Camestros Felapton

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Revisiting Voxopedia

I haven’t written about the alt-right’s vanity version of Wikipedia for awhile, indeed it’s been over a year. Observant readers will have noticed that it has not replaced or eclipsed Wikipedia in that time. Vox Day’s own promotional blog for Voxopedia ( https://infogalactic.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/dynamic-forking-manual-edition.html ) did have a post in January 2017 but has been quiet ever since.

The encyclopedia itself still has active editors but no more than when I last looked

Despite the “dynamic forking” Voxopedia pages tend to be out of date. For example, take Barnaby Joyce (please!) until recently the deputy prime minister of Australia.

https://infogalactic.com/info/Barnaby_Joyce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnaby_Joyce

The Voxopedia article is just a snapshot of the Wikipedia page from 2016. Consequently it misses the citizenship crisis that overwhelmed Australia politics, the surprise revelation that Joyce was technically also a New Zealand citizen, the high court case that forced him to resign, the subsequent by-election which saw him returned to office, the news that he had left his wife to live with a former staffer who was having his baby, a major expenses scandal around a donor paying for his flat, a serious allegation of sexual harassment, and his resignation from cabinet and as leader of the National Party. Yes, on a global scale it is minor stuff but an encyclopedia is for looking up the stuff you didn’t already know.

Actor Robert Guillaume is alive and well on Voxopedia despite dying in October 2017 in Wikipedia: https://infogalactic.com/info/Robert_Guillaume as is (for all you Swap Shop fans out there) Keith Chegwin https://infogalactic.com/info/Keith_Chegwin who on Wikipedia died in December 2017. More famous people are more likely to have their deaths recorded but it is hit and miss.

The majority of pages remain as out-of-date Wikipedia pages from 2016 and the basic issue with Voxopedia remains the same: not enough editors and the editors it does have are mainly working on fringe projects. These are supplemented by one-off vanity pages (e.g. https://infogalactic.com/info/Richard_Paolinelli )

Of those fringe projects one editor* stands out as a self-declared ‘truther’, pushing various kinds of conspiracy theories and maintaining Voxopedia’s obsession with ‘Pizzagate’ style conspiracy theories about paedophiles. It is areas like this where the overall bufoonishness of Voxopedia takes a sinister turn. For example, this case https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/19/claims-of-satanic-cult-and-child-sacrifices-in-london-are-baseless-judge-rules  is treated as if the allegations were legitimate and ignores the psychological abuse that the people who made the allegations subjected children to.

In better news, Voxopedia finally decided in February this year that Stephen Hawking didn’t die in the 1980s (and replaced by an actor) https://infogalactic.com/w/index.php?title=Objections_to_the_Big_Bang&oldid=725460699  And, as of this post being written, Voxopedia even has him still being alive. The wheels of Voxopedia grind slowly but they also grind erratically.

The site is also extraordinarily slow and clunky at times. Just doing this post resulted in multiple “504 Gateway Time-out The server didn’t respond in time” errors. It’s frustrating to try and follow even a couple of links deep as pages can take an age to load or simply not load at all. I’ve looked at this page before https://infogalactic.com/info/Shadow_Party but I can’t comment on its current state of wacky political-paranoia because I had to give up trying to get it to load.

The question is how long it will continue to stumble on in this way. Arguably, if what it does is divert money and resources from worse alt-right projects then it’s continued existence is a net good.

*[I’m not going to name Voxopedia editors – it unnecessarily puts the focus on individuals]

[Thanks to Doris Sutherland and Space Oddity for some aspects of this post]

 

camestrosfelapton

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30 responses to “Revisiting Voxopedia”

  2. Teddy came up with a grandiose idea, got some suckers to pay him money for it, and then lost interest?

    I need a sarcasm font to properly express myself here.

    Not replaced, not eclipsed, not even supplemented.

    TBF, I can’t fault them for not updating the Joyce entry — outside Australia, nobody cares except as gossip fodder when they don’t want to read about Kardashians. Also he wanted to kill Johnny Depp’s dogs. I think there are probably a lot of people inside Oz who don’t, esp. now that he’s not sleazing all over the government.

    Also isn’t he from a kind-of right-ish party, no environmentalism, and no gheys? If he’d been a Green and done all this (esp. the sex stuff… urp), they might have updated it out of spite.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. It looks like ‘Alt-Hero’ Comics is headed the same direction already too. Vox was bragging the other day that retailers were selling his comic series at ‘24.7% cheaper than the top 300 comics.’ Despite his boasting, what those numbers really say is that retailers are anxious to unload their unsellable Arkhaven surpluses at bargain prices. It also indicates that—so far from taking down Marvel and DC—nothing that Vox’ “Dream Team” has produced has even cracked the Top 300.

    Liked by 2 people

    • I suppose a sale and some good marketing could be how something breaks into the top X but in general retailers wouldn’t discount something that was already selling like hot cakes because… why would they deliberately cut into their margins?

      But also Top 300? Who goes that far back in any Best/Top list? Is that a standard comics thing or is Teddy being undercut by the 301st on the list or something? It seems like a bizarre slip from Ted to essentially admit that his comics aren’t even in the top 300.

      Liked by 1 person

      • It says something that his biggest accomplishment was an ultimately self-defeating act of spite that will probably wind up a footnote in Hugo history.

        Like

      • @Space Oddity

        To further riff on that, his greatest accomplishment will be introducing Chuck Tingle to a wider audience. So his achievement was to greatly enrich Mr. Tingle, something that I’m sure VD is just THRILLED about.

        Liked by 2 people

        • Kat Goodwin: Chuck Tingle almost made Sad Puppies 3 all worth it.

          His Hugo packet entry last year was absolutely priceless, wasn’t it?

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      • Honestly, Chuck Tingle has added a demonstrable and measurable amount of pleasure to my life. I hope he is never unmasked. It’s my grown-up timeline, magic equivalent of the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and homemade valentines and shooting stars. Love is real!

        Liked by 1 person

      • I thing Chuck Tingle is what effectly killed the rappid puppies (plus the rulechances)
        Think about it, after Chucks trolling Vox got more sillent and never got the momentum back.
        Thanks Chuck!!!

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        • “I thing Chuck Tingle is what effectly killed the rappid puppies”

          For the sads, exposing the hypocrisy and contradictions of their statements was a powerful counter (less so for the rabids because they were fact free from the start), and raising awareness of what was going on brought in a lot of opposition to both puppy campaigns that denied them any positive rewards, but in the end it turned out that just relentlessly taking the piss out of them was their kryptonite 🙂

          Liked by 1 person

  4. I was watching them a while back to see how long it took them to notice that Leonard Cohen had died. Six months, eventually.

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  5. Saw this on a talkpage:

    “Either get rid of that Holocaust-denying Dunning–Kruger reject flood-fill spamming the boardroom, or just turn the damned lights off here already, because this barely-functioning-over-comatose-level place has a “done” fork jammed all the way through it and out the other side, and hardly needs the even worse medical diagnosis that it’s soon to become indistinguishable from the hardcore Nazis over at Rightpedia thanks to the aforementioned loonytune. If the Starlords and Grand Poobahs and whatnotwhomever else are all too busy on other projects and real lives to deal with creeping blight problems, make me an admin, and I’ll take care of it.”

    Hmm.

    Liked by 2 people

    • And he will never be heard from again.

      Because, let’s be honest–the damn thing is a corpse, and the maggots are the only thing twitching in it.

      Like

      • Okay, just found out who said that.

        He’s the guy who wrote the “Shadow Party” page. And the “Rape Jihad” page. And a whole lot of other craziness.

        So, pot calling the kettle black.

        Liked by 1 person

    • Another gem:

      ‘Also, what’s up with “Dark Lord Designs” at “crypto.fashion”? I’m atheist and anti-dogmaticist and don’t believe in much – but many folks do and Dark Lord simply conjures up Satanist and Luciferian and child sacrifice stuff which will put off many people. It’s hardly a cool, edgy or even clever name. If that webstore is a part of InfoGalactic I would change it or find one less alienating. I’m not a prude, but potential InfoGalaxians might be.

      (Full disclosure: I like/d wicked breakbeats and my nickname is/was Sunshine so I had WickedSunshine.com from about 2000-2010 where I had my graphic portfolio and 9-11 truther stuff, but I wasn’t near as woke as I am now regarding so much about conspiracies, false flags and hoaxes, Hegelian dialectics, historical revision, the climate scam, NWO, BIS, The Process Church, etc.)’

      Like

      • Okay, I’d never heard of the Process Church so I googled it and now I’m boggled. What’s really freaking me out is how it eventually transformed into a nicey-nicey animal shelter?!?
        I hate to think what the alt-right take on it is.

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      • Most cults will pretty much defuse themselves as members get bored and leave. Which doesn’t stop obsessive paranoids from casting them as “the true servants of the secret masters”, but there you go.

        Like

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