Um … This doxing threat seems like a really dumb move, on par with daring Anonymous to take you down. Really, if you want to play Internet hardball, there are folks that would love to show you how it works. (Not me!)
The Heritage Foundation is located at:
214 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Washington, D.C., U.S.
What does the heritage foundation have against Wikipedia?
They don’t like them publishing facts:
https://forward.com/news/686797/heritage-foundation-wikipedia-antisemitism/
The best counter to bias is in an openly edited project is contributing corrected information with high quality sources. So instead of spending their time doxxing wikipedia editors, how about actually contributing quality data?
What high quality data? They have nothing, that’s why they are doing this bullshit.
Are you really saying that conservative groups should start publishing facts?
I’m guessing you don’t quite understand how these people work. Most of their policies are crap and most people are still smart enough to understand so they lie. They lie a lot. They lie about just about everything.
See Fox News, for example. Whenever fox News tells a truth, an angel gets its wings and let’s just say that angels learned to dig like worms instead.
See influencers like Ben Shapiro whom I just saw fantasising about his sister btw
See president cheeto, who would excuse himself if he ever said a truth
Truth and facts are poison to these people
Are you really saying that conservative groups should start publishing facts?
Yes.
I also understand how they work. That doesn’t change the fact that they should change to start publishing facts.
Some of their policies are acceptable (on paper). I’m generally a fan of lower taxes (ironically, the progressive income tax was created under Republicans Roosevelt and Taft), smaller scope of federal government, and reducing barriers to economic development. And that used to be what conservatives in the US stood for, at least on paper. These days they’re merely obstructionist and don’t seem to actually have a plan themselves, adding as much or more to the national deficit compared to Democrats.
I’m long past believing anyone with power will actually act on their ideological convictions. Democrats are supposed to be the pro-worker party, yet Biden gave railroad workers a pretty crappy deal. Republicans are supposed to be “fiscally conservative,” yet spending rose dramatically during Trump’s first term and is rising this year too (despite claiming to make fiscal cuts), and here’s the official Treasury page stating we’ve already spent 3.5T this year (fiscal year starts in October, so only half that time was under Trump).
See influencers like Ben Shapiro whom I just saw fantasising about his sister btw
Yeah, that was fake.
Wikipedia has been doxing their own editors for decades. Heritage is just using the public data. They’re still fash but wikipedia isn’t much better.
Sure. I absolutely hate that “anonymous” edits aren’t actually anonymous, and you basically need a user account to not get insta-reverted. It would be pretty cool if they had a trust system where untrusted edits go to an approval queue or something and you gradually build up trust by not doing graffiti everywhere.
How would that work without accounts?
I’d like to make anonymous edits to WP and personally resent their lack of accommodation of that. But I don’t have a very solid proposal as to how it could be done. So must forgive them.
You’d need some kind of account system, but you could probably get away with just signing your edits. If the same key is used to sign an edit, then it can be considered the same “user” even if there’s no persistent account associated w/ it. You’d need to register a public key, but that’s about it.
That’s disingenuous. They’re far from the only ones that don’t like how Wikipedia works, with good reason.
Yeah Elon Musk and other rich famous people also hate it!
Hey look, you can be disingenuous too! Congratulations.
No matter what you think of Wikipedia, if the heritage foundation have actually threatened to dox editors then that’s despicable.
“No matter what you think of Wikipedia” sounds like Wikipedia is extremely controversial. I’ve never met a person who has anything against Wikipedia. How insane and out of touch with reality do you have to be to have something against Wikipedia?
The only people I’ve seen that dislike it are people who want to hide things (like Holocaust deniers) or people that have some weird beef with people that run it or edit it.
Wikipedia is quite controversial tbh because essentially anyone can make edits that people then see and take as fact, even if they are incorrect and fake. These false/fake edits can stay live for hours/days/weeks.
This is why Wikipedia IS NOT A RELIABLE SOURCE and is not allowed to be used as a source at basically any school or university etc. What is written in Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt, and it should basically be used as a link aggregator. Read the wiki page, follow the sourced articles, get your information from them.
Wikipedia has often been criticised, rightly so, for not doing enough to prevent activist-style edits, not even from repeat offenders.
There’s nothing “out of touch with reality” to want seemingly the main source of information for many internet warriors to be better at vetting updates and the people making them. In fact I would argue the one that is out of touch with reality is you if you think that Wikipedia is above criticism.
What makes Wikipedia unreliable is also what makes it useful, so they have to strike the balance somewhere. As you point out, it’s broadly rejected as source reference itself, so I don’t agree that Wikipedia is “controversial” as much as a known quantity.
The editing process is under constant review and is updated to address problems, while adhering to the design principles of the effort. It’s not as if they are ignoring the concerns you share. In fact, they hire people explicitly to think about and address these issues.
That’s fine, I was simply responding to the poster calling me “out of touch with reality” for saying that Wikipedia has known issues and controversy surrounding it.
Not everyone thinks that Wikipedia isn’t a valid source, as the poster I replied to shows. That’s the main issue.
I’ve never met a person who has anything against Wikipedia.
You probably hang out with too many lames.
As this post explains, wikipedia has been doxing its own editors since inception. Beyond that people who use VPNs are blocked. Beyond that the founder is a fash. Beyond that the editors are a closed group of insiders consistently promoting hegemonic narratives. Beyond that many pages are just corporate/state propaganda…
Wikipedia has been doxing its own editors for decades. The Heritage Foundation is just threatening to use this public information… It’s a hegemonic team working together to maintain the narrative.
Anyone got a list of the heritage foundation leaders and big players?
It’s only fair
Does Heritage dox its own people too?
Oh they decided to protect anonymous editors?
If Wikipedia actually gave a shit, they would have done this decades ago.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
I’ll note too that even absent Heritage Foundation threats, this can be useful to spur development of the project (i.e. for people who don’t want a permanent account but don’t feel comfortable having their IP permanently, publicly attached to edits). Probably the reason it hasn’t been done in the past is it’s almost certainly going to make it easier for bad actors to fly under the radar. Before, you either had to show your IP address (which can reveal your location and will usually uniquely identify who edited something for at least a little bit; you also can’t use a VPN without special permission) or you had to register a single account (where if you created multiple, a sockpuppet investigation would often find out).
So there’s an inherent trade-off, but I think right-wing threats of stochastic terrorism really tipped the scales.
TL;DR: Wikipedia has been doxing its own editors since inception.
Doesn’t Wiki still have the data? So a bad actor’s behavior pattern can be seen at aggregate behind the scenes?
There are only 846 administrators on the English Wikipedia. This is across 7 million articles, 118,000 active registered users, about two edits per second, about a million files just on Wikipedia (most of them are hosted on Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikimedia Commons), and over 60 million total pages (articles, talk pages, user pages, redirects, help pages, templates, etc.). So although they have this data, it’s not useful if somebody doesn’t notice and investigate it. Administrators are stretched thin with administrative functions, and that’s not even accounting for many of them participating as normal editors too (tangent: besides obvious violations of policies, administrators have no more say over Wikipedia’s content than any other editor).
Contrary to the idea that new editors sometimes get of Wikipedia as a suffocating police state run by the administrators, usually when edits get reverted it’s because regular editors notice this and revert it citing policies or guidelines without any administrator involvement (every editor has this power). If an administrator intervenes, it’s usually because a non-admin noticed and reported (what they perceive as) bad behavior to an admin, two editors are locked in a stalemate, or there’s some routine clerical issue to be resolved.
Sockpuppeting, copyright violations, etc. are often (even usually) found by regular editors who notice something amiss and decide to dig a bit deeper. Even with automated tools that will flag an edit that replaces the article with the n-word 500 times in a row, and even given that some non-admin editors have tools which let them detect some issues, there’s just only so much that 850-ish people can find on a website that massive. For example, one time a few years back, I just randomly stumbled across an editor who was changing articles about obscure historic battles between India and Pakistan to have wildly pro-Pakistan slants – where treacherous India was the aggressor, but brilliant, strong, and courageous Pakistan stood their ground and sent pathetic India home crying with shit in their diapers. The bias was oozing from the page (with poor, if any, citations to match), and I can imagine this would fly under the radar for a while on a handful of articles that collectively get maybe 30 pageviews a day.
TL;DR: Too few admins.
Well you say you can use a VPN, but you may often see that you’re not able to edit using a VPN IP if that IP block has been used for vandalism in the past. So then you’d have to potentially revert to a coffee shop or library which would still identify your location.
Point of clarification: I said that you can’t use a VPN, and that’s because those IPs are blocked. As noted, you need to ask for a special exception, which for most people isn’t navigable and may not even be granted without a good stated reason and/or trust built up through good edits.
Oh whoops, my bad I must have been reading too quickly. Thanks for clarifying!
I was surprised I was blocked from editing even after logging in. They do hate some IP blocks.
Make a list of necessary changes then go to your local cafe.
Sounds like a nice plan.
I might have to go lookup their implementation. I feel like a good way of addressing your concern would be a secure hash of the IP address combined with a persistent random number.
The same IP would always map to the same output and you wouldn’t be able to just pre-compute it and bypass everything.What’s the persisted random number? Sounds like a salt, but usually each user has their own salt right? I assume we are not talking about logged in users here? Or are we?
Since the goal is to create a correlation ID that maintains privacy, you need the result to be consistent. Hashing four billion IPs might take a minute, but it’s fundamentally doable in a reasonable time.
By using some much large value that you keep secret, you’re basically padding the input to make the search space large enough that it’s not realistically able to be enumerated.
Normally each user would have their own salt so that if two users have the same password, they hash to different values. In this case, you would want two users with the same IP to map to the same value, and simply for that value to not lead to an actual IP address.
So you just use one salt for all IP addresses, but you keep it secret.
Essentially.
I’m sure there’s other ways to accomplish the goal but that’s the first one that came to mind.
I’ll never contribute to Wikipedia because they block VPNs
They should really unblock them. I know it’s not always easy to combat these problems, but a dedicated individual can break articles using non-VPN IPs like mobile data IPs
They not only enforce IP bans on account creation but on every single edit you make, even if logged in…
It’s not an open website at all. It severely privileges hegemonic editors promoting the status quo. Thus it’s actually a right-wing website.
Wikipedia is too liberal.
Web encyclopedia is too free in sourcing actual information.
Can we rewind to 2010? I know these weren’t really that great either, but world didn’t burn and I was a lot more ignorant.
Edit: As one person below me noticed, I drawn fun at the level of idiotism that these sentences bear. Sadly, it was a subtle humor.
what’s the problem with free actual information on the world?
Also Wikipedia is a s politically unbiased as it can be. Every artivle presents just facts and no opinions or emotions.
I think the intent of the comment was meant to be sarcastic? not sure
Every artivle presents just facts and no opinions or emotions.
Propaganda is the dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion.
A biased release of information (for instance, a local news channel that reports exclusively on black criminals and white victims) is presenting exclusively facts and can be fully devoid of an opinion section or an editorial appeal to emotion, and still have a powerful impact on how its audience perceives their world. More banally, if you have a sports section that exclusively covers baseball games, baseball scores, and baseball players’ life events, you’re going to incline your audience towards baseball as a topic of conversation and as a cultural touchstone.
Wikipedia biases itself towards western media, particularly larger and more corporately owned and operated media conglomerates. It’s editors are primarily English-speaking and source data from English-language academic sources. It’s founder and the original team of editors are whiter more professional class GenXers, and are biased towards researching and recording a body of historical and cultural touchstones most relevant to this cohort. The moderation team has standards that were implemented by these founders and original team members and are biased in turn.
Deliberately or not, if you click the “Random” button on the website, you’re going to end up on a page with a decidedly white, english-speaking college-degreed GenX bias.
I love Wikipedia, and I treasure it as a project dedicated to accruing and curating enormous amounts of information. But it is absolutely a biased source.
The issue with your take is that literally "everything has a bias*. But Wikipedia does what it can to correct for that bias. Any good media outlet will attempt to reduce their bias when possible.
Unfortunately, all too often people on the internet will see someone complaining “this outlet is biased, you can’t trust it”. Then those people get pushed towards some other source that does nothing to correct for bias with those sources sometimes being just outright propaganda.
The issue with your take is that literally "everything has a bias*.
Absolutely.
But Wikipedia does what it can to correct for that bias.
Absolutely not.
Any good media outlet will attempt to reduce their bias
Corporate media attempts to reduce the appearance of bias in order to maximize its customer base. But that is because the call to action of corporate media is to indulge in the consumer economy.
Activist media attempts to deliberately agitate its audience in order to affect political change. That is because the call to action of activist media is to achieve political reform/revolution.
Social Media attempts to maximize the number of interactions with the online material. That is because the call to action of social media is repeat engagement and continuous contribution (which the site’s administers consider valuable free labor). Wikipedia is a form of social media whose business model revolves around power-users continuously contributing volunteer time and money. And since the root of the organization is liberal-libertarian, and the goals of the organization are similarly skewed, the incentives to participate flow towards like-minded people.
Unfortunately, all too often people on the internet will see someone complaining “this outlet is biased, you can’t trust it”.
They’re virtually never wrong. But the impulse to call out bias is rooted in one’s prior understanding of the world. It’s this friction that causes schism, not the degree of bias within the media.
Then those people get pushed towards some other source
Sure. But what you’re neglecting is the people who remain. People who are also biased, but whose biases segway with the existing material.
Wikipedia is hyper biased on any nonscientific topic.
Also Wikipedia is a s politically unbiased as it can be. Every artivle presents just facts and no opinions or emotions.
lmao. Half of the articles are corporate propaganda and the rest are CIA.
Wikipedia is too liberal.
Yes, wikipedia is right-wing. It reproduces hegemonic narratives that serve the status quo. That’s the point of them doxing anonymous editors by default for the past couple decades.
Wikipedia is too liberal.
So, I agree with this on its face. Wikipedia is absolutely a source of information that’s couched in liberal rhetoric, biased towards liberal media sources, and heavily pruned to conform to a liberal reading of history and modernity.
The initial response conservatives made to address “liberal bias” was to introduce “Conservapedia” and other conservative-branded alternative publications. And that did work in the sense that it gave them a (more biased, less enthusiastically edited) alternative source of information. The problem was nobody taking it seriously.
Just like Twitter (which was also overwhelmingly biased towards liberal users, content, and advertising) the problem wasn’t that conservatives couldn’t compete. It was that Twitter was broadly considered a source of truth even by other conservatives. Elon’s buyout was necessary to capture and eliminate an alternative popular narrative. And that has largely been successful.
Web encyclopedia is too free in sourcing actual information.
That’s not really the critique, though. Conservatives regularly complained that their news media and their editors were being silenced. They couldn’t post long-form articles about Black Crime or fill up the Criticism section of liberal politicians with right-wing critiques and allegations. They couldn’t simply throw an army of their own editors into an open sandbox. The existing editors had administrative control over what is still a privately owned and operated environment.
Wikipedia wasn’t something they could control purely by weight of financial resources. And that’s unforgivable.
Can we rewind to 2010?
Bring. Back. Blogging!
Can someone please ELI5?
The Heritage Foundation has threatened to doxx the editors of wikipedia because the greatest threat to authoritarians is information
ELi5 please: how can heritage foundation track an IP address to a particular person? and what happens if the editor simply makes edit via VPN? and why does WP show the IP adresses anyway?
That depends on which groups play ball. IP addresses are geographically distributed, and since most people use VPNs (and Wikipedia disallows VPNs anyway), it’s relatively easy to track an IP address to a geographic area. Further, companies buy IP blocks, so you can also usually figure out which ISP that IP address is associated with. If you happen to be near the area, you might be able to triangulate it further with latency checks, but you’d need understanding of how the network is laid out.
That gets you in the ballpark with publicly accessible information, and then it’s just a matter of getting the relevant parties to connect that to an address or a name. If the ISP allocates them in a predictable manner, you may not need the ISP to narrow it down.
This mostly applies to IPv4, IPv6 is another beast entirely. But most people are still on IPv4 at home. For IPv6
how can heritage foundation track an IP address to a particular person?
- There are services that try to do this, although they’re mostly inaccurate and a scam. I can’t find the story, but there was such a service that many people used that erroneously led people to some dude’s house. Instead of giving a wide area to indicate uncertainty, the service put a point in the middle. This guy lived there. So such services do exist.
- It doesn’t really matter if the person’s name is associated with the IP. Just knowing the IP address of someone you hate can be enough to mess with them. I hope your home network is as secure as you think it is. I hope you don’t play games and get DoSed during them. That happens to popular streamers sometimes.
Your IP address says far more about you than you think. Your IP address can generally automatically identify what country and continent you are on. Who your ISP is. Possibly narrowing down to even your local region. At which point they simply need to find some marginally plausible reason to petition the ISP to identify who that IP address was leased to during x period of time. And then all of a sudden you’re not very anonymous.
I had a guy contact me about buying a Minecraft account a few months ago. It was an account held by a highschool friend of mine with a three-letter username that is a word, making it incredibly unique.
He identified the now-unmonitored email address associated with it, found that email in leaked logs from a forum, then searched for other hits from the same IP in the same time range. That forum access was from my house, so he found my email associated with it elsewhere.
He successfully identified another friend of ours at the same time. All from a single dynamic IP fifteen years ago.
Wikipedia blocks edits from pretty much all public VPNs and is very harsh with IP bans in general. They do allow edits without accounts though, so they show the IP so that an accountless user can be identified when making multiple edits or posting on the talk page. Hashing it would probably make more sense.
- Wikipedia shows IPs instead of usernames for anonymous edits, which the heritage foundation can see. Wikipedia now automatically creates “temporary accounts” for anonymous edits instead of showing the IP
- Wikipedia blocks most VPN edits because they cull malicious edits by IP, so while possible, it’s difficult to make an edit from a VPN since the IP is likely shared with bad actors
- See above. In an effort to limit malicious or nonhelpful edits, anonymous edits are shown by IP in the edit history, though this now stops that
TIL that anonymous edits show your ip address.
We must all do this anonymously editing in coffee shops and libraries.
Wikipedia attempts to shield editors from being Doxxed and harassed by right wing nuts and their followers over writing accurate information.
Right wing nuts take offense at not being able to shape the narrative/history.
I can’t wait for the ring wing nuts to fall back behind so behind from this massive web of lies they’re concocting for themselves. They’re now saying “vegetables are toxic and that you shouldn’t eat them”…
To be fair, most plants do manufacture their own pesticides that may harm small reptiles.
How is that defensible? Are there no laws to tamp down online terrorism from bad actors like Heritage? I’d imagine they’re 100% in the wrong for making threats of any kind but I’m just a wee layman.
It’s defensible because it’s public record. Wikipedia has been doxing editors by default for decades. It’s one way that they intimidate people from making edits.
I’ve never edited anything there but log in sometimes just if I’m interested in a topic and want to bookmark it. This is making me think I should just delete my account.
You should not make that decision only because of this conversation, what if they are massively misinformed?
Truth. Good point. I’m waiting till I get myself more well informed. Thanks.
The issue with “Wait that’s illegal” is that it never work in practice.
If the heritage foundation decide to dox an editor tomorrow. The editor in question would have to file a lawsuit and go against an army of layers the heritage foundation can afford. Even if the editor win at the end, it will be a long and drawn out legal battle where heritage risk almost nothing.
And this is not accounting for the editor having to deal with harassment due to being dox while having to pay for a layer and fighting a legal battle.
And that is why making such terroristic threats should be criminal in the first place.
They absolutely should be. Them being so doesn’t stop the problems from happening.
It literally gives people in the US the constitutional right to due process, and that bedrock law is being massively ignored.
There needs to be actual protections for when the law is not being followed
It probably is, but again, it needs to reach a certain threshold before the authorities will get involved. Threatening to reveal the identity of an internet user isn’t particularly egregious, because the actual risk to that person from that information is likely minimal (is anyone going to actually hurt them?). If that person then starts to get actionable threats, then the authorities might get involved.
So the best recourse these users have is suing for libel or something if they make false claims about them in connection to the doxxing.
Unfortunately, there is no federally recognized right to privacy in public spaces, and the Internet is considered a “public space,” so revealing someone’s home address or identity isn’t considered a violation of any law. I’m a homeowner, and you can totally find my address if you know my name, or my name if you know my address, since it’s all public record. I think most people would assume an IP address is less intimate than that public record, hence why there are no laws against it.
I’m not happy about this, and I personally wish there were federal privacy protections here. I don’t want my address being associated with my name as public information, though there should be a legal way to get that information when needed (i.e. a journalist doing a story on crime in an area or something). This should also apply to IP addresses, connecting an IP address to an identity should require some kind of legal measure.
The laws exist to protect bad actors like Heritage
Even if there was, look who’s in power. Even if judges ruled against Heritage, I’m not holding my breath of them getting any sort of accountability.
No laws? Sir/ma’am, we have the 2nd amendment. I can’t think of any law higher.
Too bad the 2A nutjobs and right wing nutjobs are the same people.
Once you go far enough left, you get your guns back…
You’re not wrong…
Well theres the 1st admendment. The 2nd is for when the 1st is being denied…
The 2nd was meant to ensure the 1st was respected.
The internet is, by nature, problematic in terms of legal compliance because it is not wholly under the jurisdiction of any singular country.
You can go after hardware physically located within your own jurisdiction, and you can go after operators under your jurisdiction. But if you start going after folks/hardware outside of that, you’re rightfully going to be told to fuck off. (Which is why IP holders burn so much money on anti-piracy lobbying and get practically nowhere)
Its the same reason encryption bans are laughably idiotic.
how is that not blackmail
There’s a lot of crimes happening nowadays by members of this administration. Add it to the pile.
What administration? The Wikipedia admins? What the fuck you talking about?
Sorry, did you think the internet was only for and about America? Fuck you.
As someone else said, the Heritage Foundation is American. They’re also currently part of Trump’s cabinet, and they wrote Project 2025 which his administration is largely through enacting already. They’ve already heavily influenced American politics right from the top down, and are responsible for the vast majority of EO’s from Trump’s administration.
Wikipedia is also an American based non-profit.
If you don’t understand this, then I don’t know what else to tell you. You might be one of those can’t see the forest for the trees people I hear about.
Edit: Lol, this guy went through my history and downvoted everything I’ve ever posted from yesterday on back. What a snowflake ;)
Dude, check yourself.
The Heritage Foundation is an american organization. Wikipedia is an american organization. Do the math.
I imagine this has been underway since whenever that legal kerfluffle in India happened
What is the reason?
Wikipedia has dox’d “anonymous” editors by default for its entire existence.
So temporary means anon?
Pshhh. You’ll upset the Americans. They don’t want filthy foreigners in their fediverse.
