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Friday, October 14, 2016

Wikipedia: where information goes to die - by Vox Day

We've created a new Infogalactic blog where the Galaxians can post and discuss various aspects of building the Planetary Knowledge Core. Already, the distinct differences between Infogalactic and Wikipedia are readily apparent, and Infogalactic is still in Phase One: Vanilla Fork.
An interesting discussion on Wikipedia about Infogalactic. Notice that the Wikipedians have not only buried the contributions of the contributors about whom they affect to be so concerned, but they have ensured that no one can retrieve it.

Now, why would Wikipedians want to completely bury a page about Cultural Marxism?
== Attribution for deleted content ==

[http://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page Infogalactic] is a new Wikipedia fork set up by Breitbart as [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/10/10/anti-thought-police-infogalactic-launches-as-wikipedia-alternative/ "an alternative to biased Wikipedia"]. I have been asked to supply a copy of the page deleted at [[WP:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Cultural Marxism (2nd nomination)|this MfD]]. Since Infogalactic's standards for notability and for COI are intended to be more relaxed than ours, it is likely to want to keep many articles that we delete, and we can expect more requests for copies.

My concern is, how should attribution be handled? Under CC-BY-SA we promise contributors that their contributions will be attributed, and any copies carry the same obligation. It does not seem right to accept contributions to a page, delete it, and then provide copies without attribution. Forked articles in Infogalactica are correctly linked to the original here, but where our page has been deleted there is nothing to link to.
You have to read the whole thing there to believe it. This is classic Wikipedia rules-mongering, where the spirit of the law is defeated by the legalistic gyrations of the expert Wikipedian. Better to permanently bury someone's contribution than risk - risk - the possibility that it might not be correctly attributed as per the CC-BY-SA and the phase of the Moon.

The fact that this particular contribution happens to be anathema to the radical SJWs of Wikipedia is mere happenstance, of course.

Consider: Cultural Marxism is deemed unworthy of a page on Wikipedia, deleted, and buried. But the page about gay performance artist Chris Crocker, best known for his 2007 "Leave Britney alone" performance on YouTube, has hundreds of edits and 53.9k of data devoted to it.

This is why the world needs Infogalactic. To support it, you can either help us cover the monthly burn rate or help us reach Phase Two: Neapolitan Spoon. And needless to say, I'm confident our Galaxians will put together a superlative page on Cultural Marxism that is considerably more accurate than the deleted-and-buried version ever was.