This is fake, right? Why would Wikidata touch this with a ten-foot pole?

There is a lot of paid promotion on Wikipedia and highly-motivated vandalism. Just because someone has reserves of ETH, they get to say what a valid edit is? It seems altogether antithetical to the free-knowledge open-source ethic of the WMF.

It is one thing to propose this as an extension for MediaWiki that some rando running a website may use. It's entirely another thing to mock this up as if it's part of Wikidata's own interface.

EDIT: Headline says "Wikipedia" but screenshots are allegedly "Wikidata" which is really different.

Sorry, but this is an absolutely terrible idea.

Signing things is cool. Humans on the internet should sign more things. But why in the world would you want to use the same key that can instantaneously shred the dollars in your bank account to ensure authorship of some edit on a website article? The UX for these two things should be incredibly different; instead you are setting people up to get phished and lose their savings.

I work in crypto, and even I ask, what makes this better than GPG?

Why is this better than just signing it with any private key and sharing the public key? Why do you need to involve a blockchain and I assume transaction fees as well?

This is stupid and doesn't solve any real problems.

OP(xinbenlv@HN): Hi all, OP here. I am new to the HN so please forgive me and educate me for the proper etiquette if I doing anything wrong.

I am super thrilled to see 28 upvotes and 58 comments overnight. thank you for your passionate response, suggestion and critize of what we shared. It took me a while to read every comments you left so please bear with me for delay.

Here are the combined responses for your questions:

https://hackmd.io/@d3servelabs/hn-wiki-eit ---

It's done via a Wikipedia feature called "User script", which works like a Chrome/Firefox Extension. If an user choose to install what you build, it could load additional JS and CSS. Our code is open sourced on https://github.com/wikiloop/signed-stmt,

and the feature is enabled for my own account User:Xinbenlv

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Xinbenlv/SignWithEtheruem...

I'm interested to see an integration of wikis and web-of-trust. This looks to be a step in the right direction.

Considering most Wikipedia editors are under-employed guitarists and retired house painters deciding on the veracity of details about local history events and obscure scientific niches, this doesn't help much.