The Register Exposes More Wikipedia Abuse

cyofee writes "The Register has up another article exposing abuse of Wikipedia's policies and processes. It tells a tale of a man, Gary Weiss, controlling the Wikipedia article about himself and his enemies (one of Wikipedia's biggest taboos) all under the blessing of the Wikipedia Cabal. A man who attempted to expose the affair on Wikipedia, along with his his entire IP range (some 1000 homes), was permanently blocked. This comes only days after the affair of the Secret Mailing list."

Comments

All or nothing

[overshoot]

I'd hate for Wikipedia to be taken down over some scandal.

So there's no point in wasting cycles on Wikipedia's imperfections, since the only alternative is its total destruction?

That's good to know -- I don't need to write up that material I was going to submit since Wiki is a "love it (as is) or leave it" regime.

Re:All or nothing

[Torodung]

Hey, whoa pardner. I'm not the one with the "all or nothing" attitude. There are plenty of people saying that this "scandal" somehow affects every article on Wikipedia, even the ones on the boiling point of water, and that is mostly because they have an agenda to take it all down.

They don't like the idea of Wikipedia, or they are natural conspiracy theorists who think all power and centralized control is evil, and are willing to take Wiki down in their cause to reform it on an idealistic model of total anarchy, which anyone with a lick of sense knows wouldn't work, as evidenced by the vandalism problems Wikipedia has had.

I don't want to see that agenda served. I think Wikipedia is a good idea, but it was inchoate, as all good ideas are, and they need time and balance to sort out the problems with that idea, without someone screeching "totalitarian" at what is little more than a bunch of snotty intellectuals with little to no PR experience and/or tact.

Though they failed to mention Nazis, I am calling "Godwin" on the whole bit. I agree with you. It needs to be worked with, and praised for what it is, not assaulted.

--
Toro

Re:Meh.

[SatanicPuppy]

They certainly like to think so.

The problem is that their idea of merit is far better described as "prolific". If someone does a lot of decent edits, that makes them prolific. If someone creates a small number of extremely high quality original articles, they have merit. It's the second class that really adds value to WP, and they vastly outnumber the first class. But the second class isn't well represented in the admin group, and the first is.

Without the guys who only write one or two articles, WP would be tiny. But those people have no say. And worse, if they move against the groupthink, then they can be banned.