WHEN WIKIPEDIA TURNS WICKEDPEDIA — THE WIKIPEDIA SKYCOIN SAGA

9 min readNov 21, 2018

It might not be news to everyone that Wikipedia — especially in the EN version — has issues with editors using Wiki articles to spread political propaganda and libeling innocents, sometimes being bribed to do so. Most of Wikipedia readers should have noticed that articles related to anything controversial are heavily biased if not purely propagandistic. This puts shame on the rest of Wikipedia, and on the work of honest editors who spend their free time making unbiased articles.
Well, now there is compelling evidence proving Wikipedia has a problem with wild, biased, and even bribed editors.

The main strategy biased editors adopt to create false narratives is to report their side in a confident, matter-of-fact tone that leaves little doubt in the reader, while at the same time misrepresenting the opposition using shaky, disillusioned statements. Sometimes the opposition’s statements are even followed by a counter-statement (worded much better) that invalidates them.
Another reason they get away with it is that Wikipedia’s higher-ups are unwilling to denounce the bad editors or even punish their misconduct.

Jimmy Wales (Jimbo) and Larry Sanger are joint founders of Wikipedia and for the non-profit basis on which the organization is operated, they should be commended.
However many contributors to Wikipedia do not share his high ethical standards and take full advantage of the fact that it is possible to edit Wikipedia corporate articles completely anonymously for financial reward, removing or suppressing negative information.
Parties can completely hide any trace of their identity and motive, even their ISP addresses.

Editors of non-corporate articles are individuals attracted out of genuine interest, often with expertise in the particular subject. It is a completely different matter when corporate articles are surreptitiously modified by employees of a featured corporation, or by specialists supplying an online reputation clean-up service to the corporation. There are numerous firms offering this service.

Because of the huge popularity of Wikipedia, the content of a Wikipedia article about a business is important because it can have a positive or negative impact on the reputation of the business. This, in turn, can impact its value.

Wikipedians who choose to openly disclose their identity and background as editors are at a huge disadvantage to the vast majority who hide behind a pseudonym. Such individuals can be very unpleasant. Because identities are concealed, it is not practical for anyone editing under their own name to take legal action in the event of defamatory comments being made against them on Wikipedia by an anonymous party.

While it is understandable that these founders try to defend Wikipedia’s interests, siding with obviously biased, agenda-driven editors isn’t a great idea; I think we can all agree the better action, in this case, would be to weed out the bad apples poisoning the well, rather than trying to cover them up.

WIKIPEDIA HAS TURNED INTO JUDGE AND JURY

For years, Wikipedia has danced around scandals about its reliability and transparency. The worst example of this was when a major Wikipedia site administrator and employee called Essjay, who claimed to be “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a Ph. D. in theology and a degree in canon law” was proven to be a high-school dropout.
Wales first defended him but then distanced himself.
Aside from the scandals, Wikipedia’s unique combination of self-righteousness and know-it-all-has long led it to deny experts from outside its closed circle from writing and editing stories.
The most egregious recent example was when Wikipedia’s editors wouldn’t correct an entry about a novel by famous American author Philip Roth when the writer himself reported the error.

So there you have Wikipedia in all its glory: Touched with corruption, employing fakes, and so sure of its own correctness that it won’t listen to the real experts.

Recently the Skycoin page was approved in Wikipedia after months of strenuous criticisms, rewriting, reformatting and reviews. However, for a page that was approved in October of 2018 to be deleted by the same organization in November of the same year leaves much to be desired and highlights all the problems wrong with Wikipedia.
The creator of the page has eight years of experience editing for Wikipedia and had to follow the rules religiously to make sure it conformed to specifications required by Wikipedia.
To show that the Wikipedia editor in charge had an ulterior motive, a day after deleting the Skycoin page, they are trying to delete the Cojoin page of Skycoin also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/CoinJoin

Above is an important problem with leaving people with power as they become power drunk and it is one of the problem blockchain and Obelisk is trying to solve. We cannot trust humans, Government to make decisions that do not have their self-motives and selfish interests at heart.
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Apparently, the Editor faulted references that were cited on the Skycoin page as unreliable.
He deleted the video of Skycoin at the United Nations and the work Skycoin is doing on the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals as a reference.

If you can’t be patient enough to watch the whole video skip to 9.55, 14:20 and 17:30 in the referenced video.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Brunnhuber is is an economist, psychiatrist, a member of the Club of Rome and senator of the European Academy of Sciences. He is the medical director of the Diakonie-Klinik of Integrative Psychiatry in Dresden and Professor for Psychology and Sustainability at the University of Mittweida in Germany and is on Skycoin advisory team.
In the video, he proposes directing 5 trillion dollars (with the help of all the central banks) directly into these SDGs with a parallel financial system enabled by blockchain. Supposedly for every dollar, you spend in SDG, the world as a whole generates a 7x return for the investment.
Blockchain allows the UN to ensure that there will be no room for these funds to go towards corruptions. He stated that currently it is estimated 30% of all funds spent goes towards corruption. At the same time, a lot of micro-financing projects are a promising use case for blockchain as we all know.
He talked more about his vision a bit further in this TEDx talk .

Wikipedia also discounted references from Reuters, Forbes, Nasdaq, CNBC, and Bloomberg.
An announcement by Binance via their official Medium account was unilaterally declared to be an unreliable source and removed.

The Editor in charge further displayed his ignorance when he described the Bloomberg article, which was a live video interview with Bloomberg, in their studio as a directory and not an article.
A deletion discussion page was put in place in order for interested parties to vote and discuss whether the deletion is valid and should in fact occur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Skycoin

Although Wikipedia etiquette requires editors/contributors to act in a civil way towards one another when discussing issues, which inevitably arise, the fact that people can hide behind an alias means that they sometimes adopt a dictatorial aggressive and even bullying tone that they would never use under their real name.
However, the Wikipedia editor acted complete ultra vires to the above-stated statute.

He topic banned the guy who wrote the article draft, for writing articles. YES, He BANNED someone for writing the article that the editor was trying to delete.
(Topic bans are a kind of editing restriction imposed either by the Arbitration committee or by community consensus as usually determined on one of the two active administrative notice boards )

He banned people from arguing with him against deletion, including 8-year-old Wikipedia contributor.

He was edit warring and then banning anyone disagreeing with him, instead of going through the arbitration process. (An edit war occurs when editors who disagree about the content of a page repeatedly override each other’s contributions)

He made up Wikipedia rules or policies, which do not exist and contradict the actual written policies. He violated Wikipedia’s policies on primary sources and made up rules that do not exist. He enforced a “no primary source rule” and began deleting all “primary sources” and secondary sources. And then voted to delete the article because he had deleted all links.

When the real Wikipedia rules were read to him, He brought in his army of sockpuppets to back him up.

His arguments for the removal of primary and secondary sources from the article showed his malicious intent.

He openly admitted his bias and intention not to follow policies and that he just wanted all the cryptocurrency pages on Wikipedia deleted.
Consensus (agreement) should be based on the merits of the arguments, not by counting votes using puppets.

Behaviors like these are what have given rise to fake news and I am sure having read through the Skycoin page, He probably felt the project is a threat to Wikipedia’s existence. Once Skywire starts running and BBS on Skywire is completed, it will become difficult for anyone to choose Wikipedia as his or her go-to free reliable source of information if stories are being manipulated for cash and written and edited by insiders without a clue while outside experts are ignored.

Skycoin BBS: Social Media for You
Skycoin BBS is a peer-to-peer replicated social media application built on immutable data structures (CXO) on top of the Skycoin platform. Planned features include:
• Decentralized network so that you retain your privacy and freedom
• Ability to post content, upvote, downvote, and comment
• User profiles
• Tipping for content with Coin Hours and Skycoin
• Resistance to network failure
• Public keys and trust lists that let users filter out spammers, bots, and untrustworthy users.

This centralized idea of making bad decisions on people’s lives will be a thing of the past as Skycoin already has a solution in place to deal with infractions like these as you can see from the BBS.

The scandal of Wikipedia is the false assumption of the good of “Wisdom of the Crowd” which leads to Wikipedia being anti-profit and anti-professional and eventually anti knowledge*. Wikipedia lack of reliability is the result of shunning professional peer review for unpaid volunteers and assumption the wisdom the crowd would bring in experts to freely give of the time and knowledge for the mass of non-contributing users. But instead, we only get the most ignorant whom either the loudest or most connected.

You will be scoring yourself a big Zero if you don’t curb these corrupt practices.

On a final analysis, It is always good to give benefit of the doubt to certain stories you hear hence the motive of creating a Skycoin Wikipedia page but it is just a matter of time before Wikipedia becomes obsolete like Netscape, myspace and their likes.
Bottom-line we do not need Wikipedia to validate Skycoin. Wikipedia needs Skycoin more than it knows. Watch the Skycoin space.
I will kindly welcome any rejoinder from the Wikipedia team in regards to these entire allegations.
Not replying to my article will be described as cowardly and admission of guilt
Do not become the dark side of the web. You can’t win that battle.

If you are interested in a Wikipedia-like page that was deleted, you can check at https://skycoinwiki.com

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