[theamk]

There is a non-zero amount of people who are unhappy with wikipedia's policy. The "rot in wikipedia" link gives some examples: "fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative Medicine and progressive politics"

I am afraid that the new clone would be mostly full of pages about "Curing Cancer using Magic Healing Crystals", because people writing amount more conventional knowledge would prefer traditional wikipedia.

[arp242]

That article is upset alternative "medicine" quackery isn't taken serious. In particular it seems upset that it calls Gary "you can cure AIDS with a diet" Null's fraudulent bullshit exact that. It calls Stephen Barrett from quackwatch "a discredited former psychiatrist", which is a blatant brazen lie.

That article is the classic "Wikipedia criticism": butthurt they can't spread their favourite flavour of shit on Wikipedia without criticism.

I'm not saying Wikipedia is perfect or doesn't have problems, but that is definitely not a good description of anything.

[BizarroLand]

That article (http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/exposing-wikipedia/49-wi...) is a perfect example of radicalizing material.

It starts off gentle, "OMG guys, look at the sketchy things this person who is typically portrayed as "One of the good ones" has been doing!"

And then it ramps up, "they claim to have 100,000 editors, but it actually only has 30,000. What is up with that?"

Insert picture of Wikipedia icon colored red with devil horns, pitchfork and tail.

Then: Big Oil has been paying people to edit its articles! There are companies who exist to edit Wikipedia articles and they work for the bag guys! Wikipedia makes millions of dollars a year! The CIA edits Wikipedia! BIG PHARMA! And another bad guy ALSO PAID TO HAVE WIKIPEDIA EDITED OMG!

(trust me, here's a reference number to a link below that we all know you will definitely read and verify the authenticity of ;) )

Then Washington! The "Phillip Cross Affair"! Dictators!

And once you are sufficiently outraged, also, here's this poor little guy, just a little guy, an everyman, just like you, being picked on by the big bad evil wikipedia editors because he's right and they're wrong and they don't like that.

How can you tolerate this injustice!?!

___________________________________________________________________________

And it all makes sense, inside of its bubble. Outside of verification, this is terrible.

But then you look at the rest of the website:

http://helenofdestroy.com (no ssl certificate because?)

And the rest of the webpage is pure distilled "covid, conspiracies, bill gates, commoncore, newspeak, prince andrew, coronapocalypse, biden, New world order, China blah blah blah blah" insanity.

And you see exactly where being radicalized leads you. Desperately searching for the truth at the core of every lie, ultimately burying yourself under a mountain of bullshit in hopes of finding a pearl.

You're not gonna find a pearl. At best, it's going to be an undigested piece of corn.

Caveat Emptor, don't buy the bullshit.

[shuntress]

> no ssl certificate because?

This is way beside the point but there is nothing inherently wrong with unsecured plain http traffic if you aren't accepting user information over that connection (such as a name/password, auth token or whatever).

[BizarroLand]

True, but based on the remainder of the page, my guess is that they found some correlation between SSL and the Mark of the Beast or the New World Order or some other craziness.

[panopticon]

SSL also protects against certain classes of third party snooping and injection. It's nice knowing that every piece of networking gear between me and the server doesn't know what I'm reading. Hell, I've seen ISPs inject ads into non-secure pages.

There are also networking policies that prevent non-https connections, so you could be accidentally blocking out users on a strictly managed device.