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sparkzilla | 6 years ago

I am not convinced that having a vocal blockchain skeptic (Mr Gerard has written the book "Attack of the 50ft blockchain" and has written many articles critical of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies) as an arbiter of Wikipedia pages on cryptocurrencies and blockchain is necessarily a good idea. For example, Mr Gerard will refuse to allow the addition of well-sourced articles on popular projects even though they are reliably sourced in major crypto news publications. As you can imagine, much crypto news doesn't reach the mainstream press, so this blocks a lot of useful information appearing on Wikipedia.

Also, major projects, such as IOTA, don't even have a Wikipedia page or stub, despite the project having a multitude of academic papers and reliably sourced news. Mr Gerard will say this is because of the huge amount of spam on the pages, but other crypto pages, and non-crypto pages, have plenty of spam and they still manage to appear on the site.

As an analogy, imagine if climate deniers were in control of Wikipedia's climate change pages.

Mr Gerard simply has too much influence on Wikipedia's crypto pages. There is certainly a crypto spam problem on Wikipedia, but it seems like he is actually censoring information, which for those interested in crypto, is somewhat ironic.

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La1n|6 years ago

This isn't only happening there, a lot of Wikipedia pages basically have someone revert a lot of changes they don't agree with, while you could bring this up on the talk page this takes a lot of time and knowledge about how Wikipedia works, for more controversial pages this often works out that those whom have most time to spend get to decide on the direction and point of view of the article. This might even be just small rewordings and copy edits to put something in a more or less favourable light.

michaelt|6 years ago

One of the downsides of Wikipedia's methods of conflict resolution is controversial articles select for editors with strong feelings.

I'm largely disinterested about cryptocurrency, so maybe I'd be an ideal neutral arbiter in arguments about such articles. But for the same reason, I'm not motivated to do the tiring political work that would involve.

9588|6 years ago

If you write a negative book about a collection of topics and make it diverse enough not to have to go in detail you can tailor it such that wikipedia becomes the perfect promotion vehicle. It has to be negative since removing positive material is much easier than either writing it or removing negative material. (There is often some sub-human narcissist volunteer willing to preserve negativity.)

Sober neutral voices get nothing done. You have to be extreamly biased