Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn’t have more ‘toxic content’, harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn’t unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire ‘fediverse bad’ section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, ‘zoosadism’, and then pages with titles like ‘bad monkey’ that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I’ve learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like ‘an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim’ should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I’d learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people’s main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics’ are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
The crappiness of this section has been noted
Someone put that on in the last 12 hours, and since then, some anonymous person just deleted the entire section lol.
I legit feel really grateful, I’d been going down a bit of a ‘either every source of information is corrupt and there’s no hope, or I’m losing my mind’ rabbit hole. I haven’t quite pulled the plug on Reddit yet, which may be contributing to that.
I prefer the whole ‘major additions and changes should be introduced in the talk section of a page so it can be discussed by the committee of reasonable good faith adults with lots of spare time and patience’ approach to Wikipedia editing, but in retrospect that may be a wee bit idealistic in current times. So the ‘one person complains and documents, another person flags, and another just deletes the entire thing’ is a process that may be a good compromise between The Way Things Should Be and how to edit Wikipedia with consensus and without being harassed by neo Nazis.
There was a few months where I had to ban server after server every day because someone was really into semi-lolli anime. They were posting it in every anime forum. I asked them why they were non stop posting upskirt or provocative drawings of very young girls and they got angry that I dared ask.
I’m unsure if you’re speaking as a previous admin or just as a user, but if the latter, would it not have been easier to just block the user directly?
Back in the day, we used to marvel at the mental fortitude of paramedics and war medics, who constantly see and deal with the most extreme accidents and horrors of humanity so that we, the public, don’t ever have to.
That burden does seem to have expanded rather. I legit think it might be less traumatic to triage and transport a selection of burns victims, traffic fatalities etc for a living than to moderate busy social media platforms.
At least in an ambulance you generally get fair warning what sort of unspeakable horror you need to attend next, and you can help them.
I suppose in the medical emergency industry you also don’t have to inform the disfiguring disease / patch of black ice on the road / tainted drinking water that ‘yep, sorry, you can’t operate here. Yes I know you’re just trying to get by but we do have a No Festering Gonorrhoea sign that you ignored before infecting this lady’.
TLDR: at some point community moderators (not the over zealous type) might need to be recognised as an emergency service
Today you learned any idiot can edit Wikipedia and it is mostly done by pro government entities.
Even worse. A lot of it just seems to be done by trolls.
Every now and again they have a big push to get more editors from more sections of society and normal humans, because a majority of the edits are done by a small amount of people, and these people spend so much time doing that that they don’t have much time for things like jobs, hobbies, socialisation, etc.
They are doing a great service, and most of them are great editors, but they are very very online and aren’t always interested in Wikipedia being a collaboration of people from all walks of life.
So they manage to get more random people to make an account and make their own first little edits, and then half those random people get yelled at for not following some hidden rules or for disagreeing with Big Mike who doesn’t like to be corrected or whatever and, surprise surprise, most people whose first experience editing Wikipedia never try again. The ones who stay are the dogged, determined ones, or the ones who don’t really care about criticism, and thus the cycle continues.
Seriously though, small time editors are absolutely essential to keep Wikipedia (reasonably) honest and unbiased. Literally anyone can contribute to the world’s biggest shared knowledge hub, and if you’re not a troll, a dick, a shill or an extremist then your contribution is really, really valuable.
If you see any page that has incorrect info, or anything that’s missing information that you know, or even some clunky grammar or out of date references, please do consider making an edit. There are a bunch of best practice guidelines on editing (that aren’t always very accessible) but the main ethos is to do what you can in good faith and don’t sweat the red tape. Someone else can come along afterwards and tidy formatting up or send you a message saying ‘hey, I’ve reverted your edit because you need a source / this type of source / you accidentally replaced the entire page on astrophysics with an emoji’, and they’ll link to the guidelines you need to follow if so.
I’d love to say it’ll be fun and chill and once you’ve realised how easy it is you’ll be evangelical about it. If you edit a totally innocuous page, it probably will be.
But it’s the internet, so there are all sorts of people including the knobs, so I’ll just say - by widening the pool of editors you will be benefitting Wikipedia whatever your actual edit is, and by ignoring any argumentative bastards you’ll be adding to the majority of Wikipedia editors who are normal human beings and not, well, argumentative bastards.
(Obviously if you are actually an argumentative bastard troll, no offence meant, I hope you have a great life but the applications to be a Wikipedia editor are sadly closed and honestly it’s not worth it 😀)
Lol wait till you see any of the Pakistan or India related articles. Its like the Ganges river in text form.
I’ve just seen your edit and the material added to the Fediverse entry on Wikipedia, your assertions seem well founded although I’m not tied into Wikipedia’s Mod community and the motivations of users therein. You’re definitely right that the Fediverse isn’t exactly a node of objectionable content, frankly I’ve seen none, although admittedly I haven’t plumbed the depths of every single instance. Their assertion should be noted though, that the Fediverse is wide open for abuse despite IMO not already being affected by the same volume as other platforms.
out of approximately 325,000 Fediverse posts analyzed over a two-day period, 112 were detected as instances of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM); 554 were detected as containing sexually explicit media alongside keywords associated with child sexual exploitation; 713 contained media alongside the top twenty CSAM-related hashtags on the Fediverse; and 1,217 contained text relating to distribution of CSAM or child grooming.
By their own numbers, the volume of CSAM was 0.03%, the volume of CSAM posted alongside keywords was 0.17%, the volume of CSAM posted with known associated hashtags was 0.22%, and 0.37% contained text related that kid of content. Less than ideal, you could say, given the nature of the content in question. The real crux of the matter seems to be whether or not it will increase, and whether or not Lemmy’s Mods have the capacity to moderate the content like other platforms IMO, but their claim that “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse” is more than slightly overblown even in considering the material.
I get your point, but the 'real crux of the matter ’ is very much - what is the fediverse. That’s what an encyclopedia is for. It defines things.
Wikipedia is not the place to highlight or discuss the moral or legal standards that every entity must meet. That would be ridiculous.
Chicken soup is subject to at least 10,000 individual regulatory restrictions (no poisons, name must reflect content, pay this tax to enter this country, staff must be paid and free and blah blah, no more than x foreign substances, must not go rancid within this time frame, can’t be packaged in a paper envelope). Some, like the workers’ rights and fair pricing and amount of weird chemicals, are actually pretty important human rights issues that have very real, immediate effects of the health and wellbeing of various population groups.
Should they all be on the Wikipedia article for chicken soup? All of them? If so, I have news about the laws, restrictions, relations, challenges, emerging research, etc, into vegetable soup. And also tomato soup. And, in fact, every processed food. And if that looks a bit ridiculous, consider the ethical considerations of the tea industry. It’s horrific (source: I’m English). It’s been horrific for hundreds of years now and has literally ended nations, killed millions of people, and doesn’t look like it’s in the final stretch of being solved.
It is, therefore, probably too much to include on a page about a new cruelty-free brand of iced tea that’s just taking off. People would go to that page to read about that brand of iced tea, not tea in general, and certainly not the troubled history and socio-political scandals of the tea trade in general, unless they had a beef with the iced tea brand.
Which, I suspect, is what happened on the fediverse page. And I didn’t put the flags on the page, or remove the content, but I’m glad someone did.
I think Wikipedia itself says that it is just an entry into topics. To confirm the things that are written there you check sources.
It’s pretty cool being a member of a den of iniquity.
Meh. I’m holding out for wretched hive of scum and villainy.
I can bring villainy and snacks, maybe some sandwiches or something?
Wikipedia certainly isn’t wrong, the Fediverse is filled with so much political extremism, made worse by the Tankie Developers
!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works to see more of how widespread tankies and their extreme bigotry and violent rhetoric spreads across the fediverse
Note this person is a Zionist promoting a community where they encourage Jewish ethnic surpremacy.
That’s not at all true
It’s true, check the various pages of info collected by other users. And he’ll ban you for calling it out.
But he won’t ban the nazis! He was on Voat for a reason.
There are no nazis in my comm and they’re not allowed either. I was banned from Voat
What’s written on Wikipedia is no different from what’s written on a wall in some city’s street. No one knows who wrote it, no one knows how much of it is true. What’s written is determined by insistence, not by agreement or expertise. Whether you can get something useful from its pages is a matter of luck.
Literally everybody can see exactly what was written, when, and from which IP address. Not only is that history maintained indefinitely on Wikipedia, it’s also downloaded by thousands of people around the world.
Everybody who has ever added a missing punctuation mark to a page is recorded in history, the specific date and time and page and action, accessible even if the world wide web goes down and Wikipedia ceases to exist.
I’m not sure if your ‘anonymous graffiti’ analogy is quite right, though I’m also struggling to imagine many places in my country where someone could graffiti on a wall and not be tracked down very quickly if necessary.
It is pretty fucking toxic if you’re not a Linux sheep or violent-leftist.
linux sheep
bruh
Thanks, another recommendation for my block list then :3
i’m a peaceful leftist and support criticism of fascism. if that makes me toxic then you’re the problem :3
