The Register Takes Aim at Wikipedia Again

Syberghost writes "The Register has fired off another salvo in their long-running war of words with Wikipedia, in the form of an article about the lack of "moral responsibility" from the operators of Wikipedia. Wikipedia users fired back less than an hour later, making the Register headline obsolete."

Comments

Lawsuit

[MeatSockit]

Just to note, there's allegedly a class-action lawsuit against Wikipedia. But it turns out that the site was created by an organization called QuakeAID, who had previously had complaints about Wikipedia due to information about possible problems as an organization soliciting donations. Today, they posted a whiny press release about the site going live:

Now another story suggesting that Wikipedia is out of control emerges. Some months ago, OfficialWire published an article about untrue postings on Wikipedia, by Christian Wirth also known as RaDMan. Shortly after the devastating earthquake and tsunamis on December 26, 2004 in the Indian Ocean, Wirth took upon himself to wage a war against QuakeAID Foundation, Inc. Wirth's arsenal consisted of untrue, libelous writings that he and Wikipedia published as fact. All attempts, by QuakeAID's founder, to correct the untrue comments were re-edited, blocked or labelled as 'untrue' by a group of volunteers, who hold themselves untouchable and above the law.

QuakeAID has written once again to Jimbo Wales, demanding the untrue and libelous information be removed from Wikipedia, while a group of interested parties have joined together and plan to initiate legal proceedings against Wales and Wikipedia Foundation, Inc., and numerous others--the so-called anonymous 'volunteers'--who they believe should be held responsible for the content they publish.

Re:Two-word response

[MarkusQ]

I'm probably wasting my time, but:

• The "straw man" accusation was targeted at the post above it, not the wikipedia, so the anonymity of the Wikipedia community has no bearing on the point.
• In any case, anonymity has nothing to do with straw man arguments.
• And even if it did, print encyclopedias do not provide their readers with information on the authorship of individual articles
• In fact, Wikipedia actually provides more (and more accessible) information on the revision history and editorial decisions leading to the present state of an article than any print encyclopedia I've ever heard of.
• Wikipedia may not provide a strong or prominent enough disclaimer to suit you, but the obvious question would be: what does? TV news? The New York Times? Can you name a single "authoritative" source of information that either 1) Prominently disclaims their status as authoritative or 2) provides some substantive guarantee of the accuracy of the information?

--MarkusQ