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Socked Into the Puppet-Hole on Wikipedia


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Positivity     44.00%   
   Negativity   56.00%
The New York Times
SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/story/socked-into-the-puppet-hole-on-wikipedia/
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Summary

Wikipedia defines a sock puppet as any “online identity used for purposes of deception.” The rest of us recognize the term as referring to a trusted tool of thin-skinned politicians, athletes, and other public figures who worry that not enough people out there love them.I let the news sink in: Someone had made up an identity to create an article about Noam Cohen. If I was losing my Wikipedia article, I should at least get a column out of it!His response was almost immediate, assuring me that, while the term sock puppet was being thrown around, anyone who read the wording of the takedown notice—“Created by a banned or blocked user (Slowking4) in violation of ban or block”—would recognize that this wasn’t a case of a vain tech writer but, rather, a response to misbehavior by a specifically Wikipedian type of bad actor.Beetstra wrote that slowking4 had repeatedly uploaded images to Wikipedia that ran up against Wikipedia’s licensing rules; as those images were discovered and taken down, that user account was blocked, and ultimately banned, from making any further contributions to Wikipedia. “I’m basically creating accounts to get work done,” he told me in a telephone interview.Hayes has been fighting what he sees as a guerrilla war against Wikipedia’s overly strict rules on what images can appear on the site. Hayes has been told that he cannot add fair-use images to Wikipedia’s articles unless he meets a long list of conditions, including that he show he first made a serious effort to find a comparable free image and that he explain in writing why fair use applies. (The photo on my article, for example, was taken at a Wikipedia conference and released as a free image; it wasn’t Queen-Washington but another editor, Gamaliel, who added it to the page.)Despite all the banning and sock puppeting, Hayes has been a prolific editor. By his own estimate, he has created 3,000 articles on English Wikipedia, with an emphasis on women and other underrepresented groups, and made 50,000 editing changes. So far, 17 of Queen-Washington’s deleted articles have been restored to the site, because Beetstra or other administrators determined that the pages had been substantially improved by other editors, even if the sock puppet account first created them.

As said here by Wired