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The Dangers of Open Content

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the something-to-think-about dept.

gihan_ripper writes "Recently released open movie Elephants Dream found itself in hot water with Catalonians after accidentally using an offensive word instead of 'Català' in the subtitle menu. The cause? Designer Matt Ebb had used Wikipedia to look up the Catalan word for Catalan on a day when the entry had been vandalized. He writes about this experience on the Elephant Dream blog. We may have scoffed at John Seigenthaler over his criticisms of Wikipedia, but it gives us pause for thought when we to heavily on Wikipedia."

2 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. is open content the real problem? by a10_es · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm catalan. And I can say that lately there's been a lot of hatred against our nation pushed by some spanish political parties (Yet I don't to turn this into a political discussion). This problem appeared because of a vandalized entry in wikipedia, but could also have appeared if a person had modified the film or written it wrong from the start, so the problem here is not the reliance on open content, but the reliance on people's goodness, which in the open [content, source, ...] is mostly there, but can be displaced by some feelings, most of them learnt and fueled since childhood. But the same thing's been happening throughout the history. Surely if you looked on recognized encyclopedias some time ago, a lot of entries about slaves would be unaccpetable by today standards. The same happens over conquered soil after a war, when the losers become the vermin that had to be erradicated and the winners the saviors of the people (and usually end up being as bad as those they overthrew). And many other examples could be given. So the problem here is the open content or close-minded people?

  2. Re:De-vandalized by Tim+the+Gecko · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Just for your info, guys: I just visited the article and removed the offensive terms, also leaving a small explanative note about the term itself just in case someone hears it again knows what it is all about.

    You edited a version from April 7th and therefore you overwrote all the edits people have made over the last three months. You also managed to miss about 10 stray "Polacos" scattered through your old starting version of the article. The article was reverted and had no "Polacos" at all, but it now seems to have been reverted to your version again.
    I hope you will have a long and happy relationship with Wikipedia, and get an account there