On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Lilburne lilburne@tygers-of-wrath.net wrote:
On 28/12/2015 18:00, Jane Darnell wrote:
All I said is that the wiki way works, that's all. You can't hide it when someone tries to take over a project, and that is the reason we shouldn't try to anticipate that with convoluted strategies. "Assume Good Faith" will always win out over any strange misguided takeover strategy, which is why governments that intend to do such things choose nowadays to just block wikimedia altogether. It is not our wake-up call to take, but that of the Kazakh people.
Facebook showed the other year that it could manipulate people by what it showed them in their feeds.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/10932534/Facebook-conducted-s... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28051930
They didn't do this for fun, they did it to show their clients (advertisers, governments) that they could manipulate millions of people. You only need a small push in one direction or another to influence a large population. Doesn't matter if the push is to buy a particular soap, vote one way or another, or how you see a particular minority, or issue.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2450825/big-data-business-intelligence/f...
Do it to a naively trusted source and you have a triple word score jackpot^H^H^Hboot.
I thought Epstein's and Robertson's paper, "The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections", was very interesting as well:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016...
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.abstract
On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 7:43 PM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
Well the chances of me being firebombed while on vacation in the states are probably higher than me being firebombed for editing Wikipedia, but that still doesn't mean we need to worry about changing the wiki model. I guess I have lost the thread of your point entirely now.
To be honest, I don't think you had ever gotten hold of it in the first place. To me, you seem to live in a very sheltered and naive world.
If we have reports of Wikipedians being tortured in Azerbaijan (and there seems to have been some truth to these reports, as the sysop named in them was globally blocked by the WMF a short while later[1]), you should be able to understand that it is not quite as easy to live the wiki way there as it is in your country, and that some of the assumptions you have formed based on your own experiences of the wiki model may not hold in other locales.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Irada&diff=12421543&am...