The curious case of the Skycoin Wikipedia page.

in #skycoin5 years ago

wiki1.jpeg
It was a grand idea which came about at a time when the open source movement was gaining traction at an unprecedented rate. A massive online collaborative knowledge repository created and edited by the community. Free from censorship and corporate agenda, the information on Wikipedia was supposed be democratically inclusive and unbiased.

There was a time when Wikipedia was heralded as a shining beacon of open collaboration harnessing the wisdom of the crowd but it seems that time has come and gone. Now referred to as Wikkedpedia by some, the online encyclopedia is increasingly criticised.
Many feel that the complexity of the editorial policies acts as an entry bar for new editors which resulted in elitist old timer editing cliques with hidden agendas who use the platform to further those agendas and censor conflicting points of view, often for personal gain

The saga of the Skycoin Wikipedia page. Which follows below, perhaps serves as one example which validates the claims made above.

The Skycoin Wikipedia page was approved and published in October 2018 causing some excitement among Skycoin community members but simultaneously questions were raised around the content which sometimes appeared critical of Skycoin. A source at Skycoin revealed that the page had to be reformatted and edited multiple times before approval in order to pass the Wikipedia standards and not appear to be promotional material. Apparently this was a painstaking and laborious process which lasted several months and saw the page reworked several times before Wikipedia approved it. The creator of the page is an old salt with an established account and traceable 8 year editing history. No doubt he was used to jumping through Wikipedia hoops.
Be that as it may, the hard work was worth it because in today's world you have not arrived until you have a Wikipedia page and Skycoin, one of the oldest and most mature crypto projects in the space, certainly deserved it's day.

Shortly after publication though, various admins started removing the references from the page citing unreliability as the reason. It should be noted that these references included Reuters, Forbes, Nasdaq, CNBC, Bloomberg and the United Nations, all of which are generally considered to be reliable sources and must have passed muster with Wikipedia admins who had approved the page. Even an announcement by Binance via their official Medium account was unilatteraly declared to be an unreliable source and removed.

Following the administrative pogrom of source references, the Skycoin Wikipedia page was marked for deletion and, as per Wikipedia policy, a deletion discussion page was put in place in order for interested parties to vote and discuss whether the deletion is valid and should in fact occur. The discussion can be [viewed here]
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Skycoin ) and makes for some noteworthy reading while at the same time demonstrating the extent of the usurpation of collective commons information by Wikipedia admin and editorial cartels.

wiki2.jpeg

What can be surmised from the dialogue is that the Skycoin Wikipedia page creator, as per Wikipedia policy, was invited to participate in the deletion discussion. It seems that he had in the meantime arbitrarily received a topic ban from one of the admins and when he commented on the deletion page discussion, a permanent ban was slapped on him. It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to balance the equation here...
Meanwhile, Wikipedia admins scratched the majority of comments from interested parties voting to keep the page stating that the keep votes were the work of "meat sock puppets". Yet another example of unilateral decision making as a result of bureaucratic centralisation within Wikipedia. Following this kangaroo court style parody, the Skycoin Wikipedia page was deleted.

Had it been the case that Wikipedia enforced a blanket ban on all crypto, this story of bias and strongarm tactics would be comprehensible. However, several known scamcoins and shitcoins maintain a Wikipedia presence,a fact that screams out for an explanation to be forthcoming.

Sort:  

Hello,

We have contacted you on Twitter to verify the authorship of your Steemit blog. We would be grateful if you could respond to us via Twitter, please.

Please note I am a volunteer that works to ensure that plagiarised content does not get rewarded. I have no way to remove any content from steemit.com.

Thank you

This is exactly what happened to me when I attempted to create the original Steem Wikipedia page back late last year. No matter the sources I used they were “unreliable” and attempting to question the mods on why they felt this way resulted in a temporary ban on my account and a larger ban on posting in the crypto section in general. It wasn’t until early this year that the Steem community as a whole came together and created a new Steem page not dissimilar from the one I made.

I hope this doesn’t happen to the Steem page as well, while I also hope the Steem community sticks to their guns about this and keeps the page from being deleted by parasitic mods and admins.

Posted using Partiko iOS

This kind of thing is exactly why we need Skywire and CX. Censorship of crypto projects isn't limited to Wikipedia only. One of the community writers had his medium account shadow banned. No reason given. Not like he was promoting ICO's or spammy in nature. He only contributed high quality commentary on the actual technology.

The battle lines between the digital oligarchy and crypto-anarchy is being drawn very clearly. Watershed imminent....

I have been pushing the meshnet for years ..even put up a site yesterday for fun mesh-net.org to help promote things .. its going to be an uphill battle but its winnable...

Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:
https://medium.com/@lawrenceqholloi/the-curious-case-of-the-skycoin-wikipedia-page-1e01d8d544d6