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This week, two prominent Republicans, Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) and Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina), both of whom play influential roles in the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, announced plans to probe into everybody’s favorite digital encyclopedia. In a letter that Comer and Mace sent to the Wikimedia Foundation (which helps run the site), they asked for internal documents that might show evidence of bad actors who had commandeered Wikipedia for their own ends. The letter, dated Aug. 27th, states that the committee is
investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion. We seek your assistance in obtaining documents and communications regarding individuals (or specific accounts) serving as Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated Wikipedia platform policies as well as your own efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics.
You miss my point, and I suspect most people did given the torrent of downvotes on my comment.
Wikipedia is not just the big blob of data, it’s the editors who are constantly updating and curating it. It’s the site where those editors do their work. If Trump manages to “shut down” Wikipedia, then it doesn’t matter if that blob of data is safely stashed away on some peoples’ hard drives - it’s no longer a living document. The editors can’t edit, the readers can’t read. It becomes a clay tablet buried in a pit somewhere.
That’s why “protecting Wikipedia” can’t simply involve downloading a database dump. That’s like “protecting” someone by embalming them and sealing their corpse in a vault.
FaceDeer, you keep having these takes that people hate because it is a truth. Maybe it’s the percieved pessimism, idk. Wikipedia absolutely would not be the same if it wasn’t organic and changing.
Yeah.
They they don’t need to kill Wikipedia, they just need to make it inaccessible enough to not matter. This is the Fascism 2.0 playbook.
Archiving it is good, but it also won’t matter if the site can’t stay up, and it is backed up thousands of times over, probably.