I'm not. 

I'm a huge supporter of collective editing platforms and the usefulness of their utility and a developer of a collective editing platform myself. Harassment and bullying may be a disruptive annoyance on Facebook or discussion forums, but in an online collaborative environment its poisonous to consensus building. 

Since my own sanction in Oct of 2013, other editors who have joined the article have been threatened with similar treatment and banned. It's still happening, other admins are literally threatening recently banned editors that if they do not go quietly from Wikipedia, they may find similar 'media attention' as other problem editors, i.e. yours truly. 

Activist editors game Wikipedia, a case study 

This entire case study is a detailed summary with evidence provided in links which shows how Wikipedia's own guidelines, notice boards and committees are gamed by activist editors. It shows how personal attacks are leveraged by experienced editors and admins. It is suggested by this study that this may be a symptom of an increasingly shrinking and increasingly insular community who may be blind to its own toxicity to its core principle of neutrality. 

Other points of view on the issue 

This happens more than you think, as this recent discussion on Reddit reveals. Its turning away countless new editors and is responsible for more leaving. Sophisticated studies are showing that Wikipedia is in decline. 'Polluted' editor culture is often mentioned. 

In case you think I'm driven by my own bias in writing this, see how neutral editors with no opinions on the topic note the same. 

We simply can't have bullying influence articles on Wikipedia 

I write this account both for selfish and unselfish reasons. My selfish reasons are to clear my name online and the attack on my reputation that was waged on me from editing on Wikipedia. 

The unselfish reason is that this is simply 'wrong', both morally, ethically, and yes perhaps even legally. That Wikipedia is turning a blind eye to its own internal online harassment is troubling and I believe a genuine and reasonable concern. What happens when the largest repository of knowledge becomes run amok with bands of activist editors who have bullied their way to the top of the food chain? 

This case study shows this happening in one particular instance. It is the hope that seeing how this can happen in one instance may prevent it happening in another. I believe this study may be unique because the evidence shows where the flaws are in Wikipedia's own internal process. 

Admittedly, I may appear to bring a 'idealistic enthusiasm' to this project, but if I do I do so without apologies. 

As a big supporter of collective editing platforms, even a developer of one myself, I believe we must not allow online bullying and harassment to 'work' on any consensus building platform, much less the worlds largest website and repository of knowledge. 

Even Google and Apple assume the credibility of Wikipedia's meta data and distribute it directly to their users, regardless if its corrupted meta data gamed by agitated editors. 

So while my case study is about me - the problem on Wikipedia is not. And that is what my case study addresses. 

A Biography of a Living Person poses a unique problem 

This happened on a very well known and contentious article on Wikipedia about biologist Rupert Sheldrake and a 'bona fide' wiki war occurring there long before my arrival. This wiki war has captured the attention of the BBC, Forbes, The New Republic, The Huffington Post and a microsphere of bloggers, with mainstream skeptics like Jerry Coyne and Sheldrake supporters such as Deepak Chopra escalating the wiki war to the mainstream. 

I was surprised to find detractors of a notable living person controlling his biography on Wikipedia 

To me it did not seem appropriate that vocal detractors of a living biography would be allowed to control his Wikipedia article. It was as if members of the Tea Party would be allowed to control the biography of Barak Obama, or if the biography of George Bush was controlled by the editorial staff at the Huffington Post. Regardless of the ideologies or beliefs, that's clearly not an environment that would produce a neutral point of view nor is it in line with the principles of Wikipedia. 

I was just one of a handful of outside editors or bystanders that came in to help. Speaking for pretty much most of the other editors on the page, we just wanted the article to be more neutral. 

I took this challenge of getting the page towards a more keen neutrality pretty seriously too. I spent weeks doing research into Wikipedia guidelines and even hired an experienced Wikipedian as a consultant to make sure my participation was in tune with Wikipedia's rules. This is partially why this whole experience was so surreal to me. I made such an effort to operate with integrity to Wikipedia's principles. I was shocked to see all of these guidelines and rules as I understood them ignored and editors like myself who diligently tried to stick to them harassed and banned. 

Overview: Harassed in first three days of participating 

Within three days of my six week presence on Rupert Sheldrake's 'Talk' page, I was outed and harassed by a Wikipedia editor called Vzaak who immediately issued several warnings to me and then exposed personal information about me on the site. This is was only one of many forms of bullying, harassment, and personal attacks. 

I took Vzaak's behavior into dispute resolution on day four - causing Vzaak to pull back her attempts to harass me. 

Although Vzaak offered me an olive branch (a sign of resolution between editors) and agreed to stop harassing me with my personal information, she continued anyway after I accepted her peace offering. 

Continuing Sept 20th, Vzaak initiated a campaign of 'reputation destruction and disruption' against me through the talk pages of other editors throughout Wikipedia. This campaign was used to ban me indefinitely from Wikipedia and harm my identity off Wikipedia, which continues to this day. 

Overview: Hunted and hounded 

As evidence shows, Vzaak became the ring leader in a co-ordinated effort with other editors to harass and personally attack me further, continually spreading personal information about me and seeking to sanction me off of Wikipedia. 

Vzaak's campaign for reputation distortion became apparent to me when I presented my 'Request for a New Consensus' on the 'Talk' page in question on Oct 8th. 

Vzaak, IRWolfie, Louie Louie and Roxy the Dog plotted various ways to create a 'sanctionable' event against me, beginning first to sanction me for spreading 'conspiracy theories'. This backfired. A few days later they found found a third way to sanction me for 'sock puppetry', accusing me of operating more than one account on one Wikipedia article. 

One user I was accused of being even came back to Wikipedia to clear my name and his. And even though their tools used to verify such accusations determined it was technically unlikely we were the same person - he was sanctioned anywayby Mark Arsten and instigated by Vzaak because he showed up to defend me in the AE hearing as you see here. 

Overview: Five attempts to sanction me, one finally works 

Just as an admin was set to clear me of sock puppeting charges, and Vzaak tried to stop it - a second AE hearing on me started. This time the charge was 'trolling'. The evidence of me trolling was based on the personal information from eight years ago Vzaak continued to spread around. Not one admin noted that this was a personal attack, or cared. Any personal attack was good enough for them. No evidence of my behaviors in 'Talk' were ever substantiated, indeed my contributions were supported by an equal number of other editors who strongly opposed the banning. Not one admin respected anything they said. 

They then made a pillory, with admins and editors hailing my trollish ways, completely oblivious to the traumatizing experience they were delivering. This second hearing was an incredibly organized process that concluded in under 24 hours with less than half of the support of everyone commenting. 

Overview: Highly questionable sanction 

My banning was challenged by other editors quite powerfully, as found in this AE noticeboard here, other editor talk pages and admins pages involved. More recently, TheCapn instigated an Arbitration Request for a hearing on the issue. His requested was deflected to the lower appeal Arbitration Enforcement to handle the problem. 

Overview: Tumbleman ban sets off 'cultural' war momentarily 

After I was banned admins and editors jumped in and wrote on my talk page, calling me incompetent, autistic, a troll, an ego maniac, a conspiracy theorist, and a heap of other awkward and libelous associations. If the intention behind this 'mob mind' was not so abusive, the entire affair would be comical, as one editor commented it was like watching Monty Python's 'Blasphemy' sketch. 

Shortly thereafter a wiki war began to happen on my own talk page. Admins and activist editors began an argument with supportive editors, with the final attack being an article created about me on Rational Wiki. Craig Weiler blogged about 'The Trial of the Tumbleman' and somehow I unwittingly became involved in a cultural war between skeptic activists and supporters of Rupert Sheldrake's research. 

Ironically - the entire experience as the evidence will show was almost step for step with a 'humorous' essay on Wikipedia called 'How to Ban a POV you don't like'. Its meant to be written as a joke, but the irony is its exactly what happened. 

Don't take my word for it, please check the evidence 
Although my story is going to be covered with my own point of view, what protects you from my unavoidable bias is that Wikipedia records everything. Everything that happened is archived. I present evidence with each claim I make in each link provided. This article you're reading now is the wireframe for everything. Each link provides and overview of the context of what happened to links on Wikipedia that support it in evidence and the chapter for context. 
I believe we need to shine some light in these dark little crevices. I believe we need to give this a proper review. This is a factual case study of how harassment and bullying is used to control an article on the worlds most popular site. This is what it looks like. This is how it happens. This is how it will continue to happen. 
So hello world, come meet your guardians of knowledge. 

Wikipedia, we have a problem. 

http://wikipediawehaveaproblem.com/
Rome Viharo 

Jimmy Wales with his second wife, Christine Rohan

 Wikipedia Controversies
Since the launch of Wikipedia in January 2001, a number of controversies have occurred. Wikipedia's open nature, in which anyone can edit most articles, has led to various concerns, such as the quality of writing, the amount of vandalism, and the accuracy of information on the project.
The media have covered a number of controversial events and scandals related to Wikipedia and its parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Common subjects of coverage include articles containing false information, public figures and corporations editing articles for which they have a serious conflict of interest, paid Wikipedia editing and hostile interactions between Wikipedia editors and public figures.
The Seigenthaler biography incident led to media criticism of the reliability of Wikipedia. This incident began in May 2005 with the anonymous posting of a hoax Wikipedia article with false, negative allegations about John Seigenthaler, a well-known American journalist.
In March 2007, Wikipedia was again the subject of media attention with the Essjay controversy, which involved a prominent English Wikipedia editor and administrator who claimed he was a "tenured professor of religion at a private university" with a "Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law" when in fact he was a 24-year-old who held no advanced degrees.
The 2012 scandals involving paid consultancy for the government of Gibraltar by Roger Bamkin, a Wikimedia UKboard member, and potential conflicts of interest have highlighted Wikipedia's vulnerabilities. The presence of inaccurate and false information, as well as the perceived hostile editing climate, have been linked to a decline in editor participation. Another controversy arose in 2013 after an investigation by Wikipedians found that the Wiki-PR company had edited Wikipedia for paying clients, using "an army" of sockpuppet accounts that purportedly included 45 Wikipedia editors and administrators.
 In 2015, the Orangemoody investigation showed that businesses and minor celebrities had been blackmailed over their Wikipedia articles by a coordinated group of fraudsters, again using hundreds of sockpuppets.
Controversies within and concerning Wikipedia and the WMF have been the subject of several scholarly papers This list is a collection of the more notable instances.

Wikipedia Exposed As Part Of Climategate Scandal
Saturday, 30th January 2010
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/wikipedia-exposed-part-climategate-scandal  
Wikipedia, the notorious online encyclopedia, which features the likes of Chip Berlet among its "editors," has been caught in the center of the climategate swindle. According to a report by Lawrence Solomon published in the National Post of Canada, a Wikipedia editor and UK Green Party activist named William Connolley, doctored literally thousands of entries, to conceal the fact that, during the Medieval period, there was a global warming spell, following the Little Ice Age. The fact of this Medieval Warm Period exposes the lie about man-caused global warming, the chief argument for radical population reduction and deindustrialization.
Beginning in Feb. 2003, Connolley began rewriting or editing posted entries refuting the global warming lies. According to Solomon:
#All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, nowever, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn't like the subject of a certain article, he removed it--more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred--over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.
The Medieval Warm Period ran from 1000-1400 AD, and the warming resulted in a flourishing of agriculture, increased life expectancy and other benefits, according to the historical record cited by Solomon. Many of the email messages that surfaced from East Anglia University discussed the "problem" with the Medieval Warm Period, which "diluted the message" of the climate change fanatics. The IPCC report codified the banning of any mention of the Medieval Warm Period, by producing the so-called "hockey stick" graph, which blacked out the 400-year period of global warming, claiming a constant temperature for 1,000 years, leading into the industrial age when things heated up due to evil industrialization and other ills of modern society. According to Solomon's account, a rapid-reaction team was established to kill off all criticism of the global warming hoax, centered around a website called RealClimate.org. Connolley was one of the nine members of this group, and he used Wikipedia as a major base for their Big Lie campaign.
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Wikipedia exposed as junk science propaganda platform for Big Pharma

DAVID 8 August 2016

https://www.davidicke.com/article/381217/wikipedia-exposed-junk-science-propaganda-platform-big-pharma

According to Bolen Report, Wikipedia is not a website we should be trusting when it comes to unbiased, accurate information. Wikipedia is an example of "skeptic" leadership – with the "skeptics" actually being an organized hate group that claim to be the sole protectors of intellectual truth. 
"Skeptics" are in favor of vaccines, mammograms, pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter medication – and opponents of nutritional supplements, herbal medicine, massage therapy, energy medicine and homeopathy, as reported by Natural News.' 
Read more: Wikipedia exposed as junk science propaganda platform for Big Pharma

The Śarīra pagoda in Qixia Temple in Nanjing, China. It was built in ad 601 and rebuilt in the 10th century.

Canadian Sen. Mike Duffy (image via Wikimedia Commons)

​Wikipediocracy
Because you can’t talk about Wikipedia flaws on Wikipedia
Why this Site?
http://wikipediocracy.com/2019/09/05/melania-trump-is-a-former-sex-worker-and-porn-star/

Our Mission:
We exist to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with its structural flaws; and to inoculate the unsuspecting public against the torrent of misinformation, defamation, and general nonsense that issues forth from one of the world’s most frequently visited websites, the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

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Wikidata: Melania Trump was a “former sex worker and porn star”
Guest post by Wikipedia editor Fram

Editor’s note: Fram submitted the essay below to Wikipediocracy on June 23rd, 2019, in lieu of a statement that had apparently been requested by one or more of our forum members regarding actions that had been recently taken against him by the Wikimedia Foundation. We declined to publish the essay immediately, however, since this might have been seen as our “officially” taking sides in the dispute. At this point, we don’t think that really matters anymore, so we’re publishing this updated version (modified by Midsize “Somey” Jake and one or two others who have chosen to remain nameless), which gives the durations of the “vandal-edit” examples cited in the original. Please note that at the time of the original submission, none of these vandal-edits had been fixed.

Melania Trump was a “former sex worker and porn star” — or at least that’s what people visiting Wikimedia Commons, Simple-English Wikipedia (aimed mostly at children), and Wikidata (the Wikipedia data repository) read for nine days after her Wikidata entry was vandalized on June 15th, 2019.

This is just one example of a problem that has faced Wikidata for years without ever being formally addressed: The almost-complete lack of vandal fighters on the site. Wikidata prides itself on the enormous number of items stored there (database dumps of all Wikipedia articles, bibliographic information on millions of scientific articles, and an unknown amount of random information of little or no value at all). Many edits are made there every day (though most of these are small, repetitive changes made by bots), and they are even accepted as an “authority source” by the Library of Congress and the like.

But the actual number of editors, people interested not in their own pet subject but in keeping Wikidata correct and vandalism-free, is very small. Since they are all volunteers, it’s perfectly understandable that they don’t want to spend their time on boring tasks. But at the same time, Wikidata administrators and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) want to use Wikidata as a central repository of data that is automatically shown on every language-version of Wikipedia.

One of the things they’ve done, largely without the Wikipedia community being aware of it, has been to show the description “tag” from Wikidata at the top of Wikipedia pages in mobile view. Wikipedia editors don’t see this description, nor are they able to change this description from Wikipedia. This has removed key editorial decision-making from Wikipedians, as well as vandalism control — even though this description is the first thing mobile viewers see for each article subject, and is also displayed in search engines and when hovering over links.

This issue was raised with the WMF in August 2016, but was largely shrugged off by WMF employees and apologists with responses such as “It seems… like a problem that doesn’t actually exist in practice.”

I then raised the issue at en.wiki in March 2017.

After a Request for Comment and much stalling from the WMF, they turned off this “feature” on en.wiki, though it was later revealed that they only did that for some cases, not all. The history of this whole sorry episode is documented, and efforts to get rid of these descriptions on en.wiki are still ongoing, more than two years later.

Apparently, no one at the WMF realized that if the English Wikipedia had these problems, then all other language versions would have them as well. And sure enough, it is painfully easy to find severe attacks on living people at Wikidata which remain in place for days or weeks because no regular vandalism checks are done there. These are then shown to people on Simple and Commons, but also on other non-English Wikimedia sites, including the French, German, and (especially) Spanish Wikipedias.

Mrs. Trump’s entry is one of the more egregious examples; she’s hardly an obscure topic, regardless of what you might think of her or her husband. But for nine days starting on June 15th, 2019, she was described as “First Lady of the United States, former Slovenian model, former sex worker and porn star” on Commons and the Simple-English Wikipedia.

Similar problems often occur with less-visible pages, but for the persons involved it can be just as hurtful (and in many cases also demonstrates another of the WMF’s gender-related problems).

Ana Villafañe was tagged as a “pornographic actress” for nine weeks, starting on June 8th. She isn’t a highly-notable person like Melania Trump (her en.wiki article only gets about 100 page views per day), but she still deserves some basic respect and protection from a site that claims to be an “authority control” for the world.

The same goes for Sara Ali Khan, labeled an “Indian pornographic actress” for four weeks starting on June 5th. She’s a fairly major (and non-pornographic) star in India; her article gets 6,000 page-views per day on en.wiki alone. The vandalism was hidden at en.wiki on June 11th, when an editor added a local short description, but it remained elsewhere.

Other examples:

· On June 11th, Mexican actor César Bono got a new name and was tagged as a porn actor for eight weeks

· Starting on June 6th, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a large stadium in Australia, was described as a “gaydium” for three weeks

· Actress Emily Browning was renamed to “Camila Medina” on June 7th (at the top of the infobox to the right) for three weeks

· Nicolas del Caño’s English and Spanish labels were changed to a Spanish-vernacular insult (“Coño,” often used as a euphemism for “shit”); starting on June 8th, this lasted for six weeks

Popular Mexican actress Violeta Isfel was first labeled a pornographic actress on June 16th, and edit-warring over this continues to this day. The description was finally suppressed on en.wiki, but the WMF hasn’t taken the next logical step of doing the same for Wikipedias in other languages, failing badly in their job to protect living persons against such defamatory material. The description is still visible for every mobile reader of her page in Spanish (and note that mobile users now account for more than 50% of all readers).

A better-known example to most Wikipediocracy blog readers is Jason Momoa (star of Aquaman, “Khal Drogo” from Game of Thrones, and the husband of Lisa Bonet). His Spanish Wikipedia article gets more than 2000 page-views per day. In the first line of that article, Spanish mobile readers saw him described as an “actor, escritor, productor, director, modelo , homosexualizador de hombres.” I’m not fluent in Spanish, but I don’t think “homosexualizador de hombres” is something one would expect to see at the top of an encyclopedia article, even if it’s meant to be more flattering than insulting. This change was made on the 10th of June and lasted for five weeks, so apparently it simply wasn’t spotted by any regular vandal-fighters who may have happened by.

In the Portuguese language, Brazilian actors Tony Ramos and Antonio Calloni were both tagged on June 14th as porn actors for two weeks. (The latter was referred to as a “Russian porn actor and sunscreen,” according to Google Translate.)

Teala Dunn is a young actress with 3.6 million subscribers to her Youtube channel who has never appeared in an adult film, but not according to her Spanish Wikidata tags. There, she was tagged in December of 2017 as a “porn actress,” and that lasted for 18 months.

Max Berliner, an Argentine actor, was tagged in August of 2017 as a “porn actor” in English. Guess what — he still is, as of today (Sept. 6th).

Lastly, did you know that in the Mapuche language (spoken in Chile and Argentina), Billy Ray Cyrus has been described by Wikidata as a “chaman, actris porno y cantante de regaeton post modernista” since at least 2015?

Such vandalism happens every day, and to be fair, some of it is fixed reasonably quickly. For example, on June 23rd, right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen stopped existing completely on Wikidata, where you instead had to look for “Booba,” but only for about one full day. Meanwhile, Borussia Dortmund soccer player Leroy Sané became “dudu Sané,” but only for about two days. So we know it’s at least possible for the situation to improve.

The English Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation were seriously embarrassed by the Seigenthaler incident in 2005. This (among other factors) led to the creation of the Biographies of Living Persons (BLP) policy, and improved vandalism control — much of it through the use of highly efficient anti-vandalism bots. For high profile pages like Melania Trump’s, such vandalism normally remains there for a few minutes at most.

But while the English Wikipedia has taken its lessons to heart, the same cannot be said for the Wikimedia Foundation, which has left a known vulnerability in place for more than two years on a site notorious for its lack of vandal fighting — thereby exposing readers of numerous WMF sites to the results of these egregious attacks.

 

Wikipedia is asking for donations again—here’s how much cash it already has in the bank
https://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-donations-profit-money-chart-2016-11?r=US&IR=T 
Businessinsider.com- Jeff Dunn - Nov. 28, 2016

Head over to Wikipedia on Monday and you'll see a familiar sight: a big, bold banner asking US users to donate some cash. Once again, it's the time of year where the Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit behind the free, openly editable online encyclopedia — asks its millions of readers to lend a few bucks in an effort to help keep the site free of ads.
If this chart from Statista is any indication, those requests are working. In the past fiscal year, Wikimedia received more than $80 million in donations and other contributions. That's a far cry from the roughly $2 million the organization received in 2007.
So if Wikipedia is a nonprofit, and it doesn't pay its writers, and it's already bagged a ton of cash, why does it keep asking for more?
Well, for one, hosting a site as massive as Wikipedia costs money. Note the red bars — as the site gets bigger, that cost only goes up. Second: reserves. Building up a big emergency stash isn't terribly uncommon in the nonprofit world; the idea is to keep some spare cash handy in case things tank down the road.​

Wikipedia and Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales
Wikipedia began with its launch on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered ..... free content. Nupedia was founded by Jimmy Wales, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief, and funded by the web-advertising company Bomis.
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7, 1966) is an American Internet entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia. .... The intent behind Nupedia was to have expert-written entries on a variety of topics, and to sell advertising .
​Jimmy Wales
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales​

Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland.    
Dunbar is a town on the North Sea coast in East Lothian in the south-east of Scotland, approximately 30 miles east of Edinburgh and 30 miles from the English border north of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Dunbar is a former royal burgh, and gave its name to an ecclesiastical and civil parish.Wikipedia

The Dark Side of Wikipedia BY FULL MEASURE STAFF
 SUNDAY, AUGUST 21ST 2016
http://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/the-dark-side-of-wikipedia  

Right now, this very second, people are busily editing away on the website Wikipedia, at a rate of more than ten edits per second.

There are over five million articles written in English on Wikipedia, with a thousand being added every day.

But there's a dark side to Wikipedia you probably don't know about. The promise of accurate, neutral articles and privacy for contributors is often just a mirage, according to two insiders. They say they've been left battle-scarred after troubling personal encounters with the world's most popular encyclopedia.

Wikipedia, is billed as "the encyclopedia anyone can edit." But for many, it's the opposite.

Greg Kohs is among the blocked. Banned, he says, for challenging Wikipedia policies.

Kohs: Just in the past four hours, 500 IP addresses and users have been blocked from editing Wikipedia.

In 2012, Kohs helped start an opposing website called, "Wikipediocracy," to expose what he calls Wikipedia's "misinformation, defamation and general nonsense."

Sharyl: So Wikipedia does censor users?

Kohs: Absolutely. In a given day, Wikipedia administrators typically are blocking about 1,000 different IP addresses.

Sharyl: 1,000 a day?

Kohs: 1,000 a day. Yes.

When Kohs ran afoul of Wikipedia, he was drawn into an unseen cyberworld. One where he says volunteer editors dole out punishment and retaliation, privacy is violated and special interests control information.

Sharyl: Most people don't know what?

Kohs: Wikipedia is often edited by people who have an agenda.

To understand how it helps to start with the Wikipedia most know and love.

Co-founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia boasts 37 million-plus articles in 291 languages.

Research experts, like Mary Frances Forcier, count on Wikipedia.

Forcier: I think it's user-friendly. I think it's easy to use. It has a very appealing visual interface, and I do think that having the sources at the bottom of the page is really important.

Wikipedia's promise to volunteer editors: anonymity and privacy. Its promise to readers: unbiased articles.

But there were conflicts in this encycutopia from the start. Co-founder Sanger quickly broke away. He later told a reporter, "People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum."

Kohs says Wikipedia's "inmates" include some volunteer editors with an ax to grind or serious conflicts of interest.

Kohs: Sometimes editors will have very aggressive attitudes about what they want to appear in a Wikipedia article.

Sharyl: They can stop opposing opinions?

Kohs: Exactly, exactly.

Sharyl: Even opposing facts?

Kohs: Often times, yes.

When volunteer editors disagree, and they often do, it leads to "edit wars" fought out on Wikipedia's "talk" and "discussion" pages.

Kohs: There's drama on Wikipedia just about every day. You just need to know where to go and look for it.

Edit wars fill thousands of pages deep inside Wikipedia with dialogue that ranges from civil to childish and hostile, like this argument that Kohs read us.

Kohs (reading from Wikipedia): He has violated NPA, which means no personal attacks by telling someone they are 'inferior' and to 'accept their station in life.' He wrote, 'I refuse to be blocked. I am not blocked. You can pretend that you block me all you like, but someone who is right can never be blocked. It is impossible.'

In Wikipedia's world, the ruling authorities are the hundreds of volunteer editors who've reached the most powerful editing status. They're called "administrators," known only by their pseudonyms or user names. They always win the edit wars.

Sharyl: The more edits you make, the longer you've been making them, the more power you're going to have?

Kohs: Yes.

But what happens when powerful editors improperly control content?

Kohs: You'll have different people with a particular scientific point of view and they'll edit and modify Wikipedia so that its articles kind of reflect that point of view.

Wikipedia has given names to bad behavior: malicious editing is "vandalism" and editing for personal or financial gain is paid or "covert editing." Wikipedia discourages both, but they happen all the time.

Two trusted Wikipedia officials were exposed running businesses that covertly edited Wikipedia for PR clients.

Interests for Sony, the CIA, the Vatican, Barack Obama and John McCain all reportedly have been caught secretly editing their own Wikipedia pages to their advantage.

And anonymous Wikipedia editors maintain a stranglehold on selected topics. Kohs demonstrates with the case of Morgellons. The Mayo Clinic calls it "an unexplained skin disorder characterized by sores." But the Wikipedia page dismisses Morgellons as a "delusional belief."

Kohs: So I'm just going to make a little comment here.

Let's see what happens when Kohs adds a research footnote that differs with that narrative.

Kohs: They can just go to this link and you get the abstract of the study right there.

In less than an hour, Kohs' edit disappears.

Kohs: I see that our edit to Morgellons was reverted after about 38 minutes or so.

It was reverted by an administrator who is anonymous, but for his username. If you know where to look, it's possible to see the many Wikipedia topics the same editor worked hard to control.
Kohs: It seems to me that this is someone who is either involved with the medical profession or the pharmaceutical profession. They probably have an agenda to discredit or to suppress alternative medicines, things of that nature.
One study found mistakes in nine out of ten Wikipedia medical entries.
Millions of dollars can depend on how an idea or product is portrayed within the computer pages.
That may be why Wikipedia editors reportedly linked to the pharmaceutical company, AstraZeneca, got caught posting negative material on competitors' pages and adding promotional material to their own.

Kohs sees himself as an equalizer. His business helps clients, including supposed victims of unfair edits, navigate Wikipedia's unbridled landscape. Wikipedia banned him for violating the policy against paid editing and when Kohs criticized the policy and continued under a borrowed account, Wikipedia editors targeted him.
They went to great lengths to track him, using inside information and computer addresses. They researched where Kohs grew up, and traced his movements all the way to Orlando, Florida, where he was making edits while on vacation.

Sharyl: Wikipedia editors that you didn't know at the time were tracking your movements, speculating that you went home for Thanksgiving?

Kohs: That's absolutely correct.
He only discovered that he was being tracked because somebody leaked internal Wikipedia discussions about him.

Kohs: And then somebody chimed in, 'looks like someone went home for Thanksgiving to visit mom and dad,' so you think you're editing with some degree of privacy, but if they want to they can really start to investigate.
Wales has publicly feuded with Kohs over the paid editing policy but declined our interview requests. Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia editors we asked also offered no comment for this report.

Another paid editor, Mike Wood, says his confrontation with Wikipedia was life-changing. Like Kohs, Wood publicly criticized Wikipedia's policies on editing for pay, which he did while on breaks as a casino inspector, until one day when his boss called him in for a meeting.
Wood: He says, 'We received an email and a phone call from the Wikimedia Foundation, telling us that you are using our servers to edit Wikipedia.' He said, 'Wikipedia,' meaning the Wikimedia Foundation, 'put a hard block on our servers, so now no one is allowed to access Wikipedia from our job site.'

That was enough to get Wood fired.

Wood: It was a huge violation of privacy. They put so much pressure on my employer by blocking access to Wikipedia, by telling them what was going on, just the embarrassment, the potential embarrassment alone of what the Wikimedia Foundation pressured my employer with was enough for the employer to terminate me.

Despite the controversies, Wikipedia has many devoted followers.
Mary Frances Forcier is with the Loudoun County Public Library in Virginia. She says Wikipedia is a valuable research tool when used properly.

Forcier: It's accessible. It's in language everyone understands, and it does provide you the kind of source information that can lead you to scholarly works, encyclopedias, reference works and primary sources that can really help you out.

But the next time you visit the world's most popular encyclopedia, you may want to consider some advice you won't find within its pages.

Kohs: When you read Wikipedia, you have to be aware that the people who are writing it, who don't identify themselves, who don't necessarily have any credentials to be writing in the subject matter that they've chosen to write in, are very often pushing an agenda.

Wood: There is no privacy. If they want to know who you are, where you are editing from, they have that, and they can check it and they will. Do not step in front of the train, because they will run you over.

Kohs and Wood still edit Wikipedia for paid clients. And here's an inside tip: on any Wikipedia page, if you want to see what an editor has removed, you can click the tab that says, "view history" and see for yourself. Sometimes, the most interesting material is what's been deleted by those who are guarding the page. Wikimedia has said it makes an effort to prevent biased articles and, when a page is disputed, sometimes editors flag it with a warning notice.

 

Above
Where Popular Apps Are Under Assault
Number of Countries where the following apps are restricted/users were arrested in 2016

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales
'It’s completely insane and it needs to be fixed.' Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer
by Juliette Garside @JulietteGarside  Sat 2 Aug 2014 20.06

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/02/wikipedia-page-google-link-hidden-right-to-be-forgotten

Google is set to restrict search terms to a link to a Wikipedia article, in the first request under Europe's controversial new "right to be forgotten" legislation to affect the 110m-page encyclopaedia.
The identity of the individual requesting a change to Google's search results has not been disclosed and may never be known, but it is understood the request will be put into effect within days. Google and other search engines can only remove the link – as with other "right to be forgotten" requests, the web page itself will remain on Wikipedia.
In May, the European Court of Justice ruled that citizens could ask search engines to remove particular links from results for a search made under their name, if the material was deemed to be out of date, no longer relevant or excessive.
 Google has already begun to implement the ruling, with tens of thousands of links removed from its European search results to sites ranging from the BBC to the Daily Express. Among the data now "hidden" from Google is an article about the 2009 Muslim conversion of Adam Osborne, brother of the chancellor, George Osborne.

Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 and has overseen its transformation into the sixth most visited site on the internet, told the Observer: "It's completely insane and it needs to be fixed."
Wales is one of 10 members of an advisory council formed by Google to decide how to handle takedown requests. The council will travel Europe, with a first hearing scheduled in Madrid on 9 September, before writing guidance for Google and other search engines, such as Microsoft's Bing, on implementing the new law.
It was a test case brought by a Spaniard called Mario Costeja González, who wanted a 1998 article about his home being repossessed removed from search results, that triggered the change in legislation.

"In the case of truthful, non-defamatory information obtained legally, I think there is no possibility of any defensible 'right' to censor what other people are saying," Wales has said. "You do not have a right to use the law to prevent Wikipedia editors from writing truthful information, nor do you have a right to use the law to prevent Google from publishing truthful information. Wikipedia can and should work hard to do a good job, just as Google can and should work hard to do a good job."

On Thursday, Google revealed that France, with 17,500 requests, had made more demands for changes to search results than any other European nation. Germany had made 16,500 requests, and 12,000 requests originated in the UK. Some 8,000 requests came from Spain, 7,500 from Italy, and 5,500 from the Netherlands.
By 18 July, Google had received 91,000 takedown requests in total, relating to 300,000 pages. Its privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, revealed it had refused around 32% of them, asked for more information on 15%, and removed 53%.

The European ruling is not intended to tackle incorrect information, with many of the links removed so far being to news articles whose accuracy has not been challenged. Wikipedia's open editing system means any member of the public can request a change to articles, so long as any new claims are underpinned by independent sources.

Las Vegas, USA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas  
Las Vegas (/lɑːs ˈveɪɡəs/,  Spanish for "The Meadows"; Spanish: [laz ˈβeɣas]), officially the City of Las Vegas and often known simply as Vegas, is the 28th-most populated city in the United States, the most populated city in the state of Nevada, and the county seat of Clark County. The city anchors the Las Vegas Valley metropolitan area and is the largest city within the greater Mojave Desert.  Las Vegas is an internationally renowned major resort city, known primarily for its gambling, shopping, fine dining, entertainment, and nightlife. The Las Vegas Valley as a whole serves as the leading financial, commercial, and cultural center for Nevada.

 US Senate candidate Deedra Abboud announced her candidacy in April 10 2017- Photograph: Matt York/AP

​​Jimmy Wales at the tenth anniversary celebration of the Bengali Wikipedia

Boise, Idaho. USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boise,_Idaho 
Boise (/ˈbɔɪsi/) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Idaho, and is the county seat of Ada County. Located on the Boise River in southwestern Idaho, the population of Boise at the 2010 Census was 205,671, the 99th largest in the United States. Its estimated population in 2018 was 228,790

Wikipedia exposed
 By Alek Boyd  First Published in 2007
http://infodio.com/content/wikipedia-exposed