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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)?
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.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
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.
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."
The whole thing would be moot if anybody bothered to implement CD-Text
Were that I say, pancakes?