Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

It can go the other way, too. I’m a computer programmer and I don’t use an ad-blocker, one of the reasons being that the presence of add is a very good indicator of websites that I should avoid. That strategy makes me actuality consume less content on the web, which I find as a big plus, and that’s because the great majority of today’s websites are filled with ads.

Related, the same goes for TV, where I don’t try to avoid them by purchasing an even more exclusive access to TV content (such as streaming), I just choose not to watch it because mainstream TV has become infested by ads. So the idea is not to play the game, just to ignore it.

To be fair, adblockers have an inordinate amount of access. We all trust uBlock’s creator but I’ve never met him. So it’s a realistic risk but we (hope) not a threat

"With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users."

- Richard M. Stallman, 2011, writing in Der Spiegel

He was right. He was always right. About all of it. People didn't listen, or perhaps were never introduced to his ideas. Software grew faster than the idea of free software (on some level this was inevitable, since the latter is by definition a subset of the former).

And so, the noose tightened a little more every year.

The remedy has never changed: you must explain to people why freedom is important, and what the terrible consequences are of non-freedom. Refer them to the free software ecosystem, Linux and the FSF. Many will not listen. But whether they listen is to some extent irrelevant. Life is more fulfilling when it is lived ethically. By doing your part to advocate for freedom and against its enemies, you are at least making your own welfare better, and hopefully someone else's too.

make a tv movie called the craigslist killer and get every news program and social media troll room to hype it.

change began with smartphone release and accelerated.

the old internet with only the top half of the iq chart participating was better.

I, for example , i'm scared of using YouTube alternative clients like re(vanced) et simila, i'm personality scared to have my youtube/gmail account banned.

Mac apps have never bern restricted to the App Store, so I’m not sure the idea of “sideloading” makes sense to apply there. I still know what you mean though.

It might make more sense/be more palatable if you think of it as manifestations of particular inter-societal evolutionary strategies.

And that people actually have less control over their actions than anyone is willing to acknowledge or believe.

It's like the humans turned into cattle in the seventh season of Supernatural, except they are doing it to themselves.

> bjp it cell

I'm not Indian, I have no specific interest, I'm reading to pick up PoVs outside my own:

BJP IT Cell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BJP_IT_Cell

    a department of the Indian political party BJP that manages social media campaigns for the party and its members.

    According to Washington Post, 150,000 social media workers spread posts aimed at exploiting the fears of India’s Hindu majority across a vast network of WhatsApp groups.

    BJP orchestrates online campaigns through its social media cell to intimidate perceived government critics. Sadhavi Khosla, a BJP cyber-volunteer in the BJP IT Cell said that the organisation disseminated misogyny, Islamophobia and hatred.

It’s the same on Reddit. I wouldn’t confirm if it costs of ‘teams’, since it could also include loosely organized organic behavior.

Reddit also has similar turfing efforts for Sino related news and content.

The only time this ever gets over turned, is when some news article gets traction during EU/US consumption hours, and gains its own following.

Without the full details of the edit war you were involved in, the scenario seems to be clash between your "world view" and those who reversed your edits. From your username, being from a region where a successful genocide/ethnic cleansing of a minority religious group was conducted by the majority local population only a couple of decades back, the possibility of your edits being controversial to others not necessarily the alleged "BJP it cell" is there.

Wikipedia lost many good editors over a user named BrownHairedGirl. She single handedly removed extraordinary valuable editors and left a bunch of simps in her wake. The site has never recovered.

If you want to split the categories between normies and neckbeards that's good enough a model of the world to understand the issue.

The part that I miss is we had things in public, collaborations between everyone who was interested in spending the time to access the space. This barrier was enough to keep things feeling like a community, with most of the things like this that came up being able to be addressed by internal arguments.

Now everything has to be robust to the idea that you will have neckbeards and normies interacting, and that curation is required. You have passive users, who's eyes are valuable... contributors, with divergent motivation, some pure for the joy of the project, some who want to put their agenda in front of the first group... And even external state actors pushing things at a scale that's hard to understand.

The nomenclature could use some polish, but on HN we know they mean ability to bypass technological restrictions .

Why? It’s a salient distinction when talking about mass-adoption of technology. Social dynamics change dramatically when the ratio of neckbeards to normies is upset. I don’t like these terms either, but “neckbeards and normies” has a nice alliterative quality.

Smartphones were the next stage evolution of the Eternal September effect.

It's all "beer and barbie on the beach" until you realise that's all illegal.

It's hardly the only especially bad country though. At this point the entire western world is pushing for it (and Russia/China are already one and two steps ahead respectively).

The wider Anglosphere is pushing this too. One organization behind it in both the UK and the US is the UK Labour Party. Yes, you read that correctly - high level Labour party operatives formed a nonprofit in the US to lobby for misinformation legislation, to ban X, and to pressure various other websites into deleting content.

> CCDH also held meetings with federal legislators while pushing for “change in USA” toward a censorious proposal it calls the “STAR framework,” which would create an “independent digital regulator” that could “impose consequences for harmful content.” STAR’s core concepts are similar to Europe’s just-instituted Digital Services Act and Britain’s even more stringent Online Safety Act, which puts the national media regulator Ofcom in charge of determining fines for uncooperative platforms.

The whole article is worth a read, where many people were targeted for innocuous stuff or in at least one case, for reporting on an article in JAMA:

https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/election-excl...

Apologies for the Substack link, but it covers (and cites) material you otherwise need a dozen links to discover.

Yes, nothing. It's better than allowing the government to decide what is fact or lie, Ministry of Truth style.

Doing nothing is working fine in the USA so far. Not all problems need to be solved, and sometimes the solution is worse than the problem.

In a perfect world I would expect the government to stop deliberately spreading misinformation, but I know that isn’t realistic.

I expect the government to enable people to think critically and make their own deicisions, primarily through adequate education.

Beyond that, no, "misinformation" is only a problem for those who want to control others.

Yes. People who want to control the information want to distribute misinformation freely and be guaranteed nobody can contest them. That's the link. The censors always will be the liars, because once you can control who can say what, it is impossible to resist the temptation to lie a little bit for a good cause. And then a little bit more. We have seen it happen many, many times.

No.

Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance.

Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.

Not sure what cases you are referring to, but “Hurt feelings” in India have caused multiple riots, resulting in utter carnage, spilling over to years, decades longs strings of terrorism and reprisals against minorities.

Feelings are the reason people get up to live in the morning.

I get why we used to make that statement. In a way it’s about rationality mattering, and how feelings being hurt are different from actual hurt.

In the context of this conversation, I’ll argue its an un-pragmatic dismissal of a pertinent fact.

I’ll make this argument: “At the scales we are talking, and across the breath of human cultures, feelings end up mattering.”

These days, causing hurt feelings is called violence by many people. Or sometimes, saying nothing at all is.

Are you saying that hurt feelings aren't harm? Words can hurt too you know, e.g. popular black footballers getting racist abuse anytime they go online is harmful to their mental health; trans people being told to kill themselves because they're Satan's spawn and pedophiles and what not also take severe hits to their mental health.

That's a nursery rhyme we tell kids to help them be brave though. It's not a principle of law.

Defamation and similar concepts are ancient. Ostracization, excommunication, etc are also harms committed primarily by using (or withholding) words that have been recognized throughout almost all of human history as ways to significantly harm someone.

So I think one would have to work pretty hard to come up with a theory where only bodily harm counts.

> They do add value to society compared to a fully lawless anarchic community/tools/etc.

Think it depends on how large you want your communities to be. It should be fine until some 200 people.

Totally agree.

The key point, which perfectionists miss or more likely just don't agree with, is about being less wrong. WP is time and again show to be less wrong than supposedly trusted or more formal resources.

When it started many people would look to the Encyclopedia Britannica as more reliable yet research showed that on average it contained more errors and that's with the occasional inexperienced/ rogue editor on the WP side.

EDIT: fixed my own typo! (relatable -> reliable)

Wikipedia is often wrong once you stray from mainstream topics. Subspecialties often have 1-2 super-contributors, whose blind spots and misunderstandings become part of Wikipedia. Plenty of articles also have no actual citations of their technical content.

I would change that wording to say that: it's mostly reliable, but not perfect and not as objective as it purports to be.

I’ll take Britannica any day.

> Can you provide links to some examples of bias on Wikipedia so that we can make up for ourselves how bad this is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...

Here is an example of a Wikipedia admin who spent years harassing a blogger (and a community the blogger belongs to), and it took a lot of effort and a lot of luck to make other admins admit that this was a bad thing and that it should stop.

(This is not the worst example I know of, but it is an example where Wikipedia changed its mind later, so you can agree that this was bad even if you trust Wikipedia.)

One very recent anecdotal example involving narwhals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0L-3FfkXfM

Let's just say Wikipedia made an absurd lie, for years from an obvious misunderstanding, and a viciously protective editor got involved...

Something can be technically correct, yet unreliable. How? Simply by reporting with a bias. The easiest example would be to look at a left (or right) leaning but accurate news organization like Vox or WSJ - they’re absolutely great at many topics, but read only one of the two and you’d have a slightly distorted view of everything. Being unbiased is incredibly hard even for newspapers, let alone a volunteer run org.

For a more specific example of wiki’s biases, think of the average Reddit bias - like their insistence of “if you can’t prove it it doesn’t exist”. A lot of people in the world would be very sad if they learnt that their god supposedly vanished.

There has been a little bit of furor in some circles in Japan, regarding the status of Yasuke, who was a favorite of Oda Nobunaga, whether he was a samurai or not. Around September of 2015, a user by the name tottoritom made numerous edits to the Yasuke article, citing to yet-to-be-published papers by Thomas Lockley. Coincidentally, tottoritom's user page introduces himself as Thomas Lockley too, and Lockley happened to also have lived in Tottori. After some time, the citations were changed to refer to a book that Lockley published in Japan (in Japanese). (Now, if the two are indeed one and same person, he has broken a Wikipedia rule on not publishing original research.)

The book become a basis for a romanticized novel he published for western audiences, which I believe inspired the production of Netflix animation for the same character. From then on, the view that Yasuke was a samurai gained foothold, which caught some Japanese historians off-guard.

He's also had his hand on the Britannica article of the same title, and now Wikipedia cites the Britannica article too, thus completing the cycle.

I edit a bit and it seems mostly accurate but I've followed covid origins for a while and the bit "While other explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence." isn't really true. There is evidence but for some reason they only want to cite papers from the scientific establishment saying the scientific establishment is innocent.

Out of curiosity: was it marked as possible citogenesis during that period? How did the situation resolve itself?

I’m a bit surprised Google is still serving at Russia, are they doing it to avoid loosing browser and search market share? They could not be making any money on advertising there, I assume?

Agreed. Nothing wrong with it. I was just trying to fully understand what the other commenter said.

If following the law is such a burden on them then they should by all means pack up and leave. This is also what the Delhi High Court said after Wikipedia chose to ignore its order. This applies to all western institutions and corporations. If the expectation is that, Indian courts and the Indian public should continue to bend over then that is not going to happen.

> The rest of us not in India don’t want to be affected by the rulings of a Delhi court.

How wikipedia choses to follow rulings of Delhi High Court is not India's problem. This is 100% on wikipedia to implement it without a geo block, so maybe you should take this up with Wikipedia.

> This ruling seems as corrupt as they go

The defamation case is still ongoing. But I guess any ruling that isn't favoring Wikipedia will automatically be "corrupt"

I don't think that will help a lot. This my opinion, but I think most Indians treat western sources such as NYT, BBC to be biased/racist against India. If wikipedia were to put a banner on top, it would just end up being another entry in that list.

In theory that the quote starts with "In my opinion" should protect HN in this scenario.

Wikipedia almost exclusively words things as if they are know facts (because they usually are), which means they lose the safety of it being an opinion

Governments have ways of making themselves difficult to ignore.

> purge the judiciary of independent judges, control the news media, and open culture-war fronts to distract and sap the strength of opposition while riling up your base

I don’t like whataboutism as much as anyone else, but if we’re going to criticise one country I’d like to point out that with Murdoch et al, you’ve got the same stuff happening in a lot of countries (US/UK/Aus off the top of my head) too. And unlike some places like the US, in India the judges are relatively much more independent politically.

What you’re likely missing is that a significant chunk of the population itself (and likely some judges) hold such views. You don’t need to politically cajole a judge if they already share the same view, do you?

Indeed.

Start your own Wikipedia.

Why not both?

Cue an Australian Prime Minister saying "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" [0].

Yes, India can make ridiculous unenforceable laws, same as any country, but that doesn't actually do anything: Laws only matter when they can be enforced.

In this case India trying to enforce a worldwide ban on this story is clearly unenforceable. And because of VPNs that means that enforcing a national ban on this story is clearly unfeasible. However, because the people who make the laws are ignorant of the technical reasons why it's unfeasible they'll carry on and do it anyway. The Australian PM was in the same boat, made the same mistake, and was widely ridiculed for it.

[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...

> prevent the Indian government from repressing citizens who choose to defy the law

This is why it is so important to spread the knowledge of how to make IEDs.

Actual change is not required, symbolic change is enough.

India, much like Nazi Germany, is a culture that views position over all else; simply being in power is enough to make your word greater than anyone else's truth.

You want engagement from a bot 1 on 1? Let me do it for you. I know politically incorrect opinions are tough to digest in the West. If someone doesn't comply with your echo chamber, you find it hard to wrap your head around it. That's how the lands of the free work nowadays sadly. I got one reply after posting it thrice. Says enough about why I did it, seemingly I'm the one who doesn't "want engaging dialogue" lol. Some people love to remain in delusion and take tags like "BBC", "citations" at face value. You are welcome to continue doing it. Isn't it funny how BBC is a govt funded agency but they are obviously unbiased coz they are white. That's why I said earlier it's a funny world we live in.

I’m not sure what the breakdowns are for Indian contributions, but Indians make up ~10% of daily visitors.

European push for privacy legislation seems quite different than we’re talking about here.

The link you posted does not support the statement you made.

>Wikipedia doesn't currently have the technical ability to block a single article on a country basis.

I can imagine. That's too much to ask to a company that's been on business for 20 years and have received 1.3B USD in total.

I could come up w/ a solution to that in an afternoon on my $5/mo server but yeah "you don't understand the scale of wikipedia" or some bs.

Not "donating" a single cent ever again.