I think the two words you were looking for were "financial gain". Because let's be honest, the person clearly wants to be paid for this story as he himself has said so, and I am not saying he shouldn't get paid for his work.
But if you have to choose between never publishing your story and publishing it for free, I'm pretty sure the latter is a clear choice. And at the level he is talking about it, it would spread like absolute wildfire (if what he claims is true and he has irrefutable evidence) that Wikipedia could never stop even if it tried.
I'm willing to acknowledge the possibility that this person has exposed himself to Wikipedia directly and if the story was to break he would be liable, but that isn't made clear so I think I'm sticking to my point of view at least for now.
Not just a run of the mill drama affair, it's a nuclear-grade scandal which will generate another MeToo phenomenon.
"For the folks at home, the story I was working on was going to be published by the Daily Beast in Spring 2024. Everything was in place then we had to go to both Wikipedia and the National Archives for comment, as required by law. Archvies wouldn't speak to us and Wikipedia threatened to sue, I suspect because of what we had found out about their administrators. The piece had mainly been about administrator abuse, using tools on Wikipedia to trace ip addresses, dox people's identities then harass them in real life. The Oberranks clusterf*k was a big part of the story, but not the entire story. The real beef of the article was about female editors on their site being stalked and even assaulted after having their identities revealed online by administrators. I found several cases of that including a woman who was stabbed outside her home in Mexico City by a stalker who had researched who she was off of her Wikipeida profile.
Daily Beast backed out because of the lawsuit threat, but I still have the whole story and might one day sell the rights. For now, its back to Eastern Europe covering real news."
It turns out that Daily Beast had killed the story about the dark side of Wikipedia, which is chiefly about how Wikipedia treated women badly with harassment and doxxing, particularly by powertripping admins.
that happens on HN every now and then, what concerns me is the flagging. The guy is simply responding to offending comments with even more offence. While not in the exact spirit of HN, the comments in the first place arent suited either.
I really hope this place isnt losing its libertarian approach. We dont have much apolitical alternatives, do we?
Mobile phones are definitely what keeps the advertising industry alive, especially social media.
In my opinion, thats a good thing for the majority of the population. Those who do not care about ads and tracking makes it so evasion still possible (to some extent)
I understand not being able to understand different opinions on certain (or all) matters, its something that happens to everyone. Announcing it in a nonconstructive way instead of avoiding the topic, however, feels extremely off to me.
OP might be the perfect stereotypical HN user while criticizing the same stereotype.
Agreed. The moment i saw AnonFiles i was out of there, even considered uploading the declaration of indepence in pdf form to get my social credits up.
I dont know where the servers were, but i feel like it was used for less lovely purposes by the owners and a lack of identifiers & internet curated mess would obfuscate law enforcement's efforts
Edit: my theory however falls flat if there were multiple websites, since having a one large database would be in their best interest. You could argue that there were multiple entities self-hosting the same thing, but why would they link to eachother? Coupled with the VPN ad, sounds like data harvesting all around (honeypot or not)
While a shortage of admins/editors w/could cause the death of rather niche entries, Wikipedia would still have a huge propaganda outlet potential. Whether you believe its being actively used or not, wiki entries that might have political influence (history) will stay active, thus keeping Wikipedia (barely, that is) alive.
Perhaps I should have made it clearer in the article, but the English Wikipedia is not really short of editors. There was an era of decline from 2007 to 2014, though much of that was a side effect of edit filters that rejected certain edits that were highly likely to be vandalism. But the 2015 rally in editing numbers has turned into a sort of plateau - editing from 2015 to 2023 has consistently been above the 2014 minima. This is looking at "time between edits" How long it takes for each ten million edits.
The numbers in the OP indicated that few new editors are being added, so even if it’s not short of editors now, it will be eventually, unless new editors are added or there’s some breakthrough in longevity research.
No. The article is about admins. Very few new editors are becoming admins, and my fear is that a Wikigeneration gap is emerging between the admins and the active editors. New editors are starting, old ones leaving or dying, total volume of editing is higher now than it was in the 2014 minima. But the number of admins is falling. Another way to look at the numbers is that if new admins continue to be promoted at the same rate as the last ten years, they would on average, need to be active as admins for fifty years each if you wanted to maintain current admin numbers.
So you get emailed a usually pretty obvious fake website, you are asked to login, and if you login you leak your password! Surely nobody would fall for this!
This is also like how difficult people want to expose Synanon back in the old days.