From RationalWiki

Infogalactic is a wiki encyclopedia project created by alt-right staple figure Theodore Beale in 2016[1] that "aspires to be more objective" than the allegedly crooked and bias-ridden Wikipedia,[2] while simultaneously giving power to "corelords", corporate professionals who have purchased the ability to oversee the editing of pages related to their industry.[3]

Founding by Beale [ edit ]

According to Beale, who goes by the online blogging handle of "Vox Day", part of his inspiration for creating the wiki was his biography on Wikipedia: "The page about me there has had everything from my place of birth to the number of times I've been married wrong. And that’s not even counting the outright abuse, such as when Wikipedians replaced the entire page with a definition of a sexually-transmitted disease or with a string of obscenities."[4] (Apparently, the vandals had made light of the fact that "Vox Day" usually signs his posts with the acronym "VD".)

Beale's wiki has minimal structure and mostly consists of unedited pages plagiarized from Wikipedia. Although he claims that "We already have 11 million pages",[5] that number isn't backed up by the site's own statistics page, which reports barely a fifth of that number.[6] Vox Day cites Wikipedia's alleged loss of favor from powerful metaphysical entities for why it will be superseded by Infogalactic:[5]

Wikipedia has lost the Mandate of Heaven. As a result, Infogalactic is going to become a top 100 Internet site en route to becoming The Planetary Knowledge Core. And it is going to do so faster than anyone likely believes possible… That is far from the entirety of our vision, that's all we're willing to discuss publicly for now. Believe me, if you think what we've said so far is outlandish, you haven't seen anything yet… Where I've improved over time is finding more, and more capable, partners to execute and produce, and staying out of their way. And the core Infogalactic team is not merely good, they are scary good.

But why? [ edit ]

Everything about Infogalactic is to grind Day's personal axes.[7] (His working user is "Fenris".[8]) Fortunately, future galactic citizens' instance of the planetary core knowledge base will tell them all the Important Information about SCAAALZIII!!![9]

Reception [ edit ]

Vox Day notes:[10]

One way you can be certain that Infogalactic already threatens the SJW's control of the cultural high ground that is the online knowledge base is the reaction of SJWs to it. I am reliably informed our old acquaintance and master of rhetoric, Cameltoes Freckeltongue, is bent out of shape about the fact that our editors are removing the ideological graffiti that litters many, if not most, Wikipedia entries… I do so love the smell of SJW outrage in the morning… What concerns them is maintaining control of the flow of information and converging it to suit the Narrative as necessary, which is why Wikipedia's 531 thought police patrol the encyclopedia so relentlessly. Infogalactic threatens that control and the SJWs know it. They're already past the Ignore phase and have entered the Mocking phase, which is remarkably fast considering that we only launched it one week ago. We'll know Infogalactic is firmly established when they do a 180 and go from mocking it as "Voxopedia" to denying I had anything to do with its success.

Some Kings Wiki editors have questioned whether their website will become irrelevant now that Infogalactic exists, which is presumably a more "alt-right friendly" alternative to Wikipedia with a much more comprehensive focus than Kings Wiki.[11]

Some Redditors are very on board. TheSlicemanCometh explains, "The wikipedia killer will be a decentralized wikipedia with contributors having reputation. SJWs get horrible rep and get banned and their former contributions auto-deleted."[12]

As of November 2017, the website popularity is in decline from a peak of popularity at rank 52,821 in July 2017 to the current rank of 82,792.[13]

The Brave web browser used Infogalactic as one of its built-in search engines, on the direction of founder Brendan Eich,[14] until it changed software base in December 2018. Like the other built-in search engines, it was unable to be removed.[15] Brave were alerted to what they'd added in February 2018,[16] but were apparently just fine with it until the base software change.

But surely this is a well-planned and thoroughly thought-out endeavor [ edit ]

Vox would probably go pretty well against Larry Sanger of Citizendium in a wiki control-addict face-off. He repeats a lot of the same mistakes:[17]

No, it's not. My designs always work. See: multibutton mice.

Infogalactic is not using tawdry MySQL or MariaDB for the database, just because MediaWiki is relentlessly overoptimised to use it, and it's what all the paid developers at Wikimedia develop against. No, they started on Oracle, the port for which is maintained by half a volunteer! Deliberately making work for yourself with no actual benefit at all is apparently genius systems administration. Infogalactic has since moved to Postgres. (As Citizendium did. The Postgres port is also maintained by half a volunteer, but at least it gets run through MediaWiki core unit testing.)

Infogalactic is directly competing with Wikipedia by first copying the whole thing: "The name isn't the issue. It has to show up first in any search engine. That's what Wikipedia has." Google first instituted the duplicate content penalty in 2005, a while after Wikipedia asked why they were typically on page three or four, behind thirty of their own mirror sites - and they've consistently been first ever since.

But then, Vox is a bit of an expert on wiki communities, you know.

Infogalactic features an innovative approach to dealing with corporate spam: charge companies to become admins on their pages.[18]

Reliable sourcing policy [ edit ]

You'll be delighted to know that Infogalactic has solved Wikipedia's wrangles with sourcing![19]

Reliability is rated from one to nine on the following scale, with one representing least reliable to nine representing maximum reliability. 1. Direct information from an unrelated party not confirmed to be privy to the subject matter. 2. Social science studies. High school or university textbooks. 3. Mainstream media articles. 4. General historical consensus. 5. Wikipedia's "reliable source" standard. 6. Unsupported direct information from a first-hand source. Consensus history published in books and academic papers. 7. Government documentation. 8. Published and replicated scientific evidence. 9. Direct testimonial evidence from a first-hand source, supported by unrelated evidence from other sources.

We're sure there are no immediately obvious edge cases there, as, e.g., the past couple of decades of Wikipedia might have demonstrated. If you were a bright high school student coming up with something off the top of your head, that list would be a good start for classroom discussion about why, in practice, the world is a bit more complicated than that.

References [ edit ]



