Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Good, bad, biased, paid or what-have-you. There's an endless supply.
User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Aug 20, 2021 8:08 am

These articles were written in 2009-2011 by obvious paid editors (main article tagged for ELEVEN YEARS AND COUNTING), plus a succession of IP addresses belonging to China Unicom Beijing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAP_(motor_company)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAP_Alias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAP_Xebra

Wired even ran a warning article back in 2008:
https://www.wired.com/2008/03/the-zap-x-and-a/

What happened to ZAP Motors? They fell apart very quietly in 2017, after years of struggling, internal battles, bankruptcies, "partnerships" with Chinese suppliers, etc. The shredded remains now belong to an unknown Chinese company. And none of that is mentioned on Wikipedia. I suspect because the paid editing continues today. Even though it could not be a deader outfit.

You be the judge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... kybear2009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... .118.83.40
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... 41.170.221
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... 43.125.139
And many more.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Aug 29, 2021 5:45 am

Here's yet another electric-car bit of POV edit abuse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNSW_Sunswift

Dates from 2006.
Was almost entirely written by people who are associated with the UNSW Sunswift team.
They made NO attempt to hide their connection---and no one tagged the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... 41.116.173
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PrinceArutha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... s/Sunswift
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... scharles92
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... Luandy9811

Also, in 2015 an IP address who likes electric vehicles requested a slew of page redirects to the Sunswift article, plus a bunch of other redirects. They were routinely granted by an idiot admin--who THANKED the IP address for "good editing work". Which said IP address did very little of. See how easy it is to manipulate the Wiki-Fools?

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Sep 06, 2021 11:57 pm

A probably paid editor from Houston.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... .124.47.10

Must be a fruitcake too, because the primary editor of Collin Street Bakery has to be a little fruitcakey to write such drivel. Along with several other probably-paid fruitcake editors.

Also, this.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Sep 19, 2021 7:43 pm

Why doesn't this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian

mention this

https://shitlassian.com/

or this

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/0 ... vate-data/

or "Atlassian isn't a profitable company"

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/had-boug ... 04605.html

Great example of a "unicorn" tech company. or something. (?)

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Oct 02, 2021 8:57 pm

Steven Pinker really makes me wonder.

Normally, a prominent publicity-chasing Harvard academic like him (supporting the status quo, phone contact list full of billionaires and world leaders, glass-half-full and the like) would be pilloried on Wikipedia by any means possible.

Buried deep in his article:
In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its list of media experts was signed by hundreds of academics.[96][97] The letter accused Pinker of a "pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them", citing as examples six tweets and a phrase used in his 2011 book.[98]
This charming attempt at backstabbery by a gang of extremists trying to slap "RACIST" and "SEXIST" labels on him? -- it failed. He's just too damn popular, Jewish (a longtime en-WP warning sign not to defame him), and too damn good at sliding out from under a concerted campaign of personal attacks like this.

Read this bit of snipery in the Guardian. Exactly the sort of "well, he's not a bad guy, but he's still a racist (wink), sexist (wink), establishmentarian counterrevolutionary whatever whatever...." sort of thing the Guardian often specializes in.

Also read this Slate article.

The WP article looks like the Jimbo article. Despite the well-known unpleasant intellectual tendencies and history of the subject, and an article history full of brutal/unnoticed editwarring, it still comes off looking like a happy-talk homily. The part about his hair is, um, pathetically stupid.

It has been dominated by two editors in particular. McNulTEA was banned last year for fighting. It appears McNulTEA was trying to make Pinker look worse. And tried to do the same with Robert Trivers, mainly by trying to tie both of them to Jeffrey Epstein. But since 2012 the Pinker article has also been manicured by Chiswick_Chap, an anonymous freak with a very bizarre complex editing history.

If paid, he/she/it is one of the best concealers of paid editing I've ever seen. If just a great lover of Pinker's shtick, why did he work on the article in parallel, for years, with Maunus, aka Magnus Pharao Hansen, a fellow linguist and former Wikipedia administrator? Who, in 2009, wrote a long academic paper criticizing one of Pinker's books? Shortly after that paper came out, Hansen successfully passed his RFA. So how does that "work"?

For background: Maunus spent those same years fighting with the "race and intelligence" cranks. And with the infamous Off2RioRob/YouReallyCan (thus). And with others. I suspect he resigned his adminship in January 2013 because of these petty battles. And in 2018 he posted this on his blog.

Paid editing aside, it's amazing how many academic intellectuals ended up on Wikipedia, the "free encyclo-thing" that is at least occasionally trumpeted as being "for the ordinary people". And how many of them reached adminship. And how many of them ended up fighting over trivial shit, and leaving/being forced out. Looking at Mathsci here. Also interesting how these discussions end up leading away from Steven Pinker, and right off a goddamn Cliff of Crazy.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Oct 10, 2021 10:50 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_Holdings

The most prominent editors: two IP addresses. One from the Chicago area.
Which did nothing other than make nicey-nicey about Reyes Holdings and J. Christopher Reyes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... 38.106.231

The other literally belongs to Reyes Holdings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... .85.68.190

Unmentioned: Reyes's ongoing attempt to monopolize the beer distribution business.

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/b ... competitio

https://www.beervanablog.com/beervana/2 ... year-to-go
I’m also keeping my eye on consolidation, partly in beer but especially within the wholesale tier. Reyes is in the midst of creating a wholesale monopoly on the West Coast, with massive holdings nationwide. That’s definitely not good for small breweries fighting to get their product on store shelves. The bottleneck wholesalers create is increasingly becoming a choke point for most breweries in the US.
https://slate.com/business/2020/07/brea ... -beer.html
Jensen, from Argus Brewery, tells a similar story. Argus was approached early on by Chicago Beverage Systems, the local subsidiary of Molson Coors–affiliated Reyes Holdings, the largest beer distributor in America and the country’s eighth-largest privately held company. Jensen says he was flattered that such a major player would be interested in his brewery—but he quickly realized the distributor was not actually interested in trying to get his beer into more bars and stores. Sales languished, and when Jensen tried to leave to find a new distributor, he learned it would cost a multiple of the brewery’s total sales to do so. Argus and Chicago Beverage Systems eventually parted ways, but the brewery struggled to recover. By the time Argus found a distributor that would actively sell its beer—Louis Glunz, a Chicagoland-based operation—it was too late, Jensen says.

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Fri Oct 15, 2021 8:27 pm

worst autobiographical abuse I've seen in literal years......

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktoria_Modesta

and who is the primary editor? Who else?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Viktoria_Modesta

This is almost TWELVE YEARS OLD. I see no evidence it was discussed on a noticeboard. The COIBot listed it REPEATEDLY on Wikiproject Spam in April 2010 -- NO administrative action was taken. Someone tried to tag it for "multiple issues" at the time and Viktoria kept removing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =354649720
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =354649894

Finally, the stupid babbling on the talkpage only underscores the lack of interest.

And that wasn't the only "questionable editor"!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... pnarrative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... layagdarof
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... r_Sniffler

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Oct 23, 2021 6:43 pm

Yo, bubs, I keep finding and posting this shit. Nobody on Wikipedia even fucking notices anymore. They have vanished up their own assholes completely by now. Anything coming from outside the cult is to be ignored. That is a cult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Motorcycle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... Jannetpark

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Sun Nov 07, 2021 2:38 am

Looks as though idiot YouTuber Louis Cole may have paid this person to glorify Louis Cole, idiot YouTuber, on Wikipedia. Maybe?

User avatar
ericbarbour
Sucks Admin
Posts: 4547
Joined: Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:56 am
Location: The ass-tral plane
Has thanked: 1099 times
Been thanked: 1797 times

Re: Paid Editing on WP is permissible

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Nov 15, 2021 7:45 pm

I'd like to see someone deny that VF Corporation is being paid edited--especially when one of the primary editors is called "VF Outlet". Plus we see Edwardx and Vchimpanzee all over the history. They appear over and over in the paid-corporate editing space.

Not mentioned on Wikipedia: VF's infamous tendency to make stupid legal threats over "trademark infringement".
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211 ... ment.shtml

And to keep shareholders they "don't like" out of investor meetings.
https://nationalcenter.org/ncppr/2018/0 ... r-meeting/
https://www.bizjournals.com/triad/news/ ... e-sec.html

Just pretend to be one of the robotic basement-dwellers and the fools-in-charge will never notice you.

Post Reply