• 2 Posts
  • 95 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 30th, 2023
  • Mudface@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•They use to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia. Now we know. Wikipedia is the only website you can trust.
    612·
    8 months ago

    A lot of the political entries are written with a bent towards being sympathetic with leftists.

    The Kyle Rittenhouse article spends a lot of time on how Rittenhouse ‘appeared in conservative media’ or ‘appeared with conservative personalities’ which is a pretty weird thing to say, if you don’t already understand the political undertones of the Kenosha riot.

    When you click the article for the Kenosha riot, it’s titled ‘civil unrest in Kenosha’ and focusses a lot on what a reader would perceive as positive aims of the riot. Protesting racism and police brutality, and doesn’t focus at all on the crime, danger, guns, vandalism, arson, etc

    That article mentions BLM and when you read that article it makes sure to state that BLM protests were ‘largely peaceful’ and totally misses the amount of deaths and destruction that had happened at them.

    The BLM article, if written like the Rittenhouse article, should focus a fair amount in the organizations ties to Marxism, the overthrowing of capitalism and colonialism, but doesn’t.

    Wikipedia articles are written and edited and maintained to push a narrative.

    If you agree with the narrative, you probably like that it does this. If you disagree, you probably don’t bother reading Wikipedia very much.

    The issue with sources, is that a lot of ‘sources’ for stuff like this are already heavily curated to paint a picture the editors want to put on front street.

    And anything that would combat that narrative is just outright banned from the site.

    A lot of citations with politically charged topics are just opinions anyway. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer or sources on the war between Palestine and isreal, for example. But if Wikipedia editors want to push propaganda for either side over the other, all they have to do is only cite pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli sources.

    This is easily exploitable by editors for whatever narrative they choose to push.

    Wikipedia is not an exhaustive gathering of all relevant information, it is a carefully curated propaganda machine for the editors.

  • Mudface@lemmy.worldtoPiracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com•Can someone explain the benefits of Usenet to a long-time torrent-er?English
    13·
    9 months ago

    With a Usenet account, I was able to make things relatively autonomous.

    I told it what I wanted and it found it immediately, downloaded it, renamed it, even replaced it with higher quality whenever it became available.

    It would find new episodes of shows I asked it to look for as they aired, new movies I was interested in as soon as they became available, Scott’s, genres, it was crazy.

    If I was at work and someone recommended me a movie, I could add it to an IMDb watch list and my PC at home would have it downloaded automatically before I even got home.

    It was way too efficient for me, I don’t watch much ‘content’ in real life, but it was so easy and efficient I ended up with dozens of TB’s of stuff that I never had the time to watch to begin with.

    I was a collector of ‘content’ and not a consumer of it. So I stopped torrenting and using Usenet.

    But Usenet is really pretty awesome with the right setup. I felt like I didn’t need to do shit once I set everything up.