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Gracenote Founder Rewriting History At Wikipedia
An anonymous reader writes "Gracenote founder Steve Scherf is busy again in his attempts to rewrite history after his recent interview at Wired. This time around he is aggressively deleting or seeking removal of any content on Wikipedia that discusses the controversy behind the commercialization of the formerly GPL'd cddb. Slashdotters may remember when cddb joined the Bad Patent Club back in 2000. Gracenote followed up by filing lawsuits against its customers for trying to switch to freedb and for alleged patent violations. Are there any Slashdotters out there who know the facts about Gracenote — its history, its business practices, its lawsuits? Wikipedia needs your help."
Because many people think that everything on Wikipedia is The Truth (tm)?
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
and ultimaty possible undoing. The problem is that a small group of people with prodigious amounts of time can delete and browbeat editors, in a usually succesful attempt at pushing their and only their point of view on wikipedia. Rather than strive for accuracy and truthfulness, they have no fear of continual edit wars until they brow beat other editors into compliance. As more learn how to "game" Wikipedia, any sort of seemingly controversial subject or topic will be deleted off the pages, as most editors do not have 24/7 time to patrol the pages that apparently some groups have. This prodigious amount of time lets them fly by the 3RR rule with ease. I suspect corporations and politicians have hired such groups to do just that.
I welcome a healthy debate over any topic. But the rules concerning censorship needs to be enforced much more strongly with IP bans being put in place for those that engage in censorship rather than "editing." I just don't see that happenning with the Jimbo Wale's mutual admiration society and structure that Wikipedia seems to promote.
Another article that this happens a lot with is the "Muhammad" article. No muslim will let *any* historical artwork depicting Muhummad on that page as its against their religion. Forget about truthful statements that might cast the prophet in a bad light or go against their religion (like that he founded Islam and married a young girl or his military murders). People need to chime in that this is censorship and nothing more there too.
Posting anon so I'm not trolled on Wikipedia.
Lets give him a legit reason for him to sue us. Yay.
Parody remains one of our few frequently-upheld forms of free speech. The more over-the-top, the less grounds he has to sue.
As for the side effect of damaging a valuable source of information, well, I will admit I have that as my sole reason for not editing quite a few entries on folks like Scherf, McBride, or Thompson. I respect the truth, if not the men.
But when someone like Scherf throws down the gauntlet and takes away the factual content aspect, well, not much point remains in exercising restraint, at least until someone really does fix the entry. So as a placeholder, why not let such asses suffer an entry on llama-buggery for a few weeks?
I don't know whats what, but its probably best to keep this stuff in the wiki. By all means people can contribute to the page but make sure you understand the various ways of wikipedia before turning this into something bigger than it is.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Actual truth however, is occasionally there in between The Truth, Lies, Vandalism, Opinions, Spam, and Articles that would be true if you could understand what the hell language they're written in...(probably Bablefishese)
Wikipedia should really have a disclaimer at the top of every page warning and reminding users that there's a good chance that the page below may contain absolutely no facts whatsoever. That really would solve a lot of issues, and is honest.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Interesting, I've found more truth on Wikipedia than anywhere else, literally. Show me one place which has a smidgen more truth than Wikipedia. Oh wait, those sites don't exist.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
No, really. Those things are buried among the true stuff, not the other way around. If you watch the changes people make during high vandalism periods(for english wiki, that's usually when schools get out during the 4 U.S. time zones). It still has a really high ratio of "good" to "bad" edits.
Of course, that's been reverted. But not the normal wikipedia reversion. It's completely erased from the revision history, 1984 style. You will see something's up if you click on parent's link. And here's the Wikipedia log to prove what happened.
:)
Fortunately the truth is preserved on Slashdot
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Every time I have seen one of these topic and I go look at the page it have been vandalized by someone seeing it here. This time I look at the page and someone had stapled the slashdot entry to the bottom of the gracenote page. It is the same thing with Fark, posting about wikipedia controversies on popular forums like this just makes the problem worse.
I went the i-bless.com route, blessing "grace more notable than gracenote."
All that negativity is too much like a political campaign.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Everything that you write, even a shopping list, automatically has your copyright, ...
Not exactly - only if it is a creative, intellectual or artistic act. If you are just copying the track names off the back of a CD case, it is not any of those things.
Arguably, even a shopping list is not copyright, because it's hardly intellectual or artistic, and its creativity is disputable!
I worked at a company acquired by GE; we were ALL required to take a mandatory all-day *ethics training course*. Mine was held the Friday before the story about Jack Welch's unbelievably lavish and hitherto entirely secret "retirement package" (personal use of a corporate 747, his own apartment in Trump Towers including catered food and flowers, and much else, all of it lifelong and irrevocable except with Mr. Welch's consent) hit the press. You might say I felt somewhat betrayed by this...
Immelt, the CEO of GE, tried to portray this as all being perfectly fine and appropriate, and not at all excessive. Once the public outrage got too hot, the board hurriedly rescinded this platinum handshake and claimed "All fixed now, no ethical issues at all. Nothing to see here, folks, move along."
Let's see, I get punished if I don't fly the very cheapest route on company travel, regardless of the cost to my personal life, and a retired exec gets FREE use of a WHOLE 747 for his PERSONAL use whenever he feels like it? And THAT is considered ethical conduct?
That's MY beef with Mr. Immelt. Any questions?
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Here's one, admittedly it's restricted to encyclopedic knowledge of one topic.
However I do agree that for trully encyclopedic knowledge with a strong referencing regime, WP is light-years ahead of any other free site. As you say: if it's not then where is a link to something better?
I find most "contraversies" about WP's "inaccuracies" are usually about some stupid "he said, she said" egotistical argument that interests only an ultra-minority of its users and has zero impact on WP's usefull qualities.
Either that or the "WP suck's" brigade simply don't like being proven wrong at the push of a button, instead of keeping their mouth shut and learning something they defend their fragile egos by attacking the messenger at every opportunity.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The whole thing would be moot if anybody bothered to implement CD-Text
Were that I say, pancakes?
For amusement's sake, I quote from the Wikipedia entry on Slander and Libel:
"the defendant may claim that the allegedly defamatory statement is not actually capable of being defamatory--an insulting statement that does not actually harm someone's reputation is prima facie not libelous."
* Slander is spoken, libel recorded. You wonder why everyone thinks you're a twit and doesn't take your opinion seriously, oftentimes it's because you don't know what you're talking about-- in this case, that being the difference between libel and slander.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The history of the Gracenote article is a big edit war between two completely different versions of the article which are both being incrementally updated along the way. See some examples.
One version is the original (and current) article starting with the wording "Gracenote is a commercial enterprise". The other version (starting with "Gracenote is a company") is being maintained by a group of users who are presumably related to Gracenote (ie Steve Scherf and Gracenote employees/friends).
I thought the best approach to correcting an article you don't agree with on Wikipedia was to make or suggest small incremental edits. Outright changing virtually the entire content of an article over and over and accusing others of vandalism along the way is kinda petty.
Steve: if you want to write your own article on the history of Gracenote as you see it, put it up on Gracenote's website or your own personal website. I'm sure no one would have a problem with Wikipedia linking to your article so they can include all points of view.
But that is a failure. Rather than looking for the truth, they are looking for something that will satisfy two groups. Well, what if one is wrong but vocal? Do we need to hear untruths mingled in with the truth just to shut them up? If I wanted that, I'd watch Fox news. "Fair and Balanced" is an excuse to give nutjobs equal time.
Learn to love Alaska
The argument is sound, even if the particular example of Fox News is biased to the Slashdot audience. All sources have bias, and the original poster never said that CNN wasn't. I think the statement "It's a good idea, but why limit it to Wikipedia, it should just be built into the browser itself." makes this pretty clear.