Ran across another funny example of Team Apologista activity on Wikipedia today.
Checking them logs
For a long time, I would get a bit of traffic now and again from the Wikipedia page on Moonlight, as someone had placed my exceedingly brilliant analysis of 10 Problems with the New Moonlight Covenant.
Today I was looking through the logs and it struck me I haven’t seen any Wikipedia traffic of late, so on a lark I went to the site and saw someone had (anonymously of course), removed the link to my site, with the following “explanation”:
The Source and BoycottNovell are not trustworthy “news” sites and are known to be anti-Mono/anti-Novell propagandists.)
Note that same users edit history; every edit (excluding a handful back in 2008) is a .NET/Mono-related topic and in every case that I bothered to look at are all non-factual and (in wiki-speak) non-NPOV edits.
Especially devious is how this individual edits articles to downplay patent concerns for Mono, while emphasizing the issue of patents for Portable.NET.
Gotta let people know where they can get that “IP peace of mind” I guess.
umad?
This is just more of the same from Team Apologista. I’ve said multiple times that the number one thing that soured me personally on Mono was the dishonesty of its promoters – the more I learned about Mono and Moonlight the more offensive I found their arguments and actions.
It’s one thing to betray the community and work up an end-run around the GPL. It’s one thing to turn on Free Software and carry Microsoft’s water. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to be devious and deceitful about it. (Although I’d argue you need the qualities in the last bit to do the actions in the first two bits.)
Lying, personally attacking and attempting to simply silence critics are both so rampant among Mono Apologists – and so rarely condemned or even corrected – it’s easy to think such behavior is not only approved but encouraged.
An interesting note
As an aside, this is another nice example of the favorite standby of Team Apologista: the ad hominem. Some people absolutely adore trying to discredit the message by attacking the messenger. It’s a tactic with a long and proud history, so I guess they are just going with what they feel has the best chance of success.
Because I guarantee you that addressing the argument is scary as hell to them.
Awhile back I saw this sort of thing play out much more candidly than usual on Reddit: read if you want to see someone lead off the attack ad hominem, when corrected (by directhex!) shrug it off by asserting “they are all the same as far as I am concerned”, and then finally admitting that the exact same information from someone else would be acceptable.
It doesn’t work like that people. Facts are facts, regardless of where they come from. And if you reject facts simply because you don’t like who is delivering them that is a personal failing on your part.
For the record
I’ve never edited any Wikipedia article related to Mono or Moonlight. I didn’t reference my site from the article, have no idea who did, don’t care to know who did, and don’t care if the reference is restored or not.
#1 by Dan Serban on July 19, 2010 - 6:10 pm
There is no excuse for removing criticism from Wikipedia, no matter how controversial the subject is.
Heck there is even this on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia
So whoever made the change you describe should instead have created a new section on the Moonlight page, called “Criticism”, and moved the content there.
Or created a new page called:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Moonlight
and moved the content there, and linked to it from the main Moonlight page.
Needless to say, I am disgusted by this form of perception management, it has a stench of Microsoft.
#2 by Yonah on July 21, 2010 - 1:07 am
Despite your claims on this website, I can’t agree with you. The Source is not a “news and opinion website” as it was once worded on Wikipedia. It is a non-profit blog run by a private individual who has dedicated a sizable portion of their free time to advocating FOSS.
Commercial news organizations don’t have a perfect track record of honesty and accuracy. Despite this, they do not fit Wikipedia’s definition of a “trusted source”.
#3 by Jason on July 21, 2010 - 5:57 am
Yonah,
Thanks for the comments!
As I said, I didn’t make the edits, nor do I care one whit if they are restored. (Wikipedia has a huge body of navel-gazing editorial guidelines that I could not be less interested in knowing about.)
The point is some Mono supporter is out there making sure the spin is what it is across a wide range of .NET/Mono-related articles — I only noticed because it happened to touch a link to my site – I’m not the one out there policing Wikipedia to try to slip in my POV on Mono/Moonlight.
(On a pure tanget, I’d like to think what The Source offers is exactly “news and opinion”, but again that’s not my point, nor do I really care that much.)
#4 by William Immendorf on July 21, 2010 - 10:48 am
I’ve undid that edit that you mentioned. I probably think that it was done by hAL (remember him?) or one of his cronies. And I also gave him a warning not to add pro-mono statements to the page and/or remove the Techrights/The Source refrences. That should teach him…
#5 by Roy Bixler on July 24, 2010 - 7:32 am
Sadly, it seems that someone from a Novell IP address promptly undid your change and even labeled it as “vandalism”. I agree with Jason that it would be bad form for him to add references to his own pages in Wikipedia, but it’s equally bad form for Novell to label valid criticisms as “vandalism” and remove them.
#6 by William Immendorf on July 31, 2010 - 9:09 am
Good point. I undid that edit and told the Wikipedia admins to block that vandal. I’m not the vandal, that user is.
#7 by William Immendorf on August 6, 2010 - 5:51 am
This whole reverting and re-reverting has escalated into a edit war, and both me and the user with the Novell IP address have both recived warnings. At the very least, I told the admins to put the refrences to Techrights and The Source back, and tell the other user to deal with it.
#8 by Eric on August 15, 2010 - 6:56 pm
It seems that the admin did not put your references to techrights/etc back and had this to say:
The emphasis is his own.
#9 by Roy Bixler on August 16, 2010 - 8:18 pm
I’m not surprised that this ended up as an edit war. I understand Maghnus’ criticism, but it does not say anything about other sites such as this one. It should be OK to add the reference to this site back. Also, everyone seems to agree that the reference to the statement that the Moonlight “covenant” is not suitable for Fedora is valid. Perhaps that reference could be expanded to include the reasoning behind the statement.
#10 by Jason on August 16, 2010 - 9:08 pm
Personally, the only thing interesting to me is watching how hard Team Apologista turns themselves into knots to hide criticism. This whole Wikipedia thing is just one example of many.
First, they insist on pretending like there is some association between The Source and another website. There is none, I have said so multiple times, yet the distortion persists. With a single exception, I have never seen a member of Team Apologista draw a distinction or correct this misinformation. In fact, I see this non-existent relationship promoted quite often by those who I know know better.
In the case of the Moonlight article, they insist any criticism on this site is inadmissable because I am not an “expert” or The Source is not “reliable”.
Yet, in the Mono article, they are trying to remove FSF criticism – note they don’t dare bring in any question of the “expertise” or “reliability” of the FSF. They just find an whole new hoop to jump through. (This time it’s “NPOV”)
I learned long ago that the vast majority of Mono Apologists are not interested in honest debate and love to “move the goalposts“. They will say that something is wrong because of A. If you clear A, then something is wrong because of B. Clear B? There’s C. And on it goes.
Similarly, I see Team Apologista accepting flawed arguments and even outright lies simply because it supports their position.
Both are hallmarks of people that are not only not interested in honest examination of a question, but that fear it.
#11 by William Immendorf on August 24, 2010 - 7:57 am
If you notice, I’ve pointed out that any and all smears against the FSF are just FUD, only I was irritated (at the aplogists) at the time that I posted the message.
#12 by William Immendorf on August 25, 2010 - 5:39 am
Also, what’s somewhat silly is that my statement (about the FSF smears all being FUD),one of the apoligists took my statement as a persional attack, while it was not (even through I was really frustated at the aplogists when I wrote the statement).
#13 by William Immendorf on August 26, 2010 - 12:01 am
And the apologists don’t really want to give up. They claimed that you and Techrights preform no research (but I think that you do a good bit of it, don’t you, Jason?), that both sites aren’t trustworthy (which is most defintly false, since I think that both sites do research a lot, and Techrights is credible enough to earn a 951st ranking in Netcraft, which is actually quite a lot), and they claim that Techrights and The Source attack people (which is just more smears). Then they claimed that de Icaza’s biased blog is credible, which it is most definitely not for a multitude of reasons (incredibly biased towards Mono, endorses Microsoft technologies, traitor to the FSF, and an Microsoft MVP).
At this point, I’ve wanted the references put back in, and all references to de Icaza’s blog removed.