Difference between revisions of "Wikispooks:News"
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==July 2011== | ==July 2011== | ||
===A brief review of Wikispooks' first 12 months=== | ===A brief review of Wikispooks' first 12 months=== | ||
| + | '''Sent to the Wikispooks mailing list on 22 July 2011''' | ||
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It has been largely a solo effort but with noteworthy contributions about [[Wikipedia's Hasbara|Hasbara influence on Wikipedia]] and maybe [[WikiSpooks:Wikipedia+ Page List|50 other Wikipedia-enhancing original articles]]. | It has been largely a solo effort but with noteworthy contributions about [[Wikipedia's Hasbara|Hasbara influence on Wikipedia]] and maybe [[WikiSpooks:Wikipedia+ Page List|50 other Wikipedia-enhancing original articles]]. | ||
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Please feel free to post suggestions, criticisms, offers/queries about contributing, using any of the methods outlined on the [[WikiSpooks:Contact|Contact Page]] | Please feel free to post suggestions, criticisms, offers/queries about contributing, using any of the methods outlined on the [[WikiSpooks:Contact|Contact Page]] | ||
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== June 2011== | == June 2011== | ||
Revision as of 07:18, 22 July 2011
Contents
July 2011
A brief review of Wikispooks' first 12 months
Sent to the Wikispooks mailing list on 22 July 2011
It has been largely a solo effort but with noteworthy contributions about Hasbara influence on Wikipedia and maybe 50 other Wikipedia-enhancing original articles.
In total there are now some 5,000 articles and files comprehensively categorised and indexed - though the category tree is a mess.
In the 12 months to date (21 July 2011) there have been 250,000 page loads with average page read time of 1 Minute 7 seconds. ie about 200 man-days of reading in total. Hmmm certainly nothing exceptional there, but it's a start.
Technical stuff
I try to run the latest stable versions of everything the site uses. The most noteworthy being Mediawiki (though we are still on the 1.6 branch). It runs on a dedicated VPS so there is also considerable operating system and other server side software to be maintained. It has been a steep learning curve but the site is now probably as secure as any small security-concious site - FWIW - and, whilst far from a Mediawiki guru, I'm no longer a rookie.
The site is also in process of mirroring to a separate VPS in Iceland
Wikipedia+
This is a Browser extension designed to help people who access Wikipedia a lot, but who recognise that it reflects the establishment view and are interested in reading alternative perspectives. Wikispooks has been co-operating with its development through the summer. See here for full details. It has major potential to facilitate wider access to "Official Narrative" dissenting information. It will therefore be of interest to any webmaster whose site hosts information not readily available on or through Wikipedia.
Appeal
I will continue to develop the site along the lines set out in the project information pages. However, realising the potential of the project will require additional contributors - authors, editors and techies.
With the launch of Wikipedia+, the most pressing task is to cross-reference existing Wikispooks content to appropriate Wikipedia pages. It's a fairly simple procedure and a few hands to that pump would be most welcome.
Please feel free to post suggestions, criticisms, offers/queries about contributing, using any of the methods outlined on the Contact Page
June 2011
The site is now Wikipedia+ enabled. This is a browser extension designed to help people who read Wikipedia but who recognise that it reflects the establishment view and who are interested in reading alternative perspectives such as Wikispooks.
19 August 2010
The following is the text of the message sent to the Wikispooks mailing list on 19 August 2010:
Introduction
Part of the rationale for the WikiSpooks site concerns the impossibility of Wikipedia providing effective coverage of deep political issues which have the potential to seriously jeapardise key 'official narratives'. To expect balanced coverage on such matters is akin to expecting the encyclopedias of the day to have provided rigorous coverage of Gallileo's evidence on 'Heliocentism' when to do so was to invite excommunication or worse by the Catholic Church power structure of the day. In similar fashion, and in company with the rest of the Mainstream Media, stable articles on Wikipedia largely reflect the consensus view of 'experts' whose continued rank, position and place as 'experts' among their peers and society at large, is dependent upon them keeping criticism and questioning of 'the official narrative' within clearly understood (if unwritten) bounds. Coverage outside such bounds is permissible, but only if relegated to the category of 'conspiracy theory', an inane and meaningless pejorative, but one which has a life of its own. Its sole purpose is to pigeon-hole anything and anyone anointed with it to the equivalent of a lunatic asylum and thus better kept both out of sight and out of mind.
Zionist Shenanigans
There are sub-sets of this global self-censoring mechanism which may manifest when a well organised group of Wikipedia monitors, authors and editors set out to influence content in pursuit of an agenda. In its third month of operation, WikiSpooks has stumbled upon a fascinating example of just such a sub-set in action. The evidence is of a group of Wikipedia editors rapidly coalescing around a carefully researched and properly referenced article, and using all the tools available to experienced senior Wikipedia people to remove and/or dramatically reduce coverage of events seen as damaging to Zionist Israel.
For full information see https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Israeli_art_scam.
A related, if less blatant, example is at: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/2001_Israeli_Nerve_Gas_Attacks
Both articles were provided by their original Wikipedia author. "The Israeli Art Scam" article is preceded by referenced details of its Wikipedia history.
Wikispooks does not have a view on the significance of the 'Art Scam' article beyond posing the question: "Would such blatant airbrushing of Israeli involvement really be warranted if the intent was merely to cover-up a relatively trivial financial scam?"
The lessons
- If you want to know the truth about deep political issues - don't rely on Wikipedia.
- If you want to know the truth about Zionist Israel - don't expect to find it at Wikipedia.
- For pretty much anything else, Wikipedia probably IS your best option as a 'first-port-of-call' introduction to a subject.
Information for editors
WikiSpooks is a collaborative project aimed at building a comprehensive reference source of deep political structures and events, together with the people and organisations connected to them. In company with 'Wikipedia' and other wiki-based projects, knowledgeable involvement with the site is invited.
WikiSpooks enforces an editorial policy designed to compensate for the blind-spots of Wikipedia and other mainstream media. Principle tenets of the policy are:
- The veracity and accuracy of official announcements, documents, press releases etc should be treated as inversely proportional to the power, wealth, statutory - or other claimed - authority of their source.
- Any such information should be assumed to be in furtherance of a hidden - if more or less obvious - agenda and thus designed to mislead rather than to inform.
- Reputation, Position, Rank, Place etc., in Establishment hierarchies and protocols should be treated as pretentious conceits serving Establishment agendas (hidden or otherwise) and thus deserving of ridicule, satire and other forms of literary attack.
WikiSpooks also provides a secure anonymous file upload facility for whistleblowers wishing to put information into the public domain without revealing their identity.
The Wikispooks site is hosted in the Irish Republic.
3 July 2010
Lots of behind the scenes techie stuff done in the past couple of weeks:
- Traffic to and from the entire site is now available encrypted using a Starfield Technologies Standard SSL certificate. This guarantees that you are communicating with the bona-fide operator of the 'wikispooks.com' domain and encrypts all traffic so that anything intercepted between your browser and the WikiSpooks server will be gobbledygook.
- The anonymous upload form no longer uses Flash. It too is available over SSL which means that both message and and uploaded files are also encrypted.
- Encrypted messages intended for WikiSpooks can now be left on the Yahoo pgpboard. Messages should be encrypted using the WikiSpooks PGP public key
- 'Fail2Ban' installed on the server to screw all those persistent brute-force attempts to break in.
- 'Spider-Trap' installed on the server to screw all those bad-mannered, bandwidth-consuming bots that ignore the 'Robots.txt' file.
- 'PiWik' stats package installed so that useful management statistics on pages accessed, referring sites etc, can be collected without the need to retain server log files and IP addresses.
I just keep plugging away and hope to garner one or two interested parties to help develop this thing before long.
Help WILL be needed if it is to get anywhere close to its stated objective so, Any offers?
12 June 2010
A brief update:
As of this morning the site has a total of 1,104 articles documents and files posted. Many of the files remain uncategorised; many of the pages need extra work - most of them lots of it.
I haven't done any more site promotion because I'm acutely aware of a host of security-related and software enhancement things that need attention - ALL of them distracting and time-consuming - and I am immersed in trying to get a reasonably comprehensive category-tree framework plus substantial content up - even if only in outline.
The 'Spooks' 'Israel Lobby' and 'Northern Ireland' categories (accessible from the left hand 'category tree' menu option) are particularly well populated (Thanks in large part to SpinProfiles and Wikileaks) - though all need masses of additional input. The whole thing to date makes me realise what a mammoth task it will be to do an 'alternative' encyclopedia of Deep Events justice. I certainly won't be able to on my own!. Still, time-enough for approaches to disgruntled Wikipedia editors when it has (if it gets??) a bit more credibility eh?
It currently averages just over 300 unique visitors per day equating to 4000-5000 page loads - which of course means that its content is effectively hidden from the Lumpen and therefore probably of little interest to you know who - yet anyway. Googlebot and other greedy slurping bots are constantly trawling though it and account for over 10% of bandwidth consumed - I'd love to figure out a way of charging them
Right now I still intend to just keep plugging away and maybe give it a proper launch/push when the inclination to do so strikes. --Peter P 11:56, 12 June 2010 (IST)
24th May 2010
- Just over 50,000 page loads in three days equating to 2,500 unique visitors.
Need to sort out the precise meaning of those AWstats reports. MediaWiki probably causes 2-5 log entries per actual page rendered because the ratio of pages to visitors seems a bit cockeyed.
