All Entries in the "wikipedia" Category

Are You A Wikipedia Junkie?

I saw a great post about a ton of places to get the answers you want about almost anything. A lot of people go right to wikipedia as the authority on a topic. In reality, wikipedia is edited by human editors that may or may not be much of an authority on the topic they are writing about or editing.

Don’t get me wrong. I applaud some of the editors at wikipedia for their dedication and thank them for the volunteer time they put into editing. However, there are some editors who seem to have an agenda and it shows in the entries they edit or delete.

It has led to acknowledgement that wikipedia is not an authority on any topic. It is just a source for “some” information about a topic, enough for most people, but not authoritative enough for researchers who want authoritative information.

When qualified people in a specific field only write about their field on their website, it tends to be much more accurate than the entries in a human edited wiki. Visit the blog post below to see how many great information websites this person links to on their blog.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely – Ask Wikipedia

It seems to go this way often in several different arenas. Policing spam on the web is a great idea. People who volunteer to help reduce the amount of spam should be applauded for their efforts.

The admin team and the creators of wikipedia are also to be applauded for buiolding such a great information portal. Many volunteers put in countless hours to make that a great project.

The same goes for those editors who started and worked on DMOZ years ago.

But then the same thing begins to happen. Some of these volunteers for some reason begin to believe they are all powerful and some begin to weild that power to suit their own agenda rather than for the reasons they began volunteering for.

Many DMOZ editors began adding their friends websites to the open directory project and making sure that some websites they did not like were not added. There were rumors at one time about editors offering to add sites if you paid them. I cannot verify that any editor was caught doing that and if they were you can bet they were banned immediately.

And look what has happened. DMOZ is pretty much outdated and not worth the effort anymore since they take so long to add a site.

Some spam police or anti-spam programs began nobly then became power hungry as well. Some even doled out “fines” to take your site off the blacklists even if you could prove you were not a spammer.

Now we have this story about wikipedia;

Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia
By Cade Metz in the Register

Controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia’s core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.

Many suspected that such a list was in use, as the Wikipedia “ruling clique” grew increasingly concerned with banning editors for the most petty of reasons. But now that the list’s existence is confirmed, the rank and file are on the verge of revolt.

“I’ve never seen the Wikipedia community as angry as they are with this one,” says Charles Ainsworth, a Japan-based editor who’s contributed more feature articles to the site than all but six other writers. “I think there was more hidden anger and frustration with the ‘ruling clique’ than I thought and Durova’s heavy-handed action and arrogant refusal to take sufficient accountability for it has released all of it into the open.”