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

Hmph

[moogied]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16

If I was...

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Story seems dubious to me

[squiggleslash]

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.

Ainsworth has contributed more featured articles to Wikipedia than all but six other writers. But in October, when he attempted to edit the Weiss article, he was immediately banned from the site for 24 hours by an administrator known as "Durova" - the administrator at the heart of the secret mailing list scandal.

And Durova's ban was seconded by none other than Jimmy Wales.

"Durova [has] my full support here. No nonsense, zero tolerance, shoot on sight," Wales wrote on the site. "No kidding, this has gone on long enough."

and

Without a doubt, Judd Bagley has seriously angered the powers that be at Wikipedia. He's even received an email from Jimbo Wales saying: "Your feigned innocence is not very endearing" and "It would be helpful if you could come to terms with the fact that you have behaved very very badly over a long period of time."

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:

Bagley restored the link to Businessjive. A few hours later, the same person removed it. So Bagley restored it again. And it was removed again.

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.

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.