Wikipedia editors have noticed that people use wikipedia for this purpose (finding the current location of sites) and so they have started to censor links for sites they don't want to encourage people to access. Right now this mostly impacts sites few would condone, like 8chan or kiwifarms. But in theory the policy applies to any site with illegal material so places like the pirate bay or scihub could have their links removed at any time.
Here's a well-reasoned argument linked from that thread for keeping extremist URL in articles about extremist websites. Strange what can change in just a couple of years.
Ah, the ever expanding definition of extremism. By now it already means anything that isn't politically correct. Organize terrorist attacks? I bet it's just protests they don't like. Lots of protests going on in my country right now and it's really tiresome to watch the media call them terrorists. It's like they all use the same arguments to silence and censor people.
Wikipedia has helped me in a couple of instances in which Google or DuckDuckGo couldn't, for example getting the latest onion or clearnet URL for a certain site.
Arguably the onion URL is information of value, but someone who can't figure out what the URL for 8chan might be probably doesn't need to go there anyway.
They certainly are no better than Google in that respect. Wikipedia has been censoring and promoting tilted political edits to the pages of certain figures for years now. Unbeknownst to most people, Wikipedia is central to the global censorship apparatus that's been put in place in the last decade or so.
I wonder if Wikipedia could take an approach similar to what package managers do in Linux distros when they decide not to include non-free packages by default: savvy users must add external repositories containing the banned entities (with such a repository possibly being unofficial and externally hosted).
Perhaps this could be realized by letting logged in users fill out a field for sources of third-party domain records, each of which could be a source of domains across the entire Wikipedia site. Or, more simply, just flag certain domains as such, and silently require users enable something like HN's "showdead" bit.
Otherwise, if you look at the size of that talk page, trying to decide this once and for all brings to mind the idea that "hard cases make bad law".
I thought it might be something like automated edits to Wikipedia talk pages as a database or cache, which would be abusive.
But actually it's using Wikipedia entries as a smart name search. This is read-only and a clever and legit use of the WP. If the browsers allowed the use of spaces in the domain name portion URLs it would be even more useful, but it's probably better that they don't (out of spec for TLDs)
On the other hand, Wikipedia pages seemingly get "vandalized" all the time and sometimes aren't corrected immediately.
Doesn't this create a situation where a bad actor could change the Wikipedia page for a `semi-popular-brand.com` url listing to something bad? Anyone who used `semi-popular-brand.idk` in that timeframe would land in the bad page. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding.
One challenge with this approach can be seen by considering a scihub takedown followed immediately by a correction to a new TLD. The new(and suddenly correct) address would be changed to an incorrect old address.
Not sure when this project first began exactly, but the Show HN for it is from 2020 <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22790425>, and various things suggest that timeframe for its genesis.
The same concern was raised by the user "segfaultbuserr" in that Show HN thread[1].
In 2019 I wrote up this very idea as part of a brain dump of long-stalled thoughts that I had been kicking around but not published anywhere. There are mitigations to the attack you describe, which I included in my original terse writeup about such a "Wikipedia Name System"[2]. I pasted the explanation in a comment in the original Show HN thread. The idea lies in the fact that although wikis can be edited to point to your own fake honeytrap, there are things that can't be faked; it's a public ledger sort of thought exercise in the vein of Bitcoin—but no need for proof of work or what is currently associated with cryptocurrency, etc. As I (re-)explained three years ago:
> Not as trivially compromised as it sounds like it would be; could be faked with (inevitably short-lived) edits, but temporality can't be faked. If a system were rolled out tomorrow, nothing that happens after rollout [...] would alter the fact that for the last N years, Wikipedia has understood that the website for Facebook is facebook.com. Newly created, low-traffic articles and short-lived edits would fail the trust threshold. After rollout, there would be increased attention to make sure that longstanding edits getting in that misrepresent the link between domain and identity [can never reach maturity]. Would-be attackers would be discouraged to the point of not even trying.
(This also provides mitigation for what is (currently) the top comment in this thread—the issue of Wikipedians censoring certain domains, provided that they have a long enough history to meet the trust threshold before they were decided to be too contentious to share information about them.)
Why Wikipedia though? Wikidata should be one to get this kind of data and all Wikipedia articles has Wikidata items. On top of that Wikidata even keep records of site name, like when someone change their site name.
I suppose the thought process is, more eyeballs are on corresponding Wikipedia pages for entities than are on Wikidata entries, so it's more likely to be corrected/up-to-date.
In many type of Infobox on Wikipedia, it's Wikidata which is working from the behind and editing the data in such articles is basically being done at Wikidata.
Since the linked README doesn't even mention "IP", I suspect the author misunderstands what "DNS" is about, and this is actually a search tool, and the headline is bad.
DNS is for associating various information with domain names, and looking that information up. Yes, the most popular information to associate with a domain name is IPv4- and IPv6-addresses via A and AAAA fields; but CNAME records exist as well, you know.
I thought the chrome extension didn't work at first, but you have to type "https://scihub.idk" rather then just "scihub.idk", which leads to a google search.
Once upon a time I built an iOS language translation/dictionary app which used Wikipedia as a back end. Basically, if you entered a word in language X and the Wikipedia version for language X had an entry, it could find the translation for that word in language Y by looking at the "this article in other languages" information in the source for that page. It was useful for finding translations or transliterations of terms that wouldn't commonly appear in standard dictionaries, like neologisms, brand names, or even just really obscure topics. Unfortunately it eventually got taken down from the App Store because Wikipedia's asshole lawyers didn't like that I used a serifed W in the logo even though I made it clear it wasn't an official Wikipedia product everywhere and I didn't have the motivation to "correct" my audacious use of an upper-case W which Wikipedia now apparently holds the copyrights to.
I still use this technique "manually" for finding translations when dictionaries, though. Wikipedia has a lot of information which isn't in a typical API-friendly format, but with a bit of regex there's some interesting possibilities.
If this sounds interesting, the Objective-C source is still available here: https://github.com/garrettalbright/wptrans You might also be able to find clones of it in the App Store since I know people were taking my source and republishing it back in the day, some even for a profit (mine was always free).
Your app was probably taken down because you apparently don’t understand what a trademark is, or what it is for.
> Wikipedia's asshole lawyers didn't like that I used a serifed W in the logo
It’s not the lawyers which don’t like it. Trademark exists to protect consumer confusion. If a reasonable person could reasonably (but incorrectly) believe that your app was officially associated with Wikipedia based on only looking at the logo, then you have created consumer confusion. Trademark law disallows you from (using trademarked branding) letting people believe that your app is official.
> I made it clear it wasn't an official Wikipedia product everywhere
Posting “No copyright infringement intended” on a YouTube video does not, contrary to masses of people, turn a copyright infringement into something else.
Likewise, just writing that your app is not official will not make a trademark infringement vanish.
(Of course, if Wikipedia does not have a valid trademark which you infringed, that’s another story. But it’s not what I would guess has happened here.)
Note that it does not use the same colors as the Wikipedia logo or the same puzzle piece/globe iconography. It uses a serifed “W” as well as characters from other writing systems, with a brown and yellow color scheme - alluding to Wikipedia as well as the app’s purpose, but intentionally avoiding copying to a degree that would cause confusion. If, after considering this, you still believe I was intentionally inviting confusion between my app and an official Wikipedia product even before all of the documentation stating that is not the case, I believe that you are either operating on very bad faith, or are one of Wikipedia’s lawyers trying to justify your invoice. “Our firm removed 20 violating apps from the App Store this month!”
I agree that that logo was a bit more dissimilar, and non-confusing, than I would have to imagine would make Wikipedia’s laywers show up with opinions. But IANAL.
> If you Google "Piratebay", the first search result is a fake "thepirate-bay.org" (with a dash) but the Wikipedia article lists the right one. — shpx
I'm laughing in pain. I detest google so much for being so bad at its only job - finding stuff - merely to maximize $$$. Google was such a great product and genuinely serving humanity. Now it's only a shell of its former self.
Google’s approach is not, in general, capable of handling adversarial inputs. This isn’t a Google problem as much as Google is currently losing the SEO war.
What are you going to do if people start to trust this and then someone edits the wiki sources to redirect people to phishing sites mocked up to look real?
This is a good point, this it something that has happened (I've personally witnessed) and probably still happens from time to time unless wikipedia has worked to stop that sort of abuse.
Long story short, about ten years ago, my recommendation of a specific search tool (shareaza) to a friend went south, since it was over the phone. I'd found telling people to use web searches didn't work out well, wikipedia on the other hand, usually had an up to date address -- I no longer recall what trouble it caused, but I spent some time wondering what malware was redirecting to the bogus software site -- there was none, it was the edited entry at wikipedia. (When I tried the bogus software I recall it looked like it was doing something, but in fact it was doing nothing as far as searching p2p networks. Being busy I wasn't interested to see what its objectives were before deleting.)
This is neat, but I expected something completely different from the name. I already had my hopes up for doing VPN/IP over DNS over Wikipedia.
Frustratingly, beyond not actually offering that (which is entirely reasonable), it does not even seem to be using DNS for the implementation of what it does.
This isn't DNS (resolving IPs to FQDNs) as much as resolving DNS prefixes to their current suffixes.
As others have pointed out, Wikipedia is starting to censor results just like Google. Maybe it would be better for this extension to pivot into providing their own service that performs this task.
If the point is to get to the site faster, why is the TLD "idk"? Couldn't it be 1 letter or at least the same three letters?
On a separate note, someone could actually make a website do this without any extension. It would need to use wikipedia dumps and has the advantage it can't be suddenly edited by a malicious actor.
> On a separate note, someone could actually make a website do this without any extension. It would need to use wikipedia dumps and has the advantage it can't be suddenly edited by a malicious actor.
Why would we trust "a website" more than random wikipedia edits to provide correct or up-to-date data?
The purpose of this app is to get the current url of those sites, which keeps changing url semi-frequently, so a offline copy of wikipedia would not work.
If this takes off, it's just going to result in a court order against Wikipedia. Z-lib getting popular on Tiktok = no z-lib anymore. Getting Wikipedia censored will ultimately make it harder for people to find sites like scihub.
Bad information is like viruses. Right?. So what we need is an immune-system. Bad information will still be there but it is prevented (to an extent) from multiplying.
What would an immune-system for online information look like?
How do you define “bad” information? I found a list of CSAM sites via a link in a Wikipedia book about onion services- having a known evil target to practice getting a dot onion to reveal its ip was both good and bad data, depending on who you ask.
(The CFAA has since expired, and those rude little pedophiles DEFINITELY noticed me.)
Bad information is like viruses. They look like legitimate parts of a biological system but in the end are dangerous to its health.
Note that "wrong" information is not bad as such, it is just wrong. It can be corrected. It becomes bad when its purpose is to mislead people, in which case its originators will never want to correct it.
> Instead of googling for the site, I google for the site's Wikipedia article ("schihub wiki") which usually has an up-to-date link to the site in the sidebar, whereas Google is forced to censor their results.
In the video, it doesn’t show this. It shows going to the scihub.idk domain. And then a redirect happens. So does this tool just host a local a domain resolver (and HTTP redirect server) for all .idk domains that does a wiki search and then responds with a HTTP redirect?
1. Make a Wikipedia search API request for the .idk domain, using the name as the article name.
2. Retrieve the rendered page contents if found.
3. Find the first Wikipedia infobox table on the page.
4. Extract the first "URL" or "Website" entry in that infobox.
5. Return the entry's value, if it's a link.
All this runs in a nickel.rs server on 127.0.0.1:80, which routes the requests as permanent redirects to the destination. Using dnsmasq,[1] if it's an .idk domain, it routes the request through the above Wikipedia resolver.
The extension could also use Wikidata [1] entries – which (AFAIK almost always) hold the data that is displayed in Wikipedia article's infobox – because then it wouldn't have to resort to parsing HTML.
Specifically, Wikidata has a "official website" property [2] that seems to be used. If there are multiple extensions, like in Sci-Hub's case [3], it could pick one based on user preferences.
DNS is a good name to help understand what it does but I am perturbed at the misappropriation. If it ramifies to calling everything DNS, search for real dns services will be cluttered with irrelevant results.
This a redirect to the right domain. It is not an IP address lookup. This could have just as well been an “I feel lucky” search box using Wikipedia as the source. Or a Duck !bang.
We live in a distopia where one of the last search engines that returns real results related to anything the western mainstream "hidden forces" do not want you to be able to see is Yandex, a company located under a dictatorship. In 2022, the only way for a regular citizen to approximate what is reality, what is the "truth", is to look for information provided from the opposite side of any argument you're trying to understand more of. Everything is fake or hidden from you. It's the stable diffusion distopia.
What I don't know is, I see mainstream media become increasingly curated and clearly agenda driven.
Is this a function of reality or me getting better at spotting it?
I felt as though in the 90s CNN legitimately was a good news source. Early 21centuey VICE was legitimately good.
Today there is next to nothing given anything other than a heavily biased view.
I think the internet has made things worse, there's a new kind of bias. What do you set the headline to for the breaking alert? Because that's what people will see. Follow that up with a more subtle article and boom you've got a basically iron glad propaganda machine.
I think it is a function of game theory akin to Prisoner's Dilemma.
If all the news sources are rather centrist (i.e., they all "cooperate"), then no one gains or loses audiences because of bias. This is a good strategy when publishing is expensive. However, as the costs of publishing drop, it becomes profitable to shave off niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication. This begins the defection phase of the PD game series. As defections accelerate, anyone who doesn't defect eventually suffers by continuing to not defect, leading to a new optimal state of all defections--i.e., publishers have to defect to maintain audience.
I dunno, I just came up with that as I was writing it.
There are also things to be said about the ability now to track engagement, which allowed humans to quantify (i.e., put a cost/value/ROI on) the extent to which bias/outrage drive engagement. But, this function would still play into the greater theoretical framework I proposed.
We estimate a model of newspaper demand that incorporates slant explicitly, estimate the slant that would be chosen if newspapers independently maximized their own profits, and compare these profit-maximizing points with firms’ actual choices. We find that readers have an economically significant preference for like-minded news. Firms respond strongly to consumer preferences, which account for roughly 20 percent of the variation in measured slant in our sample.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing. Since it is a like minded result, I obviously have a significant preference for it. (Unlike the sibling to your comment, which was obviously produced by someone from the other team)
> niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication.
We could just call them specialized audiences with particular interests, instead of equating the neoliberal centrism of a bunch of collaborating oligarchic publications to lack of bias.
edit: e.g. if all of the publications collaborate to not discuss issues concerning Mexican-Americans, a defector who peels off a large audience by being the only publication that attends to Mexican-American issues would not be an example of "bias" except under extremely normative definitions of "bias."
I’m not sure. Herman and Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent - a book describing the manipulation of public sentiment in the service of corporate and political goals - in 1988, and they were talking about wars from the 60s. The term itself comes from the 1920s. And 1984 was published in 1949.
> I felt as though in the 90s CNN legitimately was a good news source.
Nope. They were the original cheerleaders of modern militarism, from the first Persian Gulf War, which they turned into an infotainment spectacle devoid of any serious critical analysis, to their promotion of NAFTA and neo-liberalism. This idea that things were better in the past is a form of rosy retrospection and nostalgia. Things weren’t better, they just hid the bullshit under thicker layers of opaqueness. And I say this as a progressive liberal who has always hated CNN and despises Fox.
I agree with this post. Over the span of the last 20 years, and most certainly the last 7-5 years, the information wars have ramped up to an entirely new level. After 2018, large portions of dissident content mostly stemming from the right was completely banned on youtube, facebook, twitter. And it's being kept up in tiktok, instagram, and more recently even entities like cloudflare have begun participating.
I understand, the truth is not comfortable. It is sometimes incredibly hurtful to know the other sides version of the truth. But even then truth is worth it.
We live in an imperfect society where extremists leverage the very real flaws to insist that everything is absolutely corrupt and that we should embrace the exact opposite of anything that’s imperfect. Vaccines don’t prevent 100% of all infections for everyone? They’re obviously complete frauds that do no good at all.
The sad thing is that we have real problems, and this nihilistic insistence that everything is fake means that those problems will only get worse.
This argument is 100% of the time used to silence people by telling them that they should be talking about anything other than the subject they are currently talking about. It's also a generic argument that can be used to dismiss any issue without changing the wording.
As things stand Wikipedia is pretty good. Non-contentious topics are free to edit by everyone, contentious/political/hotbutton/etc topics have restricted editorship.
I do not sense any specific bias. As usual, "freedom of speech" does not imply a right to be listened to.
Also, I do not buy this dystopia claim. In 99.99% of all topics we know exactly what is true and what is not. The sky is blue, clouds are condensed water, the earth is a sphere, there is racism, there is poverty, wealth is unevenly distributed over the planet, hygiene helps prevent sickness, vaccinations have prevented a lot of suffering, social security is expensive, etc, etc.
The facts are easy. We used to argue about consequences stemming from these facts and what do to about it. These days we tend to confuse our disagreements with "alternate facts".
This is the style of thinking that is drilled into children from a young age. No one has ever discovered anything, mankind has not continually rediscovered the world and then forged dogmas and killed dissenters and then burned the dogmas and killed the priests of the former dogma. There is Capital T Truth and Capital F Factx. No one is responsible for those factx, they just exist and are delivered by God into the minds of men. Looking out my window right now, the sky is grey.
Bias definitely exists but it's on a page by page, or perhaps topic by topic basis. It can be fun looking at the talk page - and better yet, the archives of the talk pages.
I hate to break it to you, but the facts are not easy. To take something which is far enough away that it hopefully doesn't come across as inflammatory to you, consider the 9/11 attacks. And how the opinions about what happened are incredibly split all around the world.
Now, you can ofcourse dismiss all these opinions as "alternate facts". Probably similarly to how devoted christians dismissed theories about a heliocentric solar system as "alternative facts" only aspoused by lunatics.
Hackernews almost never actually deletes things (afaik they only do if there is a legal requirement or in exceptional circumstances after human review). Instead of being deleted comments/posts get marked as dead and hidden by default. You can enable viewing dead posts in your profile.
Its the best of both worlds. People who get offended easily or just don't want to deal with low quality content can view the moderated content only. But if the moderation gets taken too far they can opt in to viewing the unmoderated content as well.
> How about this: try posting an URL for kiwifarms or stormfront or whatever right here, in this thread. See if it stays up. See who's willing to tolerate it.
Man, I almost did. But people just get so irrationally angry about words on the internet nowadays that I decided against tempting fate. I don't need people trying to destroy my career because I don't irrationally hate the right people right now.
Yes, Kiwi Farms exists and has information and opinions you might not like. It certainly has ones that I don't like. But at the end of the day, it's just words on the internet; the stuff about "organized harassment campaigns" and all that is a media lie. I really wish people would just visit the place and realize that it's just a bunch of shitposters with a clear "look, laugh, but don't touch" mentality and not the demonic bogeyman the press has made it out be. But I realize that irrational hatred is faster and easier, so…
> I don't need people trying to destroy my career because I don't irrationally hate the right people right now.
You don't "irrationally" hate them probably because you happen not to fit the target profile.
EDIT: And are you serious? You truly think that KiwiFarms is a quirky, harmless place that just collects info to do nothing with it, and at the same time believe that on HN you'd be targeted by people who'd try to ruin your life? What force keeps such nasty people off kiwifarms but allows their presence here, I wonder?
> Yes, Kiwi Farms exists and has information and opinions you might not like. It certainly has ones that I don't like. But at the end of the day, it's just words on the internet;
There's no such thing as "just words on the internet". Words express beliefs and intent. I take them seriously.
> the stuff about "organized harassment campaigns" and all that is a media lie.
Of course. The sort of people that compile elaborate profiles on people including personal information are some sort of enlightened beings that despite obsessively tracking down and compiling every embarrassing or weird thing about another person would never actually use that information for anything at all.
Oh, God, I'm being dragged into this debate again.
> There's no such thing as "just words on the internet". Words express beliefs and intent. I take them seriously.
Intent? Find me a post on KF stating intent to harm someone in real life which wasn't either downvoted or promptly deleted. Go ahead.
> Of course. The sort of people that compile elaborate profiles on people including personal information are some sort of enlightened beings that despite obsessively tracking down and compiling every embarrassing or weird thing about another person would never actually use that information for anything at all.
Create an alt account on KF and post in a lolcow's thread saying that you want to harm that person in real life. You'll be downvoted into oblivion, probably banned, possibly doxed if you used the same username as you use elsewhere, and possibly reported to law enforcement.
You can believe what you're told by people with motivation to lie, or you can discover the truth. Up to you.
> Intent? Find me a post on KF stating intent to harm someone in real life which wasn't either downvoted or promptly deleted. Go ahead.
Are you new to online communities? I've been a core member of several for years.
There's always politics, admin only channels, and people contacting each other outside the main system. Sometimes multiple levels, like two admins talking in private, then adding a third, then bringing it into the admin channel, then breaking the news into the main community.
In communities where there's external attacks, or a concern with reputation, the people in charge typically take that seriously. It's very possible that something is publicly forbidden, but with the right contacts you can find the right people.
> Create an alt account on KF and post in a lolcow's thread saying that you want to harm that person in real life.
Which is unsurprising because formerly kiwifarms used traditional hosting, and had to at least keep some plausible deniability. But everyone knows what all that stuff they post is for.
> You'll be downvoted into oblivion, probably banned, possibly doxed if you used the same username as you use elsewhere, and possibly reported to law enforcement.
Sure, and if you know the right people on the right Discord, then you can avoid all that and discuss all the plans and share all the juicy news away from prying eyes.
Besides which, the info is public. Anyone can act on it without being a member, or having any agreement on anything with people posting there.
> There's always politics, admin only channels, and people contacting each other outside the main system.
Okay, so KF is responsible for conversations that happen outside of KF now? What should KF's admins do about that?
> Sure, and if you know the right people on the right Discord, then you can avoid all that and discuss all the plans and share all the juicy news away from prying eyes.
> Okay, so KF is responsible for conversations that happen outside of KF now?
No, I mean that any organization is more than what it presents publicly. The people that own KF, and the people that post on it are going to have more ways to talk to each other than to post on public threads.
> Take that up with Discord, then.
No, I take it up with the people who use Discord to this end first of all. And with Discord second, of course, if they know that's going on there and allow it.
They post contact information, links to profiles where the user can be contacted, and so on, right? If so, they're complicit in whatever people do with that information, even if they don't talk about it on the forums.
Most online forums have rules against doxing. Then again, most online forums have problems with anonymous users making false claims.
Is wikipedia likewise complicit for publishing articles on nefarious topics? How about linking to macdonalds.com, who is surely complicit in more deaths than kiwifarms?
Sure, it's also complicit, but the cost-benefit analysis favors Wikipedia, whereas KF has a much higher bar of utlity to clear because it's publishing information that would be trivial to use to hurt specific individuals. What value could KF provide that's worth that pain? I don't think there's any.
> it's publishing information that would be trivial to use to hurt specific individuals
But so do a lot of organizations. It's legal for kiwifarms' users and it's legal for the phone company, the federal election commission and for my city government too.
> What value could KF provide that's worth that pain? I don't think there's any.
What pain, exactly though? People claim that there have been suicides, but the claims seem dubious at best. If you call someone out for misappropriating funds and they commit suicide, is that on you?
What value? Many reporters (and regular humans) use kiwifarms to get a sense of the history, backstories and relationships of online figures and groups.
By that logic, if someone uses a phone book to harass you via telephone, the phone company is liable.
Or, for a more up-to-date example, if someone uses a DNS provider to find a server's IP address and do a DDOS attack against it (as is constantly happening to KF), the DNS provider would be liable.
The phone book and DNS provider are different because they don't say why one would want to harass those people, whereas on KF that information is provided along with their contact info.
I wasn't talking about that, but since you asked: My personal views and morals, just like everyone else. If you're on something I host, then I make the rules on my property.
They've allegedly had threads on Wikipedia editors (I haven't personally verified this, as I don't feel like learning how to navigate that site, but it was stated by people I find credible). So, no, immoral things should be documented on Wikipedia, but we're perfectly within our rights to protect our community.
If you mean documenting its existence, then no, because we have to learn from history. So I wouldn't have an issue with an article on antisemitism or the like.
But if I found out that something I own actually helps Nazis, then yes, I'd do my best to stop that from happening. If I suddenly ended up owning Stormfront or Kiwifarms, I would absolutely pull the plug and burn it all to the ground with no warning.
> But if I found out that something I own actually helps Nazis, then yes, I'd do my best to stop that from happening.
But the internet helps nazis. Telephones help nazis. I would argue that censorship helps nazis. The real nazis were completely censored from Weimar radio and Goebbels touted Der Angriff as "the most censored newspaper" by the German government. What is our standard for "helps"?
Side note: the wikipedia article for stormfront retains the link to the site. Removal was discussed on the Talk page, but retained with rather pointed language.
> But the internet helps nazis. Telephones help nazis.
I'm a consequentialist. I'll make the decision based on the overall consequences. So for instance the internet helps nazis, but it also does a lot of good for a lot more people. Now if the effect of the internet was 99% to help nazis, that would be a problem.
> Side note: the wikipedia article for stormfront retains the link to the site. Removal was discussed on the Talk page, but retained with rather pointed language.
Like I said, that's up to them to decide. If it was up to me, I would not allow that link.
That's how I lean too. I'm maybe just more leery of the long term consequences of censorship and proscribed ideas. I think they are ultimately poisonous.
> If it was up to me, I would not allow that link.
How would you write that policy for wikimedia, so your editors would know which articles could link to the website they describe, and which could not?
> That's how I lean too. I'm maybe just more leery of the long term consequences of censorship and proscribed ideas. I think they are ultimately poisonous.
Over the years, I figured that in practice pretty much nobody is truly willing to commit absolutely to their ideals. Everyone has a breaking point where if they have bad enough consequences, ideals will be discarded.
Musk is showing this on Twitter right now.
And I think most any sane person would do the same, because unyielding commitment can trivially be taken advantage of. Eg, if you open up your house to absolutely everyone, and hold steadfast when people start punching holes in the walls, eventually you won't have a house to offer anymore.
> How would you write that policy for wikimedia, so your editors would know which articles could link to the website they describe, and which could not?
That highly depends on my position, the leadership structure, the state of the organization, and so on. As per the above I have some moral flexibility and will compromise somewhat for the greater good.
> YES, we as a society have decided that some forms of discourse are to be shunned.
"We as the cultural elite have decided what you may read."
> No one is confused about what kiwifarms stands for.
This is demonstrably false. You have invented or swallowed a narrative about kiwifarms and are working to prevent anyone else from discovering the truth for themselves.
A different narrative is that Kiwifarms operated within the law. False accusations were made against it. CloudFlair believed those accusations and stopped protecting it from illegal network attacks. Illegal network attacks knocked it offline for a while.
Which of these narratives is true, and how could we find out?
> How about this: try posting an URL for kiwifarms or stormfront or whatever right here, in this thread. See if it stays up. See who's willing to tolerate it.
Everyone's already taken the bait, but I'm an awful fish, so I'll post their secret .onion url: kiwifarmsaaf4t2h7gc3dfc5ojhmqruw2nit3uejrpiagrxeuxiyxcyd.onion
It's not really something I'd be comfortable with either, so I get it, but everyone in this thread should at least understand that the average kiwi farms thread is roughly as offensive as the conversations at every job site that constructed all your houses, every field that grew your vegetables, and every rig that pumped the oil for your car. I'm not saying it's okay, but you have to accept it to some extent. Those people are out there offline, too.
While you're at it, check out their "Christmas Art" thread and think of the average Nazi spending most of their time being a perfectly polite and non-hateful person: https://archive.ph/TffRs
> is roughly as offensive as the conversations at every job site that constructed all your houses, every field that grew your vegetables, and every rig that pumped the oil for your car. .... Those people are out there...
I'm trying to understand what you are saying with that. What are you implying? Please be more specific. Because it sounds like you are painting with a very broad brush and making a lot of assumptions about great swaths of society.
Absolutely, even the so-called "free speech" platforms like Truth Social will ban you for saying the wrong things. Moral absolutism never really works out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kiwi_Farms#URL