Monday, December 19, 2016

Pale Moon redirect

From a Pale Moon-using Infogalaxian.

I'm on Vista using Pale Moon, this is how I did the Infogalactic redirect:

Install Redirector 2.9.3 (older version)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/versions/?page=1#version-2.9.3

After installation, set it up this way:
  1. Example URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*
  2. Include Pattern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*
  3. Redirect To: https://infogalactic.com/info/$1
  4. Pattern Type: select wildcard 
  5. Check the enable box 
  6. Test button will say SUCCESS 
  7. Save button gets it done 
Any link to Wikipedia now brings up the Infogalactic page instead!

Sunday, December 18, 2016

Fan mail

From a new user of Infogalactic:
Today, I did a quick internet search (Google) for "Shiva" to verify a detail or two.  I clicked on the Wikipedia link.  By the end of the second brief paragraph, I was already informed of "the goddess tradition of Hinduism called Shaktism" and how it considers Parvati to be "the equal complementary partner" of Shiva.

Hmm.  Is Shaktism so prevalent or important that it must be introduced before we learn anything more of Shiva?  Also, I can understand how Parvati may be "complementary", but the addition of "equal" smelled too SJWish.  I went to Infogalactic to see how its page differs.

On Infogalactic, the offending lines are absent, among other changes.

I am impressed.  I am also encouraged.  I don't know where Infogalactic will lead or what all it will accomplish.  I can only imagine what providing a more pure source of information may do, how it may affect all the minds searching for information.  What if our youth become accustomed to the *lack* of SJW propaganda, and as a result become similarly skeptical when they meet it, as I did today?  You are saving lives and securing the future.

Enough for now.  I just wanted to drop you a line to say you're appreciated, that I am proud to be a supporter, and that I will help spread the word.
That is certainly encouraging! One step at a time. One page at a time. But the goal of an objective, user-centric knowledge core is gradually taking shape, thanks to everyone's support.

Monday, October 31, 2016

500 editors

That's a landmark worth noting. We now have 500 registered Galaxians and we're seeing a growing number of daily edits as well.

We'll be introducing three levels of editing capabilities soon.

L1: Create and edit new pages only.
L2: Create and edit new pages, add text to existing pages only.
L3: Create and edit new pages, add and delete text from existing pages.

Once we get to Phase Three, this sort of differentiation will be unnecessary, but it will reduce the likelihood and amount of edit-warring in the meantime.

Monday, October 24, 2016

Infosextant: the browser extension

Thanks to Blake Roussel, you can now make sure that you're always using Infogalactic instead of Wikipedia, no matter what links Google feeds you.

INFOSEXTANT is the browser extension to automatically change Wikipedia links to Infogalactic.

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/infosextant

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/infosextant/plieanmckkckfcdfaobonmmmbeniaige

Opera version coming soon. Brave integration coming soon. Please note that the Chrome extension is an updated version and is an improvement on the previous one.

With regards to Safari, that should be doable but we need a Macintosh programmer to do it. Any takers? Blake explains:
Safari does have extensions on OS X (not iOS), but they work on a different system than the other browsers and I don't have a Mac to do the development/testing with. The scripting for this was pretty simple and I believe the same javascript could be used for a Safari extension. If you can find a volunteer with a Mac and a bit of technical aptitude it shouldn't be hard for them to get it up and running. The basics they would need to get started are available here.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Chrome extension

This extension replaces Wikipedia links with Infogalactic links for Chrome users. Download it here.

UPDATE: the link has been changed to the updated version. If you installed the earlier version, please replace it with the new-and-improved Infosextant. There is now also a Firefox extension.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Roadmap 2.0

On Monday night, the Techstars held a meeting, and after a series of intense discussions, it was decided to radically modify our development schedule. Instead of utilizing the existing MediaWiki engine to incorporate the new features we are planning, both the Techstars and the Star Council agreed that Infogalactic will be better served by replacing the MediaWiki engine with a superior engine of our own device, codename DONTPANIC.

We also decided to add additional levels of administration and editing in order to better maintain cohesion in content modification until the preference filters are operational and render content management unnecessary. There will be three levels of Galaxians, create page only, create and add content only, and create, add, and remove content. This will permit the Starlords to more easily contain and constrain the behavior of any editors whose behavior is not in line with the Seven Canons or the objectives of the Star Council.

ROADMAP 2.0

Phase One
FUND LEVEL COMPLETE

Image load speed improvement
Search time speed improvement
Integration with Brave browser
Operational ad server
Additional administration and editing levels

Phase Two
DONTPANIC engine
Dynamic page updates
Improved Database categories
Relativity, Reliability, and Notability 1.0 algorithms

Phase Three
Tri-level page content: Fact, Context, Opinion
Verified autobiography sub-pages
Preference filtering
Initial gamification and status bling operational
Safe Mode
Gab integration
User Interface 2.0 Beta
Gamification and status bling complete

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Why we have a strong Anonymity policy

Actually, we just think it is a wise principle in general, but this reported problem of threats and harassment being directed at Wikipedia editors and admins tends to support our decision.
Some of the administrators in charge of editing Wikipedia pages have admitted that they have become greatly concerned about online privacy due to receiving threats whenever they moderate pages about controversial topics. The admissions were made to researchers of Drexel University in Philadelphia, US, who were carrying out research into how and why internet users protect their privacy while working on collaborative projects online.

The researchers interviewed 23 individuals, including several Wikipedia editors, and discovered that users who work on collaborative projects often receive threats from governments, groups of people and other individuals that are substantial enough to make the users fear for the safety and reputation of themselves and their families.

The extent of the abuse is so bad that many Wikipedia editors now have to use the Tor anonymity network to disguise their IP addresses, because otherwise people who mean them harm trace their IPs and threaten them with violence.

Pervasive threats of harrassment, rape and death

"We were surprised to learn how pervasive and dire the threat was perceived to be among people with central roles (like employees of the Wikimedia Foundation) and permissions like blocking editors or protecting pages (like administrators chosen by the community)," the researchers wrote in their paper.

One female Wikipedia administrator reported that "the fear of harassment, of real, of stalking and things like that, is quite substantial. At least among administrators I know, especially women", while another individual, who started working for Wikipedia as a teenager, said: "It's a lot of emotional work, and I remember being like 13 and getting a lot of rape threats and death threats, and that was when I was doing administrative work."

The Wikipedia editors reported that threats were made to both male and female editors, and that the threats sadly often came from other editors on the project, who had a conflict with the content that was either allowed to be published, or taken off pages for various reason. Threats became more intense if the editors were holding central positions as administrators or members of the arbitration committee, who were given the final say on content.
No one involved with Infogalactic is known to anyone outside the project except for the Lead Designer. We plan to keep it that way. Only the members of the Star Council will have access to the real identities behind the various handles, as there is no reason anyone else needs to know them.

Even if a Galaxian turns out to be a problem, we'll just cut off their editing access. We certainly won't doxx them or ID them, as has happened to Wikipedians in the past, unless they are using Infogalactic to engage in criminal activity.

Monday, October 17, 2016

Censorship at Twitter

Here is another Infogalactic page you won't find on Wikipedia. If you know of anyone else who has been banned, suspended, shadowbanned, or otherwise censored by Twitter, sign up as a Galaxian and add them.

Just be sure to put them in the right category, provide a date, and a link!

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Tips and Tricks: Firefox redirection

There is a Firefox addon that automatically replaces URLs locally in your browser. To redirect all Wikipedia links to Infogalactic, add the following rule:

Redirect:*://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*
to: https://infogalactic.com/info/$2

For example, this will redirect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon to https://infogalactic.com/info/Bacon. So, when you google something and the first result is a Wikipedia link, when you click on it you'll be taken to Infogalactic instead.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Help required to refurbish the Help:Content pages

There is currently a large amount of help information within Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core, but it suffers from a few problems:
  1. There are many references within the material to Wikipedia,
  2. There are many links back to Wikipedia,
  3. The views expressed in some of them diverge from the Infogalactic Seven Canons.
There are also many subsidiary articles within the Help:Contents articles, so it is not just a matter of changing one article. They all have to be checked.

I want to get these cleaned up, but I need help and am calling for volunteers to help go through this material.

There are a few styles of edits required:
  1. Simply taking one of the articles and converting all appropriate references to Wikipedia to Infogalactic. That should be pretty mechanical.
  2. Changing links to refer to Infogalactic.
  3. Creating a list of pages that don't yet exist within that set of articles.
If you can help, please email crew@infogalactic.com so I can farm out articles for people to work on, We don't want multiple people working on the same article.

Once we have this all cleaned up we can link to it generally and let new editors know to refer to it.

Friday, October 14, 2016

Where information goes to be buried

An interesting discussion on Wikipedia about Infogalactic. Notice that the Wikipedians have not only buried the contributions of the contributors about whom they affect to be so concerned, but they have ensured that no one can retrieve it.

Now, why would Wikipedians want to completely bury a page about Cultural Marxism?
== Attribution for deleted content ==

[http://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page Infogalactic] is a new Wikipedia fork set up by Breitbart as [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/10/10/anti-thought-police-infogalactic-launches-as-wikipedia-alternative/ "an alternative to biased Wikipedia"]. I have been asked to supply a copy of the page deleted at [[WP:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Cultural Marxism (2nd nomination)|this MfD]]. Since Infogalactic's standards for notability and for COI are intended to be more relaxed than ours, it is likely to want to keep many articles that we delete, and we can expect more requests for copies.

My concern is, how should attribution be handled? Under CC-BY-SA we promise contributors that their contributions will be attributed, and any copies carry the same obligation. It does not seem right to accept contributions to a page, delete it, and then provide copies without attribution. Forked articles in Infogalactica are correctly linked to the original here, but where our page has been deleted there is nothing to link to.

Where an existing article is copied by Infogalactica and later deleted here, attribution will be lost anyway, and of course there are sites such as Deletionpedia which specialise in deleted content; but the fact that those sites are breaking the terms of CC-BY-SA doesn't make me happy to do it.

The best I can think of is to supply a list of contributors extracted from the history and require that the link at the bottom of the Infogalactica page which reads "''This article's content derived from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (See original source)''" is modified to say "''See list of contributors''" with a link to the list in a subpage. Any ideas? [[User:JohnCD|JohnCD]] ([[User talk:JohnCD|talk]]) 10:42, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

:My reaction would be "no thanks". I see no reason to provide anything to ''unbiased'' Breitbart. If they want an article on Cultural Marxism, they can write one. If they can't even do that, then how are they planning to make an alternative to Wikipedia in the first place? [[User:Fram|Fram]] ([[User talk:Fram|talk]]) 11:13, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

::Agree with Fram. I see no need to supply alternative encyclopaedias with content that isn't in our own encyclopaedia! -[[User:Roxy the dog|Roxy the dog™]] [[User talk:Roxy the dog|bark]] 11:26, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

:::I agree with Fram also. Despite the hype, this is a tiny fork ([https://infogalactic.com/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&offset=&limit=500 ''every'' registered editor there]), and while I appreciate that they're making an effort to do things the right way rather than just copy-pasting, there's no reason for us to be spending time assisting on a project which will almost certainly no longer exist in a few months when the [https://infogalactic.com/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&offset=&limit=500 half-a-dozen people responsible for every edit] lose interest and drift away. If Breitbart can't write an article on one of their own pet themes, I don't see how they can consider themselves a credible rival to Wikipedia. ‑ [[User:Iridescent|Iridescent]] 11:33, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

::::Let me echo what has been said above.  Wikipedia's license ''allows'' mirror sites to ''take'' content from Wikipedia at any time.  It in now way ''obligates'' Wikipedia editors or admins to do any work to ''give'' them content, however.  No one should be obligated to undelete anything or to find old revisions or anything like that.  If they want to take it, let them come get it.  If they can't find it, or it has been deleted, that's not your, mine, or anyone else here's problem.  --[[User:Jayron32|<span style="color:#009">Jayron</span>]][[User talk:Jayron32|<b style="color:#090">''32''</b>]] 11:45, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

:::::Are the deleted versions in the datadump? then they would have access anyway. [[User:Agathoclea|Agathoclea]] ([[User talk:Agathoclea|talk]]) 12:06, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

::::::If deleted versions are in the datadump, then that needs an urgent fix. I don't believe they are, however. Otherwise the WMF would be providng countless BLP attacks and copyright violations this way. [[User:Fram|Fram]] ([[User talk:Fram|talk]]) 12:35, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

*Unilaterally doing this would be a misuse of the admin tools since it was deleted out of Draft space by a community decision after the main space was SALTed.  To me, this isn't an administrative decision but a community one, which means [[WP:DRV]] is the right venue.  I doubt it would fare better there, however.  [[User:Dennis Brown|<b>Dennis Brown</b>]] - [[User talk:Dennis Brown|<b>2&cent;</b>]] 12:21, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

: Yep. Send him to DRV and let him take his chances. I've got other things to do than run around fetching deleted articles for a POV fork. <span style="color: #9932CC">[[:User:KrakatoaKatie|Katie]]<sup>[[User talk:KrakatoaKatie|talk]]</sup></span> 12:39, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

Monday, October 10, 2016

Page content

Here is a post to add prospective new content for Infogalactic in the comments.

An online encyclopedia without bias or thought police

All around the world, thousands of users are accessing and editing the new online encyclopedia for the 21st Century, Infogalactic, which styles itself the Planetary Knowledge Core™. Conceived as a next-generation replacement for Wikipedia, the troubled online encyclopedia, Infogalactic is a dynamic fork of Wikipedia that is designed to supplant its predecessor by addressing the problems of bias, vandalism, harassment, abuse, and inaccuracy that have plagued the Wikimedia Foundation’s flagship project for years.
“Every notable public figure who has a page devoted to them knows very well what an inaccurate nightmare Wikipedia is,” said Vox Day, Lead Designer of Infogalactic, a computer game designer and bestselling philosopher. “The page about me there has had everything from my place of birth to the number of times I’ve been married wrong. And that’s not even counting the outright abuse, such as when Wikipedians replaced the entire page with a definition of a sexually-transmitted disease or with a string of obscenities.”
Infogalactic plans to solve the structural problems of a community-edited online encyclopedia through objectivity, proven game design principles, and a sophisticated series of algorithms. Currently in an operational Phase One, the Planetary Knowledge Core has a five-phase Roadmap that its founders claim will eliminate edit warring, significantly improve accuracy, neutralize vandalism and other forms of griefing, and render all forms of political bias on the part of administrators and editors irrelevant.
“The primary challenge facing any online wiki is the individual editor’s incentive to impose his perspective on everyone else,” said Renegade, the Operations Director of Infogalactic, who, as per the organization’s pro-anonymity policy is known only by his handle. “Most people who contribute to an online knowledge base do so because they want to have their say, but in the end there can be only one perspective that is enforced by the site’s administrators. Infogalactic has solved that problem by embracing true objectivity and eliminating the enforcement incentive by moving from a centralized, vertically-stacked orientation to a decentralized, horizontally-distributed model.”
Infogalactic’s anti-bias architecture will permit users to select their preferred perspective and automatically see the version of the subject page that is closest to it based on a series of algorithms utilizing three variables, Relativity, Reliability, and Notability. This means a supporter of Hillary Clinton will see a different version of the current Donald Trump page than a Donald Trump supporter will, as both users will see the version of the page that was most recently edited by editors with perspective ratings similar to his own.
“The single biggest problem with Wikipedia isn’t Jimmy Wales or its outmoded 1995 technology, but the fact that it is patrolled by 532 left-wing thought police who aggressively force their biased perspective on the rest of the world,” Vox Day, aka “Fenris” on Infogalactic, added. “This isn’t Conservapedia 2.0 and we aren’t replacing Wikipedia’s admins with their conservative equivalent, we are making the function of thought police irrelevant through technology. Our design philosophy is based on the idea that only the user has the right to define what his reality is.”
The Planetary Knowledge Core is also distinguishing itself from its predecessors by its corporate-friendly policies. Corporations, large and small, are welcome to participate on the site, advertising by page and by category is permitted, and a number of strategic partners have been established, including Gab, the popular new Twitter alternative that already has over one hundred thousand active users.
Andrew Torba, the CEO and co-founder of Gab, said: “At Gab our mission is to put people first and promote free speech for all. Part of this mission includes working with others who share our core values, specifically around promoting and protecting free speech online. This is why we are incredibly excited to work with Infogalactic. We look forward to building a strong partnership that puts people first and promotes free expression for all.”
Even prior to its public announcement, tens of thousands of people have made the switch to Infogalactic. “The support from the community has been tremendous,” said Rifleman, the Technical Director of Infogalactic. “We haven’t even launched and we’ve already signed up subscriptions to cover more than one-third of our current server-and-storage burn rate. It’s clear there is a tremendous appetite for an alternative to Wikipedia’s institutional left-wing bias.”
Infogalactic has replaced the well-known Five Pillars of Wikipedia with its own Seven Canons™, which refer to the fundamental philosophy by which the Planetary Knowledge Core intends to operate. They are explained in detail on the Seven Canons page:
   1. Infogalactic does not define reality.
   2. Infogalactic is written from an objective point of view.
   3. Infogalactic is free content.
   4. No griefing.
   5. Play nice and play fair.
   6. Rules are guidelines for users, not chew toys for lawyers.
   7. Facts are facts.
While the 5-million-page Phase One Infogalactic is virtually identical to the English-language Wikipedia, in the Planetary Knowledge Core’s next phase, Infogalactic developers will introduce a number of new features to distinguish it from other online encyclopedias. These innovative features include Context and Opinion sub-pages, dynamic page updates, Autobio sub-pages for Verified editors, and an alpha version of perspective filtering.