Tag: Infogalactic

Wikipedia: the information manager

This little exchange on a Wikipedia Talk page demonstrates the vital importance of Infogalactic as well as the fact that even the highest-ranking Wikipedians are well aware of the Planetary Knowledge Core and its potential significance. You will note that Wikipedia admins are primarily concerned with managing “publicity” and concealing relevant information from the public instead of making it available to them.

Pictures of murderers?
Is there a reason why they are not shown in the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.142.184.18 (talk) 19:05, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Why do you want to give them publicity? Doug Weller talk 19:40, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

They’re available on Infogalactic here: https://infogalactic.com/info/Murders_of_Channon_Christian_and_Christopher_Newsom — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.228.112.21 (talk) 22:32, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

The pictures of those disgusting criminals are shown in nearly all news articles covering the event. I think we should show the pictures so their faces are forever associated with that act of evil they committed. Mr Ernie (talk) 18:02, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not here to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS, that’s not a good reason. As for the IP’s comment, Infogalactic is an alt-right website created by Vox Day and a bad example. Doug Weller talk 06:31, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

User:Doug Weller their photographs were routinely shown by the local newspaper (The Knoxville News Sentinel). There were constant updates about the trial by reporter Jamie Satterfield, whose reporting probably constitutes the bulk of all reporting about this saga. I don’t understand your argument that showing their photos gives them “publicity.” It’s also a bit odd for you to ascribe RIGHTGREATWRONGS to my comment. There is nothing to RIGHT as they were convicted of their crimes. Mr Ernie (talk) 14:11, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

IIn any case, “so their faces are forever associated with that act of evil they committed.” means to me that your reason is not that it would be encyclopedic but you want to use the article to as you say associate their faces etc. But no one or at least no one who wasn’t closely involved is ever going to remember their faces. Although I guess they might remember they were black. Which would be a terrible reason to include their faces of course. It would certainly publicise that fact. Doug Weller talk 14:40, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

The Wikipedia editor attempting to bury the fact that the murderers of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom were black is an administrator on the English Wikipedia for 9 years, 6 months and 23 days, who is on the Arbitration Committee, has checkuser rights, and is an oversighter on the English Wikipedia. He is also is identified to the Wikimedia Foundation as one with access to nonpublic data.

And the fact that the 536 active administrators are almost uniformly SJWs intent on utilizing Wikipedia for social justice is why Infogalactic will be an increasingly vital resource in years to come. Infogalactic is not “an alt-right website”, and this will become increasingly clear to even the most inveterate SJWs over time.

Infogalactic update

We made some major changes to the Infogalactic structure yesterday. While most of the work is interior stuff that will not be readily apparent to the user, we have significantly expanded our storage and processing capabilities while reducing our monthly burn rate by about one-third. This means that we are running about twice as fast and about 2.7 times more efficiently than before, while giving us considerably more control over our backend.

What this means, as you will see, is that our search time has been cut in half again. Just copy and paste :i vox day into the search bar of Brave and you will see what I mean.

Thanks very much to the Burn Unit, who continue to keep Infogalactic moving forward. And you should not fail to note that the Planetary Knowledge Core is actively updating itself, as even recent events such as March Madness 2018 are already documented online.

We’re #2

Things have been quiet at Infogalactic lately, and they will continue to be quiet even as we continue to improve performance, until DONTPANIC is ready to bring the noise, but you can bet that Wikipedia is aware that it exists now. This is #2 on Breitbart’s list of the Best Examples of Left-wing Bias on Wikipedia in 2017:

2. Burying CNN’s Blackmail controversy and other scandals at the network

Shortly after CNN’s blackmail controversy, an editor created a page on the topic. Other editors promptly had the story buried by moving the content  into the bottom section of an article about CNN controversies. Roughly two dozen editors, mostly left-wing, supported this move citing a policy that says Wikipedia is not for news. Five of these editors showed a double standard, having previously voted to keep an article on Trump’s disclosure of intelligence about ISIS threats in a meeting with Russia where the same policy would apply.

A few editors went even further by cutting out critical information on the blackmail controversy from even the general CNN controversies article, as well as gutting nearly a third of the article’s content covering a variety of scandals that gripped the network, despite much of it being backed by sources considered reliable by Wikipedia standards. These removals included a section on CNN New Year’s Eve host Kathy Griffin’s firing from the network, which was justified by claiming it wasn’t a CNN controversy. The same argument was used to keep out mention of undercover journalist James O’Keefe’s video series on CNN, itself denied its own article by many of the same editors.

Only a small amount of the removed content had been restored after the flurry of deletions. When the situation was mentioned on the Vox Popoli blog of science fiction author Vox Day, the founder of Wikipedia alternative Infogalactic, an editor sought to restore noteworthy content about the blackmail controversy and was immediately reverted.

Scandalous! The mainstream media won’t cover this, of course, but that’s fine. More and more people are routing around them every day.

But this underlines the importance of Infogalactic. Do take the trouble to thank the Burn Unit, which make it run. And if you’re using Infogalactic, consider joining it. The thing about foundational structures like Infogalactic is that they’re neither sexy nor exciting. That’s why people pay so little attention to them even when they rely upon them heavily. The thing is, they are absolutely vital. Which, of course, is why I prioritized it in the first place.

Note that only 561 of Wikipedia’s 1,237 administrators are active now. We have a LONG way to go, but it is doable. And the more that Wikipedia is converged by its admins, the easier our long march becomes.

Wikipedia buries CNN scandal

This sort of thing is exactly why I put Infogalactic at the top of the priority list. Because we need a way of accurately preserving the history that SJWs are always trying to revise and rewrite:

CNN Blackmail Controversy Buried on Wikipedia with Help of Partisan Editors

Following CNN’s blackmail controversy, left-wing Wikipedia editors had the Wikipedia article on the incident removed and its contents buried at the bottom of a page on CNN controversies. Editors then proceeded to gut this article of roughly a third of its content about controversies at the network in the latest example of liberal bias at the online encyclopedia.

Roughly an hour after the article on CNN’s recent blackmail scandal was originally created, editor NorthBySouthBaranof started a discussion on having the article made into a redirect to a CNN controversies article with a small section about the incident. Baranof was previously one of the anti-GamerGate editors banned from edits about the ethics in games journalism controversy due to his aggressive agenda-driven editing.

Over the course of the discussion, 23 regular editors on the site expressed support for the move. Although a majority of editors supporting the move in the discussion have some history of editing in favor of progressive positions, most notable are a group of five (MrX, Volunteer Marek, Objective3000, Sagecandor, and ValarianB) who also participated in a discussion on deleting the article about President Trump sharing classified information on ISIS terrorist activities with Russia.

Standard operating procedure at the SJW-converged site. Rather like the BEA, which has retroactively eliminated the 2001 recession from the official GDP figures, SJW history reflects nothing more than their version of what it suits them now to claim happened then.

Classic headlines

This was simply too good not to mention.

Transgender Woman Danica Roem Elected To Virginia HouseLeft Celebrates Another White Man In Office

If you’re not relying upon Infogalactic News for your daily headlines, you are missing out in more ways than one.

I haven’t spoken about Infogalactic much because we are in pure heads-down development mode. But rest assured, progress continues and the Burn Unit resources are not only not being wasted, we are using them more economically and efficiently than ever. This is a long game, more akin to an ultra-marathon than the proverbial sprint, and we are actively working on adding features that no one presently even imagines.

Just create. Just do it.

Davis Aurini commends those who go out and create rather than sit around and complain:

Rather than trying to distribute the ideas – and handing them over to the Obsessives and Extremists who turn them into a farce – we need to own them.  We need to implement them.

We must go out there and create.

Roosh V took this theory, and put together a series of books which explained it’s application to his audience.  He wasn’t lecturing about theory – he was writing about practice.  He created something useful and marketable, a solid base which he owned.  This expanded into his forum, a community which has taken on a life of its own.  It is worth noting that the RVF exists for its own sake, not as a counter-reaction against an ideological opponent.  While feminists are frequently ridiculed on its pages, those who comprise the membership would be just as happy if there were no feminists to oppose.  RVF members don’t derive their identity from being anti-X – their identity comes from their individual accomplishments, and they frequent the forum for the sake of intellectual debate, entertainment, and networking.  Any political actions which derive from this shared identity will be as organic as the community-group that participates in local politics.

Another prominent example of the Red Pill in application is Vox Day’s various endeavours.  Of note are Castalia House and InfoGalactic.  Upon realizing that the publishing industry and Wikipedia had been taken over by far-left interest groups who eschewed objective truth and good fiction in favour of ideological nepotism, he didn’t go on a quest to ‘raise awareness’ of the problem; instead, he saw an opportunity for action.  While both of these projects are still finding their footing, by all accounts InfoGalactic is not only providing unbiased information, it’s providing it at a superior level to the equivalent articles on Wikipedia.   Castalia House, meanwhile, is free to pick up the talented authors who are being ignored by the mainstream publishers due to their race or sex.

The truth is that the SJWs are creating more opportunities for us than we can reasonably pursue. The trick is to identify the institutional weakness and hit it hard. For example, one thing I’ve learned about the comic industry is that the artists are often not paid royalties, just a flat per-page rate. So, one thing we are going to do to ensure that we eventually secure the best talent over time is, in addition to the flat fee, pay royalties for an extended period of time on our comic book sales, just as we do on our regular book sales.

You can’t start at the top, but you can come up with a plan to get there eventually. The Castalia House team goes over every print book carefully; if you compare our earliest print editions to the latest ones, you can see that we’re continually trying to improve the product. Creation is a dynamic process, and so the more you focus on improvement, the more you will gradually improve, until one day people suddenly blink and say, “Hey, you know, that’s actually rather good.”

Ever notice that no one calls Castalia House my vanity publishing house any more? I never had to say one single word to convince people otherwise. We just keep working on improving our offerings, one ebook or print edition or audiobook at a time. (I’ve always said that we’ll know that Castalia, or Infogalactic, is truly successful when the SJWs start denying that I had anything to do with it.) There is no magic plan for success and no easy path. You simply have to choose your path and walk it as tirelessly as you can.

Speaking of Castalia House, it turns out that today is a dual-release day. THE LAST WITCHKING & OTHER STORIES is now available on Amazon and Audible. Narrated by Jeremy Daw, our wonderful new narrator, it is 9 hours and 13 minutes of epic fantasy set in Selenoth. It includes “The Wardog’s Coin”, “Qalabi Dawn”, and “A Magic Broken” as well as the three stories from the ebook edition, “The Last Witchking”, “The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro”, and “Opera Vita Aeterna”.

The next Selenoth audiobook will be Summa Elvetica & Other Stories, which will also be narrated by Jeremy Daw.

Alt-Tech overview

One year on, Cheah Kai Wai reviews the current state of Alt-Tech:

Last year, the Alt-Tech promised a revolution. These platforms aimed to disrupt and replace the legacy platforms, placing the rights and freedoms of users first. One year on, how well did they fare?

Infogalactic

Infogalactic is an unqualified success story. Beginning as a dynamic hard fork of Wikipedia, it strives to be more objective and informative than its predecessor. In line with its Seven Canons, Infogalactic maintains a strict non-ideological position for all facts — but in the future, it will introduce Context and Opinion levels to its pages, allowing greater depth of content.

Every time I compared an Infogalactic page to Wikipedia, I found the former to be more informative and accurate. The only major knock against Infogalactic is its load time, and even that is improving by the day. In the beginning, it took long minutes to load a single page. Today, it is only slightly slower than Wikipedia.

I use Infogalactic exclusively these days. Wikipedia’s explicit left-wing bias means it is no longer a neutral source of information. Infogalactic has demonstrated itself to be a viable and sustainable alternative to Wikipedia, and in the long term I suspect the disruption and replacement of Wikipedia is inevitable.

Gab

Gab was supposed to be the Twitter killer. A platform dedicated to free speech, it has survived allegations and lies about it being the haven of the Alt-Right and Neo-Nazis. Apple and Google have repeatedly prevented Gab from publishing its app on the iTunes Store and Google Play Store respectively for spurious reasons. Gab brands itself as a proponent of free speech — but that is also its undoing.

Gab’s key weakness is its inability or unwillingness to moderate posts. While it is unwaveringly committed to free speech, freedom is not and cannot be unlimited. As the old adage goes, your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Harmful speech — speech that incites violence or compromises the privacy and safety of individuals — is not protected speech. Gab must be able to moderate harmful content to preserve the continued health and safety of its users, and it has failed the test….

These controversies expose Gab’s core weakness. As Gab refused to moderate harmful speech, Gab users have no choice but to lodge complaints with the domain registrar, who will inevitably respond by ordering Gab off its platform. Like the Daily Stormer, I foresee Gab migrating from registrar to registrar, virtually guaranteeing disruption of services. Alternatively, these users may turn to the police and the courts instead, which will invite another round of troubles.

Free speech ends where harm begins. Incitement to violence, exposure of confidential information, and lying about someone to smear his reputation counts as harm. If Gab will not handle harmful speech in-house, other parties will. To Gab’s detriment. I, for one, cannot in good conscience continue to recommend anyone to use Gab until they fix this oversight, if ever.

Ironically, the fevered assaults by the Daily Stormpoopers and other Gab enthusiasts on me appear to have borne some unexpected fruit. After I reported about 20 or 30 attack tweets to Twitter, in addition to banning and suspending a few of the responsible accounts, Twitter has restored full link access to Vox Popoli using the .com extension after more than 18 months of blocking it.

Enemy of my enemy and all that, I suppose. Go figure.

I will also say that my experience of Brave has been considerably more positive than Cheah’s. But regardless, I am very pleased to know that Infogalactic is working so well for its users, even in Phase One.

Fake Ads

As Facebook has already been caught multiple times, Google has been caught faking ad traffic:

The WSJ is reporting that Google is issuing refunds to advertisers over “fake traffic,” and are now working on new safeguards against the issue.
Google’s refunds amount to only a fraction of the total ad spending served to invalid traffic, which has left some advertising executives unsatisfied, the people familiar with the situation said. Google has offered to repay its “platform fee,” which ad buyers said typically ranges from about 7% to 10% of the total ad buy.

The company says this is appropriate, because it doesn’t control the rest of the money. Typically, advertisers use DoubleClick Bid Manager to target audiences across vast numbers of websites in seconds by connecting to dozens of online ad exchanges, marketplaces that connect buyers and publishers through real-time auctions.
As we at Adland have argued for years now, digital paid media is a fraud due to the many incidents of fake traffic, bots, and the smoke and mirrors that blind the less tech savvy clients. Last year, Russian bots earned 180 million by fake-watching ads all over the Google empire.
Google has participated in efforts to clean up the digital market, joining the industry initiative Ads.txt project launched back in May by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. They’re hoping to bring trust back into the digital ecosystem. But in the arms race between consumers who use ad blockers and ad networks making ads unblockable, unskippable and even more intrusive, the consumers are staying one step ahead. More importantly with each new fraud brought to light and the hundreds of millions wasted, it’s hard to believe clients take Google at face value much longer. Advertisers are finally figuring out that this is a house of cards, built by pretty graphs in slick interfaces that look great on paper but in reality does very little to drive sales.
Google’s latest crisis comes at the same time that it is removing content creators from the ability to monetize their content, policing Youtube like never before. Google’s policing doesn’t end there, however. In Professor Jordan Peterson’s case, they banned him from his entire account, including mail and calendar.
Bloomberg reports that Google has just begun their biggest crackdown on “extremist content”

The new restrictions, which target what Walker called “inflammatory religious or supremacist content,” are expected to hit a small fraction of videos, according to person familiar with the company. YouTube says it uploads over 400 hours of video a minute. Videos tagged by its new policy won’t be able to run ads or have comments posted, and won’t appear in any recommended lists on the video site. A warning screen will also appear before the videos, which will not be able to play when embedded on external websites. YouTube will let video creators contest the restrictions through an appeals process, a spokeswoman said.
If the appeals process is anything like what Adland encountered, then it will be labyrinthian, time-consuming and arbitrary. The only reason we were un-banned from Adsense the first time around, was because we knew someone who knew someone that worked at Google in Ireland. These days, the only replies we get are automatic. Adland.tv the domain has even been delisted from Google search completely, which we managed to fix, and we’re currently being heavily deranked for no apparent reason. Or perhaps these articles are the reason.
In dealing with international brand boycott of Google advertising, and cleaning house so that they no longer fund terrorism by running pre-roll Super Bowl ads on ISIS videos, Google is now again apologising and “tweaking” their system.

The ad economy is increasingly a) monopolistic and b) fraudulent. I have never used AdSense or Facebook ads because I have never seen any indication whatsoever that they are effective or reliable. I did try using BookBub four times, but after they rejected both A THRONE OF BONES as well as Jerry Pournelle’s THERE WILL BE WAR for ad campaigns, I stopped using them.
What I have found to be effective is a) this blog, b) Larry Correia’s book bombs, c) the Amazon giveaways, and d) the two mailing lists. In other words, direct marketing. Indirect marketing, be it advertising in magazines or the various social media ad schemes, only appear to benefit the owner of the advertising vehicle rather than the advertiser.
Notice that YouTube still puts ads on videos it has demonetized. Such as those produced by Ron Paul.

Former US Congressman Ron Paul has joined a growing list of independent political journalists and commentators who’re being economically punished by YouTube despite producing videos that routinely receive hundreds of thousands of views. In a tweet published Saturday, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange tweeted a screenshot of Paul’s “Liberty Report” page showing that his videos had been labeled “not suitable” for all advertisers by YouTube’s content arbiters.

Infogalactic is up again

Just FYI. Nothing serious, just a technical problem. It should be back up before 9 AM this morning. It’s neither an attack nor a billing issue.

UPDATE: 9:20 AM Eastern. We’re back up.

Infogalactic in L’Express

A French take on Infogalactic. The original article in French is here.

Presented as “trustworthy” and “unbiased”, these encyclopedias are the privileged terrain of racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Because they considered Wikipedia to be unreliable and contaminated by the “social justice warrior”, several extreme right-wing figures have invented their own online encyclopedias. Their names: Metapedia , Infogalactic, or Conservapedia .

These sites now have several hundred thousand contents. A success such as the first of them now exists in no less than sixteen languages. The second, currently only available in English, will also be launched in France by the end of the summer …

Supremacy, anti-semitism and complicism

At first glance, these three encyclopedias resemble Wikipedia . The design, like the participative concept, have indeed been borrowed from him. On the other hand, the difference is quite clear. Founded by extreme right – wing American and Swedish figures, the sites do not hide their political

On the home pages of Metapedia and Conservapedia, there are two columns relaying theses and theories negationist, supremacist, antisemitic, racist, islamophobic, antifeminist, complotist, or homophobic. Infogalactic is more subtle. Its founder, who calls himself Vox Day, is the first to denounce the “extreme right bias” (movement to which it belongs elsewhere). “We are trying to make available to the Net surfers a neutral platform, which allows them to form their own opinion”.

Even if you look at it, the news from the main page is always cleverly chosen. Those celebrating the success of President Donald Trump , for example, are regularly highlighted. As for the thematic pages, some, rather well documented, are next to others containing objective nonsense.


For Infogalactic, the Pizzagate was real

An example is evocative. The site Infogalactic has a page dedicated to “fake news” . Among these misinformation is the ” Pizzagate”, a conspiracy theory according to which the former director of campaign of Hillary Clinton would have organized a pedophile network from a pizzeria.

On the page “fake news”, is quoted the Pizzagate. On the page “fake news”, is quoted the Pizzagate. Problem: the site also contains an entire page on this same event . And there, more question of “fake news”: the Pizzagate has for the authors well existed. Pseudo-evidence, such as the number of missing children in the pizzeria region, is even advanced. Asked about this by L’Express, Vox Day explains that according to him, the media “were lying” about this scandal. He accuses them of having conducted “no search, no reportage” before reversing the facts. Notwithstanding the New York Times and other newspapers that conducted the investigation.

For now, these platforms remain less popular than Wikipedia. While the latter is the fifth most visited site in the world, Infogalactic is only 14,710th, and Conservapedia 18,066th in the United States, according to the Alexa ranking. But their traffic would not stop growing, boosted by “anti-Wikipedia revolt.”

It’s a bit of a hit piece, of course, but it was well worth providing the reporter with a few quotes, as the article generally backs up our criticisms of Wikipedia. International awareness continues to grow. Traffic continues to grow. And we’ll have an exciting new feature to announce soon. And for the record, here is what I actually had to say about Pizzagate.

All I know about Pizzagate is that the mainstream media is obviously lying about it. If you look into the timeline of the media’s coverage, you will see that they started claiming Pizzagate was fake news from the very start, just as soon as the news first broke. They never looked into it, they never reported on any of the evidence gathered by the chans, they just unilaterally declared it to be fake news without any research or reporting.


No one in the mainstream media bothered looking into why a little pizza shop owner was listed as one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington DC. If nothing else, you’d think they would have asked at least one or two questions about that anomaly. And they haven’t addressed the fact that the DC police say no shots were fired by the actor arrested at Comet Ping Pong while the Washington Post reported that at least one shot was fired.


Then note that CNN just fired three respected and award-winning employees for getting caught putting out fake news.


Anyhow, since Pizzagate is an INVESTIGATION, not a conclusion, it’s not even correct to say it is a single “story” at all. There are multiple aspects to Pizzagate, so some of them may be true while others are false. I haven’t spent any time looking into it myself, so I don’t have any opinions in that regard, but I will say that I find the mainstream media’s behavior to be suspicious.