Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 23:40, 18 November 2024

Summons issued for Misplaced Pages editors by Indian court, "Gaza genocide" RfC close in news, old admin Gwern now big AI guy, and a "spectrum of reluctance" over Australian place names

•  PDF download
•  E-mail
•  Mastodon
•  LinkedIn
•  Facebook
•  X (Twitter)
•  Reddit

Asian News International case against Wikimedia and Misplaced Pages editors

Background: Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation blanked by court order, Litigation involving the Wikimedia Foundation, prior Signpost coverage

Summons issued for Misplaced Pages editors in ANI case

Commentary and facts involving the case were published by Bar and Bench, India Legal Live (ENC Network), The Hindu, and Hindustan Times. At least one source said that according to a summons issued by Delhi High Court, WMF had released or will release email addresses of three editors, "Defendants 2–4".

According to MediaNama, one of the defendants signed the on-wiki open letter protesting the case (see related Signpost coverage). – B

Should Misplaced Pages be treated like a publisher?

Aditi Agrawal covers the ANI case for Hindustan Times. The question of Misplaced Pages's publisher-like status is also addressed in India Today's Fiiber channel on MSN, "Why has the Indian government issued a notice to Misplaced Pages, explained in 5 points". – B

Bias complaint: the phantom menace / MIB is MIA

As we went to press on our last issue apblive reported that "According to ANI, the government has written to Misplaced Pages highlighting a number of complaints of bias and inaccuracy. In the letter, the Centre pointed out that a small group of people have editorial control over the website." The "Centre" refers to the central Indian government or specifically the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB).

The existence of this letter, or the timing of its issue, has itself be called into question. At The Signpost, we could not find a solid report to base a story on for the last issue.

Need to be more specific here: some just said there was "a notice" sent, another said unnamed government sources had spoken to one media outlet, and none we could find provided any real details (example, example). Since then, TechCrunch is also reporting that no complaint has been found by their staff, either. – B

RfC closure noted

• "Misplaced Pages Editors Add Article Titled 'Gaza Genocide' to 'List of Genocides' Page" (Haaretz)
• "'It's not close' - Israel committing genocide concludes Misplaced Pages ending editorial debate" (Middle East Monitor)

This closure of a more than month-long Request for comments (RfC) at List of genocides was noted in several press sources ...

The RfC confirming the page title follows a Requested move talkpage discussion which initially set the title earlier this year – see previous Signpost coverage. – B

Luckey Gaetz Misplaced Pages

There's a bizarre style of biography that commonly appears off-Wiki in the less-than-reliable press with headlines like John Doe Wiki. This week "GhanaCelebrities" provided the best example I've seen "Ginger Luckey Gaetz Wiki, Age, Career, Husband". The article is so well-written – it doesn't seem to have been authored with either artificial intelligence or natural stupidity – that if provided with references it would take at least a week to delete if it were posted on-Wiki. Luckey Gaetz's main claims to fame – if not notability – are that she has a rich brother and is married to the former congressman and currently nominated U.S. Attorney General Matt Gaetz. Mrs. Gaetz, according to the article, is a KPMG manager who has taken some MBA courses through Harvard's online program and in person at UC Berkeley. Mr. Gaetz's notability includes accusations of drug use and paying for sex with minors.

A completely separate linking of Gaetz with Misplaced Pages was published as a trivia question in Above the Law. Kathryn Rubino asked "What law school did (Matt) Gaetz attend?" Despite a wealth of official sources that she could have linked to document the answer, she linked to Misplaced Pages. She told The Signpost that she did so "because Misplaced Pages is the easiest way to encapsulate multiple facts about a source with a single link. In this instance I wanted a reference that Matt Gaetz went to William & Mary Law as well as the other notable legal figures that went to the law school but never held the position of U.S. Attorney General." – S

Gwern interview: How a longtime Wikipedian became an influential voice in AI — and still remains anonymous

Dwarkesh Patel (a US podcaster who TIME magazine recently described as one of the 100 most influential people in AI) published an interview titled "Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory". According to Patel, Gwern has "deeply influenced the people building AGI," and "If you've read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive."

User:Gwern is also a longtime Wikipedian with almost 100k edits on English Misplaced Pages. While the interview mostly focused on AI and Gwern's life as an independent writer, it also discussed the pivotal role that editing Misplaced Pages had played for him:

Dwarkesh Patel

What is it that you are trying to maximize in your life?

Gwern

I maximize rabbit holes. I love more than anything else, falling into a new rabbit hole. That's what I really look forward to. Like this sudden new idea or area that I had no idea about, where I can suddenly fall into a rabbit hole for a while.

Dwarkesh Patel

What were you doing with all these rabbit holes before you started blogging? Was there a place where you would compile them?

Gwern

Before I started blogging, I was editing Misplaced Pages.
That was really gwern.net before gwern.net. Everything I do now with my site, I would have done on English Misplaced Pages. If you go and read some of the articles I am still very proud of—like the Misplaced Pages article on Fujiwara no Teika—and you would think pretty quickly to yourself, “Ah yes, Gwern wrote this, didn't he?”

Dwarkesh Patel

Is it fair to say that the training that required to make gwern.net happened on Misplaced Pages?

Gwern

Yeah. I think so. I have learned far more from editing Misplaced Pages than I learned from any of my school or college training. Everything I learned about writing I learned by editing Misplaced Pages. For me it was beneficial to combine rabbit-holing with Misplaced Pages, because Misplaced Pages would generally not have many good articles on the thing that I was rabbit-holing on.

It was a very natural progression from the relatively passive experience of rabbit-holing—where you just read everything you can about a topic—to compiling that and synthesizing it on Misplaced Pages. You go from piecemeal, a little bit here and there, to writing full articles. Once you are able to write good full Misplaced Pages articles and summarize all your work, now you can go off on your own and pursue entirely different kinds of writing now that you have learned to complete things and get them across the finish line.

However, echoing concerns Gwern had already detailed in a 2009 essay titled In Defense of Inclusionism, he cautioned that

It would be difficult to do that with the current English Misplaced Pages. It's objectively just a much larger Misplaced Pages than it was back in like 2004. But not only are there far more articles filled in at this point, the editing community is also much more hostile to content contribution, particularly very detailed, obsessive, rabbit hole-y kind of research projects. They would just delete it or tell you that this is not for original research or that you're not using approved sources.

He also recalled other ways in which Misplaced Pages was different in its earlier years:

Gwern

I got started on Misplaced Pages in late middle school or possibly early high school.
It was kind of funny. I started skipping lunch in the cafeteria and just going to the computer lab in the library and alternating between Neopets and Misplaced Pages. I had Neopets in one tab and my Misplaced Pages watch lists in the other.

Dwarkesh Patel

Were there other kids in middle school or high school who were into this kind of stuff?

Gwern

No, I think I was the only editor there, except for the occasional jerks who would vandalize Misplaced Pages. I would know that because I would check the IP to see what edits were coming from the school library IP addresses. Kids being kids thought they would be jerks and vandalize Misplaced Pages.

For a while it was kind of trendy. Early on, Misplaced Pages was breaking through to mass awareness and controversy. It’s like the way LLMs are now. A teacher might say, “My student keeps reading Misplaced Pages and relying on it. How can it be trusted?”

"Gwern Branwen" is a pseudonym. Of interest to Wikipedians who are conscientious about keeping their real name separated from their public editing activity (see also coverage of a current open letter in this issue's News and notes), the interview also discusses benefits of maintaining anonymity. While it was conducted in person, responses were re-recorded by a different person, and for the customary video of the interview, an AI-generated avatar was created as a stand-in.

In other parts of the interview that might likewise resonate with Wikipedians who devote large amounts of unpaid work to their hobby, Patel asked various probing questions about Gwern's personal finances, again starting from his Misplaced Pages volunteering:

Dwarkesh Patel

When you were an editor on Misplaced Pages, was that your full-time occupation?

Gwern

It would eat as much time as I let it. I could easily spend 8 hours a day reviewing edits and improving articles while I was rabbit-holing. But otherwise I would just neglect it and only review the most suspicious diffs on articles that I was particularly interested in on my watchlist. I might only spend like 20 minutes a day. It was sort of like going through morning email.

and later

Dwarkesh Patel

How do you sustain yourself while writing full time?

Gwern

Patreon and savings. I have a Patreon which does around $900-$1000/month, and then I cover the rest with my savings. So I try to spend as little as possible to make it last.
I should probably advertise the Patreon more, but I'm too proud to shill it harder.

I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I live like a grad student, but with better ramen. I don't mind it much since I spend all my time reading anyway.

The interview then took a rather consequential turn:

Dwarkesh Patel

It seems like you’ve enjoyed this recent trip to San Francisco ? What would it take to get you to move here?

Gwern

Yeah, it is mostly just money stopping me at this point. I probably should bite the bullet and move anyway. But I'm a miser at heart and I hate thinking of how many months of writing runway I'd have to give up for each month in San Francisco.

If someone wanted to give me, I don’t know, $50–100K/year to move to SF and continue writing full-time like I do now, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

Patel then encouraged him to share contact information for potential donors, and two days after the interview' release noted that these had indeed been found and that Gwern would be moving to San Francisco.

– H

In brief

• Exploding Whale Day (including video coverage) was celebrated in Exploding Whale Memorial Park in Florence, Oregon and reported in The Oregonian. See previous Signpost coverage here or just click on the illustration on the right.
• "Climate change researchers make 100 improvements to Misplaced Pages ahead of COP29" (University of Exeter News)
• itsnicethat.com tells us how 'Misplaced Pages rabbit holes' are the backbone of Chantal Jahchan's intricate editorial collages.
• Digital gravestones for lost species: Misplaced Pages articles about extinct species are a "place people return to in order to remember, or perhaps discover, what we once had", according to a study highlighted at The Conversation.
• Busybody, hunter, dancer: which one are you?: The New Indian Express , Nature briefing blog , RealClearScience , Australia's National Tribune website , and The Conversation covered new research that outlines styles of information-gathering Misplaced Pages user employ, using catchy nicknames.
• Troubled effort to address Australian place names: As covered in the previous Signpost issue, representation of Australia place names has had some trouble. Now the Australian Computer Society's Information Age reports on research findings of "a spectrum of reluctance, hesitation, discomfort, sanitisation and also active resistance and racism" in the topic area. They also said, "Despite researchers' attempts to find a diversity of editors to interview, only one who took part identified as a woman, while one identified as non-binary, and none were First Nations people... that 'basically any non-white experiences or non-dominant experiences' were omitted from many Australian Misplaced Pages articles".
• Goldstar does not get a gold star from Misplaced Pages: According to the article, Goldstar Air was a "fake airline". Yet newsghana.com says that editors describing it as such are "saboteurs hatched an evil plot". You be the judge.

Discuss this story

• I understand the high level of interest that exists on this project about the ANI vs. WikiMedia case but I think we have to use the same guidelines we use in content creation to determine the reliability of the sources of information we come across to learn new developments on this case. There are articles claiming that WikiMedia has turned over the personal information of these 3 editors to the Indian court but buried in this story you cite, WMF states that they have not turned over any information nor sent notifications to these editors yet. With so much contradictory information circulating oline, I think editors have to use their considerable editing skills to assess what is going on in this case in these days before December 16th, the next court date, so as not fall prey to disinformation. Liz 00:12, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

  This has been one of the most difficult stories to cover as a Signpost editor, and I wrote up the Framgate "constitutional crisis" synopsis! There's a combination of community pre-pushback on covering legal matters, opacity from the Foundation, press intentionally muddying the waters (IMHO), threat of SLAPP lawsuits, and a lack of Signpost staff to adequately chase down everything we would like to do. In the interest of the community knowledge about this crucial matter, I've pushed for the last two issues to include whatever information that we had at hand, even if it's not perfectly polished. ☆ Bri (talk) 00:20, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

  (Liz: it's Wikimedia, not WikiMedia.) Ijon (talk) 16:54, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

  One of the problems is that Indian news is beyond useless when it comes to trying to having the faintest idea about the stuff they report on. I doubt a single one of the reporters writing about this case have a clue how Misplaced Pages works or what they're actually typing. They're just trying to get their quota of articles about currently trending topics filled. AryKun (talk) 20:25, 22 November 2024 (UTC)
  

• Misplaced Pages Signpost archives 2024-11
• Misplaced Pages Signpost RSS feed