----- Original Message -----
From: "Skyring" <skyring(a)gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 9:07 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] How to sabotage Wikipedia, for SEO spammers
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 2:18 AM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Well, it depends on your viewpoint. From his point of view, the idea
is to rank a Wikipedia page down so a given page rises above it, and
he provides tactics on how to do this. The fact that this damages
Wikipedia is irrelevant.
I'm glad they're not manipulating the ratings themselves. I'm more than
happy to put a project's rating template in and give it the best of my
judgement, and I've never argued with someone else's rating, except upward.
I did not add the CompSci template to [[gossip protocol]], and I am not
finished with it, either. It won't get a high rating for importance, because
it is only theory.
In fact, within Wikipedia you get a lot of similar
activity from
POV-warriors. Their aim is to present polemic rather than information.
A minor example of this can be found at Alex Jones (radio host). The
guy's a nut of the first order, but he's got a string of defenders,
often anons, who remove any criticism of their hero. Of course
Wikipedia is part of the conspiracy to discredit him and these guys
are just setting the record strait.
There is so much of a record in a radio host that won't matter in two years
that I wouldn't pay much attention. Shock jock, newscaster, opinion
columnist -- don't care. That guy who does "The Rest of The Story" will
persist beyond his death.
I'm sure everyone on this list has their own
favorite example article,
where POV ducklings nibble away at objectivity, hoping to remain under
the radar.
Weasel words [[ad populum]] and other stilts (clues about POV) go in and out
of [[prion]], and there does not seem to be much to know about prions. A
great many people can conceive of self-modification with only protein. I
cannot, and it is out of my field, so I do not really know. Maybe I should
get Brown's book. I wonder if it's in the library. I got into wikipedia,
because of [[prion]] in the Oxford dictionary of Phrase and Fable. I want to
take out every mention of "hypothesis" from [[prion]], except ones in a
section header.