Merry Christmas

A very Merry Christmas to everyone from Arkhaven, Castalia House, Infogalactic, Unauthorized, and, of course, Booster Patrol.

  • Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
  • The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
  • Holly, Jolly Christmas
  • The Ninth Day of Christmas, Boosted
  • What Child is This
  • I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas
  • O Holy Night
  • I’ll Be Home For Christmas
  • White Christmas
  • Silent Night
  • Let It Snow
  • Hallelujah
  • All I Want for Christmas

DISCUSS ON SG


Wikipedia debunks Hunter Biden emails

 Of course, by “debunks”, they mean “attempts to memory-hole” the facts:

Allegations of corruption against ex-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter have apparently been “debunked” and are merely a “conspiracy theory” according to Wikipedia, where editors are battling over the terms.

Hunter Biden was the subject of an explosive report last week as the New York Post published emails alleging that he involved his father in dodgy business dealings in Ukraine and China.

While the story is still unfolding, the Wikipedia page for Hunter Biden simply states that “he and his father have been the subjects of debunked right-wing conspiracy theories pushed by [President] Donald Trump and his allies.” The curious framing was highlighted by conservative commentator Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter on Tuesday.

Eight sources are listed for this one sentence, intending to support the view that any accusations of corruption against the Democratic presidential candidate and his son have already been proven false.

At this point, if you’re still using Wikipedia instead of Infogalactic, you’re part of the problem. Wikipedia isn’t just occasionally unreliable, it is a systematically false pillar of the media’s propaganda machine.


You can’t fix convergence

A reader emails about Wikipedia’s new code of conduct:

There is a big SJW convergence step happening on Wikipedia right now. They are trying to impose an universal code of conduct on all Wikimedia projects to be more “inclusive” and target “harassment”. Aka the same old bullshit as always. Only this time it would target something as big as all of the Wikipedias in all of their languages (another hilariously hypocritical example of SJW imposing their standards on different peoples and cultures, btw). The new code would be retroactive as well, apparently, so already closed cases could be opened again.

In the meantime they are also setting up an interim “case review committee“, just to be able to start doing this shit as fast as possible:

They are clearly trying to close this process as fast as possible, even doing it during summer when a lot of users are enjoying their holidays. I wonder if something could be done to stop it or limit its effect. Maybe some users that have been on Wikipedia for a while could work on it somehow. I don’t know if you have any ideas about that.

Why would we want to stop it? We’ve already provided everyone with the ideal alternative. People have got to learn to stop crying, stop complaining, and stop trying to fix the enemy and simply start making use of the existing alternatives instead.


SocialGalactic and the Burn Unit

With so much of the recent focus on Unauthorized, I want to make it clear that every current member of the Infogalactic Burn Unit will be receiving a Bronze or better membership of SocialGalactic 2.0. Precisely where the line between Bronze and Silver will be drawn has not yet been determined. We will do this AFTER we get through the Unauthorized Premium subscribers this coming week, but before we move on to the Basic subscribers.

The SG2 community is going to be sizable on this basis alone, so please be patient as it is going to take us a while to work through the literally thousands of eligible members.

We very much appreciate the Burn Unit’s commitment to keeping the lights on.


Burn Unit 2.0

Infogalactic is pleased to announce that it is now possible to join the Burn Unit and support the Planetary Knowledge Core through the Arkhaven store. Three levels of subscription are available, Bronze, Silver, and Gold, and all three come with enhanced features and capabilities on our new SocialGalactic system, to which Alpha access will be announced this week to all Burn Unit and Brainstorm members.

We’re also working on providing a coupon to a discounted Burn Unit t-shirt at Crypto.Fashion.

Please note that if you are already a member of the Burn Unit, there is absolutely no need to switch over unless you prefer to use your credit card instead of Paypal. All current members of the Burn Unit will receive the same access to SocialGalactic as the new members.

In answer to anticipated questions, yes, we will soon be able to offer support for the Darkstream and Voxiversity through the Arkhaven store, although I have to see about delivering the promised benefits to the existing supporters before setting that up. We are also working on an Audible-style system of purchasing audiobooks, but that is turning out to be more complicated if we do not wish to have a system that is not entirely manual.

Thank you for your staunch support of the Planetary Knowledge Core. In an age of endless historical revision and SJW memory-holing, we believe it is a vital tool for the preservation of the history and knowledge of Western civilization. Please note that by doing so, you are not only supporting the technology fronts, but are also helping provide strong infrastructural independence to Castalia House and Arkhaven as well.


Metaphor

If you see a forest in Ethiopia, you know there is very likely to be a church in the middle, says Alemayehu Wassie. …

These small but fertile oases — which number around 35,000 and are dotted across the country — are some of the last remaining scraps of the tall, lush natural forests that once covered Ethiopia, and which, along with their biodiversity, have all but disappeared.

Much of the nation’s forestland has been sacrificed to agriculture to feed the country’s mushrooming population — at more than 100 million, it is the world’s 12th largest. Deforestation was particularly encouraged during the country’s period of communism, in 1974–91, when the government nationalized the land, including the large estates of the church, and distributed it to people who converted swathes to farmland. Just 5{b43a0fc0c6bef1f13a0ee688948bcd35a2a6d28785f026a3bff8ca14cb06d58e} of the country is now covered in forest, down from 45{b43a0fc0c6bef1f13a0ee688948bcd35a2a6d28785f026a3bff8ca14cb06d58e} in the early twentieth century.

Serving as an oasis is going to be our job with regards to knowledge, particularly religious and philosophical tradition in the West. Why do you think I prioritized Infogalactic over more potentially lucrative projects? Did you truly think I didn’t know there was considerably more money in clones of profitable corporate projects than in one of a non-profit?

What the Infogalactic team and the Burn Unit are doing matters, quite possibly more than anything else we are doing.


Yellow Vest deplatformings

Big Social is apparently attempting to help the French government clamp down on the Gilets Jaunes. I’ve heard that they are getting deplatformed left and right by Twitter and Facebook. Fortunately, there are alternatives coming, and very soon.

Burn Unit, you’re all going to be given the opportunity to alpha test Infogalactic’s new Twitter alternative VERY soon. If there are features you would like to see, please share them here. And it will NOT be a free speech zone, we are going to clamp down ruthlessly on the Alt-Retards and adult content trolls who destroyed the Gab community. It’s going to be a clean speech zone, so if you want to pass naked pictures back and forth or engage in bantz, you’ll have to do it somewhere else.


Why Infogalactic matters

Wikipedia, as you would expect, is whitewashing the Sarah Jeong page:

The BBC, which is generally considered a WP:RS around these parts, reports:

The New York Times has defended a new member of its editorial board who wrote racist tweets about white people.[1]
I fail to see why this would not be included in the article. Cheers to all, XavierItzm (talk) 22:50, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

*** @XavierItzm: I have changed your comment, since the BBC changed the article today. For anyone wondering, the BBC used to say “racist” but now says “inflammatory”. You can see somewhere below where I criticize this decision by the BBC, but if they changed it, we have to respect that. wumbolo ^^^ 16:33, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
I’ve reverted this Orwellian change. Changing someone else’s comment on a talk page is not acceptable.2600:1012:B147:F1EA:F559:8E27:8070:B4CB (talk) 09:32, 5 August 2018 (UTC)
I don’t see anyone disagreeing that the tweets are in fact racist. At the very least, we could insert a sentence that says: “Sarah Jeong become the subject of widespread criticism in the media in early August 2018 when, upon her hiring by the New York Times Editorial Board, it was discovered that she had posted a series of racist Twitter messages disparaging white people.” I don’t think any of that is disputed in any way at this point.Ikjbagl (talk) 23:18, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
Support inclusion of your sentence as proposed and using the BBC as source. Remember, the page has been locked up and a condition has been imposed that consensus on the sentence and source must be reached. XavierItzm (talk) 23:24, 2 August 2018 (UTC) Whereas I still think the above contribution would have been fine, its simple one-sentence statement of fact was never greenlighted by the powers that be and instead got derailed by suggestions of having an entire paragraph. So now I support an alternate proposal below. Cheers to all. XavierItzm (talk) 06:31, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
Just adding that my response here could be used to add two or three more sources to back up that the criticism was “widespread”, with no fewer than 10 major news organizations reporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sarah_Jeong#I_think_that_the_controversy_of_Jeong’s_Tweets_should_be_mentioned{2f950ec02e67afe15e56ddb5018469898c7f7df1891e5cecbf34a80033d044ba}2E Ikjbagl (talk) 23:32, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
Agreed that additional sources could be added later. However, let’s not muddy the waters and see if consensus can be reached. XavierItzm (talk) 00:38, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
Support sentence proposed Conveys what occurred concisely, with the article in the BBC I think its nigh impossible to describe the event as not noteworthy. SWL36 (talk) 00:27, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
Regarding noteworthiness, the story is now on the Front Page of BBC.com/news, archive link here https://web.archive.org/web/20180803003558/https://www.bbc.com/news Ikjbagl (talk) 00:37, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
Oppose per the above stated reasons for waiting to decide whether this should be included at all, and if yes per the sources, then how it should be characterized. We remain WP:NOTNEWS. We look at how a group of sources deal with a topic; decide if it merits inclusion in an encyclopedic account of, in this case, the subject’s biography; then summarize the significant viewpoint or viewspoints. Reiterating the BBC’s version is what news aggregation sites do. We’re not that. Innisfree987 (talk) 01:40, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
I agree with the not news point about Wikipedia, but I disagree with your characterization. All of the reputable sources linked so far deal with the subject in the same way. This single news event is more notable by Wikipedia’s own (secondary-source based) standards than the rest of this person’s career. The other secondary source mentions of her up to this point have all been in blogs, University blogs or lesser known websites (though she was cited by Forbes), and she now has an article on every major news website related to this incident. She has also had a multitude more edits to her page in the past day than she has had in her career. Waiting to see if the event “becomes” notable makes less sense when the event is already more notable than the rest of her page so far constructed. Ikjbagl (talk) 01:55, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
Well, I sure would like to work on expanding the rest of it but unfortunately I’ll have to do so by edit request for now! Meanwhile. The number of edits has no bearing, really. We don’t make decisions based on popularity. Other points: the term “racist” is definitely not being used universally; ABC, WashPost, and USNews use the expression “derogatory”. CNN calls “disparaging” and notes many people defending Jeong call them “satirical”. Who knows where it will land when the dust settles–if anywhere worth noting. Beyond word choice, your note above saying I don’t think any of that is disputed in any way at this point is just the issue: as WP:NOTNEWS, we’re not aiming to post an update “at this point” (which would be appropriate, for a news site!), we’re trying to decide if an event is rates a mention of an encyclopedic bio, which I don’t think we can see on a subject like this after one day. I’m not saying this should definitely never be addressed; I’m only saying WP:CRYSTAL applies in understanding the significance of this, or not, in the bigger picture. Innisfree987 (talk) 02:33, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
Innisfree987 argues that “Reiterating the BBC’s version is what news aggregation sites do,” as if the BBC were unique in reporting these facts, as if the Beeb were somehow fringe, when in fact, up until yesterday, the BBC was considered a gold standard among WP:RS around the Wikipedia. Innisfree987 also implies that the BBC is somehow unique, when there are other WP:RSs saying the exact same thing.

Infogalactic gives you the power to decide upon the relevant facts for yourself: Sarah Jeong. It would be nice if conservatives would simply use Infogalactic instead of constantly whining about Wikipedia doing what Wikipedia always does.

Speaking of stealth-editing, Christina Hoff Sommers notes that there’s “No mention of Sarah Jeong’s demented tweets on her Wikipedia page. Why? A little group of activist editors won’t allow it. Amazing. See them in action here.”

Why? Because the 500+ Wikipedia Admins are all SJWs and they have no intention of allowing any information on Wikipedia that will damage anyone on the Left if they can help it. Speaking of Infogalactic, we’re making some changes to the server that should increase performance considerably on certain tasks. So, if it feels faster to you, you’re not imagining it.



Infogalactic Transporter

A new Chrome extension, courtesy of one of the Dread Ilk.

This extension allows the user to move between Wiki and IG. Auto-redirects from Wikipedia to Infogalactic’s version of that page (whether entering via a link or the address bar).

Clicking the extension button shuttles you back to the Wiki version (and disables auto-redirect for that tab), and clicking again takes you back to Infogalactic. If you navigate away, on that tab, to some website outside either Wiki or IG, it’ll reset the behaviour back to auto-redirecting.

Behaviour is also bound to the tab in which the clicking took place – that is to say, if you click the button (thus disabling auto-redirect), and open a new tab, that new tab will obey the default redirect behaviour (taking you to Infogalactic if you visit Wikipeida).

Future goals:
– Easy copy/paste of wikipedia text of current page (for transporting missing content)