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Wikipedia Wars -- Lake Express Ferry
vhfer writes "Wikipedia Warfare has become the latest tool in the battle between rival lake transport systems. The Lake Express Ferry, which links Milwaukee and Michigan, bypasses Chicago traffic. The competing SS Badger runs from Manitowoc, an hour North of Milwaukee, to Ludington, Michigan. The article in the Milwaukee Journal details efforts by SS Badger supporters to highlight some of the delays and problems experienced by the Lake Express, in an apparent effort to divert some traffic to the Badger. Numerous edits to the article added links to news articles critical of the Lake Express, and some derided presidential candidate John Kerry's 2004 ride and the political value of it. The operators of the SS Badger deny responsibility for all the postings, and also say they aren't Internet savvy enough to alter a Wikipedia article."
...without a link to the Lamest Edit Wars in Wikipedia.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This points out the biggest problem with Wikipedia, people are selfish. When questions of NPOV come up the disscusion offten becomes not what the NPOV is but who's oppinion will be included in the article and accepted as truth.
There is a Penny-Arcade comic that sums wikipedia up nicely I can't (due to a proxy) look it up right now...
Disclaimer: I am a huge Wikipedia fan... but I only "trust" non political geek culture (Comics, video games) to be relitivly accurate.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Wikipedia works rather well at the core. Articles about science topics, or most history topics are OK. There are issues with current event topics, but there are plenty of editors working on those. the real problem that no one mentions with Wikipedia is on the fringes. there are 1.3 or so Million english articles. Some of them are poorly translated paragraphs from other languages. Some of them are straight lifts from a Press Release, and some of them are pretty incomplete. This is one such case. While editors can work on NPOV more directly with articles like George W. Bush or Jesus, there are only a handful of editors working on the fringes. I was hitting up the random pages button, and a few days ago, I stumbled across the "Miss Bikini of the Universe" page (no jokes, please). It consists of a few poorly translated paragraphs, a picture that's three years out of date (but attractive nonetheless), and a notice that Ukraine's candidate won the most recent one (which apparently was over the weekend in China somewhere), but no mention of the winner's name, DoB, etc. Now, I tried to do some cleanup - verb tenses, complete sentences, etc., but the page needs an awful lot of work, and frankly, I'm busy, and the orginal writer looks like he ran a few news articles through Babelfish.
What? Nobody (at least, nobody above +2) has posted a link to WikiTruth? Well, let me do so then.
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