Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Admin's Manipulation "Messed Up Perhaps 15,000 Students' Lives"
Andreas Kolbe writes: Recently, "ArbCom", Wikipedia's highest court, banned an administrator account that for years had been manipulating the Wikipedia article of a bogus Indian business school – deleting criticism, adding puffery, and enabling the article to become a significant part of the school's PR strategy. Believing the school's promises and advertisements, families went to great expense to send sons and daughters on courses there – only for their children to find that the degrees they had gained were worthless. "In my opinion, by letting this go on for so long, Wikipedia has messed up perhaps 15,000 students' lives," an Indian journalist quoted in the story says. India is one of the countries where tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet, making Wikipedia a potential gatekeeper.
Here, just for you, a quote from the Slashdot headline itself, not even the article:
> India is one of the countries where tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet, making Wikipedia a potential gatekeeper.
It's not so easy. With Wikipedia Zero and Facebook Zero, tens of millions of Indians in rural areas do not have access to anything else. They get Wikipedia and Facebook free as part of their mobile phone deal, but would need an expensive data plan to access anything else on the Internet. The situation is the same in many other third-world countries. What you have then a is a large captive audience who can only consume Wikipedia, but cannot check its sources or access alternative sources. Hence the concerns voiced by AccessNow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation about Facebook and Wikipedia becoming gatekeepers: keeping information out as much as bringing information in. The potential for manipulation is stupendous, because only political and business elites will have read-write access to Wikipedia. This case illustrates why people in developing countries need affordable access to the entire internet, not a Wikipedia and Facebook band aid.
Their facebook page is driving a pro-feminist agenda, and welcoming women-only posts in wikipedia under the guise of promoting "gender diversity". Last time I checked, promoting a diversity of something is welcoming from all sides, and nobody ever was preventing some sexes to use wikipedia. It is really a nice strategy to flip the bird to the people who most helped you grow. I have contributed to wikipedia in the past, but I am done with them.
can be found in this article by Mridula Chari on scroll.in: Wikipedia bans editor for consistent bias in favour of Arindam Chaudhuri's IIPM. Includes some more details on goings-on in the Indian-language Wikipedias (Marathi etc.)
One might even blame Indian journalists, like the one who is quoted in this article blaming Wikipedia, for not better informing the public about legitimate and scam educational institutions.
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The elephant in the room is the fact that colleges and forced cheap, easy student loans are being used to keep unemployment numbers down in the recession. Many millions of US student are in college because they couldn't find a good job. Many of them would stop attending immediately if a good job were offered.
It's not education, it's welfare.
The elephant in the room is that you don't automatically get a good job offer with a Bachelor's degree. A career is something you build. A job is something you get. While I understand the desire of baby-boomer's to give their children everything they didn't have, i.e., job-free college, I think something important is missing from their children's lives. You see, you can't expect a really good paying job even if you have a Masters degree if you haven't worked a day in your life. Don't get me wrong, college is hard, but working for money is different. You're expected to produce, not merely pursue your interests and hope they align with the company's goals.
I have yet to meet a programmer out of college that was ready to work a job. My guess is that's true of most professions. You have to learn about TPS reports and such. That's why entry level jobs don't pay too well. You're still learning. As you gain experience, you make more money. That's how "working" works.