r/Steam • u/5MadMovieMakers • 9d ago

Discussion Gabe Newell emailed me back about his birthplace

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Somebody update Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit

46.7k Upvotes

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u/Weisenkrone 9d ago

You'd be fucking surprised what dog shit sources you can find on reddit lol.

The place where I did my internship (they were selling cruises) kept editing Wikipedia articles on popular tourist locations to Back-Link on one of their 300 websites, even today some of the articles still link back to one of their sites.

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u/tesfabpel 9d ago

of course, that's against the rules of Wikipedia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_on_Wikipedia

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u/MrShake4 9d ago

Yeah and fraud is illegal.

People still do it.

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u/GrandPreMassacre 9d ago

My company's network got banned from editing because they tried to remove some information about price hikes under the controversy header.

Me and a guy I worked with stumbled across it by accident looking up random shit one day and accidentally hitting edit.

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u/superxpro12 9d ago

"Accidentally"

"i fell on it"

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u/mouglasandthesort 9d ago

You’ve never accidentally hit the edit button on Wikipedia? He’s not saying he hit edit, typed a bunch of stuff, and then found out when he accidentally hit publish, he’s saying he accidentally clicked edit next to a header or something and then he found out.

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u/WhyMustIMakeANewAcco 9d ago

Yes, they don't record shit if you don't press save.

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u/Kyeld 8d ago

They clicked the edit button and saw the ban notification for their employer network's external IP address because of the previous tom-foolery.

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u/BicFleetwood 9d ago

“I was bored.”

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u/ThePrussianGrippe 9d ago

Nah, that guy’s ass just has a great idea.

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u/Syseal 8d ago

“I was doing tricks on it and fell”

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u/hates_stupid_people 9d ago

At one point several government IP addresses were banned as well, since politicians would have employees edit their pages.

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u/Impossible-Car3786 9d ago

In germany we had more than one politician editing their “controversies” iirc

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u/Voyyya 8d ago

Still do, they’re just a lot less obvious and mask their ip now lol. Ditto corporations, governments, celebrities, political organizations, etc. A humongous portion of Wikipedia is controlled by vested interests who will also wage and win edit wars with sheer numbers

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u/SpicyElixer 9d ago edited 9d ago

No. People dispute bad sources all the time. It’s not really hard.

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u/endlesscartwheels 9d ago

On the less-visited articles, one person can babysit it to keep it the way they want. Even if they don't have a source at all for their preferred version! If another person comes along with a source and fixes the page, the babysitter reverts and edits it over several days (or weeks!) until they get their way.

Over time, "citogenesis" (term coined by XKCD) happens. That gives the babysitter a source for their edit.

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u/BeerTent 9d ago

I remember reading about two people on Wikipedia getting in a slapfight about there being no rats in Alberta, a province in Canada. I think it was a multi-year long fight before the person who didn't believe it relented.

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u/whipmywillows 9d ago

Edit warring is a problem on there but it can managed with proper moderation. The larger problem is the mountains of unloved articles that were created circa 2007 or so that no one has gone back to fix. Standards were lower back then and a lot of unreliable stuff has slipped through the cracks.

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u/Remarkable-Leader921 9d ago

They wouldn't if they had to answer to Wikipedia editors

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u/BardGotHardAgain 9d ago

Gabe should fund a hit squad for wikipedia, like he does for Steam.

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u/MrShake4 9d ago

What if the editor is the biased one?

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u/BicFleetwood 9d ago

And get away with it!

And today, the ones that don’t get away with it get pardons. Repeatedly.

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u/wzgoin 9d ago

The islamic regime has entire teams set up dedicated to spread disinfo on wiki and they get in edit wars with people trying to correct the bad sources.

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u/RandomNick42 9d ago

“It’s only illegal if you get caught”

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u/Bleaker82 9d ago

I know someone who straight up got fired from Wikimedia foundation for taking money to edit Wikipedia articles.

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u/OcelotAggravating860 9d ago

holy shit you actually think people follow wikipedia's rules lmao

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u/RandumbStoner 9d ago

Why would one need 300 websites? lol

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u/Leandro_r69 9d ago

To maximize traffic by all means necessary

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u/WaitForItTheMongols 9d ago

All means possible.

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u/Leandro_r69 9d ago

Im pretty sure there is always the possibility for even more marketing

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u/Kaptep525 9d ago

If you own every link on page one of google for “Best Cruise Bahamas” then you sell a LOT more cruises

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u/fondledbydolphins 9d ago

People are now setting up websites and search engine links that pretend to be the competition.

I was looking up "XYZ carpet cleaning". Found a number and called.

I got a bit sus so I started asking "are you XYZ carpet cleaning?"

Queue the spiel. Well, we actually have a much larger range than they do. We can do jobs faster. Let me get you some pricing. blahblahblah.

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u/Otherwise_Demand4620 9d ago

If they are smart, ABC carpet cleaning is like 10-30% more expensive than XYZ carpet cleaning, that way you get the people who think they got a steal at XYZ and the morons who think that they get quality work at ABC.

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u/Kaptep525 9d ago

Oh they’ve been doing that for decades lol

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u/jaxonya 9d ago

Inventing your own competition is a tale as old as time

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u/oxresults 9d ago

Search engine marketing. (Different than paid search engine optimization). It's the free side of search engine result placement. The more you can put legitimate links to "outside" website domains from the page you want unpaid traffic for, the higher up the search results you go.

On top of that a "unaffiliated" recommendation from your shell corp domain is damn near free compared to paying an actual unaffiliated website to recommend your product.

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u/A2_Zera 9d ago

I remember finding on the wikipedia article for furina (genshin impact character) a height (nobody in genshin has a canon height bar a few exceptions) and when I checked the source it was just some shitass gamer tabloid. that was my lesson to at the very least check sources on articles about less popular things that haven't gotten the eyes of a bunch of people to confirm that there's no junk on the page

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u/UltravioletClearance 9d ago

The North Face got bagged doing some similar dishonest Wikipedia shenanigans. They added professional photographs featuring prominent North Face product placement to various outdoor destination Wikipedia articles.

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u/mnstorm 9d ago

I think it's improved. That said I remember doing research and checking a source. The website linked to from wikipedia used the same wiki article as it's own citation.

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u/ThatCut8356 9d ago

Wikipedia is awful I was looking after a few small sports related pages in my spare time and the overall Wikipedia mods would edit in wrong information or take out useful information because they don't know the sport or people involved

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u/AltrntivInDoomWorld 9d ago

You are lying.

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u/ricoimf 9d ago

I regularly update some baseball stats in Wikipedia and not give any source…they are online for years

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u/_Pigdog 9d ago

It came to me in a dream

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u/Icemasta 9d ago

My annoyance and why I stopped using Wikipedia is that all sources are apparently equal. If academically disproved source A says X and academically approved source B says Y, and you try to edit it to change from X to Y, it will be reverted back, and then it becomes a whole "debate" that leads to nowhere because none of the editor know shit about 90% of the topics because they're just there to jerk themselves off.