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

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.

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!

List of People Censored by Twitter

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.

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.

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]]^{[[User talk:KrakatoaKatie|talk]]}</span> 12:39, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

Page content

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