The Wikipedia of the Alt-Right

Wired acknowledges the existence of Infogalactic:

Vox Day thinks that Wikipedia is the worst. But the things that bug him aren’t the typical complaints you’ll hear about the crowd-sourced encyclopedia—that it’s plagued by trolls, say, or that its pages on Pokémon lore are overly comprehensive.

Day is bothered because he believes that Wikipedia is a Democratic tool, run “by the left-wing thought police who administer it,” he tells me over email. Yet the millions of articles and stubs that make up the end product are used as fact. And that makes the science fiction writer and alt-right personality, who uses Vox Day as his pen name, angry.

So last fall, in the midst of a public debate about what, exactly, constitutes a fact, Day decided it was time to do something about the Wikipedia problem. He chose to launch his own version of it. He made a copy of the entire site and invited his followers to start rewriting its pages. “Wikipedia was the easiest and the most important of the social justice-converged social media giants to replace,” Day told me.

That site, Infogalactic, is made with Wikipedia’s MediaWiki software—so by design it looks a lot like Wikipedia. At first glance, so does its content. On the homepage is a featured article about peregrine falcons; a highlighted image of a Botticelli masterwork, housed in the Uffizi in Florence, is featured underneath.

But break into some of the more contentious topics and differences begin to emerge. On Infogalactic, Mike Cernovich is a respected bestselling author, “independent journalist,” “writer, attorney, and documentary filmmaker.” On Wikipedia, the Twitter pundit is a “social media personality, writer, and conspiracy theorist.”

The idea is that a stringent, Trump-supporting member of the alt-right shouldn’t have to read the same ideas as a Marxist, or a bleeding-heart college professor. (Day initially considered the tagline, “your universe, your view.”) But Infogalactic is only one of a number of crowdsourced encyclopedias tailored to various conservative factions….

On their own, none of these sites draws a huge audience. According to Alexa’s traffic rankings, Conservapedia is the 18,066th most popular site in the US. Infogalactic clocks in at 14,710. Wikipedia, by comparison, ranks fifth. But since last fall—just as the notion of alternative facts gained cultural primacy—such sites have seen a clear rise in traffic and interest.

Not bad, all things considered. I wouldn’t say the thought policing at Wikipedia makes me angry, but that’s pretty mild as the disqualify-and-discredit game goes. The reporter actually appears to recognize that there is a market for Infogalactic, he’s just not sure about the extent of its appeal; there are no gotchas or kill quotes, just an accurate presentation of the current facts. And while it would have been nice if they’d mentioned our perspective filters and other plans for Phase Two, we don’t have them up and running yet and so it’s entirely fair to leave them out.

I’m just pleased to be informed that in less than nine months, Infogalactic has already surpassed Conservapedia. And if you want to help Infogalactic continue to grow, please support it by joining the Burn Unit and signing up for a monthly donation.


Mailvox: doomsayers

PA observes a familiar response:

The other day some doomsayer in the comments was huffing about how Infogalactic is “only” 1% different from Wikipedia and the features aren’t happening fast enough and blahblahblah. His line struck me as very familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

This morning I remembered:

“Now when Sanballat heard that we were building the wall, he was angry and greatly enraged, and he jeered at the Jews. And he said in the presence of his brothers and of the army of Samaria, ‘What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore it for themselves? Will they sacrifice? Will they finish up in a day? Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish, and burned ones at that?’ Tobiah the Ammonite was beside him, and he said, ‘Yes, what they are building — if a fox goes up on it he will break down their stone wall!’ ”
– Nehemiah 4:1-3

Yup, that was it. Keep building that wall, brother. It looks awfully good to me.

They doubt. They jeer. They try to demoralize. Meanwhile, we simply continue building the planetary knowledge core.


Alt-Tech options

Jon del Arroz lays them out at The Federalist:

Where Can Users Get Unbiased Reference Information?

Infogalactic launched as an alternative to Wikipedia during the height of the toxic political climate of 2016. Wikipedia moderators at the time began deleting information that could paint conservatives positively, and replaced those articles with information from editorials with notorious left-wing biases. Vox Day, founder of Infogalactic, said these problems stemmed back to Wikipedia’s beginning.

When asked what he thought triggered the company’s censorship, Vox said, “anything ideologically or politically controversial. The 538 thought police, or ‘active admins’ as they are called, are hard core SJWs deeply committed to policing the Wikipedia content. For example, three of them squat on the page about me and will respond within minutes to remove anything they deem excessively positive.”

I found similar results across the Wikipedia pages of prominent right-wing voices. So what does Infogalactic do differently? “We are designing a very different system that allows the user, rather than the admin, to determine which version of the page he sees,” Vox said. “Our perspective filters will render the power of the admin entirely irrelevant with regards to content; we are utilizing a horizontal model rather than a vertical one. So, there is no reason whatsoever to engage in edit wars. It’s not applicable.”

The perspective filter is where Infogalactic shines as an innovative concept, allowing a user to determine what content he or she would like to see. The user can choose the liberal view on a topic, a conservative one, or even a variety of other factors. This gives users more agency about the information they receive. Infogalactic will have three different filters each with ten different sub-settings to allow robust user customization.

This provides much more freedom regarding the information that can be posted on a topic, and for readers, who can choose how to see the world, including how their opposition views their topics of interest. The end result, Vox says, “is more neutral, more objective, and more accurate.” All of Wikipedia’s current database has been uploaded to Infogalactic, and its hardworking volunteers have added what Vox approximates to be 1 percent of new content to its information databases.

The Brave browser has a built-in setting to allow users to switch default searches to Infogalactic, and will automatically search Infogalactic if a user types :i into the URL bar with his search. Other browsers have extensions that automatically switch Wikipedia searches to the Infogalactic page.

If you’re not using Infogalactic – and Infogalactic News – yet, you really should be. We’re now in Phase Two of five, so we’re nowhere near full functionality yet, but we’re already pretty much caught up with Wikipedia on a daily basis, as this page should suffice to demonstrate.

Jon also has a new book out from Superversive Press. I have to say, I like the cover.


Why Wikipedia can’t change

I received some questions from a tech site about Infogalactic. Here are a few of the interesting ones, since neither I nor most of you tend to read this particular site.

Do you think Wikipedia has a liberal bias? Why is that?

I know that Wikipedia has a very heavy left-wing bias. The 538 active admins are almost exclusively hard left, and they do not hesitate to impose their perspective on the editors. For example, there are three who camp on the page about me; just do an edit sometime and see how fast they act to revert it. The way they treat pages devoted to approved individuals is observably very, very different than the way they treat pages about those of whom they disapprove. There is no need to take my word for it, just look at the various Criticism sections. The page about the approved individual invariably reads as if it was written by his defense attorney and inevitably violates the reliable sources rule. The Sam Harris page is an excellent example.


Harris states that he advocates a benign, noncoercive, corrective form of intolerance, distinguishing it from historic religious persecution. He promotes a conversational intolerance, in which personal convictions are scaled against evidence, and where intellectual honesty is demanded equally in religious views and non-religious views. He also believes there is a need to counter inhibitions that prevent the open critique of religious ideas, beliefs, and practices under the auspices of “tolerance”. He has stated on his blog that he has received death threats for some of his views on religion.


On the Sam Harris Talk page, an editor notes: I don’t see how anyone can justify purging the article of almost all criticism of Sam Harris, since that would seem to be a rather obvious NPOV violation.


Is it possible for Wikipedia to become more nonpartisan? What would it have to do?

It is theoretically possible for Wikipedia to return to its nonpartisan mission, but it is very unlikely because the inmates are now fully in control of the asylum. The admins vet very carefully for ideological correctness; no matter how long or how well an editor has contributed, he will not be permitted to become an admin if he does not fit the approved ideological profile. It would probably be necessary to completely replace all of the current admins and most of the Wikimedia Foundation board with individuals committed to objectivity and neutrality. Needless to say, that is not going to happen.


How do you create an encyclopedia or reference source that people across the political aisle agree on? Is that possible? Should we want such a source? 

Your question indicates a failure to grasp how Infogalactic is designed to operate. Wikipedia is organized in a vertical, centralized, absolutist manner where there is One True Page over which the various editors war, and which the admins ultimately exert control. Infogalactic is designed to be organized in a horizontal, decentralized, relativist manner so that the user, through his perspective filters, will dictate which of the hundreds of versions of the page he wishes to see. This is not only possible, but you will see it in operation within nine months. And yes, we should want such a source, because there is no reason that anyone, from any point on the ideological spectrum, should be permitted to define what is, and what is not true, for everyone else.

Speaking of Infogalactic, you may wish to note that there are now two blue icons that appear on Infogalactic News and Infogalactic Tech. The logo indicates a link to the Infogalactic page about the subject. The letter A indicates a link to an archive version of the page, which can be used in lieu of the link to the media site, in case the media site changes the story or blocks your browser.

Support Infogalactic here.



Mailvox: a call to edit

HJ explains why he has begun to get active as an Infogalactic editor:

The other day I was interested for no particular reason in the founding of Oxford University, and looked it up on IG.  The content was the original material pulled from Wikipedia.  To my astonishment, or maybe I was naive, there was no mention of the crucial role of the Church in laying the foundations of the university system.  Here’s what it said:

“Teaching at Oxford existed in some form as early as 1096, but it is unclear when a university came into being.  It grew quickly in 1167 when English students returned from the University of Paris.  The historian Gerald of Wales lectured to such scholars in 1188 and the first known foreign scholar, Emo of Friesland, arrived in 1190.”

So apparently those were the highlights of the one-hundred-year period that began with a handful of monks and ended up setting the world standard for institutions of higher learning.  Fortunately, there was an entire section on the history of women’s blahblah, in which I was informed that “Oxford and Cambridge were widely perceived to be bastions of male privilege.”  Until they were converged, of course.

Needless to say, this cannot stand, so I jumped in and made some edits.  Much more can and will be done.  If anyone out there is wondering what the point of Infogalactic is and why it’s important to get involved, hopefully this example will demonstrate why Wikipedia needs to be disrupted.  It’s biased, and SJWs have smeared their feces all over the place as a form of territorial display.  And yet to many people Wikipedia is an impressive and reliable source.  We will do better.

Someday it may be possible to view IG content from the perspective of a Christ-hating SJW sperg.  When that day comes, I suggest we call that perspective “Wikipedia.”

People often ask me why this Infogalactic page doesn’t have X or why that Infogalactic page has Y. To everyone, my answer is the same: because you haven’t fixed it.

I am not the reality police. The Techstars are not occupying themselves with trying to fix all of the egregious errors and propaganda that litters Wikipedia, and which Infogalactic has inherited by virtue of its nature as a dynamic fork. What we’re doing, rather, is giving the truth-oriented community the ability to fix these things themselves, for their own benefit, on their own time. With 7 million pages to date, that’s all the dev team can reasonably expect to do.

So get involved. Do one edit per day. Join the Burn Unit. Start using IG News and IG Tech for your headlines. Get a group of five editors together and launch your own IG Francais or IG Finance or IG FPS. All of these things are possible, but all of them require action, not mere intentions. And, in doing so, help Infogalactic continue to grow into the replacement for Wikipedia that it is designed to be.

Global Rank: 55,991
US Rank: 15,340 

We have a long, long way to go, obviously, seeing as Wikipedia is currently 5 and 6. But we are considerably closer than we were six months ago.


Mailvox: knowledge core vs convergipedia

A pair of relevant emails:

I teach a course for an online university where students are required to submit papers (with references).  Students are citing from Infogalactic now on a fairly regular basis.  I’m still seeing some Wikipedia cites, but I thought you’d be interested in knowing Infogalactic is being used by students. 

That is an encouraging development. And Wikipedia is, by every measure, getting more expensive and less efficient. One 12-year Wikipedian with 30,000 edits to his credit even suggests it has metaphorical cancer:

According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month. The WMF spends roughly US$2 million a year on Internet hosting and employs some 300 staff. The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF’s spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.

Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn’t it? For those readers who were around three years ago, did you notice at the time any unmet needs that would have caused you to conclude that the WMF needed to increase spending by $30 million dollars? I certainly didn’t.

From 2005 to 2015, annual inflation in the US was between 1% and 3% per year, and cumulative inflation for the entire decade was 21.4%—far less than the increase in WMF spending. We are even metastasizing the cancer by bankrolling local chapters, rewarding them for finding new ways to spend money.

Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, something is going to happen that causes the donations to decline instead of increase.

I wonder what that might be? Join the Burn Unit and the Alt-Tech Revolution here.

I should also mention that due to corporate demand, we are going to be putting together an Infogalactic Consult branch to help organizations make the change from the wikimedia engine to DONTPANIC for their internal wikis, or even just to make their existing wikis more functional and efficient. If you have a need for this, feel free to get in touch.


Infogalactic Phase Two

This is the current state of Infogalactic development and the updated Road Map. Phase One is complete and we are now officially in Phase Two.

Phase One

FUND LEVEL COMPLETE

Image load speed improvement – COMPLETE
Search time speed improvement – COMPLETE (needs additional improvement)
Integration with Brave browser – COMPLETE
Operational ad server – COMPLETE
Additional administration and editing levels – COMPLETE

PHASE ONE COMPLETE

The reason we’re not putting more time and effort into tweaking the performance is that doing so would involve spending more time refining the Wikimedia engine that we’re in the process of replacing anyhow. So, now that the site is reasonably functional, we prefer to focus our development efforts on the new engine since that will provide both increased performance as well as the ability to incorporate the planned new features.



Phase Two

IN PROGRESS

DONTPANIC engine
Sub-sites wikimedia – COMPLETE
Sub-sites DONTPANIC
Ad server DONTPANIC
Dynamic page updates – COMPLETE
Improved Database categories
Relativity, Reliability, and Notability 1.0 algorithms

New members of the Burn Unit, please note that an email will be going out soon telling you how you can acquire your Burn Unit t-shirts. They’ve proven to be popular enough that we’re looking into making Burn Unit athletic jackets and baseball caps available as well.


Infogalactic: Forkbot is go!

Rifleman and the Techstars are very pleased to report that the much-awaited dynamic forking tool is not only complete, not only tested, but is now operational. You can see the results here.

What this means is that Infogalactic will always be entirely up-to-date with Wikipedia across all five million+ pages, including the newest ones, except for those where the Infogalactic editors have improved upon specific pages.

This is probably the most significant step for The Planetary Knowledge Core since we first turned it on.


Open Brainstorm tonight

Just a reminder that if you want to know what Brainstorm is like, you have a chance to see for yourself tonight. We’ll be having an open Brainstorm about Infogalactic tonight at 7 PM Eastern. Rifleman and I will be talking about the latest additions to the project, what is currently in development, and what we plan to do next. You can register for it here.