Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-07-25/Special report

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• Is Walter Grassroot even an administrator? The local and meta user rights logs appear to say otherwise. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 00:22, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Good catch @AntiCompositeNumber:. In my defense I'll say that we had occasional difficulty communicating in Englsh - and I don't speak Chinese. Possibly somebody mentioned something similar to an admin (as below) and I misinterpreted it. Sorry. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:26, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
    • You don't need to speak Chinese to use Special:CentralAuth. This was probably the easiest fact to check in the entire report, and the fact that no one did so reflects poorly on the Signpost's editorial standards. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 04:06, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
  • He is the administrator of other social media discussion groups managed by the Chinese user group.--Cwek (talk) 00:39, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • This is an old story with a long history. The current Chinese user group has a certain connection with the former Shanghai user group. And a long time ago, a user mentioned in a screenshot of a discussion group that threatened other users through the Communist Party. At first, he was permanently blocked through the off-site threat and UserCheck's information association. Later, other user who shared the same idea with him argued for him, but was eventually banned for disrupting and other reasons. The point is that these users also believe that the screenshots are fake. This is some news that I have heard, and I don't want to be the chief dig up the past, so I won't have any comment on this, or more directly, it's none of my business.--Cwek (talk) 00:50, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Walter Grassroot is autopatroller, rollbacker, IP block exempted on zh.WP. He is also a former AWB user (revoked due to abuse), and current Wikipedia Library Librarian. Note that he is currently banned to promote any event hosted by him for 1 year. Milky·Defer >Please ping me while replying to me... 02:10, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
• Wow, genuinely interesting stuff overall the fact he WG, states "I am a member of the CCP" and then follows with "I am not a member of the CCP" makes him a liar, maybe he is not a member of the CCP but then he did lie when he stated he did. On the other hand I have little knowledge of ZH Wikipedia, so I know I don't know the full situation. I can speak from experience towards various POV editors particularly dealing with editors with articles relating to the Balkans, and the middle east broadly. Anyway all around amazing reporting, extremely interesting, and an excellent read! Des Vallee (talk) 01:15, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • I'll add that flaunting membership in/close relationship with an authoritarian party that is wont to prosecute people breaching the Great Firewall would have, as the Indian Supreme Court often says, a "chilling effect on free speech". At best, the statements are an expression of toxic groupism; at worst, they are intimidation tactics. Additionally, knowing the nature of the CCP, legal threats of reporting users to the government are more credible than most. Wilhelm Tell DCCXLVI ^{converse | fings wot i hav dun} 03:16, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
• So uh, WG either has a serious problem with English or with contradicting themselves. How can a person go from saying "I am delighted to observe the current chaos in Hong Kong, and expact the prospective widening gap between Shenzhen and Hong Kong in next fiscal year and future. Thanks to their night efforts in streets and subways, the HK is sinking inevitably." (a comment which in itself looks sanctionable as clear NOTHERE behaviour (even considering it's in Signpost comments) and expression of schadenfreude on a serious issue) to "I am a neutral to neither support or oppose any side" and then back again to "despite most of my friends at Zhwiki naively hope HK returns to normal ASAP.", all within the same message? Wilhelm Tell DCCXLVI ^{converse | fings wot i hav dun} 02:50, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
  • It kinda makes sense when you read the messages in the context that, for hardline CCP supporters, "normal" means "all hail whoever's in charge of the Party today". Deryck C. 10:01, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
• The CCP's ideals and modes of governance are directly at odds with WMF and Wikipedia's mission of promoting free access to knowledge. Flaunting "membership" in such an organisation while apparently acting as authoritarian tattle tale should be grounds for indef global block. -Indy beetle (talk) 05:00, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
• Interesting story, but frankly, the part about "WG" is not very interesting or relevant. Half of the article is about one editor who may or may not be related to... not sure what, exactly. I'd rather Signpost wrote more about this theory of "overt inauthentic networks that it's been deploying across social media platforms–-Facebook,Twitter and Reddit for sure, and likely Wikipedia too". Now that's something that the community should investigate promptly. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:10, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
• This is just my personal opinion and not representing any other people or groups: In my view it is absolutely unacceptable to use a legal threat or even consider or joke about reporting users to authorities over purely political matters. In my personal opinion it does not matter if the other person was not careful with their personal information, and that behavior has no place on this project. WhisperToMe (talk) 05:36, 26 July 2021 (UTC)
• By the way, I am a new page patroler and I am obliged to check whether the new page meets the retention requirements. Once, there are a video game article had only a bunch of plot information and no reference source footnotes, so I marked "Notability". After that, WG just marked a source from an offline book (even including the page number) to want to solve it. Fortunately, I successfully found the online version of this book in the online library, and found that the source only mentioned the name of the game (if I remember correctly, just the name of the game series), huh. In addition, if the article needs to be improved, it only needs to translate one or two sentences of the comment corresponding to the English version article and add a small amount of reference source footnotes to meet the requirements. Therefore, I always feel a little bit skeptical about the offline book reference sources in the entries he write. Another time, this was an inspection question about a group of character articles created in batches (these entries were written by another user). I marked "Notability" and "Single Source" in batches. Not only did WG refuse to communicate with me, but also Defining this as sabotage and let an administrator block me. (Incidentally, the administrator often unblocked WG when he was blocked due to a dispute, and the activities before the unblocking act were not active.) Therefore, although there have been incidents of forged screenshots, I doubt whether WG's threatening behavior is true. Even if it is real, it is not surprising. After all, his personality makes me think that it is also possible. --Cwek (talk) 01:36, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
• Oh yeah, Chinese Wikipedia... where admin socking and harassing other editors is perfectly fine under their own standards. — regards, Revi 08:12, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
  • It's a double-edged sword. Hongkongers have always used multiple IPs and the presence of political threats means that there is widespread use of proxies on top of that. These technical factors, plus the mass revocation of zh.wp CheckUser rights, has made Stewards' jobs rather ineffective and often distrusted by the zh.wp community. Deryck C. 10:01, 30 July 2021 (UTC)
    • A perfect demonstration of HK editors' fear of the National Security Law is meta:Steward_requests/Global_permissions/2020-07#Requests_for_global_IP_block_exemption, which marked the start of widespread use of proxy even among HK editors. H78c67c (talk) 06:33, 4 August 2021 (UTC)
• Latest update I guess zh:维基百科:2021年基金會針對中文維基百科的行動 [1] [2]. Surprisingly couldn't find any discussion of this anywhere on en although it's been a few days (well the BBC article is new). I know stuff largely happening on the Chinese Wikipedia and given it was the WMF taking action isn't perhaps something we can discuss much here on en, still I'm surprised I couldn't find any discussion anywhere until now. I'm hoping given the WMF's involvement it isn't outing or something. Nil Einne (talk) 12:40, 16 September 2021 (UTC)
  • In case you don't notice, a discussion has started at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)#m:Office actions/September 2021 statement. Sun8908 _Talk 08:07, 25 September 2021 (UTC)