this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn't have more 'toxic content', harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.

But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn't unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire 'fediverse bad' section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, 'zoosadism', and then pages with titles like 'bad monkey' that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.

I decided to stop using the internet for a while.

I've learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like 'an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim' should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.

I thought I'd learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.

It just makes me so angry that most people's main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics' are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.

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[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago

Someone fixed it a few hours ago, yeah. We should also check back periodically to make it stay that way.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

This is ironically an inevitable consequence of Wikipedia's centralization undermining its strategic objective of making knowledge free and accessible to all.

I am not arguing for the opposite extreme, rather pointing out that Wikipedia is simply too centralized to be a durable vehicle of truth.

Federated architecture provides differentiated redundancy and the possibility for existential conflicts to be preserved in splits between elements of that federation rather than require the leaders at the top to be perfectly lucid and uncorruptable by encompassing forces (state or private) or risk cementing problematic lies as truth.

I think this would be a thing worth organizing around, can we mass report (edit ok "report" is probably the wrong word, this is about a broader editorial tone on the fediverse not attacking the particular person) this person or their particular edits on the fediverse? I don't mean a mindless spam wave, more like a well written consistent push from a large, disparate range of people that continually highlights that Wikipedia really doesn't have an accurate picture of what the Fediverse is (to put it charitably for Wikipedia).

[–] Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago

This is ironically an inevitable consequence of Wikipedia’s centralization undermining its strategic objective of making knowledge free and accessible to all. […]

Perhaps you'd be interested ^[1]^ in Ibis ^[2]^?

References

  1. Type: Meta. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:22Z.
    • Ibis ^[2]^ was recommended because of their apparent negative opinion of Wikipedia's alleged centralized structure.
  2. Type: Repository. Title: "ibis". Publisher: ["GitHub". "Nutomic"]. Published: 2025-07-14T12:39:05.000Z. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:25Z. URI: https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis.
[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 2 points 6 days ago (5 children)

The problem of reporting specific cases is that it could become cancel culture all over again. First option, I think, would be to try to correct issues in the article. Then, if they denied, then start suspecting of the site itself. And if already suspecting, it adds up to the site's untrustworthiness.

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[–] Ladislawgrowlo@lemy.lol 2 points 5 days ago

Do not view Wikipedia as the only source of truth. And please relax your soul in face of online drama.

I think Wikipedia itself says that it is just an entry into topics. To confirm the things that are written there you check sources.

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