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I know of two serious Wikipedia scandals but I don't know which media to contact
12 points by editional on Aug 29, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
I know of two serious Wikipedia scandals which if published by major outlets, will most likely cause its meteoric downfall not unlike Theranos.

The first one is a harassment scandal. A NYC-based celebrity who had worked with other big-names, is the subject of relentless harassment by a stalker. Apparently the stalker had well-off connections to government officials according to the victim due to the fact that he was able to get off each time. He was also wealthy enough to bribe high-ranking editors to delete the biographical article about her on Wikipedia through the gaming of the systems and the spurious usage of notability rules, which we know is so notoriously stringent these days. At one point she was forced into hiding after the LEOs tipped her off that her stalker had bought a weapon. She has robust documentation and paper trails to prove what had happened.

The second one is a harassment cum pedophilia scandal. A member of the Wikipedia admin corps had been harassing a federal employee under the impression that he/she is an editor who was banned from Wikipedia. A journalist got interested in investigating it and found that the harasser is a pedophile/groomer who had traveled all the way to Asia to target kids and teens. The journalist had finished the investigation and compiled it into a feature story article format, but was prevented from publication because she had received a frivolous legal threats from the WMF preventing the publication, as if they want to clutch the pearls as long as they can.

Many journalists, and even law enforcement organizations such as the NCMEC, had been contacted about these, but to no avail. Is there any way or hope that these scandals will get the fair light under the limelight, just like how New York Times first aired the Weinstein rape scandals and how the Wall Street Journal first exposed what's really going on inside Theranos?



- Neither of these scandals, if true, would bring down Wikipedia. Not even close. Wikipedia's history is full of drama.

- Not every huge outlet you contact is going to run with a story on a tip like this, especially if you aren't majorly involved with the stories themselves.


See this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416967

https://wikipediasucks.co/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2629&st...

Not just a run of the mill drama affair, it's a nuclear-grade scandal which will generate another MeToo phenomenon.

"For the folks at home, the story I was working on was going to be published by the Daily Beast in Spring 2024. Everything was in place then we had to go to both Wikipedia and the National Archives for comment, as required by law. Archvies wouldn't speak to us and Wikipedia threatened to sue, I suspect because of what we had found out about their administrators. The piece had mainly been about administrator abuse, using tools on Wikipedia to trace ip addresses, dox people's identities then harass them in real life. The Oberranks clusterf*k was a big part of the story, but not the entire story. The real beef of the article was about female editors on their site being stalked and even assaulted after having their identities revealed online by administrators. I found several cases of that including a woman who was stabbed outside her home in Mexico City by a stalker who had researched who she was off of her Wikipeida profile.

Daily Beast backed out because of the lawsuit threat, but I still have the whole story and might one day sell the rights. For now, its back to Eastern Europe covering real news."


Start up a Wikipedia page entitled "Wikipedia Scandals".


This was so well written I actually believe the author is an angry 12 year old trying hard to be as dramatic as possible while 3xplaining how these scenarios will have no impact on their stated target.


isn't this what pastebin is for?




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