Talk:Infogalactic

Blatant copying from Wikipedia
I'm not sure how missional discussing this on the page would be, but I got a bit of a laugh when I noticed Infogalactic's Article for deletion template not only references Wikipedia, but somehow manages to link to Wikipedia's AFD pages as well. Also, the random sampling of three articles I skimmed seem to be near-exact duplicates of the corresponding Wikipedia articles. Hertzy (talk) 19:17, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
 * From what I'm gathering, Day got butthurt over his Wikipedia page containing some controversies and basically wants a Wikipedia where people can control a page by having credentials. Day needs to understand that being a little famous by putting himself and his material out there doesn't protect himself from criticism and needs to grow up. I can see the wiki being like CP and imploding on itself. 20:33, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
 * It remains to be seen whether the manosphere or the alt-right can sustain a wiki in the long run. Most movements can't. Part of the problem is that once they become notable enough that Wikipedia starts to cover them and their topics, the wiki's reason for being goes away. They become victims of their own success.


 * Either that, or they run into the opposite problem, which is that they aren't able to sustain activity and a community. The wikisphere mostly consists of joke wikis, fandom wikis, and technical documentation wikis, with very little room for anything else.


 * One thing that the manosphere is good at, though, is maintaining a sense of optimism in their own ability to prevail (and bashing those with a more pessimistic appraisal as pussies or trolls). L&#39;s Ideology (talk) 20:54, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

Just noting this in case anyone is interested
Infogalactic currently has no CAPTCHA system and (according to its own /w/API.php page) allows anyone to use the write API. It'd be terribly unfortunate if someone used that power for ill... 21:07, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Better tell 4chan and GNAA that under no circumstances should they take advantage of this. L&#39;s Ideology (talk) 21:20, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

This is tedious
and doesn't get into all the little stuff that's really stupid about infogalactic. Really this should probably be a paragraph in Vox Day. I'll see if I can collate some of the stupid stuff - David Gerard (talk) 16:31, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Just found a rant I posted elsewhere, digest into this article at will:

I wonder how he and Larry Sanger would go in an alienating-your-contributors faceoff. He's repeating a lot of the same mistakes:


 * my plan is perfect and you may now guess just how hostile I will be to outside ideas. ("No, it's not. My designs always work. See: multibutton mice.")


 * we're not using tawdry MySQL for the database, just because MediaWiki is relentlessly overoptimised and it's what all the paid developers develop against. No, we're going with Oracle, the port for which is maintained by half a volunteer! (At least Citizendium went with Postgres, which port is also maintained by half a volunteer but at least it gets run through MW core unit testing.) Deliberately making work for yourself with no actual benefit at all is apparently genius systems administration.


 * everything about it is to grind his personal axes. (His working user is "Fenris".) Fortunately, future galactic citizens' instance of the planetary core knowledge base will tell them all the Important Information about SCAAALZIII!!!


 * compete with Wikipedia by first copying the whole thing. ("The name isn't the issue. It has to show up first in any search engine. That's what Wikipedia has." I'm pretty sure Google instituted the duplicate content penalty a while after Wikipedia asked them why we were typically on page three or four, behind thirty of our own mirror sites.)


 * Vox is a bit of an expert on wiki communities, you know

But of course he has his own new bad ideas: An innovative approach to dealing with corporate spam (though I predicted it in 2006)

This is the sort of thing that makes me think Vox is taking the piss, except he's clearly been working on this for about a year now and honestly thinks this is all a truly brilliant idea.

He's also pushing tie-ins to gab.io (a right-wing Facebook/Twitter thing, which Milo is apparently going great guns on; three-week queue for accounts) and Brave (Brendan Eich's new web browser, which is Chrome with bitcoins in; pretty sure he hasn't asked Eich, but Brave is indeed being taken up by the Dork Enlightenment to strike a blow against the evil SJW).

Everything on the Roadmap is ridiculous. "I think we may surprise you with our ability to develop to the roadmap without scaling up at all, because right now our only real challenge is the limitations imposed by the ridiculous tools available. We plan to replace them entirely in Phase Three."

THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN. If i were to bend over backwards until i could bite my own bum, i could concoct an explanation involving parsoid, visual editor and transforming the entire database into the HTML5 representation instead of the wikitext representation. Which would be a genuine advance, if a small one. But Mediawiki as found at Wikimedia is made of horror, tears and gaffer tape (like basically all large software systems) and holds together only because the dev team are frickin' geniuses. You really are not going to reproduce it but better, carrying a couple of billion words of legacy wikitext.

I wonder what they're doing for a server config. RationalWiki is more responsive than this, and our hosting is ~$390/mo for four VMs. (I even worked out a Citizendium-level overspecified hosting config with six VMs, that would be not much more expensive.)

Their reliable sourcing policy ... if I was a bright and stupid high school student coming up with something off the top of my head, that list would be a good start for classroom discussion.

And in conclusion, Infogalactic is as brain-eatingly hilarious as Voat was, and I've been having the same reaction, with whole paragraphs of profanity-laced ranting about it self-assembling in a spontaneously forming accretion disc around a singularity of "wat".

- David Gerard (talk) 00:16, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I assume the initial "he" refers to Beale? Reverend Black Percy (talk) 00:32, 27 January 2017 (UTC)


 * yep - bits refer to the announcement post and its comments - David Gerard (talk) 17:54, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

This thread on /r/Wikipedia is pretty funny
"With white power and hookers". 13:31, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Fuzzy, you should reply to mjaumjau with a link to here. Since, you know, it's so unfair to lump in Vox Day with white supremacy. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 13:40, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Also, regarding TOW and the Daily Heil, see here. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 13:45, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

White supremacist; better title is alt-right activist
I think alt-right activist is a more honest title, and avoids the page just being smear or defamation that could get RW in trouble. Plus the alt-right article explains connections between white supremacist groups such as Daily Stormer and the alt-right anyway.

So this seems to be much more grounded in reality than an ambiguous and unprovable title like "white supremacist", unless RW just wants to be a "progressive" version of Encyclopedia Dramatica dedicated to attacking ideological opponents rather than just presenting evidence of their behavior in action (such as Vox's explusion from Hugo Awards, which is well documented in great detail, and contains new sources I added myself).--BrittanyPBone (talk) 19:25, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
 * "Alt-right" is indeed a better single term descriptor for Beale than "white supremacist", in part because "alt-right" specifically denotes the contemporary, "cleaned-up", internet-based white supremacist movement that Beale is a part of.


 * Aside from that, Reverend Black Percy (talk) 20:06, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
 * The guy fucking calls black people "savages". I don't know what end of the world you live in where that's not emblematic of white supremacist ideology, but I'd rather be accurate than excessively even-handed.  ikanreed You probably didn't deserve that 20:49, 10 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Don't be fucking dense. He's literally a fucking white supremacist as has been explained with detailed cites and quotes at length on Talk:Theodore Beale already - David Gerard (talk) 18:35, 11 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Make this 4 for white supremacist. Hipocrite (talk) 16:18, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

"Alt-right" vs "Alt right (aka white supremacist)"
The threshold for tolerating constant arguments and disputes is very low these days. It will get lower.

The lock is in place for a mere 24 hours, enough time to settle this on the talkpage once and for all (I hope).

I personally think that "Alt-right (aka white supremacist)" is a repeat statement that reads poorly. Press "Alt-right" and voilá, it explains clearly that the alt-right is white supremacist.

So that's one editor (me). Join the discussion, folks. We determine this mobocratically, like always. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 19:51, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I just noticed what is essentially a duplicate vote above. My bad. We can certainly count the votes already cast above over the coming 24 hours. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 19:54, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I think we should just call him a white-supremacist, but accepted the compromise of both. You can see multiple other supports for white-supremacist above. Hipocrite (talk) 19:53, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * It really is kind of a minor issue, and in the end, we could just go with both (though my current vote is still for alt-right alone). Regardless, I'm a mod, and chaos is not tolerated here. Thus, the page is locked (and for good reason), and we all get the pleasure of talkpaging some more. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 19:57, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * You mean the vote you voted in and then donned your "mod hat" to support yourself over 4 other editors? Yeah, we see it. Hipocrite (talk) 19:56, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Reverend Black Percy (talk) 19:57, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I mean, right now there's you, and the pizzagator for "alt-right," and me, ikanreed, David Gerard and Cosmikdebris for white supremicist. Hipocrite (talk) 19:59, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * And there's no rush, because the page's locked for a day while things cool down. I don't doubt that your version will win, and when/if it does, Brittany will be edit warring if she keeps changing it back to just say "alt-right". So just sit back and take a breather, old timer. You can give this 23 hours. Who'da thunk it? Reverend Black Percy (talk) 20:03, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I disagree with the statement made above that white supremacist is "an ambiguous and unprovable title." For Bob's sake, look at look at our article on the subject. Of course, the terms racist and racism could be used instead as they seems much less "ambiguous" and clearly justified in this case. Regards, Cosmikdebris (talk) 00:50, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
 * There's no doubt that the guy is a white supremacist. My whole argument is that the term "Alt-right" already denotes white supremacy — and as such, writing "Alt-right (aka white supremacist)" is to write the same thing twice. It's a bit like writing "religious Christian" — it just doesn't read well to me. But hey, maybe that's just me. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 05:13, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I see where you're coming from here. My argument was not really about the semantics of "alt-right" versus "alt-right (white supremacist)" but rather that it appeared to me that another editor was using badly flawed arguments to justify what I see as an attempt to whitewash the article. Infogalactic and Vox Day should be called what he/she/it are, and using goofy arguments about "opening up RW to libel charges" (or whatever) because of semantics is bullshit. Regards, Cosmikdebris (talk) 02:57, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * On the Vox article I posted some links regarding sources who've stated his views may be fascist; so I think that would fit as a source; white supremacist is unsourced. And the only one who kept insisting on putting that here is User:Hipocrite anyway, who IMO is a troll, and might even ironically be a right-wing plant just trying to 'parody' the website and make it look as dumb as possible himself. (Won't post personal info here, but on a public ED article there are links showing he was a stauch right-winger while on WP, and a photo of him with Pat Bunchanen, who is an alt-right icon; then apparently in 2015 he all of a sudden started posting in favor of "progressive" politics on the Gamergate article; so seems really suspicious; for that matter on one of his public blogs he even says he's apparently a fan of "alternative" new age woo and crank stuff that RW probably has articles criticizing; so I am really suspicious he's just here to cause drama and not make legitimate edits).--BrittanyPBone (talk) 03:27, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * You should have stopped with the first sentence. I don't give a shit about whatever dox you've dug up on User:Hipocrite and I don't think any of the other contributors here care either. Arguing your point by attacking another contributor to the site does absolutely nothing for arguing your case. If you think User:Hipocrite has acted in bad faith, you are free to take it up in the coop. Regards, --Cosmikdebris (talk) 03:42, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Reverend Black Percy (talk) 12:56, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * "Alt right" is a euphemism created by white supremacists to try to obscure the fact that they are racists. As such the term should be avoided on RW except 1) on the page itself, or 2) when necessary for context and further explained within the page. Cosmikdebris is correct: we don't really care what Hipocrite's did in the past; it's the substance of present contributions that matter. Bongolian (talk) 09:05, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * I don't know much about Hipocrite, I'm just saying the irony is that I legitimately think he's a parodist or a plant, like some of the Conservapedia users were, since nearly every post by his outside of RationalWiki on his personal blogs is in favor of right-wing politics or "crank" stuff this site is dedicated to debunking - he has articles written on the right-wing Washington Times, the 'crank' site "Beforeitsnews", and wrote an article about how "Christianity is under attack" by progressivism; and allegedly on Wikipedia where he still edits occasionally is a right-winger, RW is the only website I've seen him post anything in favor of progressive politics; I won't post any of his stuff here, but he's apparently a published writer on many public websites so it's all easy to find.--BrittanyPBone (talk) 15:38, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * @BrittanyPBone You are trying to dox Hipocrite, which we do not allow here, without actually doxing him. In the process, you are smearing him without evidence. If you have something negative to say about Hipocrite, you need to address his actual edits on RW. Bongolian (talk) 19:09, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * @BrittanyPBone I also can't help but notice that you've yet to answer a direct (and fairly simple) question. Twice. Now, let me be perfectly clear — I'm not an ideological policeman (and we do openly invite people who disagree with our views). And I certainly don't mean to come off as an interrogator of any kind (and my question is casual, even). My query is actually not about the essay itself, nor its contents, per se. Rather, this is about the basic consistency of your own position.


 * Here's the conundrum. You claim to be Brittany Pettibone on your userpage. I ask you, "Did you write the essay which Brittany Pettibone wrote?". And it's interesting on so many levels that you would repeatedly dodge this question — a question so obvious as to be tautological. I mean, it's not like it's a "fact finding" question, or involves "prodding behind your mask" in any way. To the contrary, the question really is deductive: "Are you willing to claim that you are the person whom you've willingly claimed to be?".


 * And as absurd as it might seem when phrased as such, it's certainly a question which has an answer — one that you could provide, no less (irrespective of it being a true or a false answer). I wouldn't be checking up on that, anyways. And certainly, nobody is under any requirement to answer my mossy old questions. But in light of that fact, your failure (read: unwillingness?) to adress the very question is all the more noteworthy. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 20:42, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
 * That looks like a fake account impersonating some blogger called Brittany Pettibone, maybe a parodist just trying to create drama; the posts sound weird and why would an alt-right blogger use their real name here anyway?.--24.89.35.17 (talk) 03:58, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Examples of bias on Infogalactic
So I've heard about this site but don't follow it, has anyone taken the time to view the recent changes and spot examples of far-right wing bias creeping its way in, a la the "WIGO" page on Conservapedia?--24.89.35.17 (talk) 03:34, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

"Mandate of Heaven"
This isn't about a literal god, it's a chinese expression for having lost the will and desires of the collective unconscious. This could be spiritualized into a literal God blessing certain causes, but it's rarely used that way. Request rewording or just removing the section. &mdash; Unsigned, by: 107.77.237.129 / talk
 * Yeah, not having the Mandate of Heaven and being an atheist are two different things. I reworded the section to mean "Wikipedia lost favor with the super entities". I don't know if "super entities" accurately describes it but I'm trying to have it refer to godlike entities that doesn't refer exactly to any individual gods. 00:28, 25 May 2020 (UTC)