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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."
A good idea corrupted by human execution.
We told them it would happen, but "NO! This time it's different!". Except, it wasn't.
Where's that guy who shills for wikipedia, I'd love to hear his take on this.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
If I was Gary Weiss, my motto would be "Citation needed, bitches", then I'd be all like, "Wikipedia Cabal: block that guy's IP range.", then under my breath I'd be like, "bitches."
It's not the idea. The idea was "everyone contributes, and everyone is equal." If that was still the idea, we wouldn't be hearing all these stories of editorial abuse, because things are now unequal, and that inequality is what's breeding all these problems.
Put a group in charge, and you're going to get abuse. That's just a fact. To get around this, most other organizations add some checks and balances, some oversight, some limitations on power. WP didn't do this, and now they're suffering for it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_corrupts#Lord_Acton.27s_DictumPower Corrupts... There's a joke here, but I'm having too much fun wrecking my employee's user accounts with my admin power.
We have the same issue where I live, more than 1000 homes behind the same firewall. We have been blocked from editing at some point, bit harsh to block out so many IP's, but thats life I guess. Good thing I don't have the need to contribute.
Any project like Wikipedia will be subject to abuse. That's just the way things are. Actually, I'm always surprised the Wikipedia is as reliable as it is, and that so many people are willing to devote their time and effort to make it better.
Seek and ye shall find.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It's notable{{cn}} (heh) that, reading between the lines, Jimbo Wales is actually pretty convinced that those editing the articles concerned in the way described and banned for the fact are acting in bad faith.
and
Not exactly evidence of a cabal acting in secret. More evidence of a group of people behaving trollishly and being banned for doing so.
Indeed, looking at the original sequence of events that supposedly set this off:
it looks like the whole thing was set off because of link-spamming from the supposed "victims" in this case.
The Register doesn't give us enough information to actually tell if this is the case or if there's some other reason. It doesn't report in full what was said by anyone proposing bans on the so-called victims. It portrays the events as arbitrary despite the fact that, actually, these things don't go on in secret. Most telling of all, if Wikipedia's admins were banning people without presenting reasons for doing so, this would be newsworthy which means the fact they're not saying no reasons were given is itself telling.
Very poor from El Reg. There may be a story right there, but anyone familiar with Wikipedia who's capable of reading between the lines is going to give a big "WTF" and assume El Reg is making up controversy where none exists.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
and controversies like it long ago. I created over 600 articles, mostly on Martian and Mercurian craters, and the inner workings of the U.S. executive branch of government. The problem with Wikipedia is that only the power-hungry authoritarians seek to become administrators, while the regular editors are content to just sit there and write rather than formulate policy.
I'm sorry, did what you say have any content? All I got from your comment was, "We said it would fail and now it has, oh the humanity." You could have copy pasted that comment into any thread about anything failing, and it would have had all the same relevance.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wikipedia_and_overstock/print.html
This sort of stuff happens all the time, the only difference here is that somebody's decided to sell the idea to the general public as a devious "Wikipedia elite" rather than a couple of administrators with personal axes to grind. I notice there was no reference to using Wikipedia's own complaint processes to try and resolve the issue - just the usual edit, edit, get blocked, complain about it on your blog pattern.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
News flash! The Register has less credibility than Wiki, if only for this idiotic smear job.
Ah yes, but The Register is little more than a rag e-zine but Wikipedia attempts to pass of this air of authority that it obviously does not have as there are people, at the top, fucking things up.
Yes, but is this relevant to 85% of the body of work? Do we really need to throw the word "totalitarian" around, or "black helicopters?" Jeez.
How the fuck would we know? We don't have someone who devoted a good bit of his free time in a year to attempting to track down the source of this snafu. It could seriously be that a majority of entries are fucked with in this way -- much to the enjoyment of the douchebags that believe they are somehow important because they are in a "ruling clique" -- but we'd never know w/o more people digging around.
That said, this sounds like a bunch of forum trolling, whining and conspiracy theory that I see on almost every single web-forum that has some sort of board running most of the show. Move along, it's not worth getting upset over.
I don't really think that it was a good idea to start with. The main reason being that between outright corruption and the constant state of flux it wasn't ever something that could be properly relied upon.
It is unfortunate, but unlike an encyclopedia, the constant state of change makes it nearly impossible to use for anything beyond casual reference. Even grade school level reports require a more reliable source of information, or at least one which can be guaranteed to be the same when somebody goes to verify the claims.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
So saying that there is a problem at WP is the same as destroying the whole?
The only reason people complain is because they care about it. This is a real concern; I have absolutely no problem believing that there are abuses going on. The editors are human, and, even worse, they have a strong emotional stake in the project. That gives them a lot of motivation to do some "ends justifying the means" crap like banning someone they don't agree with.
The way for WP to solve the whole problem is to address the concerns not to do as you are doing, and pretend like they don't exist, or aren't relevant.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
as mentioned here, http://o-smear.blogspot.com/2007/11/spam-what-spam.html - at least a portion of the "censored" content appeared to be links to Overstock.com products as advertised for sale. Hm, that reminds me.. I want a spam sammich!
-Troll, Flamebait, and Offtopic are NOT equivalent to disagreement.
The defense or truth by presenting all point of views with the origin of each one is both the goal of the Wikipedia and of a vigorous, sane society. "Germ-free" have probably no real future in a living world.
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
Anytime you put a group of humans together, a pecking order will be established and the group will establish and enforce its own set of informal rules, often overriding any formal rules the group may have set forth to guide its actions and behavior.
It doesn't matter if its the local garden club or an open source project - leaders will emerge and their followers will do almost anything to protect the leader's position in the hopes of protecting their own elevated ranking.
What?
Writing to inform isn't that hard either, you should try it sometime.
Slashdot is not the place for subtle subtext and prose. Unless it's trolling or misinterpreted sarcasm. Then, go for it.
The respondent posted his reply because your comment was not a complete maturation of an idea, and was more commentary than discussion-invoking.
I think it's necessary for those who are in decision making positions step out from behind the shadows and start making decisions in a more transparent way as part of some sort of formal Wiki council. It doesn't make sense for such a popular public resource to be controlled behind the scenes without any mechanism available to promote responsibility and accountability of the powers involved. And while I'm on the subject, am I the only one who absolutely detests the name Jimbo?
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Look, stories like this are seriously hurting The Register's credibility, and now Slashdot's as well for reposting this nonsense credulously. I can't believe anyone is even able to say "The Wikipedia Cabal" with a straight face. Wikipedia is fractured into many small groups and cliques just like the rest of human society (trust me, I know, I'm a Wikipedia administrator). All that's going on here is there is some dispute between a certain group of Wikipedians and some other people. I'm not going to say that either side is innocent because neither is. But to paint it as some gigantic conspiracy, with Wikipedia being ruled and dictated by some secret monolithic cabal, is hogwash.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
The problem is the perceived corruption that goes all the way to the top.
This isn't about inaccurate information posted by those uninformed, uneducated, or malicious.
This is about administrators, and the site's creator, supporting (again, *perceived*) fallacies, in an effort to discredit and disgrace someone.
THAT's the problem.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
A good idea corrupted by human execution.
There is this thing called "Grammar" which tells me that the above sentence completely lacks meaning, as it has no subject. I'll assume you're talking about WP.
Let's explore this idea of "human execution." What type of execution are you saying would be better? Not many projects of this sort that aren't executed by humans, at least in our experience, and it turns out that a number of human executed projects (including WP) have turned out pretty well, so human influence is not obviously all-corrupting. Also, it turns out that corruption isn't exactly a slippery slope...Even if you become corrupt, you don't have to stay that way.
So basically you wrote a sentence fragment that paraphrases a fatuous truism. That's fine. The problem is when you then turn around and complain because someone "stole your idea" when they actually write something that's not so non-specific as to be meaningless. That's pretty lame.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Employee of overstock.com spams Wikipedia, uses lots of sockpuppets to avoid being blocked, and uses spyware to infect at least one user. Wikipedia blocks him. The Reg writes an article defending said employee and attacking Wikipedia (which Slashdot promptly reposts).
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah's Traverse Mountain
The imagery of the linked article is a deliberate and polemic assault designed to take Wiki down, and rob it of all credibility. He is trying to make a bunch of milquetoast intellectuals sound like "Dr. Evil." If you didn't read the article, you won't understand why I'm upset with this crap.
The article is not a reasoned complaint, it's a hit job.
--
Toro
When Wikipedia is destroyed,
it won't be from without,
but from within!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Actually, I found his post to be very complementary to yours, embiggening both.
I'd mod you Troll -1, had I mod points today. The credibility of The Register, which has a reputation years long, is not in question with me.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Personal vendettas have little or no impact on, say, Particle Physics.
I've found Wikipedia to be a useful starting point for researching highly technical or historical articles. You'd have to be mad to think of it as a good source for, say, politics, or still-living individuals.
Well said! We've definitely got a RTFA disconnect here.
The summary sounds quite reasonable, then you get to the article and you find out it's based on an infantile rant.
Just have
At the very least, thier servers will get a good workout.
One other idea: make some addition contributions to any article they have regarding Censorship, Freedom of Speech, etc...
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Point is, it is a useful source of information. If you don't have the critical skills to determine where it is not useful, you should ask your Mom for help in using it.
Unless the article is CLEARLY bias, the only way to know if an article is useless is to already know more than the article. How would you know that an article is missing some detail? If you know enough to determine a particular article is not adequate, why are you looking it up on Wikipedia in the first place?
The real problem is - as outlined in this article and others - when you DO know more than Wikipedia, and try to fix it, people can actively prevent you from doing so. Not just random people undoing your edits, but admins banning you, locking articles and deleting your articles. There is ZERO accountability on the part of the admins and other staff. Zero. Ultimately the usefullnes and credability of Wiipedia rests in the hands of anonymous, appointed staffers who don't have to answer to anyone.
Make admins accountable for the content of the articles. Not necessarily the factual/technical accuracy, since it seems unreasonable for an admin to be an expert on every subject they might watch over, but the impartiality of both the tone and accessability of the articles. Most of all, remove their anonimity and provide a proper mechanism for outing the bad apples.
Wikipedia should be the encyclopedia anyone can edit, not just the people whom the admins agree with.
=Smidge=
This is just another part of the slow-motion meltdown of overstock.com, and the 'naked short-selling' financial conspiracy theory. There seem to be a lot of financial conspiracy theories around at the moment, presumably since there is some degree of actual financial chaos in the background, and the things financiers have demonstrably got away with are crazy enough that it's difficult to reject conspiracy theories on the mere grounds of strangeness in appearance.
Disclaimer: yes, I write stuff on wikipedia, my handle is fivemack. Mostly I write about chemistry; it's pretty clear that wikipedia is the most comprehensive and reliable site for chemistry on the Web, since chemistry is advanced stamp-collecting and wikipedia is a superb medium for presenting stamps in multiple series. The science side of wikipedia is a wonderful resource, and doesn't seem too prone to the kind of lunacy that afflicts other parts of the encyclopedia; people have less heated feelings about the melting-point of tellurium or the carcinogenicity of tetramethylhydrazine than they do about whether Mount Ararat is a Turkish or an Armenian mountain.
It's vaguely worth mentioning that I've been blocked from posting on /. in a similar manner a couple of times. My ISP forces traffic through it's transparent proxies, and /. seems quite happy to block an entire proxy. Fortunately it doesn't seem to have happened rec##KR2F@F@$F$ {NO CARRIER}
Oh no... it's the future.
We in the business have a name for that kind of headline. "Joke" As far as the article, calling it a "deliberate and polemic assault designed to take Wiki down, and rob it of all credibility" is some superb hyperbole. The article itself dabbles in hyperbole, but you've pretty much one-upped it. They overdo it in many place (seriously, "totalitarian"?) but most of what is written seems reasonable when you strip away the, *ahem*, creative writing.
The thing that makes these little flukes on Wikipedia a scandal is that instead of admitting theres a problem, the wiki in-group will loudly deny any problems and pose it as an all-or-nothing, you're-with-us-or-against-us situation.
Wikipedia is probably the most successful collaborative effort on the internet, surpassing the Linux kernel in size and complexity. Its editors and authors do a lot of great work, putting data out there and generally being fair and balanced.
But, it's not a church, it's not a publicly run trust, and there's no oversight committee. Jimbo Wales and Co. can do whatever they want.. it's their site. They can ban anyone they like for any reason, even if they publically claim to be even handed, fair, and open, and the worst they may be guilty of is lying. The real reason people are up in arms is that they are surprised about it.
We get lied to every day, by the government, church, our coworkers, neighbors, pretty much everyone. We sort of expect it, though. Very few people buy in to a religion wholesale and stop questioning anything related to it. Unless you're a fanatic and stupid to boot, you realize that some of it is crap. Even though churches claim that morality and truth are the highest law, and they don't lie, cheat, or steal.
People have let themselves believe (perhaps not consciously) that since wikipedia exists today, that we must have reached some kind of golden age of the Internet and mankind, that wikipedia will grow until it contains everything we know, and all will contribute to it, everyone will learn that being fair and true is the only way to live, and we'll all understand each other better.
But wikipedia lies like anyone else. It's not utopia. "Best" is a relative term.
Wikipedia is the biggest collaboration out there. But that doesn't mean it's made from pure angelic light trapped in circuits.... it's made of people, and people can be corrupt, biased, bigoted, jerks.
The main reason I've never contributed to Wikipedia is that I was burned in the past. Anyone remember CDDB? There are other examples. I've seen some recent positive press for Wikipedia in the recent announcement that the code will be GPL.... it's another step in the right direction.
Information wants to be free.
Erik
This Jimmy Wales quote: "We aren't democratic."
That's one for future generations. That quote should haunt him for the rest of his career. It's right up there with all the ones Bill Gates and Ballmer have made, that are repeated here often.
Two words: "true colors".
I was going to add in the usual references to nazis and Ayn Rand and all the rest -- but honestly, Jimmy's quote says it all, and says it clearer. It's all you ever needed to know about Wikipedia.
The register's reputation isn't in question, we have the answer and it's worth much less than Wikipedia.
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
A permanent link to a particular revision of every article, that's guaranteed not to change, is available for every revision of every article, view the page you're interested in and click the "Permanent link" link at the bottom of the sidebar. Seems to me that it is quite possible to overcome the "material has changed when verified" problem by simply citing that link instead. That of course doesn't change the fact that no encyclopedia should be cited in serious academic work.
Sounds to me like the central problem is that after banning an abusive user with a genuine beef they then failed to take reasonable action on the genuine beef. As a result, two or three articles have become hopelessly corrupted and instead of freezing them in that state they should be declared hopelessly corrupted and removed.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Any still-living individual, or just one that happens to be in the media at the moment?
A p2p app designed to bypass Wikipedia IP bans would destroy wikipedia a lot quicker from the outside and completely trash their method of tracking.
Simply, you run an app and whenever you go to wikipedia it routes through someone elses computer. I'll call it 'wikiproxia'.
Yes, but is this relevant to 85% of the body of work? Do we really need to throw the word "totalitarian" around, or "black helicopters?" Jeez.
Relax, chief. It's The Register's odd British humor. Go look at any of their articles about robots- they usually insert jokes about robots being one step closer to world domination/human enslavement.
Nevermind that this is the paper that runs the Bastard Operator From Hell series. I can't believe you got modded up to 5 for not realizing a joke on a famously snarky-humor-laden technology news sites.
Also, your comments were a lovely bit of straw man crap: nobody is seriously suggesting (or is it really even possible to) "take down" Wikipedia.
The Register has less credibility than Wiki, if only for this idiotic smear job.
Says you, chief. I think they're one of the best sources for technology news around and I love their (obvious to any idiot) twist. CNET and others happily parrot press release after press release; only the good 'ol Reg actually views 'em with an eye of skepticism.
Please help metamoderate.
If you haven't seen biographies in Encyclopedia Britannica, then you haven't been reading Encyclopedia Britannica.
Your suggestion is not a very good one. How would you describe a US Civil War battle without bringing any of the commanders into it? How could you have a discussion about anything in history without getting into the personalities behind the event. Even the light bulb article would be vapid without mentioning the inventors.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Good observation!
The number of edit on wikipedia is going down. one reason can be that on the most popular topics everything has been written. But i think the real trouble is that wiki/fanbboys-regulars are busy applying their rule this is spam, and this is vandalism, original research, and in the end they forget the `bold edit` guideline. As a result new editors will be scared of, and the current editors will tell to themselves they are doing a fine job. new editors and old editors both are right in their POV.
if you dont like wikipidia no more. GO and Multiply the nonsense or publish a book or a blog, and buy a real encyclopedia.
I've been accused of being part of the 'cabal' because I'm an administrator who pissed off a bunch of people last year, and have on-again off-again been hounded by characters who keep baying conspiracy and trying to get folks worked into a lather.
Until now, I assumed that people would be able to properly set the bozo bit on these guys, but now that they've gotten The Register convinced, it's time for the big secret to come out:
We (the Wikipedia admins) aren't competent enough to form a conspiracy. Seriously. We all have our own agendas, our own skillsets, varying levels of intelligence, and wildly different ideas on how the project should run. Accusing us of having the ability to form a global star-chamber of sorts that seeks to control the nature of truth is like accusing us of keeping the metric system down or making Steve Gutenberg a star.
We're just editors with some extra tools, and we fight like rabid cats.
But thanks for the compliment.
Frankly I don't trust either. I look at anything I read on-line with heavy-handed skepticism, because I've been burned a time or two. Also, haven't the editors of The Register been feuding with Jimmy Wales for years now? You have to take what both sides say with a large grain of salt. I give the edge to The Register simply because independent groups have uncovered the abuses going on with Wikipedia.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Wow, that is some serious defensiveness. Wikipedia is above criticism, huh? Guess what, mature individuals and organizations welcome criticism. The inner circle of wikipedia are paranoid loons in an echo chamber, all reinforcing each others paranoid delusions. I find wikipedia useful in spite of the horrid things they do, not because of them. This isn't about the useful things the majority of wikipedians do, this is about the craziness perpetrated by the cabal that is destroying the useful things the majority do.
The cabal are the ones being childish. No one is attacking wikipedia here, we are attacking the nutters who are ruining it. Running the cabal out on a rail will only make wikipedia better, so why are you fighting it?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Hey, just as a friendly reminder, you forgot to complain about the moderators.
I did it for Johnny.
Oh..... I think I know where user SIIHP went. Seems he made a new handle. Let's see - we have here accusations of lying, temper tantrums, insults and multiple variations of "I never said that". Sounds right on the money. Awesome. I have my internet entertainment back.
I'm wondering how long it'll take you to post at -1 again?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Please add new definition of "sockpuppets" at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppets
I'm sure some people would love to have an "official" definition.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
as opposed to traditional media, blogs, and rags like The Register, where 100% of the content are controlled by a "cabal" of self-appointed guardians-of-the-truth.
Thanks, but I take Wikipedia over The Register any day.
An example -- and I don't think this will be off topic when you see where I am going with it: for years a set of researchers in Australia insisted that most peptic and duodenal ulcers were caused by a bacteria called helicobacter pylori. Problem was, the treatment for the bacteria was a simple and very cheap course of antibiotics and pink bismuth (brand name is usually Pepto Bismol) for about two weeks -- which negated the value of some very expensive American-developed medicines who basically trashed the research in the medical community for years. The end of the story is that the researchers, Warren and Marshall were correct, and 80% of all ulcers ARE caused by that bacteria. In fact these two were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on H. pylori.
So what would happen if Wikipedia were available back then and the powers that be basically chose the wrong side and banned Warren and Marshall from editing articles on stomach ulcers, because another group had a vested interest in keeping the status quo? Which is where the real ruckus lies and why I am now backing Citizendium instead of Wikipedia.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Saying that the Register has no objectivity when Wiki is concerned is no troll.
On most subjects, yeah, the Reg is a good resource, but every single article mentioning Wikipedia becomes a hatchet job. In some cases like this one, The Reg may actually have a point, but 95% of the time the best thing to do is ignore any article from the Register that contains the word wikipedia as it will be filled with negative opinions & mockery but no facts. I find their systematic opposition of anything wiki to be one of the Reg's worst faults.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
The Register before: Wikipedia is full of half-truths, lies, propaganda, and poorly written amateur drivel! Strict editorial control is the only way to arrive at The Truth!
The Wiki cabal lets loose the banhammer on people who create multiple accounts to spread half-truths, lies, propaganda, and poorly written amateur drivel.
The Register now: Wikipedia is a totalitarian regime led by a secretive cabal who wants nothing more than to silence The Truth!
* http://www.wikipediareview.com WR is a forum that is populated by a mix of Wikipedia administrators posting openly, regular users, and a few "banned" users. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia 'elite' routinely badmouth the holy hell out of the WR forums because of the fact that "banned" users are allowed. Also, the Wikipedia "BADSITES" final solution (which is still active--disregard that rejected notice, its just been implemented anyway), was a direct revenge response against Wikipedia Review and similar sites that the Wikipedia leaders have no ability to silence or control in any way.
* http://www.wikitruth.info Wikitruth is a private Wiki, which is ran by a variety of actual Wikipedia administrators, who post deleted content from Wikipedia and other insider information. Wikipedia HATES Wikitruth, almost as much as they hate Wikipedia Review, but are both helpless and powerless against them. Why? Because anything posted to Wikipedia is posted under the GFDL, and you can't de-GFDL Wikipedia content. Wikipedia just "chooses" not to display deleted content as an editorial decision. Oops.
Go to Wikipedia Review for frank and uncensored discussion about Wikipedia. Yes, some lunatics and social and/or mental defectives live there; the same as on the Slashdot comments. But a frightening number of smart and eloquent people post there. Those are the ones that Wikipedia is truly frightened of, because they can't be controlled or stopped. Go to Wikitruth for the best insider dirt.
I'm sure someone will mod me down as flame bait, or trolling, or someone who edits Wikipedia will be along to troll me. However, isn't it funny how whenever this sort of thing happens, you *cannot* get a straight answer out of the Wikipedia "executives"? It's always spin control, and damage control, sadly. Irresponsible.
Dude, where's my packet?
Cabal? Really? Are you sure you don't just need to turn off the machine and get outside for a while?
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Actually, as I understand it, there is accountability, but it is not based in hierarchy nor in authority. This bugs some people. Others just shrug and use it.
;^)
It is community based. If you try to say "I am the authority on this" without engaging the community, you are going to run into trouble.
It's an experiment, to be sure, and it may yet fall on it's face. I just don't want to see it deliberately knocked over.
I'm not going to get into critical reading, but I'll drop a hint. If you are unsure of the authenticity of a source, you need to back it up with additional source material. If the stakes are high, or your integrity is at stake, you need to get primary source material. Wikipedia is no substitute for this kind of academic rigor.
There is no magic bullet for actual research. Treating Wiki, or any other secondary source as such, is something you should have been warned against in high school, and beaten mercilessly for in undergrad. I still have the cane marks, myself.
--
Toro
Ding! Yup. Both require liberal amounts of salt to digest properly.
Actually, no.
I think the biggest benefit of an oligarch/monarch is that they have the capacity for intelligent long range planning, of the sort that everyone goddamn HATES, but which really does good things for the world.
As an example, I think we should have a higher tax on gasoline to drive down consumption, and increase public transportation and help fund alternative fuel research. Is this possible in our democracy? Not really. Everybody votes against anyone who would even suggest it. During World War II, there was mandatory recycling in a number of cities, and that has benefits, but people hated it, and it got repealed as soon as the war ended.
An absolute ruler has the ability to switch policy overnight. Democracies are unwieldy and take years to come to a new policy, and often they contain so many exceptions that they're practically useless.
If you could insure the whole "philosopher king" thing, make sure you have a person as absolute ruler who is both capable and worthy of it, then that would be by far the best system. Since you can't, we go with democracy, not because it's in any way better, but because it limits the possible harm that can come out of government toward the people. However democracy can't save the people from their own shortsightedness, and it's just damn inefficient.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The answer is always obvious if your completely ignorant of the question.
"i dont remember seeing biogs in Encyclopedia Britannica..."
Um, yeah. There's like, a couple at least.
Learning by:
- Observation
- Doing
Resulting in perceived (or even real) personal profit.It would be a sensation if things were different.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
On a side note, we need the same level of transparency into our Governments that we're currently seeing in Wikipedia. There were shenanigans going on, but those shenanigans were exposed for anyone who bothered to look for them. Opensecrets.org is a good start, but it doesn't really offer the same level of governmental shenanigans-catching.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Is there any way around the 'power-hungry weenie' problem? I think some explicit policy on blocking could help. If any IP address is blocked from Wikipedia, there must be a link to an archived copy of the Wikipedia vandalism that was responsible for the blocking, and this evidence should be verifiable by anyone.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It doesn't work. How long does it take a state's medical boards to remove a butchering quack from the ranks of medical professionals? Seriously. When you add anonymity to the mix, you're counting on a huge group of people all acting in an ethical manner. It just won't happen. And the administrators aren't any better - it's an anonymous group with "power" (albeit in a rather meaningless realm - if Google didn't give such high page rankings to Wikipedia entries, it wouldn't matter half as much as it does), and they're going to use it. That's what happens. In the absence of strong ethical standards, and a group who feels that the way to avoid criticism and attack is to behave in a manner utterly beyond reproach, it's far to easy for critics to think it's the product of infinite monkeys or a bunch of crazy, obsessive nutjobs who drive out qualified contributors. Wikipedia would be better off getting rid of the "flat" structure officially and putting something in place, than pretending it's flat and have groups forming up behind the scenes to impose it themselves.
You're in the business and you don't understand how modern PR works?
I agree, there's some useful information in there, but it is tinged with so much connotation of conspiracy and sinister control that it can have a rather marked affect on how the reader will interpret the seemingly reasonable material. It could even make them accept it without question if the job is done well enough.
This is how you get anyone to accept a poor, evil interpretation of reasonable events. You hit them with emotional words ("creative" writing), and then you "back them up" with facts that aren't sinister at all, if you gave any context.
The net result is a hit job. People are being encouraged to see mildly concerning information, to be sure, as part of a "cabal" of wicked "totalitarians" bent on.... well, God knows what. The author doesn't really get into why such sinister agents would be on the move in... Wikipedia.
Really, it goes a bit beyond a "joke." That's a very lame excuse for some rather provocative PR work aimed at coloring opinions on Wikipedia.
The only reason I used hyperbole was because it's rather hard to condense the above into something someone is willing to read. That article is poorly written, and it seeks to assault Wiki, as many of the other articles at the Register do.
I'm quite sick of it.
--
Toro
"Pay no attention to the people behind the curtain."
Where possible, of course Wikipedia is manipulated for the benefit and glory of those that own or run it (and/or their friends) - DUH. There's money to be made, agendas to set, axes to grind, opinions to influence, minds to manipulate. Then, of course, there are the evil uses :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Flamebait my wiki ass. Who modded it that way, Jimbo and the wiki elite?
Moderators on crack, no. Moderators from wiki, wouldn't be surprised. All you other non-wiki moderators need to jump in and correct this.
Infuriate left and right
Then there was a calm period where there was just the normal everyday minor background corruption/totalitarian stories about Wikipedia.
And then... now that they are back fundraising (love the little guy doing the nazi salute on the fundraising icon - woah! really uber-dumb icon for a site often accused of info-fascism) here come the stories about Wikipedia again.
Coincidence? Or is there marketing/PR people getting these stories out there to ensure high profile and more money?
I think the corruption claims are justified, and it is important they are investigated -- openly. Jimmy Wales' history seems to be a lot shadier than his Wikipedia biography would have you believe.
Not exactly, no. That's true. However, it has delusions of grandeur as to being an authoritative source (one thing it must NEVER be while even the possibility of cabals exist (which is always going to be the case)).
As a source of zeitgeist and trivia wikipedia is fine -- a source of important information it isn't.
I don't see it as a critical failing of an encyclopaedia that its governance structures are such as to bias its pool of contributors towards the stoic.
This kind of stuff really hurts the reputation of Wikipedia. I use it every day for work and personal interests, but this type of internal corruption is why I'll never donate money to the Wikipedia foundation and why I don't think Wikipedia will grow much more than it already has.
Nunya and Satan: Would you two please knock it off? You're scaring the children...
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
Look at how they operate. Parker Peters did a fantastic job writing it up: http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com/
If you look at every one of these cases, who keeps popping up? It's the same group of editors - David Gerard, JayJG, JzG, SlimVirgin, etc... all with the blessing of Der Fuehrer Jimbo.
If Der Fuehrer Jimbo did bother to pop up on Slashdot as a few posters have wished he would, what would he say? It'd doubtlessly be the same thing he says on Wikipedia as he goes around threatening to ban anyone who exposes the abuses of his buddy clique as a so-called "troll."
Ugh. Now that I've read the Wikipedia article on "naked short selling", I'm probably going to have to edit it. It doesn't mention some of the real problems. "Naked short selling" creates fake stock, which is then purchased and owned by someone. And they can vote that stock. This can lead to more votes than there are shares outstanding.
The fake stock created by naked short selling is supposed to be replaced by buying real stock within 13 days. But that's not always happening. "Overstock.com" has had such fake stock outstanding for years, more fake stock than they actually have outstanding.
Here's a New York Times article that discusses the issue. Forbes has also written about this.
The top stocks with fake stock outstanding for long periods are:
While I agree that the response was excessive (banning 1K IPs to block one user's actions), I have a hard time feeling sympathy for someone who thought it would be a good idea to send spyware to the person to whom he was appealing. That doesn't seem like a good strategy.
In addition to accountability, WikiPedia also lacks a historical perspective on the items it tries to document. Anything occurring in the recent past is always given far more "column inches" than more significant things that happen in the past. Even worse, things experienced by the writer of the WikiPedia article are given much, much more precedence than those things not experienced by the writer. That is what happens when you have amateur writers and editors: pop culture and pop knowledge win, historical perspective loses.
If you take a look at Wikipedia article on Garry Weiss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Weiss it reads like a positive list of achievements and that it reads much like an advertisement. There is even a template designed to be placed in an article if this happens normally to alert people of such blatant bias and the need for a rewrite. The article does not discuss any of the controversy. You will see that it has now been locked (not even semi protected). As someone who has regularly edited Wikipedia the blocking a page while leaving it in so biased a state is quite unusual. It so blatantly breaks Wikipedia's own rules that it's quite amusing.
However as nsayer and Minwee allude to, the people involved are powerful and the rules are always different for the powerful. Clearly Jimbo Wales and other senior administrators should not be editing articles (and worse still be the sole editors) about controversies in which they are involved. Some might think they are a little biased. Indeed any references to the recent controversy in the article above that were there before have been deleted by a senior admin.
I would suggest that a separate group of Wikipedian's who are not admins be created to oversee disputes such as this one. In fact the senior admins involved in the dispute should be temporarily barred from editing the relevant articles until things have calmed down a bit.
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
The Register has had a hate on for Wikipedia for quite some time. Don't ask me why, I have no idea. But when is Slashdot going to stop taking its pieces about Wikipedia at face value?
Grr! Arg!
"Human execution corrupted a good idea."
There is a subject, etc.: he just wrote it in the passive voice. When you remove the passive voice it's easier to tell. So, no, it's not just a sentence fragment. It is grammatically correct, just poor style.
I'd recommend Strunk & White's Elements of Style to both of you.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Just added a simple reference on Wikipedia about the Register article as an anonymous user. As an outside observer with no axe to grind I wondered how long it would be beofre it was modified. It took 11 minutes. Once the reference was removed the article was "protected" from modification until next year.
Was removed by an IP 209.200.52.180 that is somewhere in NYC. The same IP has made dozens of edits just like the article states. Looks like foul play to me when you simply remove a factual reference because it brings light to bad behavior.
Overstock.com page on Wikipedia (my edits from 68.34.73.97): http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overstock.com&action=history
All edits from 209.200.52.180: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/209.200.52.180
The anonymous edits from that IP are numerous. In my book if you do that much editing you should have an account. I maybe touch one or two articles a year (maybe) so just add anonymously. I do not remove or correct information anonymously, as that is ass-hattery (in fairness, I have corrected some bad spelling and/or small grammar slips).
Looks to me from all the recent press that Wikipedia is just like the rest of the world: full of partisanship, feuds and corruption.
Won't get my donations.
As far as I can tell the problem with the Wiki ban was that it was done out of sight of the rest of us and with little evidence that it was nessesary. Overstock is hardly my favorite company but the issue raised about naked short selling is legitimate. Pulling this sort of crap is a real good wayfor Wikipedia to become irrelevant in no time.
bob@Osprey:~>
Double-check The Register's credibility by looking it up on Wikipedia.
I'm sure there's a logical fallacy somewhere...
Well as the Traverse Mountain neighborhood is just across the highway from an active National Guard training camp there are actually black helicopters flying around quite often. Almost daily in fact.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
The cabal do not make wikipedia useful. It is the horde of small contributors that the cabal continuously screws over that actually do the work that makes it useful. If the inner circle of wikipedia were to fall off the face of the planet tomorrow, the site would be better for it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
For years, if not since inception, Wikipedia's only purpose has been to give power hungry trolls an endless stream of victims, and a platform for pushing their own agendas. There's been too many scandals and too many blatant abuses of power for anyone but the most enabling of supplicants to still take Wikipedia seriously.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
First of all, is *anybody* talking about taking down Wikipedia?
Secondly, and the thing that bothers me the most about all of this, is that there's a simple technical fix to the majority of Wikipedia's problems. "Deleted" articles should remain viewable by the general public, not just administrators. Even if that didn't solve the problem, it would at least let people look at the articles and see whether they should actually be deleted or not.
Thirdly, Wikipedia's motto is "anyone can edit." If they don't let people with 'sockpuppets' (I hate that term) edit, then they need to change the motto. Pointing out hypocrisy in this is perfectly well and fine; it's the same as Comcast advertising unlimited usage, then canceling accounts when they use 5 GB a month. If banning exists on Wikipedia, then not anyone can edit it.
Comment of the year
I used a poor turn of phrase, sorry. I'm not in the business of writing.
I agree, there's some useful information in there, but it is tinged with so much connotation of conspiracy and sinister control that it can have a rather marked affect on how the reader will interpret the seemingly reasonable material. It could even make them accept it without question if the job is done well enough.Yep, I mentioned that I thought that they were hyperbolic, and I agree with your point. To call the admins "totalitarian" is excessive.
This is how you get anyone to accept a poor, evil interpretation of reasonable events. You hit them with emotional words ("creative" writing), and then you "back them up" with facts that aren't sinister at all, if you gave any context.I agree.
Really, it goes a bit beyond a "joke." That's a very lame excuse for some rather provocative PR work aimed at coloring opinions on Wikipedia.From my limited reading of the site in question, I had the impression that this kind of stuff is normal for them. I guess my point of view was more that they were trying to be witty and not malicious. But, see my previous post and above comments. I do agree that the article is too hyperbolic to be informative. There may be legitimate complaints, but they're tainted by the way they're stated, which leads me to...
The only reason I used hyperbole was because it's rather hard to condense the above into something someone is willing to read. That article is poorly written, and it seeks to assault Wiki, as many of the other articles at the Register do.See, thats the thing, you did kind-of the same thing as the article.
And to be honest, I really like Wikipedia, but every time there's a controversy, instead of saying "Well yeah, we'll have to fix that. Nothing is perfect," Wikians come out of the woodwork to scream, "How dare you sir! There's absolutely nothing wrong with Wikipedia, and if you insist there is then you just want to bury the project!" At least thats how it seems to me. Anthropomorphizing the situation, you go from a likable guy who you can give you really great, if maybe a bit flawed, information, to a perfectionist prick who starts screaming at you at the first hint of criticism.
Framing the argument to say that agreeing with what the article is saying amounts to killing off Wikipedia smacks of the latter person. Based on what you've written, thats not at all what you were trying to say. But I also apply that logic to the article at hand.
I'm quite sick of it.You and me both. I guess thats what I was trying to point out, but I stated my point poorly. Communication is a bitch.
>>If you look at every one of these cases, who keeps popping up? It's the same group of editors - David Gerard, JayJG, JzG, SlimVirgin, etc... all with the blessing of Der Fuehrer Jimbo.
I don't know the other guys, but I really detest JayJG. He would do "drive-by reversions" on completely uncontroversial edits, like adding ISBN numbers to book entries, or modifying a summary to better reflect the article below, usually saying they were "unsupported edits".
Looking at his history list at the time, he was doing between one to three reversions a minute, so there's no fucking way he actually read the article in question to see that the summary changes were, in fact, reflective of the article below (which also had the references in question). Changing it to have the reference in the summary, he'd revert it saying that there was now too much link cruft in the summary.
Either he was pushing his own personal agenda (which, looking at his history of 'edits', I'm strongly inclined to believe), or he was just trying to boost his "edit count" in some sort of retarded metric that a lot of wikipedians share, that rank people by the numbers of edits they make, which is perfectly retarded. I saw a admin ignore one guy's post in a edit war thread because he "only had 80 edits".
I actually prefer to make edits anonymously, since I'd rather have the edits judged solely on their merits, and not traced to me as well, in case a potential employer googles me, but the wikipedian admins (ignoring the don't bite the newbs policy) tend to treat all anonymous edits as vitriolic spam, regardless of quality. You know what? Just turn off anonymous editing on all of wikipedia if you're going to reject the addition of something as noncontroversial as adding ISBN numbers to a page, ok? Right now, they're just pretending to allow anonymous edits.
Try the following experiment: make 10 anonymous edits to a {{controverisal}} page, then make 10 while logged in, and see if their isn't a bias there.
The only really positive thing is that it seems JayJG has retired (an extended so-called "wikibreak", which is a perfectly retarded term as well, IMO).
He was probably referring to living persons (ie the myspace reference).
I do agree, biographical entries should be about the entire lives of peoples. That is only possible until someone is dead.
Its an El Reg meme. You know, in soviet russia the overlords welcome memes.
Point is, it is a useful source of information. If you don't have the critical skills to determine where it is not useful, you should ask your Mom for help in using it.
That kinda misses the point, doesnt it?
If i already have all the knowledge on the topic that interrests me, whats the point of looking it up?
Let's not fan the flames, and that is what the linked article is: a flame. Don't do this to the staff of Wikipedia just because you may think they are "a bit snotty."
I dont consider the linked article a flame.
Of course, if you have been "in bed" with the
I dont want to discredit wikipedia, i do consider it usefull. But the stength of wikipedia, giving everyone the power to edit articles, is also its greatest weakness.
Wikipedia isnt a box ring, but if thats whats happening (two people undoing each others changes to the same article) thats a serious problem. Wikipedia will have to solve that problem. And banning one adversary wont solve the problem, they will only loose neutrality and be considered biased. I do think you realise the problem with people being allowed to edit their own (and adverseries) biographies on a project that would like to be an encyclopedia and like to be considered neutral.
Even permanently linking potentially flawed information is a rather bad source. The problem (which is increasingly evident) is that there is no real accountability on Wikipedia. Yes I can find out that SexyJohn69 wrote this current article, but really that means nothing, whereas in a real book, or article, I can evaluate the credibility of the author based on his credentials. Sure, SexyJohn69 can claim any credential he has (or wants, or decided he should have) on his personal page, but that is about as useful as the text he wrote.
More news like this makes me kind of depressed, I had some actual hope for the Wikipedia project, but as time goes on it just keeps proving how fatally flawed the idea is. I first got a whiff of this while doing a quicky search of Ayn Rand, and quickly got sucked into the 300 pages of argument, and flames by "pro Rand", and "anti Rand" Wikipedians. 300 pages of name calling hardly surrounds anything written there with an aura of respectability or veracity. You pro/anti stances shouldn't matter to an overview of written content, sure you can disagree or agree, but the text remains the same.
Part of the problem, I think, is the idea of "nonbiased". NO ONE, in their own mind, is biased. Everyone, in their own minds is completely objective and correct, and thus everyone dissenting is biased. And when you develop an editorial system like Wikipedia, which seems purposely adjusted to group-think and editorial territoriality you end up with a biased, politically influence pile of steaming fallaciousness.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
This is the first "there is no cabal" argument I've seen that I haven't had the strange compulsion to mod "funny."
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I have to take issue with your claim that the majority of changes are vandalism; assuming you are using the same definition of "vandalism" as Wikipedia does -- any intentionally unconstructive revision -- approximately 5% of changes are vandalism.
This is really all about Patrick Byrne and wheither his opinions about Naked short selling are correct or not. It's almost impossible to judge, becuase there are no unbiased opinions on the web.
Even if you don't agree what he says is quite interesting:
http://www.deepcapturethemovie.com/
Ha! And the article of the day on the wikimedia fundraising blog is 'Can you trust wikipedia'? http://whygive.wikimedia.org/2007/12/07/can-you-trust-wikipedia/ Pfft.
"It is a good divine that follows his own instructions" - Portia, The Merchant of Venice
It's a bit unfair to say that that is its only purpose. For a start, you omitted its purpose as a convenient tool to separate students who research things properly from those who look at the first thing they find on the Internet. Then there's its use as a way of going to look something up and then wasting several hours reading entirely unrelated articles. Finally despite what you -- and various other people who evidently only look at administrative pages and not the actual articles -- say, there is plenty of stable, useful material there.
So do think it was appropriate for me to create the OMFG wikipedia article?
You go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. It's your choice.
Dan
Track your TV Shows with your iPhone - FREE
So a wiki admin is accountable to the wiki community in much the same way that a monarch is accountable to his public? That's not really accountable at all.
What's the likelihood of getting an admin thrown out for power abuse (and general douchebaggery) if that admin is popular among the other staff? I've never even heard of second-hand accounts of this happening. What's the likelihood of throwing out an unpopular admin regardless of actual performance? I'd suspect it's so likely it might even be spontaneous. That's the crux of the problem. At least with corrupt politicians they have to go through the trouble of rigging an election to keep their jobs.
-----
I had a pretty lengthy debate about the relative merits and "truthiness" of Wikipedia. I think most reasonable people would not take it as an authority on anything. However, even though wikipedia explicitly states no claims to validity, there is no doubt that people visit it with at least SOME expectation that the information they get will be valid. It is touted as an encyclopedia - an all encompassing, typically factual collection of knowledge. They sell the fact that anyone can edit it to correct mistakes and that many eyes and many opinions help to eliminate bias. People expect articles to be written by or at least corrected by those who know what thet're talking about. Whenever someoen defends WP these are exactly the drums they beat.
You never see anything about Wikipedia being inaccurate unless you click the very small link at the bottom of the page that says "Disclaimers." Nobody would use an encyclopedia if they weren't at least somewhat sure the information they find in it is correct. Even if it is common sense that anyone could write anything, and therefore you can't trust it. A lot of effort goes into maintaining a public image of authority while downplaying the ugly truth of the matter.
That said, though, I use wikipedia several times a day and usually (but not always) employ that information without any further research, usually because the purpose of that information is of little consequence. I don't think I'm unique in that matter, but that only reinforces the image of an authoritative source.
=Smidge=
Hey, I found one here.
Grow up. Please.
... on Wikipedia because there will always be people who will argue that Abraham Lincoln was was worse than Hitler, that all Christians must be killed, that the Earth is flat, and other crackpot ideas. Not worth arguing about.
But you are known by the company you keep, and if enough shite posted by idoits piles up on Wikipedia, then I'm also going to stop finding it useful for things like how many bytes are in an Ethernet header, and just go somewhere else.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
As an example, I think we should have a higher tax on gasoline to drive down consumption
and therefore directly injure people who have to rely on it for their livelihoods beyond simply traveling to and from work - farmers, truckers, deliverymen, and so forth - who are probably making fucking close to minimum wage anyways.
Is this possible in our democracy? Not really. Everybody votes against anyone who would even suggest it.
And for good reason!
During World War II, there was mandatory recycling in a number of cities, and that has benefits, but people hated it, and it got repealed as soon as the war ended.
I've lived in a mandatory-recycling city, because Milwaukee and its surrounding suburbs all have that. You know what's funny about it? That's the only way to get it to happen. Where I live now, I'd love to recycle my glass and a lot of my paper, but I can't because without the government program it's not fucking profitable and there's no place around willing to take anything but scrap metal for recycling.
An absolute ruler has the ability to switch policy overnight.
And royally fuck up when they do, too.
If you could insure the whole "philosopher king" thing, make sure you have a person as absolute ruler who is both capable and worthy of it, then that would be by far the best system. Since you can't, we go with democracy, not because it's in any way better, but because it limits the possible harm that can come out of government toward the people. However democracy can't save the people from their own shortsightedness, and it's just damn inefficient.
"Democracy is the worst form of government... except for all the others." And we don't really have a democracy (you want that you need to go to a religious commune, or else Switzerland is the closest existing); we have a representative republic.
And even the representative republic royally fucks up when you have shitwads like Shrub who are more interested in the $$$ they're going to get from the drug gangs for keeping the border open and starting wars to keep the public's attention off of it.
a) Someone must have come up with this theory, who? I dont know.
b) Why are they advertising for candy on a particle physics page?
I exaggerated slightly for effect, and what you have said above does have merit.
"Finally despite what you -- and various other people who evidently only look at administrative pages and not the actual articles -- say, there is plenty of stable, useful material there."
This is wholly inaccurate. I don't find squabbling, backstabbing, and quashing of any and all dissent to be very readable. I'm a frequent reader of the articles, and I frequently find glaring errors and inaccuracies in them. Don't ask me to fix them; I'm done with revert wars and POV pushing. And no, offering a multitude of authoritative sources doesn't help. There is only one pravda on Wikipedia, that of the Cabal, or rather that of interconnected and inter-supporting power cliques.
I don't get why every time a person that's likely been on Wikipedia longer than most people, they get tagged as clueless noobs.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
It's the same basic reason that communism ultimately fails. It assumes that the basic nature of people are good. The problem is, power corrupts. Period. Even with checks and balances, it's a huge problem - much less when there are no checks and balances as with the wiki crap. I was never of a fan of it from the get-go - I find the basic idea of anyone can edit to be patently absurd when it comes to accuracy. It's certainly an interesting place to visit, but it has a false sense of being 'right' when there's really no reason to assume it IS correct. Just when you get your mom to understand that just becuase it's on a web page, it doesn't make it reality, along comes wiki-crap that likes to tout itself as being factual when it truth, it sorta depends on when you read it. You never know if some moron put up something stupid and no one has caught it yet. Anyway, a bit off track. I can't remember who said it, but basically no one that WANTS to be president should be president. That statement says so much in so few words about human nature. Wiki will evenutally self destruct.
--
Toro
Actually, Slashdot banned 99.9% of the IP range from contributing to the front page, and left the rest of us with no ability other than entering into endless discussions on the talk page, none of which ever appear in Google's top ten search results for common search terms.
Yet one more data point in the universal requirement of introducing learned helplessness into any large-scale human interaction. Promise too much, you get a riot. Promise too little, the circumscribed become defenders of righteousness.
Even with the quick fingered (and occasionally abusive blocks) on Wikipedia, it remains 100 times more open than Slashdot. But since we never labored under the delusion that this was more than "news for nerds" social unrest on Slashdot has no ability to cure a slow news day on the Inquirer/Register (with their own sordid feuds to better help them condemn the feuds of others).
Lately the Inq/Reg are suffering from the hiatus in the Intel/AMD Nvidia/ATI sand squabbles. Eight cores. Yawn. Opteron errata. Yawn. The Everywhere Girl played out her string. Yawn. Fiorina and Cappellas are both gone. Now all they have left to scratch eyeballs is the Wackypedia. If AMD finally delivers a compelling product from their ATI ingestation, they might have eight weeks worth of IT news to report. And then what? I hate to think.
The fundamental problem at Wikipedia right now is that sock-puppets are conceptually impossible to patrol. In the old model, the problem was a fringe lunatic who needed to adjust his/her meds. In the old days, spam was likewise largely the result of isolated cowboys. The first round of defensive measures made it difficult to succeed at spam on a disorganized basis. Systems theory response? Shift to organized spam. The same will happen with sock puppets at Wikipedia, if interest groups perceive enough incentive to do so.
It would be a bit of work to pull off. You'd need several hundred identities in good standing, and enough "real" people to keep these identities in good standing with a diversity of edit histories. Maybe you can seed the pool by purchasing on the sly a long established identity from someone who has since fallen on hard times. You would probably need some orchestration to ensure that your puppets don't cross paths and congregate on the same issues too often.
I'm not saying I see the economic justification for anyone to go to this trouble, but if someone did, the existing sock-puppet defenses would not prove adequate to the task. I believe that this uncomfortable, naked fact that defense against orchestrated sock-puppets is presently unworkable contributes to the paranoia level of the beleaguered admins who teeter on the precipice of failure. I can recall a point in time when some of self-appointed spam-fighters got themselves into the same emotional state (and the same fights over abuse of blacklists erupting).
The crucial difference is that Wikipedia is centralized whereas spam was decentralized (although some of the largest players such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and Google could sample a large fraction of the effluent flow). Wikipedia needs to further exploit that centralization to find other mechanisms to accomplish the same end (preventing vested interests from banding together to shout down opposing perspectives) without having to resort to their shadowy order of paranoid puppet police.
Since Mike Godwin now works for the Wikimedia Foundation, the Godwin number for all discussions on, in or about Wikipedia is automatically one, and any subsequent invocations have zero marginal value.
They say that political infighting in academic circles is so notoriously vicious "because the stakes are so low". Something like this must be going on at Wikipedia. What was so important about any of this? What horrible deed did the banned offender commit?
I read the article and the comments, and I'm still very fuzzy on what all this was about. Apparently, there was a squabble of the sort often referred to as a "urination contest", and the Virgin won. I guess the controversy centered on "naked pantsing", or something like that. (Note to self: must research involvement of Thin Virgin with Naked Pantsing. And why does Mr. Wales oppose said activity? Is he, perhaps, a secret practioner?)
OK...seriously...isn't there some kind of conflict resolution policy in place at Wikipedia? Aren't there procedures that must be followed before drastic action is taken against an individual who offends against Wikipedia policies—let alone collective punishment of a range of IP addresses? I'm thinking something like this:
Now, that's how I think a serious enterprise of the sort that Wikipedia claims to be would proceed. What's happening now doesn't look serious to me. Indeed, it appears to me that the people in charge over there think that Wikipedia is their own private plaything. That's hardly going to encourage me to become a contributor.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
For certain issues, you will never get agreement even after 100s of years. Start a thread about the US Civil War being "caused by slavery" and see what I mean. Generations of American history textbooks have treated the South delicately so that they could sell books, and as a result there are generations of people who were taught that the Civil War was not caused by slavery.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Hey, it's not like I wouldn't mind seeing this... oh, wait, I already have.
It didn't seem that bad to me.
And don't you hypercritical armchair linguists generally prefer Latin plurals?
* http://www.wikipediareview.com/ WR is a forum that is populated by a mix of Wikipedia administrators posting openly, regular users, and a few "banned" users. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia 'elite' routinely badmouth the holy hell out of the WR forums because of the fact that "banned" users are allowed. Also, the Wikipedia "BADSITES" final solution (which is still active--disregard that rejected notice, its just been implemented anyway), was a direct revenge response against Wikipedia Review and similar sites that the Wikipedia leaders have no ability to silence or control in any way.
1. "BADSITES" was not, and never was aimed at WR. BADSITES was primarily intended as a tool against Encyclopedia Dramatica, which included quite a lot of openly hostile and very personal criticism against a number of regular wikipedia editors, including real names of editors who wished to remain anonymous. Nevertheless, the proposed policy is not in place, and attempts to enforce it WRT sites other than ED have failed (e.g. ).
2. I'd dispute any suggestion that WR presents an unbiased view of wikipedia. Note that WR was started and is run by an editor who had been banned from editing Wikipedia. There is a lot of comment on the site from people who don't know the whole story involved (e.g. they covered the lawsuit by Barbara Bauer and subsequent out-of-process deletion of the article about her as a good thing, which anybody who knows anything about the subject would say is not the case: that wikipedia article should have existed, and didn't say anything that shouldn't have been said).
I have been reading a little bit of these stories and this Bagley dude seems rather shady to me. Sure Gary Weiss may put some feathers in his on ass. But Judd Bagley seems to be a hired gun to eradicate any criticism of his employers, whatever it takes. Sure Gary doesn't like Judd but if you read his stories they seem a whole lot more convincing than Judds. I personally think The Register missed out on this one here. They have been used in the hit job Bagley is been hired for on account of Patrick Bryrne.
Or just look into the webcomics/notabilty purge background. The wiki admin tactics in that "little" episode soured me on wiki.
(btw, they still defend the actions/admins from then)
Erm... forgot to include the link that should have been in parent post.
There's an old saying in America — I know it's in New Zealand, probably in America — that says, power tends to... absolute power... absolutely. Absolute power — It's quite powerful.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
In the talk page of the Gary Weiss article (the article itself is currently under protection so nobody can edit it), lots of highly fallacious arguments are being made by high-ranked admins to shoot down all attempts to put in anything about the issues discussed in the Register article. The line of argument seems to go something like:
1) Bagley claims that [list various claims of his, such as that the
Weiss article is non-NPOV]
2) Bagley is a sociopathic, evil harasser.
3) Therefore, the claims in (1) are all false.
4) Thus, anybody who repeats the claims should be dismissed out of
hand.
--Dan
Web Tips
The Gary Weiss article reads like Weiss wrote it himself. The Byrne article reads as if his enemies wrote it. There is dirt on Weiss- he has enemies- but no one can touch his pristine article. Byrne has plenty of supporters, and there are facts which support his claims yet no one can modify his negatively biased article. I guess it boils down to this: No one can criticize or add negatives on the Weiss page No one can add positives or support Byrne on his page So the question becomes: Why is wikipedia protecting the Weiss wiki entry? Why is it ok to tarnish the Byrne Wiki entry? Weiss claims he never ever edited a Wikipedia article- so why do they protect his bio? This hypocrisy needs to get out. People need to understand that wikipedia is trying to tarnish one mans reputation while it is protecting his arch enemy. And for what? Why? For whom does the bell toll? They tell us nothing is going on- that it is all a fabrication on Brynes part- but then you figure out to what lengths his detractors are willing to go- and you need to ask yourself why?
Let's start with SCO... there's something in the water in Happy Valley.
BTW that county is the largest single contributor to Mitt Romney's campaign fund.
The fact that you got modded down to the gutter for daring to express an anti-The Register, pro-Wikipedia viewpoint on Slashdot is a nice illustration of the fact that abuses of power happen everywhere, not just on Wikipedia.
This whole thing reminds me of my IRC days. My MOO/MUD days. My Fidonet days. My BBS days. Cripes, even my university days. Gosh, this makes me feel so old.
And I shake my hed as I pat the Wiki children onna hed.
Children will be children.
EPA Official: S-sir, I'm afraid you've gone mad with power...
/simpsons
Russ Cargill: Of course I have. You ever tried going mad without power? It's boring. No one listens to you!
Yeah, whatever, I will still do research for unimportant papers via Wikipedia and its vast citations, because when I use other encyclopedias I only get ONE source for information. Jeez, what is the big deal? If your subject is controversial, what makes you think a single source is more reliable? If you just need to know the molecular structure for cuprous iodide or Mussolini's place of birth it's great! Only pricks are trying to turn it into another Myspace.
FairTax baby!
Certain high level wikipedia editors have the ability to remove such a permanent link from the database, for reference check out Jimbo's birthday on wikitruth. http://wikitruth.info/index.php?title=Jimbo's_birthday
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
You mean (very amateurish) armchair editors.
Linguists don't criticise language usage, they study and learn from it.
Advanced users are users too!
You'd sound about 100% less irritating if you'd just call it a "running gag" or "inside joke" like those of us who don't live life inside a Douglas Copeland book.
(and it figures someone who spells "useful" with two L's would be fond of Wikipedia's, er, "style of prose"
0. Get involved in content dispute with paint-huffing retard.
1. Leave message on other editor's talk page. Get ignored / threatened / whined at / banned (choose one)
2. Leave message on article's talk page. Wait one week for someone besides yourself and the other guy to chime in. Get sucked into ridiculously pretentious, drawn-out argument.
3. Go to Requests for Comment. Get yelled at by some condescending beardo because you skipped a step, god what a newb you are.
4. Go to Peer Mediation section. Wait one month for the queue to drain. Get yelled at by some condescending beardo because you dumb fuck you should be posting in "Outside Opinions" not Peer Mediation god what a stupid little newblet you are.
5. Go to Outside Opinions. Wait a day or two. Realize that anybody and everybody who pays attention to this page is a fucking moron who offers only the most ineffectual, waffling advice possible. (note that one time in seven you'll find someone with half a brain, which basically unlocks a long ending cinematic where they do everything for you. Sorta like that one disc of Xenosaga, except more typos)
6. Realize that you've wasted weeks of your life to this useless Wikipedia shit.
7. Post "FUCK YOU NIGGER I HOPE YOU BURN IN HELL YOU FAGGOT FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU" and/or long, rambling, shaggy-dog death threats on the talk pages of anybody and everybody. Post links to one of the "SlimVirgin is Linda Mack" tell-alls in highly visable places for style points.
8. Get banned.
9. Register new account, repeat step 6.
10. Once your entire neighborhood is banned from Wikipedia, sit back and congratulate yourself. You have resolved the dispute.
11. (New Game+) Go back to step 0. This time, you play the role of the paint-huffing retard. Make sure to be completely, willfully, flagrantly stupid, yet remain as cheerful and polite as possible. This keeps you safe from the banhammer, prolonging the game and making it more fun for everybody involved.
Sorry 'bout that. Every now and then a professional troll gets a rise out of me.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
How does my post get attributed "flamebait," when the majority of the mods down were for "overrated?"
A little confused, would enjoy a short reply.
Thanks.
--
Toro
Wikipedia does allow sockpuppets to edit (that is, the same person having multiple accounts). What it does not allow is for that person to abuse this (e.g., use two accounts in turn to do reversions to bypass the three-revert rule). ~~~~
What I do know is that once my dad -- a hospital pharmacist who would have known which companies were doing what at the time -- read the research, etc. he started to point the medical doctors in the area towards the simple solution as something to consider and the doctor's themselves moved away from just passing out and prescribing based on the samples provided by the American drug companies.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Anyone who wants is welcome to discuss this issue at The Wikipedia Review, a forum dedicated to discussion of Wikipedia while remaining totally independent of the controlling establishment there: www.wikipediareview.com